No vitriol from me, but I do want to try to change your perspective a bit, and it starts with this: The world is what you experience. Start with HN: reading H

No vitriol from me, but I do want to try to change your perspective a bit, and it starts with this: The world is what you experience. Start with HN: reading HN too much can really warp your views on what the tech world is like. HN tends to feature political topics and young tech companies that are good at marketing. But that's far from what's actually going on; it's even far from what YCombinator is doing. For instance, there was a post on the YC blog just yesterday about a really neat thing that a YC-funded biotech startup has done (http://blog.ycombinator.com/one-codex-yc-s14-wins-the-cdcs-no-petri-dish-challenge http://blog.ycombinator.com/one-codex-yc-s14-wins-the-cdcs-n...) -- and it was posted to HN and went basically nowhere. So, be aware that HN is distorting the tech world a bit. Along the same lines, you only heard about Dennis, the owner of Klippers barbershop, because someone took the time to sing his ballad. Before January 19, you probably didn't know he existed. Well, there are a lot of people out there, just like Dennis, except nobody's written about them yet. One of the things I appreciate about my business is that I meet such a wide variety of other businesses and people all the time, and it helps to re-adjust how I see the world. For every "github announcement of some two bit project with a catchy name and a super nicely designed logo but only an initial commit of a blank page", I bet there are at least two github projects that have gone unannounced that are labors of love by some developer somewhere just trying to improve something. For every "[company] with two people, non-technical co-founders looking for a ‘first hire’ at a terribly low salary and with 0.05% stock to create their ‘vision’ which will surely ‘change the world’", I bet there's at least two companies full of really smart people who have been fighting the good fight to actually change the world. (My go-to example for this is always HN's own daniellefong, of http://lightsailenergy.com/ http://lightsailenergy.com/, which YC declined to fund years ago.) We have arduino and Beagleboard and quadcopters and all kinds of fun things now, and kids love them, and these represent "toy computing" in exactly the same way that the Commodore did when I was young -- only now the computers can fly, swim, crawl, and roll. I think your advice to avoid crap projects is good, but ... even then, I think that helping people cultivate "a job is just a job" attitude might be better. Go to work, do a good job, get paid ... then go home and do what you really love. The part of crap work that really screws people over is that we invest so much of our self-worth in our jobs. You can "keep the love for the tech alive" at home, and still work for the "get rich quick types" -- just make sure you get paid. I guess I'm not feeling very curmudgeonly today. I don't think a few comments from a few people that are unhappy with the way their parts of the world has turned out actually means things are all that bad. Things actually seem pretty good to me still.