Yes, there are a lot of dumb startups but I&#x27;m still not convinced this is a bad thing. Why does every 24-year old have to be changing the world?<p>Imagine you have a 2x2 matrix where the x-axis is positive value added to the world and the y-axis magnitude of impact. You want your job to be in the top right corner, high impact, high value added to the world but there&#x27;s two ways to get there. You could do something that has high value but low impact like working at a non-profit in DC helping with excel spreadsheets or whatever, you&#x27;re delivering value to the world but making a very small impact. The other approach is that you could learn how to build a large scalable system for delivering a solution to millions of people first. Maybe you&#x27;re making the 100th best photo sharing app and it will never add large value to the world, but you&#x27;re learning how to deliver impactful solutions you just need to figure out how to deliver real value. I&#x27;m not sure why there&#x27;s a bias against the second approach. I lived in DC for five years and most of my friends are doing less interesting things than my friends in SF. Someone who gets experience at a startup that builds interesting technology but never takes off could be the next CTO of a political campaign for all you know.<p>Also, it&#x27;s a complete myth that San Francisco is expensive to live in. You can leave cheap or expensive in any city. SF has a culture where being poor is totally cool. Everyone gets it, you&#x27;re in tech you&#x27;re an entrepreneur etc... There&#x27;s no pressure to go to nice restaurants for social status like there is in New York. I spend much less money in SF than I did living in DC just because of the lifestyle I&#x27;m living. Buying a house in SF is impossible due to the insane prices, but it&#x27;s really not that bad living in an apartment here.<p>I don&#x27;t think people are spoiled here, I think your perceptions are off. First, programming takes place entirely inside a persons head. Mental state is really important, and the 9-5 office job with a commute to and from the office every day doesn&#x27;t work very well for engineering. I like to break up my day into two halves. The first half of the day and the second half of the day, this gives me two discrete time periods where I can do work and I like to take a bike ride in between because I can think about the problems, and then not have to go to the gym later in the day. When I was working for a company in DC there was no way I could have left at 2:00 to take an hour bike ride, even if that&#x27;s how I work best. I think it&#x27;s ridiculous to say that people working in their optimal workflows makes them spoiled.<p>And again, it takes probably 3 years to become a high-quality engineer. So I&#x27;m not sure what you would want coding bootcamp graduates to do after 3 months, get together and talk about how hopeless life is? I&#x27;m glad that people are getting into the industry, the only way you&#x27;re going to get better is by getting real world experience. So what someone with 8-months experience isn&#x27;t a great engineer yet? By continuing to get better over the next couple years he will become a better engineer and then be able to add significant value to the world, I&#x27;m not sure why you would want to discourage developers from perfecting their craft. This would be like heckling a Med School student for not being a great doctor yet.