flowereaterz

Sounds like everyone in any career, including the OP or people on Hacker News.

They are not. But are startup employees doing something meaningful, or building their own reputations and expertise?

And since you're talking about software startup employees, probably the closest comparison is CS phd students, who are nowhere near suffering. The vast majority of graduate students are at least as satisfied as a developer, otherwise whole programs would have disappeared decades ago from inability to recruit. New admits always ask current graduate students what it's like. There seems to be this dissonance between people here on Hacker News believing that everything is like the horror stories of grad students being abused by psychopathic advisors and at best will get poorly paid adjunct positions before burning out, and what's really happening.

Probably not too dissimilar to the delusional early employees who sign up for a startup hoping to make millions from their shares...