It was recently asked on stackoverflow ”When should you leave your day job to open a start-up?“. Some of the popular answers revolved around issues of financial security and the current “economic climate”. It felt to me like the common wallet-based fears and anxieties that get rolled around whenever someone breathes that they are thinking of going rogue (this applies across many fields). While the concerns are valid, they don’t really speak to the full scope of the concerns faced when hanging out a shingle of your own.
One often overlooked point is that within a company there exists an entire infrastructure to support the talent–to support support you in whatever guru role you are in. Building the software that people need is one component, getting the software into the hands of the people that need it is another, and convincing people that they need your automated sprocket widgetizer may be yet another large component of the whole package.
Joel Spolsky explores these concepts quite well in “The Development Abstraction Layer”.
All of that said, if everyone listened to the naysayers, we’d never have any startups or the fresh thinking that comes along with it. If you have it in you, you won’t let anything stand in your way. That’s not to say nothing will stand in your way. There will be obstacles every day. But to the right person, nearly every obstacle can be gotten over, under, around, or through. One can only aspire, train, and continue to test his mettle.
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