Not sure what type of "greenfield" startup experience you've had, but most of the work I'm talking about involves solving problems that most people simply don't have the combined skill set to solve. Typically problems that involve a substantial amount of quantitative skills combined with the ability to bring those solutions to prod.

Nearly all of the teams I've joined had problems they didn't know how to solve and often had no previously established solution. My last gig involved exploring some niche research problems in LLM space and leveraging the results to get our first round of funding closed, this involved learning new code bases, understanding the research papers, and communicating the findings publicly in an engaging way (all to typical startup style deadlines).

I agree with your remarks around "greenfield" if it just involves setting up a CRUD webapp, but there is a wide space of genuinely tricky problems to solve out there. I recall a maintainer style coworker of mine, who describe himself similar to what you are describing, telling me he was terrified of the type of work I had to do because when you started you didn't even know if there was a solution.

I have equal respect for people such as myself and for people that you describe, but I wouldn't say it is more challenging, just a different kind of challenge. And I do find the claim "you don't learn the actually valuable lessons" to be wildly against my experience. I would say most of my deep mathematical knowledge comes from having to really learn it to solve these problems, and more often than not I've had to pick up on an adjacent, but entirely different field to get things done.

Yup. You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them.

It's kind of like when the FAA does crash investigation -- a stunning amount of engineering and process insights have been generated by such work to the benefit of all of us.

Everyone can do 0 to 1. Because delivery drives dopamine. The it is the boring thing, but there comes experience to find interest in that part

It is more challenging, but I feel like it also has fewer people looking for that. That whole "move fast and break things" phrase messed with too many people's heads. I don't think people appreciate this segment of a product's life cycle as much as they should. They're always looking for the quick solutions.

> Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons.

You learn a ton of valuable lessons going from 0 to v1. And a ton of value is created. I guess I'm unclear how you're defining "actually valuable" here.

Taking this to the extreme, I think most lessons represent sunset or dead projects. There's no sweet illusions anymore. No assumptions. No ego. No account for infinite flexibility. No shine. No excitement of a new thing. No holy wars. No astronaut architects. Only you, the ruins and the truth.

Soooo agree. I've had to clean up the messes of people that did the 0-1 in my field and going from 1-unconditionally stable was a lot more work than the 0-1 part.

This is unironically my favorite kind of HN comment: to say something incredibly rude and/or condescending but wrap it in the right kind of thoughtful language to qualify as HN nice

The original punchline ("you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons.") was just a bit too sharp, so you even edited in a psuedo-clarification which actually just repeats that punchline but in a softer way, masterful!