There are several points this guy doesn't acknowledge: often excluded from that culture, not because we're lousy coders If he is an amazing engineer, he'

There are several points this guy doesn't acknowledge: often excluded from that culture, not because we're lousy coders If he is an amazing engineer, he's not "excluded" from the culture. You need a command line and an internet connection to start your own thing. for the promise of striking it rich. Few people do startups for the "promise of striking it rich". They do it to "make it big", which is not the same thing. They are more fame- and impact- motivated than dollar motivated. So this right there bespeaks the wrong motivation. Especially when the people who really strike it rich aren't the ones writing code. If he's not starting his own thing, he expects someone else to pay him a salary. But then turns around and says that coding is the only source of value. Guess what, it's harder to raise money for a technology startup than to get up a Rails site. Many more people can do the latter than the former, and it's not for lack of wanting. So from day minus one (not even day zero of signing or day one of working) this guy is already hating on the people who hired him and pay his salary (often in addition to coding the first prototype), without even understanding what they do. Why would you hire someone like that? trade their lives and their health for the potential...we won't put up with that shit. We have lives, we have families, we have other things that are important to us. We're not about to sleep at our desks and trade watching our kids grow up Do you want a guy like this at your company? This is absolutely poisonous from a culture perspective. Not only does the guy not want to work hard, he equates working hard with "losing your health". Somehow I missed seeing that Levchin, Thiel, Brin, Zuckerberg, Pyncus, and every early Googler and Facebooker were in wheelchairs for carpal tunnel syndrome. It's really not that hard to work hard and work out at the same time (even the dreaded brogrammers manage it). If you are an engineer, you have to admit that tradeoffs exist. Go home and be a family man, like Guile's famous taunt, just don't expect to also become a multimillionaire at a hot tech startup in an intensely competitive environment without any sacrifice of time. After all, you've got your wife and kids, and startups are all stupid scams meant to bilk the coders, so why feel excluded from anything? Answer: because he doesn't believe his own analysis. He wants someone else to prop him up, to raise money and employ him, to provide the structure and the idea for him, and to organize everything into nice clean chunks that he can knock out with no technical risk in 40 hours per week, resenting them the whole way. Guess what: the kind of person who can do that doesn't want to work with people like this.