Ask HN: Is it me or ...?

In any case, I respect that you're looking at this from the perspective of a tech investor in Silicon Valley, but you're in a completely different boat than prospective startup employees like the OP.

The universe of opportunities for developers is significantly greater than the universe of investment opportunities for Silicon Valley investors. There are literally countless opportunities in literally countless markets to build companies that, if not pure "tech" companies by standard Valley definition, use technology and the web to gain advantage. A lot of these would not be viable investment opportunities for YCombinator, but they will still make those who are successful in exploiting them very financially "comfortable."

Bottom line: any developer motivated in some part by a desire to make real money is doing himself a disservice by considering that the best path to financial success is to join an early-stage Silicon Valley startup for basis points in equity.

If I did believe in my team then I would try to do whatever I could within my domain of expertise to help the company succeed. As a developer there are usually lots of things you can do to help. When a deal doesn't close - find out if there are any technical features that might have make a difference. Give the sales department tools to better sell your products. Give the business people tools to analyze stats so they can make better decisions. Maybe these are not sexy things, but they might be necessary to get a company off the ground.

Depending on the organization you may not feel that you have the authority to do certain things. But, if the team is any good then they would recognize when somebody is trying to step up and help with the big picture. I would probably use that as a yardstick to tell me whether it's me or them.

Also vastly increasing the cost of the machine, and decreasing its range. Boyd's vision was of huge numbers of cheap lightweight fighters dominating the skies. They could shoot down anything, evade any threat. Combine them with the unmatched pilot instructor training offered at the FWS and the Air Force would be a truly awesome beast.

Other roles such as CAS could be handled by other planes like the A-10. Boyd's critical insight was that you don't want much flexibility in an aircraft. Make it supremely effective, and it would find a versatility on its own. Just as the superior training of the F-4 pilots (instructed by Boyd himself and his peers) allowed them to be effective despite inferior hardware. A master with an old, rusty sword will beat a novice with Excalibur every time. But give him a gun and he's got a fighting chance.

> In other words, Boyd's vision of where air combat was heading wasn't really spot on.

I would say that air combat could have evolved the way Boyd had envisioned it, but didn't because he was marginalized. Evolution doesn't just happen, someone or something makes it happen. And then the results are looked at as inevitable, when they really aren't. Boyd was probably ahead of his time when it comes to combined arms strategy.

Eventually the Russians or someone else will put his vision into action and mop the floor with their adversaries, proving him right. After all, a good radar and long range capabilities are no good if you can't even keep your bird in the air long enough to put them to work.

Most managers are in simply supervisory roles, to watch over the team and ensure it's functioning, surviving, and thriving. That is what a supervisor or lead is for. While managers are certainly responsible for nurturing and growing their teams efficiently, they're also highly concerned with managerial duties to the company, which can often be unseen or misunderstood by their direct reports.

Managers often have responsibilities to the management team, the executive team, and other departments entirely. Take an IT department for example. All of the other departments in the company, including operations (where IT often sits to avoid conflict with engineering, and because largely it's an operational focus), are its internal clients, and the management in IT must work with the management of all other departments.

Meanwhile, IT engineers (sysadmins, devops, etc) often under recognize that this intricate dance is going on. The executive team will put pressures on the department, and the manager must delicately balance their needs with what the needs of the team are as well.

Thus, the engineer often looks for a manager that focuses solely on the team. But long term, the manager ends up having to account for the needs of the company. Any manager will need to do this.

It's ultimately important that the staff understands that their manager is superior to them simply because the position requires this of them (not necessarily because of any inherent skill advances). To look for an equal out of your manager is and will continue to be an exercise in futility.