I see a lot of this assumption of #3 and #4. It has not been my experience. Yes, I was certainly a large proportion of the work that was occurring at the startups I had worked for, but overall I wouldn't say the work was that big of an impact to society in comparison to the sorts of work I was doing at other jobs for large corporations. I've been back and forth between both realms for many years, and all the startups I've worked for were high in idealism, low in through-put, whereas all of the large corporations I've worked for were low on idealism, high on mission.

This isn't to say that I preferred the big-corp work over the startup work--ultimately, I see them as two sides of the same coin of corporate cargo-cultism. It's a rare thing to find a company that respects productivity, be it big or small. But to me, it stands to reason that you're more likely to find it in a company that has a track record of being profitable. I prefer to work for myself now, on my own projects and as a consultant (B2B has an interesting effect of putting you on your "employer's" level. As a businessman, I am now my clients' pier, not their peon. It's a difference that makes all the difference).

But the biggest-impact work I've done in my life was for one of the largest manufacturing corporations in the world. At 25 years old, I had a team of developers and support technicians that I managed for a product that went out to thousands of customers around the world to facilitate them in planning and executing major, industrial construction projects. It was a combination of them giving me a chance because of successes I had in other projects (over a very short period of time, I spent longer just trying to get my coworkers to hang out with me after hours in startups), me taking initiative, and them looking the other way when I bent their rules and delivered results.

Second job out of college. Why me? Because I tried, that is all. And this was not even in the suburbs, this was RURAL. You think you need to be in the valley or NYC or Boston? Please, opportunity is everywhere.

Sure, go be employee #3 at the next bullshit iPhone app. Ooooh, you're using Sinatra and Handlebars and a flat UI. Big whoop. What does any of it mean? Put your balls on the table and show me that you can make an app that works across browsers, going back to IE 6, with a hostile network admin and DBA (who even has a DBA anymore), do it like it was nothing, and not complain about it. "oooh, web standards, boohoo" GET OVER IT! Do the work! Get it done. Preferably NOW!

Go to work for Ford or General Electric or Kellogs and if you just stand up every once in a while and toot your own horn, not expect people to recognize your "clear brilliance" over the chaos of their own lives and just hand you things, then you can do a lot of really great work and get compensated very well for it.

And they're much less likely to ask you to sleep in the office overnight. Actually, yeah, that's NEVER going to happen at a big corporation. They will know for a fact that the only reason you're doing that is to make up for goofing off during the daytime hours and come very quickly down on disciplinary action. You think it's cool your startup employer lets you work whenever your want? How do your friends feel about not getting to see you during normal social hours? Oh, what's that, you don't have any friends outside of work.

Yerp.