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Comment by Goladus | Hacker News Reader

One of the ways I know that we're in a bubble is the frequency with which I am now meeting intelligent young men who sincerely and with every appearance of unselfconsciousness tell me that they want to be founders of startups as an alternative to joining the workforce and learning their trade.

This is really the only comment I have a problem with. Do they really say "as an alternative to learning their trade" as if the workforce is the only place to learn?

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Workforce experience reminds me of the old story about the shoe salesman who goes to look for a job:

 "I have 20 years experience", he says to his prospective boss.

 "No you don't.", the interviewer replies.  "You've had 6 months of experience 40 times over."

The corporate trenches are sort of like that. You do learn some stuff, but not much, and you learn it awful quickly. 90% of the interesting aspects of my "trade" that I've learned have been on my own.

Corporate work (for developers) seems ok (but not great) for gaining domain expertise. It is a great way to meet people with domain expertise. Other than that, it's not good for much. Large organizations seem considerably less than the sum of their parts.

I thought the same thing then I realized she's right. If you want to learn the trade of being a corporate cube drone you're going to have a lot of trouble in a startup.

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