This statement is dangerous, especially for those just starting their careers. Clearly, employees are bound to perform their duties as defined in their employment contracts.
That's all.
Employees should not have the mentality that they need to work plus sixty hours a week because you have to "treat every job as if it were your own startup."
At my first programming job, I, along with many others, fell into this fallacy. Briefly, we were constantly fed this bull -- the more your worked, the more you were valued. (But it didn't matter if you had the skills to actually complete your tasks as long as you billed as much as possible.)
This type of propaganda is great for employers, but not so much for employees.
Overall, the opinion touches on many subjects, but I agree with some of the comments on the NYT Site: not everyone can be an entrepreneur.
Perhaps the inflation of the idea of being an entrepreneur is the next bubble?
For example, before, anyone can own a house and, now, anyone can own a business. (A transformation of "why rent when you can own?" to "why work for someone else when you can be the boss?".)
I take a slightly more abstract approach: I first think of the problem from the user's perspective (and their expectations), then I map out a work flow before diving into pseudo-code and wire-frames.
Overall, I agree with the parent because before you can dive into coding, you have to think of the problem and solution abstractly.
But which language is used for writing out the solution? Whichever is the best tool for that particular problem.
Yes, "hackers" use Unix-based operating systems. Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software. Not just because it's better, but because it gives them more control. Good hackers insist on control. This is part of what makes them good hackers: when something's broken, they need to fix it.[1]
Thanks to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Shiro Kawai, Jessica Livingston, Matz, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum, David Weinberger, and Steven Wolfram for reading drafts of this comment.
This statement is dangerous, especially for those just starting their careers. Clearly, employees are bound to perform their duties as defined in their employment contracts.
That's all.
Employees should not have the mentality that they need to work plus sixty hours a week because you have to "treat every job as if it were your own startup."
At my first programming job, I, along with many others, fell into this fallacy. Briefly, we were constantly fed this bull -- the more your worked, the more you were valued. (But it didn't matter if you had the skills to actually complete your tasks as long as you billed as much as possible.)
This type of propaganda is great for employers, but not so much for employees.