Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo

Talking about a handful of people - in the 80's we created the CTOS operating system and desktop computers (pre-dated the IBM PC). The whole OS, through the entirety of its existence, was worked on by 12 people.

The entire support organization was much larger. In Japan for instance, it was sold and supported through an organization of 1200 people. I always marveled at that - there were 100+ support people just for the work I did.

You only have to make a living where you are, doing what you. Release the idea that you're part of some industry, and are instead a boutique craftsperson.

Do you have contacts in the 'industry'? Will they contract out subprojects to you? Start there.

This is not merely an industry problem, most human enterprises in a society with abundance have nothing tangible to produce, hence the hype to justify their existence. Creating a tech business as you pointed out is not easy, but I think if you started a brick and mortar,down to earth business with level-headed partners it might be possible to pull it off, with little downsides.

My personal observation is that even level-headed people are few and far in between.

I am at my wits end trying to find some challenging work. I have grown up reading about Stallman, Carmack and team, Zawinkski etc. I used to love reading "A little Black book of Computer Viruses" by Mark Ludwig and Michael Abrash's books on optimization.

I am into embedded domain because of being so close the metal guys and there were so many greats in the electronics domain too.

I still remember the days of early linux trying to boot Gentoo on a iMac G3 and going nuts seeing the final bootup. Building computers by myself. Reading war stories and flame wars on slashdot.

All these were in the golden years of the 90's.

Currently I am finding no inspiration with work as there is nothing revolutionary coming out. Corp jobs are a complete mess. The systems suck with uninspiring team members. No experimentation whatsoever.

I too am in the same place as you just 4 years older. I used to do interesting personal projects before but it has completely reduced because professional life really screws you over and reduces you to an empty shell. Now all I do is grind leetcode so that I can retire in some good engineering driven company.

What are the chances of having your startup in areas other than web and mobile application development ecosystem?

Do you think starting a company working on compilers, operating systems etc will even work without huge resources and connections?