[michaelochurch]

The biggest take-away for me was that, at the least, he acknowledged that it's irresponsible to gamble his family's well-being on a long-shot startup idea.

Tech culture right now prizes irresponsibility. The youth fetish is one aspect of it, but more generally, it's founded on unrealistic (irresponsible) promises and mostly bad decisions (drop out of school to work for a startup! move to the most expensive city in the U.S. with no connections!) that pay off infrequently. No one talks about how demoralizing, difficult, and wasteful it is to rebuild your savings and career after something like that fails. It's atrocious, but most investors have a vested interest in downplaying the long-term risks.

There are thousands of people like me who are smart as fuck, played the startup game unluckily, and ended up in second-tier careers compared to what they should've had with their age and ability, and would've had, had they not gambled stupidly. Most don't talk about it. They're ashamed. I'm not ashamed. Well, perhaps I'm slightly embarrassed, but (a) I'm still smart as fuck and (b) not embarrassed enough to let the next few thousand fall into the same goddamn trap, because someone has to fucking be responsible.

[sizzle]

So will you ever play the startup game again? or are you focused on climbing the ranks to your tier 1 dream job?

lastly, is it because you are 'smart as fuck', that why you are so jaded now because the value you brought to the startup would have taken you much further in a traditional job, as opposed to an average person who has much more to gain from a startup being successful?

[michaelochurch]

So will you ever play the startup game again?

Maybe, but in a different way.

or are you focused on climbing the ranks to your tier 1 dream job?

I have no taste for "climbing the ranks". I want to get better at stuff. Corporate dysfunction irritates the hell out of me. It'd be so much better if work was about work and not interpersonal manipulations.

Right now I'm looking to level up on machine learning. I'm on par with your 95th-percentile professional data scientist, but there's a lot that I still don't know.

lastly, is it because you are 'smart as fuck', that why you are so jaded now because the value you brought to the startup would have taken you much further in a traditional job

I spent almost 3 years building the backend for a graph-based, distributed database in Clojure (for a startup). We ended up not getting any clients; that was above my pay grade. (Mistake #1. In a startup, take responsibility for all parts and run from founders who try to go alone.) If we had, though, the stuff I'd built would have made it really cool.

Then I ended up on legacy maintenance at Google. In other words, that 3 years bought me fucking nothing.