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Most smart people are ambitious and they want to make a high impact on the world. Such people will always want to move on to a position where they can make impo

Most smart people are ambitious and they want to make a high impact on the world. Such people will always want to move on to a position where they can make important decisions about the direction of product and technology - no, we are not talking about which build system to use (gyp? cmake?) or whether the usb protocol should be text based or binary based. Whilst these are important, people want to make decisions like "should chrome os be killed and replaced with android?", "what's the next most important feature required for android?" and so on. Things that change the future of technology. A company can provide only limited positions for such decision making. So, people move on to startups where they hope their thoughts will shape the future in a big way (future of technology or future of company). Note that this is regardless whether these people are any good at decision making outside their tech expertise. Today's low bootstrap cost startup world makes it possible for them to find out. And that's what they do.

mentat 13y ago
Excellent analysis. This is exactly where I am personally. It's interesting because you really want to have those kind of people as long as possible as they have the fire and passion to make things better, but they will leave.
- general_failure 13y ago
  Indeed. They will leave unless you can identify talent and ambition for decision making and move them to such a position. I also think companies of today must have a "ycombinator" division that encourages entrepreneurship. Like google ventures but for employees. It should be trivial to get into without having to get into insane amount of documents and proposals. Something like: - people that have been for 3 years can apply for "ventures" with an idea - give people real funding - they get to use all resources of parent company - absolutely no interference from the parent company for like 1 year or something. I think you will find that if people don't have interest in their idea, they will just come back to join parent company and do normal jobs.

mentat 13y ago

Excellent analysis. This is exactly where I am personally. It's interesting because you really want to have those kind of people as long as possible as they have the fire and passion to make things better, but they will leave.

general_failure 13y ago
Indeed. They will leave unless you can identify talent and ambition for decision making and move them to such a position. I also think companies of today must have a "ycombinator" division that encourages entrepreneurship. Like google ventures but for employees. It should be trivial to get into without having to get into insane amount of documents and proposals. Something like: - people that have been for 3 years can apply for "ventures" with an idea - give people real funding - they get to use all resources of parent company - absolutely no interference from the parent company for like 1 year or something. I think you will find that if people don't have interest in their idea, they will just come back to join parent company and do normal jobs.