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In my opinion, both outcomes are sad and unfortunate. Who has benefited from the engineer's genius? Well, a bunch of journal articles got written and perhaps so

by anateus 17y ago

In my opinion, both outcomes are sad and unfortunate. Who has benefited from the engineer's genius? Well, a bunch of journal articles got written and perhaps someone wrote a dissertation or five, alternatively a few thousands of dollars got written off the bottom line of some mega-corp. That's when the entrepreneur steps in. Either the dinky program fix, or the obscure (or not so much) journal article can be turned into something that is brought out to people, for the entrepreneur's profit, which is wholly contingent on convincing people that they have benefited! It's sad to me that there really are large quantities of brilliant people who could be the guy in the first two panels who truly think the two outcomes on the right are the only possibilities.

pwmanagerdied 17y ago
Adorable self-congratulation.
- anateus 17y ago
  I'm not sure what you're getting at, that I wouldn't speak quite so glowingly of that third option if I weren't an entrepreneur myself? If you mean it in the sense that I am glad I'm doing what I'm doing and would like more people to make a similar choice, then, sure, yeah, you're right.
tsally 17y ago
I think you'll find that programming ability and vision go hand in hand. So when you talk about "brilliant people ... who truly think the two outcomes on the right are the only possibilities", by definition they are unlikely to exist in significant numbers. Brilliant programmers don't believe that academia and large corporations are the only two possibilities. They wouldn't be great programmers if they couldn't see past two obvious possibilities.
- anateus 17y ago
  Perhaps. "Large quantities" comes from generalizing my personal anecdotal experience of people with great ability, and plenty of vision, but without that sense of where to go with it (one could argue that this is a defect in their vision). I wasn't comfortable enough with the generalization to go into "most" territory :> I think it's to a great degree a cultural thing. If you are exposed to something repeatedly and told it is good, such as being an academic scientist, a programmer for a company, yes, even an entrepreneur, you are more likely to see that thing as a promising path. Here on HN everyone is inundated with "startup this" and "startup that", so I seem to be belaboring a point, but my personal experience has been that "out there" entrepreneurship is not often enough seen as a viable option and that the inclination to do it is a variable (somewhat) independent of the brilliance of the hacker.

by anateus 17y ago

pwmanagerdied 17y ago

Adorable self-congratulation.

anateus 17y ago
I'm not sure what you're getting at, that I wouldn't speak quite so glowingly of that third option if I weren't an entrepreneur myself? If you mean it in the sense that I am glad I'm doing what I'm doing and would like more people to make a similar choice, then, sure, yeah, you're right.

tsally 17y ago

I think you'll find that programming ability and vision go hand in hand. So when you talk about "brilliant people ... who truly think the two outcomes on the right are the only possibilities", by definition they are unlikely to exist in significant numbers. Brilliant programmers don't believe that academia and large corporations are the only two possibilities. They wouldn't be great programmers if they couldn't see past two obvious possibilities.

anateus 17y ago
Perhaps. "Large quantities" comes from generalizing my personal anecdotal experience of people with great ability, and plenty of vision, but without that sense of where to go with it (one could argue that this is a defect in their vision). I wasn't comfortable enough with the generalization to go into "most" territory :> I think it's to a great degree a cultural thing. If you are exposed to something repeatedly and told it is good, such as being an academic scientist, a programmer for a company, yes, even an entrepreneur, you are more likely to see that thing as a promising path. Here on HN everyone is inundated with "startup this" and "startup that", so I seem to be belaboring a point, but my personal experience has been that "out there" entrepreneurship is not often enough seen as a viable option and that the inclination to do it is a variable (somewhat) independent of the brilliance of the hacker.