Another CMU grad here, and I can't agree more.
Attention all new CMU SCS grads: I envy you. You have the brains, the skills, and the YOUTH to do whatever you want! DO IT! It doesn't have to be a startup, but it should be something that you really really want to do and would do even for free. You literally have nothing to lose.
If you think you would work for someone else for free - then do it. The minute you take a job for the pay however, you're on the slippery slope of selling your soul for money.
You can always make money. Your youth is ticking away by the minute. You will never get it back.
I graduate from CMU 6 years ago. I took the safer route. Instead of searching for something I am passionate about, I settled for the paycheck. It took me 4 years to gather up enough courage to admit that I was miserable on the paycheck treadmill.
See, when you work for a paycheck, you sell yourself to the person in control of your pay - your manager. Your incentive is to please your manager so that you can get your raise. Often times, this means that you have to compromise your own judgement to be “in alignment with the management”. Each time you compromise your own judgement, you actually become more adversed to making your own judgement. And as you lose your sense of judgement, you lose your confidence in yourself to do any differently. This is when you are really in trouble. You become risk adverse: the more you compromise your soul to gain your material belongings, the more you become committed to holding on to your material goods for dear life.
I saw this happening to myself but I didn't have enough courage to just quit outright, so I took the only other socially (parentally) acceptable route: go back to school.
At my MBA program I found a whole collection of folks similar to me. Regardless of whatever we wrote on the application to get in, most of us were just soul searching. Searching for the meaning of our lives beyond our paychecks. There, I observed a phenomenon. The “I want to do something else BUT” disease. Usually, the BUT is a “but I have sustain my materialistic life”. So even as most of us were soul searching, by far the majority went right back onto the paycheck treadmill. And that is sad. Really sad.
Avoid the treadmill altogether and you will be happier for it. If you can’t, if you need the money to sustain yourself and your family, then at the very least keep your conciseness in check and remember that you’re just working for a paycheck. In your spare time, do what you truly want to be doing, challenge yourself and don’t listen to what the majority wants you to do. Be different. You only live once. Live it.