Not sure what type of "greenfield" startup experience you've had, but most of the work I'm talking about involves solving problems that most people simply don't have the combined skill set to solve. Typically problems that involve a substantial amount of quantitative skills combined with the ability to bring those solutions to prod.

Nearly all of the teams I've joined had problems they didn't know how to solve and often had no previously established solution. My last gig involved exploring some niche research problems in LLM space and leveraging the results to get our first round of funding closed, this involved learning new code bases, understanding the research papers, and communicating the findings publicly in an engaging way (all to typical startup style deadlines).

I agree with your remarks around "greenfield" if it just involves setting up a CRUD webapp, but there is a wide space of genuinely tricky problems to solve out there. I recall a maintainer style coworker of mine, who describe himself similar to what you are describing, telling me he was terrified of the type of work I had to do because when you started you didn't even know if there was a solution.

I have equal respect for people such as myself and for people that you describe, but I wouldn't say it is more challenging, just a different kind of challenge. And I do find the claim "you don't learn the actually valuable lessons" to be wildly against my experience. I would say most of my deep mathematical knowledge comes from having to really learn it to solve these problems, and more often than not I've had to pick up on an adjacent, but entirely different field to get things done.

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fsloth 7 hours ago | parent [-]

FWIW this is the best kind of job ever for me as well:

"when you started you didn't even know if there was a solution."

Regardless what the problem is - as long as I know _nobody knows if there is a solution_ it's an instant sugar rush.

You are free to bang your head against a stone wall for months trying to crack the damn thing.

OFC you need to deliver in the end. And this requires then ruthless "worse is better" mentality - ship something - anything. Preferably a the smallest package that can act as mvp that you know you can extend _if this is the thing_ what people want.

Because that's the other side of the coin - if the solution is not known - people are also not aware if the solution has true value or if it is a guess.

So in any case you have to rush to the mvp.

Such joy!

Of course the mvp must land, and must be extensible.

But these type of MVP:s are not a slam dunk.

The combined requirement of a) must ship within limited time b) nobody knows what _does_ require a certain mindset.

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in_cahoots 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting, this is a trap that I've seen multiple senior hires fall into. In my experience "we have a problem but no solution" often means (a) there actually is a solution but it's too expensive to implement, (b) there are organizational reasons why this problem exists and a new hire doesn't have the experience or credibility to navigate it or (c ) there is no solution to the problem or the solution is very complex, and by the time the new hire onboards, digs into the problem, and figures it out their credibility is shot because everyone was expecting the senior hire to figure it out in 90 days.

I've found new hires to be more successful when they join, get some easy wins, and then find their own problems to solve. But maybe it's just an artifact of working at large companies where most of the day-to-day stuff is figured out.

	▲	ua709 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think you forgot (d) although the initial statement seems credible, the problem is actually ill defined and under specified and therefore not solvable as originally stated. Example: our start-up plans to "fix health care"
	▲	fsloth 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"Interesting, this is a trap that I've seen multiple senior hires fall into." Definetly it's a trap. If you are a purist it's nigh impossible. But if you ruthlessly 80/20 it most stakeholders will be pleasantly surprised. I have no clue why I end up in these situations but I sure do like them. I do realize this would sound more of a perpetual "not invented here syndrome" but technical implementation of modeling aspects for 3D and computational geometry is such a scarce talent you actually get to do novel stuff for your business. The last time this happened I designed & implemented the core modeling architecture and led the implementation effort for our new map feature[0] [0] See section "Stunning new building facades add practical value" in https://www.mapbox.com/blog/detailed-architecture-and-new-de...