Ask HN: Just what exactly is "real-world experience" and how do I get it?
This is in response to an old comment by edw519: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226151

I've excerpted a bit of it here:

We are constantly hearing advice like "Scratch your own itch," "Find problems close to you," and "Code what you know," which is all good advice for finding a startup idea.

What then, do you do if you're not exposed to much?

When I spent time talking to people in SV 2 months ago, I noticed something I never expected: lots of people have very little exposure to "real world" problems.

People come up with "me too" startups because that's all they know.

Sure it's easy and cheap to start a business, and if you're smart and can hack, all the more reason. But what about the giant issue hardly anyone mentions: real world experience.

...

My advice to a young hacker with lots of skill but not much experience (outside of college apps): you may want to consider getting a job for a year or two. I know, everyone wants to start the next <whatever>, and get rich now and no one wants to sit in Megacorp's cube farm. And a startup, even a failed one, may be a better education.

OTOH, you will acquire dozens of great startup ideas (and contacts) and avoid the "me too" trap. Something to think about.

I found myself nodding in agreement as I read it, but I've been sitting here for 5 years in Megacorp's cube farm and I still don't think I have "real world experience." Part of the reason may be because this particular industry (aerospace) is also its own echo chamber in many ways, but I think I'm missing something.

Some people can enter a large organization, learn a lot of domain knowledge, and spot the pain points that can be solved with technology -- and potentially turn that into a lucrative startup or consulting career. Good for them. But these are the sort of "pain points" that I notice here:

- An extreme level of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. I could not even get approval to use LAPACK for linear algebra computations. This ends up with a lot of wasted energy implementing things that have already been done, and probably much better than an in-house solution too.

- A stifling bureaucracy. It takes months of paperwork to get new hardware or software. All along the chain are little fiefdoms of people who will invent processes and regulations to justify their paychecks.

- A misalignment of incentives. Ideas get shot down because they threaten somebody's career. Buggy, unstable software gets declared a "roaring success" because nobody will own up to failure.

- A lack of honest communication between users, customers, management, and developers. Sure, it might be true that all enterprise software is like this, but it's clear that a lot of misunderstanding could be avoided (and the associated cost of doing the wrong thing could be saved).

If these are the pain points of an organization, I don't see how it helps me in any way. There's two issues:

(1) These are social problems, not technical, and they probably won't be solved with software.

(2) Even if there exists a software solution, there's probably no way to sell it short of employing a sales team that costs $50,000+ to make a deal (cf. Joel's article on pricing, http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html).

Yes, these are "real world" problems, but I don't see how I'm getting any useful "real world experience" out of this sort of environment. What should I be learning here?