> It has probably effected your career, you could've gotten promoted faster, but did not.
Nah, I disagree. I've worked my ass off at companies, gotten standing ovations from regular users who knew what the work I did meant, and still gotten terrible raises. Contrast that to simply leaving a company every 2 years, and I get an amazing pay increase. Your skill, contribution, and talent have nothing to do with your promotion speed. If anything, the harder you work on real skills, the less likely you are to be promoted in my mind. The best climbers I've seen have been also the most bereft of real skills.
You work at a startup. Try being engineer number 2348219589211 at <INSERT_BIG_COMPANY_HERE>. You can work your ass off on real work and still get out climbed in a heartbeat by people better at politics and schmoozing. Most companies are like this for employees; they extract your potential business value for their direct sales value.
In these environments you don't feel so bad when people are gaming the system. If it's all a popularity contest at the end of the day anyways, what does it matter? Do your bare minimum to fulfill the contract such that you can sleep peacefully.
I think you just said “stick with it is by no means what I said”, and then gave a longer, richer explanation why he should have indeed just “stuck with it”. I agree with the original commenter. Seems these app ideas were all pretty unoriginal and in markets with giants already. Making a video game is the software equivalent of opening a restaurant… And so are a few other of these app ideas.
I think it’s good to see failure posts like this on HN. Helps balance out some of the toxic positivity you can run into. Not everyone will succeed, even the ones that work hard for years and are very talented (like these folks).
Nah, I disagree. I've worked my ass off at companies, gotten standing ovations from regular users who knew what the work I did meant, and still gotten terrible raises. Contrast that to simply leaving a company every 2 years, and I get an amazing pay increase. Your skill, contribution, and talent have nothing to do with your promotion speed. If anything, the harder you work on real skills, the less likely you are to be promoted in my mind. The best climbers I've seen have been also the most bereft of real skills.