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I find this to be more and more important the more experienced I get. At some point, I had a poignant realization. I work to earn money. I then use the money to

I find this to be more and more important the more experienced I get. At some point, I had a poignant realization. I work to earn money. I then use the money to provide for myself & my family, to buy things and experiences, and to build a safety net. I do these things to have a relatively stressless, happy, and fulfilling life. If I just maximize for cash earned, I need to compensate for other things. I want to maximize free time and minimize commute. I have errands to run and things to do. Having flexible work, with a work from home option is worth more to me than making more money. Otherwise, I need to spend more on an apartment close to the office. A more expensive car can make a commute more bearable. I value peace and quiet, and city living is at odds with this. Reconciling all this while working a 9-5 at a central office in the city costs a lot of money. I currently work at 15Five, where "Embrace Freedom & Flexibility" is one of our core values. We actually are active in living this and our other core values. You can feel the effect directly. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and arrived at the same conclusion as this article.

i_dont_know_ 9y ago
Preach it :) There's also something to be said about attention and creativity in most coding/tech jobs. I could sit at my desk all day writing marginally efficient code, or I could take a 1-hour break to do something else, come back and write really exceptional code, but most work cultures frown on doing this regularly. If you're full (or mostly) remote, you can regulate this yourself
GoToRO 9y ago
I agree with you. The question then becomes: if you achieved this level of performance, isn't it better to work for yourself rather than work for somebody who all the time undervalues your performance? Isn't it better in the long run to build a product that might need minimum level of attention once it's done?
- pm215 9y ago
  That would depend on whether the work you find happy, low stress and fulfilling overlaps much with the work you'd need to be doing to work for yourself. Personally I enjoy the software engineering part of my job, and have no desire to take on the business, sales and marketing work that I think would form a large part of working for myself.
- sametmax 9y ago
  It is. But after preaching it for a decade, I realized that working for yourself implies to develop a certain skill set and embrace another set of constraints many people don't wish for them-self. There is a lot of comfort in being an employee.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    This is true, you replace one set of problems with some completely different ones. However, it does give you the ability to set your own priorities rather than them being handed down from management.
- stult 9y ago
  That depends on your risk tolerance, though. Self-employment, especially the entrepreneurial kind, inherently has a higher risk of failure. Sure, you might win big and build a self-sustaining business that earns you a tidy living, but then again you might also go bankrupt and lose everything because you can't pay your bills.
  - BjoernKW 9y ago
    Is self-employment really so much riskier than sequential employment? With the latter if you're laid off you instantly lose all your income. As a self-employed consultant / freelancer if you lose a customer who quite likely still have other customers, which mitigates the overall risk.
    - bigmanwalter 9y ago
      Yes it's riskier. If I'm laid off it only takes weeks to find a new position. If my business goes under, I'm likeley burnt out and have just lost not only my income but my life savings as well.
    - Retric 9y ago
      If you get laid off in most western countries you get ~10k over 6 months in unemployment benefits from the government + accrued vacation time and possibly more. Assuming you where ok financially before you started that's a long time to look for the next job especially if your cut down your lifestyle. PS: It's often the case where people get a little warning and end up finding a job before they get laid off. From the companies perspective the trade off is a little more chaos up front for significant savings on unemployment insurance.
      - 9to5isdead 9y ago
        Could you be specific? Are you talking about the US or another country?
        phyller 9y ago
- koliber 9y ago
  If I do X for someone I get paid Y. If I do X for myself, I get paid X*Z. However, I also have to do marketing, sales, and everything else a particular X requires to be a business. These are things that I prefer not doing. I'm on the fence if the Z multiplier is enough. Been there, done that. I don't knock it, but for the time being, I enjoy the stability of a long-term contract and not doing the peripheral work.
  - dilemma 9y ago
    >If I do X for someone I get paid Y. If I do X for myself, I get paid X*Z. Note that Z can be less than 1.
- caseysoftware 9y ago
  I'd say it's not just about risk tolerance but also deciding what pieces to "outsource" in your daily job. When you're running your own firm (even one person), you are in charge of catching billable work, doing the billable work, billing the work, filing the taxes, etc, etc. If you add anyone else, the non-billable efforts get even bigger. I ran my own firm for ~7 years and had a team of 8 at one point. Hunting the next project just got exhausting and I never got to build things. If you work for another firm - consultancy or product - the vast majority is handed off to other people who are probably better at (or at least focused on) many of those things. Yes, you make less money but you're "paying" to have all those things done for you.
whipoodle 9y ago
I think the problem is, the money is one of the only things written down. There's no, gee we're really sorry but things got rough this month so we're only going to pay you 70%. (Of course you leave if that does happen.) But there's no guarantee on any of the intangibles. And whenever they need to save a buck, or even in ways that aren't fully appreciated, the good-workplace stuff can erode. After spending a while in this industry, I'd say places are more alike than different, and total compensation is a reasonable thing to maximize for.
- SoMisanthrope 9y ago
  Coincidentally, this just popped up on HN https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/your-money/is-the-stuff-you-buy-over-20-years-worth-40000-hours-of-time.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/your-money/is-the-stuff-y... Brilliant thought exercise.
gehwartzen 9y ago
I agree. The only rational explanation I personally see for maximizing earnings at the expense of current life flexibility is to save/invest enough to retire earlier. But even then there are certain aspects of life that you can't catch up on later; being a part of your children growing up, establishing a strong bond with your spouse, remaining healthy by minimizing stress, etc
- pc86 9y ago
  This makes sense if you're going to try to get a big payday early in your career - trying to build a unicorn startup in SV and cash out by 30. That sort of makes sense to me. But maximizing earnings by working 60+ hour weeks so you can retire at 55 instead of 65? That's a pretty high cost for not a lot of reward, as far as I can see.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    What do you want to do with your life? There is no single right answer to that question so you need to figure it out for yourself. Some of the answers require you to work 80+ hours a week (at a good job) while living in a tent so you can save every penny - when you finally retire at 68 you will just barely have enough money to enjoy the last 5 years of your life spending all the money you saved over the years. Some answers you save 50% of your income until you retire at 40 to live the life you choose. Some answers you save 10% until 65 working a 40 hour a week job. The first allows you have an expensive hobby (sail the world in a very nice yacht). The second means you have to enjoy not buying anything. The last is a reasonable compromise for most of us.
matwood 9y ago
Completely agree. I'll trade some salary for flexibility and control. I hate doing pointless work (hence control), and I like working remote and work very well at home. The odd thing is, I go to the office regularly, and it's enjoyable because it's my choice to go. At my current company we state it as "you're all adults, and that's how we treat you." We have hired some people who needed more structure and they had to move on. There is no judgement on people who left, not every position is right for every person.
conanbatt 9y ago
What this mindset and view doesn't take into account is the direct financial impact of these measures, and taxes are a lot more involved that people think. Take google catering your lunch every day and night. It might be costing google 25 U$S per meal to provide that to the employees. Would the employee, not having that option, spend 25 U$S a meal? No way. But do employees choose or prefer companies that cater lunch? Lets say google can offer an employee a double offer: either full benefits and salary of X, or NO benefits and salary of Y. What is your Y? In general I would always think that most people will take Y, precisely because most of the benefits are very costly. Y could be 30%. Now, there is a difference in taxes: that extra Y will get taxed at 30%, while googles benefit cost might even have tax deductions. So the gap between X and Y is blurred by rules that applied differently. If company benefits were not only deductible, but expenditure there were considered part of wages and taxed at that rate, they would quickly diminsh if not dissapear.
- greenshackle2 9y ago
  This is very topical for me as I'm considering offers at a couple of companies this week and was trying to estimate Y for each, since they have pretty different benefits. One of them has catered breakfast and lunch. It sounds like a great perk but in Canada* in-kind benefits, including meals, are considered part of your salary, and are subject to income tax. I'm not sure how that plays out with daily catered meals; am I deemed to have received the benefit even if I eat out or bring leftovers? I could be paying taxes on food I haven't eaten. Probably not cheap food either. I'd prefer being paid in cash, and having the option to buy meal vouchers. That's true of most benefits - cash is always more flexible. There's also what it says about the culture: we offer free breakfast because we expect you to be at the office before your usual breakfast time. We offer free lunch because we don't expect you to have enough time to go out for lunch, or to pack a lunch the night before. *For federal income tax. YMMV on provincial tax. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/publications/t4130-employers-guide-taxable-benefits-allowances/employers-guide-taxable-benefits-allowances.html#subsidized https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publi...
SoMisanthrope 9y ago
Read the book "Your Money or Your Life"... amazing what we trade, to keep a job.

i_dont_know_ 9y ago

Preach it :) There's also something to be said about attention and creativity in most coding/tech jobs. I could sit at my desk all day writing marginally efficient code, or I could take a 1-hour break to do something else, come back and write really exceptional code, but most work cultures frown on doing this regularly. If you're full (or mostly) remote, you can regulate this yourself

GoToRO 9y ago

I agree with you. The question then becomes: if you achieved this level of performance, isn't it better to work for yourself rather than work for somebody who all the time undervalues your performance? Isn't it better in the long run to build a product that might need minimum level of attention once it's done?

pm215 9y ago
That would depend on whether the work you find happy, low stress and fulfilling overlaps much with the work you'd need to be doing to work for yourself. Personally I enjoy the software engineering part of my job, and have no desire to take on the business, sales and marketing work that I think would form a large part of working for myself.
sametmax 9y ago
It is. But after preaching it for a decade, I realized that working for yourself implies to develop a certain skill set and embrace another set of constraints many people don't wish for them-self. There is a lot of comfort in being an employee.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  This is true, you replace one set of problems with some completely different ones. However, it does give you the ability to set your own priorities rather than them being handed down from management.
stult 9y ago
That depends on your risk tolerance, though. Self-employment, especially the entrepreneurial kind, inherently has a higher risk of failure. Sure, you might win big and build a self-sustaining business that earns you a tidy living, but then again you might also go bankrupt and lose everything because you can't pay your bills.
- BjoernKW 9y ago
  Is self-employment really so much riskier than sequential employment? With the latter if you're laid off you instantly lose all your income. As a self-employed consultant / freelancer if you lose a customer who quite likely still have other customers, which mitigates the overall risk.
  - bigmanwalter 9y ago
    Yes it's riskier. If I'm laid off it only takes weeks to find a new position. If my business goes under, I'm likeley burnt out and have just lost not only my income but my life savings as well.
  - Retric 9y ago
    If you get laid off in most western countries you get ~10k over 6 months in unemployment benefits from the government + accrued vacation time and possibly more. Assuming you where ok financially before you started that's a long time to look for the next job especially if your cut down your lifestyle. PS: It's often the case where people get a little warning and end up finding a job before they get laid off. From the companies perspective the trade off is a little more chaos up front for significant savings on unemployment insurance.
    - 9to5isdead 9y ago
      Could you be specific? Are you talking about the US or another country?
      - phyller 9y ago
koliber 9y ago
If I do X for someone I get paid Y. If I do X for myself, I get paid X*Z. However, I also have to do marketing, sales, and everything else a particular X requires to be a business. These are things that I prefer not doing. I'm on the fence if the Z multiplier is enough. Been there, done that. I don't knock it, but for the time being, I enjoy the stability of a long-term contract and not doing the peripheral work.
- dilemma 9y ago
  >If I do X for someone I get paid Y. If I do X for myself, I get paid X*Z. Note that Z can be less than 1.
caseysoftware 9y ago
I'd say it's not just about risk tolerance but also deciding what pieces to "outsource" in your daily job. When you're running your own firm (even one person), you are in charge of catching billable work, doing the billable work, billing the work, filing the taxes, etc, etc. If you add anyone else, the non-billable efforts get even bigger. I ran my own firm for ~7 years and had a team of 8 at one point. Hunting the next project just got exhausting and I never got to build things. If you work for another firm - consultancy or product - the vast majority is handed off to other people who are probably better at (or at least focused on) many of those things. Yes, you make less money but you're "paying" to have all those things done for you.

whipoodle 9y ago

I think the problem is, the money is one of the only things written down. There's no, gee we're really sorry but things got rough this month so we're only going to pay you 70%. (Of course you leave if that does happen.) But there's no guarantee on any of the intangibles. And whenever they need to save a buck, or even in ways that aren't fully appreciated, the good-workplace stuff can erode. After spending a while in this industry, I'd say places are more alike than different, and total compensation is a reasonable thing to maximize for.

SoMisanthrope 9y ago
Coincidentally, this just popped up on HN https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/your-money/is-the-stuff-you-buy-over-20-years-worth-40000-hours-of-time.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/your-money/is-the-stuff-y... Brilliant thought exercise.

gehwartzen 9y ago

I agree. The only rational explanation I personally see for maximizing earnings at the expense of current life flexibility is to save/invest enough to retire earlier. But even then there are certain aspects of life that you can't catch up on later; being a part of your children growing up, establishing a strong bond with your spouse, remaining healthy by minimizing stress, etc

pc86 9y ago
This makes sense if you're going to try to get a big payday early in your career - trying to build a unicorn startup in SV and cash out by 30. That sort of makes sense to me. But maximizing earnings by working 60+ hour weeks so you can retire at 55 instead of 65? That's a pretty high cost for not a lot of reward, as far as I can see.
- bluGill 9y ago
  What do you want to do with your life? There is no single right answer to that question so you need to figure it out for yourself. Some of the answers require you to work 80+ hours a week (at a good job) while living in a tent so you can save every penny - when you finally retire at 68 you will just barely have enough money to enjoy the last 5 years of your life spending all the money you saved over the years. Some answers you save 50% of your income until you retire at 40 to live the life you choose. Some answers you save 10% until 65 working a 40 hour a week job. The first allows you have an expensive hobby (sail the world in a very nice yacht). The second means you have to enjoy not buying anything. The last is a reasonable compromise for most of us.

matwood 9y ago

Completely agree. I'll trade some salary for flexibility and control. I hate doing pointless work (hence control), and I like working remote and work very well at home. The odd thing is, I go to the office regularly, and it's enjoyable because it's my choice to go. At my current company we state it as "you're all adults, and that's how we treat you." We have hired some people who needed more structure and they had to move on. There is no judgement on people who left, not every position is right for every person.

conanbatt 9y ago

What this mindset and view doesn't take into account is the direct financial impact of these measures, and taxes are a lot more involved that people think. Take google catering your lunch every day and night. It might be costing google 25 U$S per meal to provide that to the employees. Would the employee, not having that option, spend 25 U$S a meal? No way. But do employees choose or prefer companies that cater lunch? Lets say google can offer an employee a double offer: either full benefits and salary of X, or NO benefits and salary of Y. What is your Y? In general I would always think that most people will take Y, precisely because most of the benefits are very costly. Y could be 30%. Now, there is a difference in taxes: that extra Y will get taxed at 30%, while googles benefit cost might even have tax deductions. So the gap between X and Y is blurred by rules that applied differently. If company benefits were not only deductible, but expenditure there were considered part of wages and taxed at that rate, they would quickly diminsh if not dissapear.

greenshackle2 9y ago
This is very topical for me as I'm considering offers at a couple of companies this week and was trying to estimate Y for each, since they have pretty different benefits. One of them has catered breakfast and lunch. It sounds like a great perk but in Canada* in-kind benefits, including meals, are considered part of your salary, and are subject to income tax. I'm not sure how that plays out with daily catered meals; am I deemed to have received the benefit even if I eat out or bring leftovers? I could be paying taxes on food I haven't eaten. Probably not cheap food either. I'd prefer being paid in cash, and having the option to buy meal vouchers. That's true of most benefits - cash is always more flexible. There's also what it says about the culture: we offer free breakfast because we expect you to be at the office before your usual breakfast time. We offer free lunch because we don't expect you to have enough time to go out for lunch, or to pack a lunch the night before. *For federal income tax. YMMV on provincial tax. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/publications/t4130-employers-guide-taxable-benefits-allowances/employers-guide-taxable-benefits-allowances.html#subsidized https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publi...

SoMisanthrope 9y ago

Read the book "Your Money or Your Life"... amazing what we trade, to keep a job.