You actually get to do something meaningful, at least to the company.
vs working at one of the big companies and doing fuck all.
vs working at one of the big companies and doing fuck all.
I don't see what about the problems YC18 are tackling are any more meaningful than FANG. Can you enlighten us?
On the other hand, where I live, in North Texas, the bulk of the tech industry here is telecom. Telecom work is far more interesting to me than webdev, and honestly if I ever move out of town, I'm going to be very sad that there won't be as many telecom jobs. And I sure as hell wouldn't ever move to SV.
On top of the work itself, I also find that I prefer the corporate cultures of enterprise B2B telecoms to webdev-centric startups. Going back to a B2B telecom after spending a few years working at other companies (first an abusive startup, then an academia-centric defense contractor) felt like coming home, and now that I'm home I don't ever want to leave the industry again.
You see, after the part your put in quotation marks I added on "at least to the company". This was meant to mean that the work you are doing is meaningful, but perhaps only to the company. Rather than working on a small part of a small part of a small part of the massive machine, you get to work on the entire thing because no one else is around to do it.
I really don't understand why I got downvoted for that. Not sure what part of the HN hivemind I upset with that, seems fairly uncontroversial.
Intentionally or not, you implied that people working at big companies (which is a lot of the people here) are not doing anything meaningful.
Second, there's an immune response to this idea because it is part of the startup mythology that leads to a lot of people making economically suboptimal decisions about where to work, which is basically the whole topic we are discussing here.