Climbing the wrong hill (2009)

What people say that they want and what people actually want are frequently two very different things. When it comes to finding product-market fit, this is obvious. There is an old quote often attributed to Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." It is better to look at people's actions and behaviour rather than their words when judging what they actually want.

The people whom cdixon talks to that say they want to be '"working at or founding a startup"' are lying. They are lying to themselves first and foremost and only secondarily to cdixon. Their actions speak much louder than those words. Those actions say that they want to safety and security of the job that they don't enjoy rather than the risk and uncertainty of a startup.

>>“What do you want to be doing in 10 years?” The answer is invariably “working at or founding a tech startup”

Funny. I deal with startups all the time. When I ask startup employees where they want to be in 10 years they invariably say "Working for Google" or some version of "Working for someone more stable than this bag of cats". When I speak to startup founders, honestly and in private, the answer is some version of "On the other side of either and IPO/buyout". The employees look for stability, thier bosses cash.

The grass is always greener. I once worked in film/TV and everyone wants to hear the stories. They all think it was so much fun. It was hell. That glorious job is never what you think. Except fighter pilot. Every one of the dozen or so I've met live and embrace the stereotypes.

It's important to realize that working for someone else can be the best way to prepare yourself for a startup. Sometimes the best way to climb the higher hill is first to climb the short one and then work your way up the saddle.

Starting a startup is a lot easier when you're (relatively) financially secure. There's no way I would have been able to survive the first 6 months of my startup (when I didn't have any revenue coming in) if I hadn't saved up a decent amount of cash from working elsewhere (not to mention that working for others gives you important skills). The important bit is to think about this systematically: if you're going to take a job to accumulate financial and human capital, have a plan for how long you'll work there and how much capital you need to accumulate.

Being able to found a startup on your own terms (without having to desperately find angels) is very freeing and I definitely prefer it this way. My current startup is doing much better than my last one because this time I'm not worrying about investors at all.

As founder of several companies myself I always recommend people NOT to start startups. I will help or mentor them if they are really interested. Really interested people will do it anyway.

It looks today like everybody and their dog have to make a company, but first you need to have a very strong conviction that the world needs something that you provide. Starting a company is going to be very hard at first, specially when you are trained by school that effort always rewards you with results and you need a very strong force behind you to be able to face the difficulties.

The great shock is for great students that are used to have good grades or have a great job but in real startup life they struggle. In a company they will succeed but on their own they will depress and enter a death spiral. It is hard for them, for their partners, for their parents, even for their mentors.

You need a totally different set of skills than in a normal job, like the ability to manage yourself, manage risks, made decisions,make investments, choose your people, understand markets, creativity or selling yourself in front of others.

There's the very real possibility that in 10 years, you'll be broke with a failed startup. Articles like this often act as if risk didn't exist, and then claim that everyone should quit their steady jobs for a moonshot dream career, be that in arts, acting or startups.

As a counter-point, PG had this to say about startups:

"The surprising thing here is that you can safely hill climb. If you guys are programmers... What percentage of the people here are programmers? Ok, a lot of programmers, so you all know what hill climbing is. You just do this simplest growth algorithm, you just go wherever it leads up from here. And you don't plan for the future, you don't try and think about the global picture, you just think what's going to grow this week.

The surprising insight there is that that is safe to do in a startup, that you can hill climb your way into something big. It turns out the space of startup ideas--I didn't know this, this is something I learned empirically--but it turns out that there are not dangerous local maxima. You can safely hill climb without really thinking that much ahead, and you will grow. You won't even know what you'll grow into, right? Just week by week you see.

And this works for a lot of things besides starting companies too. This would work for writing. You know, you just like work on whatever interests you and every week you try and do something more interesting, and eventually you'll look back and say "Holy cow, look, we started out way down there." You know?

So who would it not work for? It's very dangerous but there are some startups where you have to go off and build something for some number of months before you can start this sort of cycle of interacting with users. Like if you want to build a new database company, you can't just like write a version 1 in a week."

It's a passage that comes to mind from time to time. I've found that it can apply outside of the startup world, too. Interesting and easy directions in research often give insights that make harder problems easier, too.

Source: http://www.bnjs.co/transcript-paul-graham-in-conversation-wi...

First of all, if you know what you want to be doing in 10 years, and you are under 30, you are likely wrong. A lot of people change their plans in their 20s, and sometimes it just doesn't work out.

If you are over 30 and look 10 years ahead, it's 40 - body breaking down, retirement planning is well underway, some form of collateral, possibly a family, etc. If you're gambling on startups then, you better be damn sure it doesn't crush all the other stuff you're juggling.

Dixon's advice is misguided. He's trying to say "Don't fear starting over", which is good advice, because you will probably start over some time in your life without intending to, and it will be fine. But he's trying to make startups sound like a good idea, or "try random things" a better one.

I would not treat life like a CS problem - I would treat it like an Operations change management action. List the departments of your life that are affected by the change. List the change(s), the work needed to implement it, the expected results, a test to evaluate, and a rollback procedure. In this way you can make a risky change and understand fully what it involves, and have some plan for how to revert if things go awry. Definitely try new things, but when it comes to changes that have potentially bad side-effects, use due diligence.

This is exactly why I disagree with the 24/7 work style that some startups have. I use a large fraction of my spare time (i.e. nights and weekends) to randomly drop myself on other hills.

This is related to the human tendency to overestimate the danger of unpredictable risks.

The danger of a major financial disaster for a healthy and educated young person in a developed country is much lower than it seems. I know many such people that traveled across the country, some with no money or possessions to their name. None of them were broke for more than a few months, and within 6 most of them lived a similar lifestyle to the one they left behind.

The danger is much greater if you're unhealthy, uneducated, or have other liabilities, but that doesn't apply to a good portion of the HN crowd.

What a lot of people don't think about is that a true disaster will knock you out even if you have a steady job, insurance, and education. I know several people whose lives were forever changed by a lawsuit, medical bills, and health problems. These risks are barely affected by anything you can control, so in most ways it's best to just go on as if they don't exist.

Kind of in a similar bind.

I work for a big company, and am paid decently well. I'm respected, but I have impostor syndrome. I really am doing nothing other than basic business logic coding. We have good tests, but no unit tests. We're not doing what I would consider as optimal programming practices, and I have not been able to convince them to change.

Yet when I look around in my city for jobs, most are lower paid than I am. Do I take the lower pay temporarily? I worry if I stay in my current job then in another 5 years, if I lose my job, no one will hire me.

I've kind of decided to make a goal for this year: Gain enough influence in my role to change some of the mindsets (e.g. convince them to introduce unit tests). If I succeed, I will have learned valuable influencing skills. If I don't, I should just find another job.

If one were to use a similar analogy as the author -- a startup is like a huge hill but a mirage. Once you're off of whatever you are smoking, you realize it's just a mole hill.

He says "Then, a few years later, they finally quit their job, but only after having spent years in an industry they didn’t enjoy, and that didn’t really advance them toward their long term ambitions." It seems to me there's a glaring oversight in his statement, which is that they could very well have gained some valuable domain expertise that will serve them well if they later decide to found or work at a startup. I mean, VC's so often mention the importance of domain expertise and the way you usually get that is working at an established company first before you f(l)ounder around at a startup.

Except in a startup you can discover that the high hill is a deep valley. Doesn't mean anything really. Only you can decide if you want to take that risk or not. I stopped pushing people one way or the other simply because only they can know what is best for them.

Another option is to work in a big company. After a few years there will be nothing new for you so you can bootstrap something while still having money for... food :)

Leave it to a computer scientist to leave out the quantum tunneling metaphor. Well, here it is:

skips current hill

"I know somebody."

"Do you want to be a startup founder?" is a trick question. Most people hear "Do you want to be Zuckerberg or Musk?" Most questioners mean "Do you want a chance to be Zuckerberg?" But the real question is neither of those.

"Over the years, I’ve run into many prospective employees in similar situations. When I ask them a very obvious question: “What do you want to be doing in 10 years?” The answer is invariably “working at or founding a tech startup” – yet most of them decide to remain on their present path and not join a startup."

"In 10 years, I want to be working extremely hard for extremely long hours, for low pay and a miniscule chance of real reward. I want to be a share-cropper on a venture capitalist's farm. I want to have a trail of failures behind me. I want to be doing the same thing over and over, because a MVP is a MVP is a MVP. I want to be ready to pivot at any instant, because shoveling everything into the crapper is better than spending an extra minute looking at another, greener pasture."

On the other hand, "I want to be working on the most interesting problems I can find" is crappy, too.

Startups, that's plural, add some randomness to this hill climbing. Most startups fail and then you get pulled off of a local maximum.

But your next startup should not be exactly random. Like the VCs who invest, you should learn something from failure and you should have the lay of the land. If you don't, if it's a random walk again, then perhaps you don't belong in startups or in VC.

I've sent this blog to dozens of people. While it's not universal, it offers an important concept applicable to many facets of life.

Here's another take on the same concept: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27033

I wonder how the author is 100% sure that working in a startup is always better than working at Wall Street. I tried both ways, and there are ups and downs on both sides, but I liked it just a tiny bit more in big finance (though not in big banks).

Other people's mileages may also vary.

Seems to me a local maximum that definitely exists is not too shabby compared to a higher hill that has a 90% chance of going dead flat on you.

I went through pretty much the situation he describes: had developed videogames since I was 15, but while at university I joined the bank entity of a huge corp. I knew I wanted to do games, graphics and related stuff for the rest of my life, so after 9 months I had cold feet, got the show, accepted the offer and stayed three more years.

One of the best decisions of my life.

I learned tons of stuff that I wouldn't have learned going straight back into games. Not about COBOL or accounting, but about leadership, management and understanding the balance between business and technical needs.

I honestly do not understand this metaphor at all. There are reasons why some of the algorithms are better implemented in a computer. Is there some magic that will allow me to clone myself to try multiple paths in parallel? Maybe I can speed up time so that I can climb the hills fast?

As a human, I have limited time and that places a huge constraint on what is feasible. Ignoring that and trying to draw parallels to algorithmic domain seems to miss out on crucial constraints.

> works at a large investment bank. He has decided he hates Wall Street and wants to work at a tech startup (good!). He recently gave notice to his bosses, who responded by putting on a dog and pony show to convince him to stay

Wrong choices. Better to stay a few years, then start your own company or consulting business.

And in my experience large corporations, are often more progressive than most startups (work from home, technical equipment, software stack, conferences....).

How bad is the ageism with respect to career length?

For example the average professional NFL player running back career length is a bit over 3 seasons. On the other hand the average lifespan in the USA is lower than real 1st world countries, at 78, but still not too bad.

So in the introduction the implication is throwing away a year of career is utterly tragic WRT "starting over" now in terms of career damage is throwing away one year like throwing away an 1/3 of their pro football running back length career or like throwing away 1/78th of their lifespan which is a rounding error?

Another way of looking at the world, is if ageism is so rampant that the dude will be permanently unemployable in the field by 30 such that throwing away one year is a substantial measurable loss, you have to consider it from a long term perspective in that a lifespan of 78 and unemployability starting at 30 means you'll live, unemployable, for nearly a half century after your career ends, half a century of wondering what would have happened if you had made that jump to try the startup. I mean, lets say due to ageism your career does end at 30, at age 55 will anything be different in your 55 year old life if you had stayed put rather than trying? So you may as well try.

You're gonna live a long time. For various macro economic reasons your career will only be a couple years. That implies you should never live to work and should only work to live. In that situation it would be foolish not to take a risk.

Extreme ageism is like terminal illness. If you know your career will be dead in five years no matter what you do for reasons way outside your control, you can complain and feel bad, or make the most of what little time you have and risk it. You're done in five years anyway no matter what, so you may as well go for it while you can.

Going temporarily downhill is very hard for most. I know dozens of bankers who want to move to tech, but can't handle the cash paycut.

What if the space you are searching is not a landscape with hills, but a maze?

I'm not saying it is, but the metaphor that makes the post so strong is not particularly well-grounded. Maybe we programmers tend to think about life as hill-climbing precisely because that's metaphor we often think about when solving programming problems...

This article seems based on a false analogy.

Real (geologic) hills can be measured. Their dimensions and slopes are objective quantities. There is no debate about their shape.

Mr. Dixon's hills (objective functions) are the stuff of wants, dreams, and deep conjecture. Their shapes are highly subjective and highly dimensional. So much so that the 3d-terrain construct adds little to the topic – whether a gradient, simulated annealing, or any other analytic approach is employed.

To me, the article is a whimsical piece of entertainment and is not useful for even notional career planning.

Or just try something outside of tech completely. You have time to explore. Yeah you'll likely end up with more money having worked at a big firm your whole life, several of my peers are more advanced in their careers than I am now, but it's not like you end up in the poor house either. I spent five years away from tech, seven in a startup, three freelancing from home before finally going back to big corp, and no regrets.

Most people intuitively know this. But sometimes it takes 10 years or even decades to climb a hill, and the probability of picking a random spot in a valley or on a plateau is high. People are just risk-averse. And I think most winners win not because of this strategy, but because they can climb hills much faster than others, thus have a higher rate to try new spots.

> People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.

I particularly like this advice.

That's why humans are not very good at finding non-local maxima, and why a lot has to do with the luck of where on the terrain you are randomly dropped for your initial climb.

Why will working at a startup prepare you to start your own? Wouldn't it be better working as an employee in the industry you want to start a business in?

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Needs (2009) tag in title please.

I don't particularly like this kind of blog posts, for multiple reasons. First, they tell people what to do.

Second, the argument is backed up by a false analogy. The whole reason that hill climbing works, is that computers are fast. If it takes 5+ years to 'climb a hill', starting at some random point costs a lot more. Actually, it is not even clear how 'starting over at a random point' translates to real life.

Third: The point (I would say is "Try something else once in a while" - and I mostly agree with this) could be captured in a single line. The blog post is basically the blog-equivalent of a motivational picture.

>everyone should work on their own startup, fuck the profession you studied for years and that is stable, well earning and can teach you a lot about business!

This mentality is why the quality of HN went to shit.