> This is very "Anyone who's not an idiot should just found a start-up because 'regular jobs' are full of immature monkeys that can't appreciate you." That hasn't been my experience at all and it sounds more like 'being your own boss' is a way to avoid having any people skills or being able to work as part of a team.

Naw, not really: My people skills are not nearly the best, but I have learned a little, have quit being afraid of having really bad skills, and have noticed that a lot of people do really well with skills clearly a lot worse than mine! Some of those people are really obnoxious!

For your "not appreciated", right! That's basic: There is competition for promotions, recognition, etc. Soooo, nearly any time person X does something good, lots of people around them in the organization chart can feel like they are about to lose in the competition and then throw person X out of communications with meetings and memos, engage in destructive gossip, form closed cliques, etc.

This matter of "not appreciated" is not just my imagination or experience but is well recognized in studies of organizations, e.g., the academic subject Organizational Behavior, and what I am describing are cases of what is called goal subordination -- person Y pursues goals of their own advancement in ways that are against the good of the organization, i.e., person Y subordinates the good of the organization for their own good.

Goal subordination is serious, common, pervasive, nearly ubiquitous stuff as anyone with good people skills needs to know.

If person X has some good ideas and is ready, willing, able, and eager to work hard to get some financial security, then, sure, consider founding a business.

In particular, in nearly any US city, if look around in any neighborhood of nice, single-family, detached houses, then will find a large fraction, maybe a majority, of the people making the money owning and running their own business. That was true in the neighborhood I grew up in.

Next door, one brother in a family building a nice business in rebuilt auto parts. Two doors away, a guy with his own scrap iron business. A few more doors down, a guy who went to farmers and contracted for their cotton crop and sold the cotton to textile companies, Johnson and Johnson for medical bandages, etc. Across the street, the guy had been a good beer salesman for a beer company that went out of business but soon was the dominant beer distributor for a big chunk of the state. A little further down, a guy running a trade magazine for the trucking industry. One street over, the main wholesale liquor distributor in the city. Two doors up, in a family that ran a very busy tire shop. Where I was asked to tutor a kid in math, the father ran a business building and putting tanks, for milk, gasoline, water, whatever, on the backs of truck chassis, etc.; clearly the father wanted his son to be able to do the math for the engineering of the tanks! Their house was immaculate, like a picture out of Town and Country -- no dust particle would dare settle! See a pattern here? Net, in the US, owning a business is not rare and not nearly always unreasonably challenging. And, now, a business able to exploit applied math, possibly original, computing, and the Internet has some powerful, valuable advantages over the businesses of those other people living in nice houses and driving late model luxury cars.

Here are some war stories:

(1) Saving FedEx. Twice I saved FedEx from going out of business. The first time, in a mad rush, from my home in Maryland (of course, the FedEx HQ was in Memphis) used the best time-sharing, on an IBM VM/CMS system, to write software to schedule the fleet. The BoD was VERY concerned about the challenge of fleet scheduling, and crucial funding was waiting on a solution. Six weeks later I had ended my teaching of computer science at Georgetown U. and had the program running. One evening a FedEx SVP and I developed a schedule for the whole planned fleet and printed it out. Then next day copies were made and distributed. Our two representatives of BoD member General Dynamics went over the schedule in detail and pronounced

"It's a little tight in a few places but it's flyable.".

The funding was enabled. The comment of the FedEx founder F. Smith was that my work "solved the most important problem facing FedEx." For this, I received a LOT of push-back. The guy who had hired me tried to get me fired. We nearly came to blows. Since I had just solved "the most important problem", these blows were about competition, not my people skills. Uh, the blows were about skills, about my skills with VM/CMS, PL/I, the law of cosines for spherical triangles, some vector algebra, etc. A guy I'd never met and recently from some aerospace company Y said to me for no reason

"We have a lot of people like you at Y".

Now who is low on "people skills"?

(2) Revenue Projections. Later the two General Dynamics guys wanted some revenue projections. No one was really assigned to get the results. People had hopes, intentions, etc. but nothing numerical.

So, I got involved: I started with what we knew, current revenue and revenue for the full planned business with the full fleet. Soooo, the projections were essentially an interpolation between those two. Soooo, how might the growth go, that is, what would be driving the growth? Well, there would be current customers and target customers not yet customers. So, the rate of growth might be proportional to both of these and, thus, their product. So, let y(t) be the daily revenue at time t and let b be the daily revenue for the full planned business. Then from some calculus the rate of growth would be

y'(t) = d/dt y(t)

and for some constant of proportionality k we would have the first order, linear, ordinary differential equation initial value problem

y'(t) = k y(t) ( b - y(t) )

I found the closed form solution. The SVP Planning and I picked a value of k for a reasonable projection, and I drew the graph of the solution.

That was on a Friday. The next day the SVP was traveling, and I was in my office. There was a BoD meeting starting at 8 AM. The first order of business was the graph of projections, and the General Dynamics guys wanted to know how the graph was developed. By 11 AM, no one had an answer. I had NOT been invited to the BoD meeting -- that was due to my social skills, right? I'd guess goal subordination, by everyone from FedEx at the meeting. The General Dynamics guys lost patience with the FedEx C-level, returned to their rented rooms, packed, got plane tickets back to Texas, and as a last chance, returned to the meeting. Another SVP, I'd gotten along well with (must have been his skills and not mine, right!), guessed that I'd done the graph, called me at my office, and asked me to come to the meeting, then scattered. As I arrived, the two General Dynamics guys were in the hall, unhappy, with their bags packed, about to leave for Texas (that would have been the end of FedEx). I reproduced several points on the curve, didn't review the differential equation, and the General Dynamics guys stayed and FedEx was saved. A guess is that the General Dynamics guys also guessed I'd done the projections and, really, were torqued at the FedEx C-level for keeping me out of the BoD meeting because of uniform across the C-level goal subordination.

I never got a raise, promotion, thank you, hand shake, or even a smile for saving FedEx the second time. My people skills, right? Or goal subordination?

I can go on this way, lots of cases, organizations, projects: Nearly always when I did such good work, I got attacked, usually seriously. You suggest my poor people skills. I suggest goal subordination.

In the past, I worked really hard and often did some really good work. So, instead of putting up with being attacked by others, for doing good work, as in goal subordination, I should run my own business.