Most of my (ex israeli military) and extremely talented people didn't even look at web startups but went to work for companies "doing real products" where "there are complex challenged".
They view 99% of web startups as glorified TODO apps with the biggest challenge being playing around doing A/B on front page headlines. Hardly an engineering challenge.
They want to build stuff like Terabite-size de-duplicated storage infrastructure, or embedded devices.
And they are the majority of the brilliant people I know who all started as "programmers" (java/c/c#/etc)
They view 99% of web startups as glorified TODO apps with the biggest challenge being playing around doing A/B on front page headlines. Hardly an engineering challenge.
They want to build stuff like Terabite-size de-duplicated storage infrastructure, or embedded devices.
And they are the majority of the brilliant people I know who all started as "programmers" (java/c/c#/etc)