I think that’s the crux of it. It’s hard to give a shit about making someone else’s product. I like what I’m working on, think it’ll help people at scale, but it’s not my product, so I’m long term ambivalent
Outside of one-man projects, it's never going to be your product. If you start a company, you're going to want to scale. Now you have sales, product, and marketing to deal with. Not to mention more engineers, many of which you will not agree with. If your software turns into a slow buggy mess, you only have high level buttons to mash (or you turn into the micromanaging jerk). These buttons are laggy. Tell upper management that your website is slow dogshit and you might see improvements 6 months from now. Maybe. Assuming the product weenies don't ruin it all with a dozen A/B darts they throw at the wall in the meantime.
Doesn't matter. If I got a large chunk of the long-term payoff, I'd care about tackling those problems. The issue is incentive, not the difficulty of the work.
That’s an interesting question. I think I would. But at the same time, I think that I would be more interested in building the next spacex than working at the current one.
