A separate comment I want to make is that the cute puzzles talked about in the article are pretty much the same everywhere: deal with politics, deal with poor performing code, deal with random idiotic UI decisions. The more interesting thing is to work on your own code or company where you have users and customers and they can guide you toward a good design or to work on harder research-y things, things that fall under computer science or software engineering.
I was re-reading one of Paul Graham's earlier essays, the ones I read while at the tail end of high school and beginning college and it basically says give the hackers direct access to user feedback and they'll do the right thing. I don't know what happens but along the way all these companies that started out like that have just introduced layers and layers of people between the user and the hacker so much so that the hackers opinions about what's the right thing to work on right now are ignored.
Maybe it's just time to get back to that and take that exit strategy; just work on a small cool product that you own where you get user feedback immediately where you decide the priority.
I was re-reading one of Paul Graham's earlier essays, the ones I read while at the tail end of high school and beginning college and it basically says give the hackers direct access to user feedback and they'll do the right thing. I don't know what happens but along the way all these companies that started out like that have just introduced layers and layers of people between the user and the hacker so much so that the hackers opinions about what's the right thing to work on right now are ignored.
Maybe it's just time to get back to that and take that exit strategy; just work on a small cool product that you own where you get user feedback immediately where you decide the priority.