[SatvikBeri]

One of the cardinal rules of software development is to ask your market what their pain points are, but come up with the solutions on your own. That's because your users understand their problems, but they aren't aware of the different ways you can solve those problems.

For lack of a better word, I'm going to call this the over-association fallacy. The over-association fallacy is when you think "I must have X, Y is one way to get X, therefore I must have Y."

This post is a classical example of the over-association fallacy. What the author really wants is the freedom to experiment, and he concludes that you can't have this in a big company.

However, there are plenty of big companies that give you that freedom, and plenty of small companies that don't. The smallest company I ever worked for had 4 people, but the CEO was an extreme micromanager who layered huge amounts of work on his employees and was terrified of innovation. In contrast, I had a huge amount of freedom to play around at a giant bank, because I automated all my work and my manager only cared about the quality of work (not how many hours I spent.) The result of this playing around helped me learn a lot and save the company millions of dollars.

So keep in mind what you really want. Don't avoid big companies, avoid places that don't let you learn anything.

[tannerc]

Yes, I love this realization.

People don't know what they want, but they sure as hell know what they don't want. I think this ties both to businesses (specifically startups and what they focus their efforts on) as well as employees and entrepreneurs themselves.

To quote Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."