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Y Combinator and Paul Graham are bad for the world (Part 1)
Technology startups have, compared to other get-rich-quick schemes, far better odds of producing monstrous wealth for founders in a short amount of time. If you have the contacts necessary to become a VC-backed founder, then startup away. Graham takes it further and says “start or join a startup”. Employees of startups get a lot of their downsides, in terms of job insecurity and division-of-labor issues, but their payoffs are, almost always, mediocre. The people who get rich off the Googles are, in general, not the early entrants, but the people (early entrant or not) who manage to become executives in the middle phases. Of course, being an early entrant can sometimes give an inside track to an executive position as the company grows, but not as much of one as a decade in finance or management consulting, or an elite MBA. If you want to get rich in San Francisco and don’t have the contacts to become a founder, find a way to jump from one executive position to another in funded companies. You won’t get as rich as the founders who beat the odds and end up in the “three comma club”, but your chances of attaining reasonable wealth are better, as you’ll still get an order of magnitude or two more than the software engineers joining at the same time.
In other words, the get-rich possibility for non-founding employees is no different in the startup game than in the mainstream corporate one. If you climb the ladder and reach a highly-compensated executive position, you can get wealthy. Usually, it takes time and luck. At the end of the wringer, some people end up not making it, meaning that their time was wasted on a promise that was never delivered.
...
Why are VC-backed startups so ageist? It’s not that they believe older programmers are stupid, but that they want to push, out of view, all of the people who’ve been in that racket and had average outcomes. Those kids throwing down 90-hour weeks (as if they were owners, not workers) for startups of which they own 0.02% might be “poisoned” if they’re exposed to people who’ve played that game (and lost) a time or two. If you sift through the older crowd and throw out the 95-98 percent of who’ve had typical outcomes, then you can convince the young that outlier success is inevitable, and get them to work far harder than they should, for minimal reward.
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/11/06/y-combinator-and-paul-graham-are-bad-for-the-world-part-1/
In other words, the get-rich possibility for non-founding employees is no different in the startup game than in the mainstream corporate one. If you climb the ladder and reach a highly-compensated executive position, you can get wealthy. Usually, it takes time and luck. At the end of the wringer, some people end up not making it, meaning that their time was wasted on a promise that was never delivered.
...
Why are VC-backed startups so ageist? It’s not that they believe older programmers are stupid, but that they want to push, out of view, all of the people who’ve been in that racket and had average outcomes. Those kids throwing down 90-hour weeks (as if they were owners, not workers) for startups of which they own 0.02% might be “poisoned” if they’re exposed to people who’ve played that game (and lost) a time or two. If you sift through the older crowd and throw out the 95-98 percent of who’ve had typical outcomes, then you can convince the young that outlier success is inevitable, and get them to work far harder than they should, for minimal reward.
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/11/06/y-combinator-and-paul-graham-are-bad-for-the-world-part-1/
