Wouldn't it feel like it's a little bit bullshit if the company went out of business shortly after and all that work was for nothing? All of our work is so ephemeral.

Same happens in big cos when sometimes hundreds or more engineering years are scrapped purely because of internal political wars or “reorgs”

That's precisely my point. Startup work is not any more meaningful or everlasting than work at a big company. GP claimed PMs at big companies only come up with meaningless work but I think the work is meaningless almost everywhere. Every human needs purpose but pouring yourself into something that is very likely to have so little permanent impact seems foolish. I think there is a desperate call for balance in life which is why work-life balance provided by stable companies is valuable, not because the work you do there is any more or less important than a startup.

> Startup work is not any more meaningful or everlasting than work at a big company

That wasn’t my intended point. I want to be a profit center, not someone you keep busy because you can.

At Google, for example, I’d wanna work on search, ads, or data mining. But I wouldn’t wanna work on chat.

At Uber, I’d wanna work on the driver orchestration machinery, not on some opensource side project they have.

I find at startups it’s easier to get to work on the company’s main core thing. And that’s where I like to be.

If the whole company ultimately proves meaningless, that’s just life.

I disagree - it’s just way harder to come by any meaning in the corporate world than it is in startup. Startups have to assign meaningful work to everyone they hired or they die. Not so for big (or even medium) corp so they have to play the “work life balance” card so you don’t blow your brains out from boredom. Ofc that also means big cos are more welcoming to people who didn’t want anything to do with their work in the first place and just in it for the paycheck (nothing wrong with that) and it’s always a spectrum.