Hacker News Reader

Comment by guptaneil | Hacker News Reader

While nobody will deny that startup life is hell, it also is very much as good as the Valley makes it sound for the right type of people. Most people aren't the right people though, so it sounds romanticized.

edit: To clarify, "right type of people" doesn't necessarily mean successful people, just people who enjoy this kind of lifestyle. Success is just a bonus.

View on HN

I would strenuously deny that the startup life is hell. Go pick fruit for a few months, for instance. The amount of assumed privilege in these discussions is shocking.

Well it's assumed that if you're in a position to begin a startup, then you are capable of a comfortable and successful life outside of one. So relative to the alternative for the entrepreneur, startup life could be called hell.

But yes, relative to all the possible situations one could be in, startup life is quite pleasant.

Ah, yes. Everything is relative. :)

For example, I imagine life is Hell right now for Egypt President Mubarak, although this probably only means losing power and living the rest of his life quite comfortably exiled in some other country.

I think he meant hell in terms of stress on your family. Those 90 hour work weeks aren't exactly relationship-building material.

There are many different types of hell.

Picking fruit is hell? Sheesh, in Australia picking fruit is considered a "working holiday" for middle-class European kids.

It depends on the fruit. Mangoes a) only grow in the tropics and b) have acidic sap. Most people who pick mangoes only do it once.

The experience of picking fruit is rather different for middle-class European kids and poor Mexican kids/parents/old folks. Two salient differences, among many: middle-class European kids can at any time stop picking fruit and resume being middle-class Europeans, and there is no outcome to middle-class European fruit picking which reads "fruit picker's family goes hungry."

I was not exactly thrilled with the experience of my old day job, and complained about it frequently, but never at church. Odds are on any given day I would be sitting next to at least one guy who did about as many hours at one third the pay working in a factory for people who treated him as a necessary reagent in an industrial process. Heck if I'm going to say "Waily waily I was in my air conditioned office yesterday at 1:30 AM when I could have been at home playing PS3."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com