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Unbundling Work from Employment (2020)

Flankk 5y ago
I think a lot of people have realized their time is more valuable than money. Sure, you can make money through entrepreneurship. Even better than that is you're finally free.
- zivkovicp 5y ago
  It is very difficult, time consuming, and stressful to run a business. More so if you have employees. Self-employment does not always provide the freedom most people imagine. I have gone back to employment myself, it's less stressful, and allows me a lot more time for my family. To be fair, I never had any significant success, I'm sure I'd be singing a different tune otherwise; so I guess the takeaway is "your mileage may vary". :)
  - Flankk 5y ago
    I don't disagree. I think people are looking for change regardless.
k__ 5y ago
I quit my last employment in 2013 and never looked back. Even when working remote, essentially being "on call" for at least 40h a week isn't a life for me.
- sdze 5y ago
  but how exactly did you escape? Where do you get your work now?
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Just quit! It's great. Turns out the door is right there. We can all walk through it. To be less sarcastic, the answer is very likely that their spouse works. I put my wife through college, then she carried us the next four years, aka way too long. But now I'm making so much money in ML that it's actually hard to spend it, so it all worked out. Another way to phrase it is "You know, the usual. You just have to get super lucky in life. Just don't be unlucky, duh."
    - WJW 5y ago
      By pre-dismissing any answer from k__ with "they were just lucky" you automatically miss out on any real answer they might have given.
      - sillysaurusx 5y ago
        Ironically, I realized that literally moments before your comment, and went to delete it. You're right for calling me out about that; thank you. My apologies. To give a more substantive answer: http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html > One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that you have to keep running it. And as anyone who runs their own business can tell you, that requires your complete attention. You can't just start a business and check out once things are going well, or they stop going well surprisingly fast. It feels like a lot of these freelancing micro-entrepreneurship perspectives sort of ignore this aspect. It's hard to imagine people still doing it when they're 50. So the game seems to be to save up as much money as possible while you're young, or to get stable, traditional employment and be reasonably useful as you march towards 60. I'm still undecided on which is the better strategy, since saving up a lot of money often requires other sacrifices.
        kevinmcconnell 5y ago
        > It feels like a lot of these freelancing micro-entrepreneurship perspectives sort of ignore this aspect. It's hard to imagine people still doing it when they're 50. Why do you say that? I’m asking this genuinely, as someone who is a) dipping my toe into freelancing and micro-entrepreneurship, and b) turning 50 next month :) Personally I’m just looking for a way to find more enjoyment and meaning in my work, and to be able to balance my priorities in life a bit differently. Which is something I didn’t think much about when I was younger, but has come to be important to me as I get older. So to me, this sort of age actually seems like a natural time to want this approach.
        nonameiguess 5y ago
        If nothing else, you eventually reach a state of seniority where the types of freelance work available that require the knowledge you have by 50 are quite a bit fewer than the number of 50 year-olds in the world, given that is still well below an average human lifespan. So it may work quite well for you, but it can't work for an entire economy. If everyone tried, most would fail, even if they all had identical skills and knowledge. Note k__2's actual answer ended up being technical writing and developer relations. There is always going to less demand for developer relations than for actual developers. So if you say a career path should be something like be a FTE salaried developer from 20 to 30, and then "graduate" or whatever to freelance developer, then to developer relations, that's fine as long as you're in the smaller tier of people who can do that, given the world is going to have roughly the same number of 50 year-olds as 25 year-olds in an OECD nation. The reason this hasn't been a problem yet in software is software itself is still an immature industry, so rapid growth has meant there are always a lot more 25 year-old developers than 50 year-old developers. That won't stay true forever. As the industry matures and reaches a stable size, more senior people are either going to need to stay code monkeys or we're going to see severe organizational rot with an inverted pyramid org structure with more managers and architects and developer relations specialists than developers. That will be true whether or not the organization is a single company or thousands of individual contractors.
  - k__ 5y ago
    I just quit and lived a year by my savings. Later I did a few web and mobile projects to pay the rent. Started blogging for marketing, but it turned out I'm reasonably good at it, so companies approached me and asked if I could write for them. So, I basically transitioned into technical writing/developer relations/education. That's what I'm doing to make money right now, and since every article is also an advertisement for my work, new clients find me online.
    - ziggus 5y ago
      What's your retirement plan?
      - k__ 5y ago
        If everything goes downhill, I have a bunch of retirement funds I paid into. Then there is family and friends. But, of course I hope to get rich before 50 etc.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
roschdal 5y ago
Being employed in one company is more stable and less risky, than being an individual freelance-worker.
- cadamson 5y ago
  How?
- WJW 5y ago
  Is it? It is true that you need to look for new employers less often, but if you get laid off then you lose 100% of your income instead of just a part. A freelancer with 4-5 companies that regularly need some work done may have a higher chance of being fired from any one of those, but probably a much lower chance of being fired from all of them than a regular employee has from their single job. The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer.
  - krageon 5y ago
    > Is it? Yes, if you live in a country with good worker protection (in the US a lot of "salaried" work is effectively freelance). > if you get laid off then you lose 100% of your income instead of just a part Yes, if. With good protections and a solid company choice, such a scenario has a likelihood approaching zero. > The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer. I would say the freelancer has a higher impact of this, because their entire work history is filled with needing to find new work. That is the nature of doing work without an enduring relationship.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > a likelihood approaching zero People get made redundant all the time, in economies all around the world, with all kinds of worker protections.
    - Frost1x 5y ago
      >Yes, if you live in a country with good worker protection (in the US a lot of "salaried" work is effectively freelance). To extend this, in the US, this is pretty much every reasonably well paying position which falls into this category, so everything is gatekept by at-will, salary, anf exempt status. In principle none of these statuses are inherently bad. In practice, they're abused left and right by employers who have historically had the leverage when it mattered. At-will being highly standard anymore is sort of backfiring now during the pandemic with labor shortages now that labor has leverage for the first time in decades, so employers are getting a bit of the taste of the leverage they created against labor with people dropping and transitioning regularly to stay ahead of inflation or find better opportunities.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lou1306 5y ago
Could somebody please let the banks know that "work is being unbundled from traditional employment"? At least in Europe, I am afraid they still expect your employment to be quite traditional (or your collaterals to be quite valuable) if you want to get a loan.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  When I've applied for a mortgage and things they've always just looked at my income not my employment. Like most people I've got multiple little incomes and you need to consider them all.
  - Balero 5y ago
    In the UK they looked at employment first, and some sort of secondary income separately. > Like most people I've got multiple little incomes and you need to consider them all. I was also a little skeptical about your usage of most here, but wasn't sure if that was because I am in a bubble. For the UK it looks like about 4% of people are in second jobs. Do you think this differs where you are? - Workers with second jobs UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/timeseries/ycbw https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... - Number of workers UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/november2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - sdze 5y ago
      Same here in Germany. They even check employment duration.
  - PopAlongKid 5y ago
    In the U.S., if you can produce one or more W-2 tax forms (annual report of wages paid) adding up to about a full-time job, the banks check it off their list and move on to the next item. However if you are self-employed, they want multiple year copies of your detail business income tax form, and letters from your accountant or tax preparer stating that your business is profitable, viable in the future, etc (which is just the banks trying to meaninglessly off-load some of their risk to a 3rd party).
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
This is just another paean to making all white-collar work "gig" work, undermining the security and benefits of traditional employment, in favor of making better-looking numbers on balance sheets for startups. Don't buy into this. Some people can do it; other's can't. I could, but I don't want to. It's too much stress on my interpersonal skills. The single, biggest, best change we could make with employment in this country -- which would benefit employer and employee alike -- is to decouple health insurance from it. It'd be better to break it out and let us buy health insurance like car insurance, but we'll eventually get nationalized health care or socialized medicine or whatever you want to call it. Either way, this will alleviate a lot of pressure on companies on their hiring decisions, and on people who get locked in jobs because of health issues.
- cadamson 5y ago
  What are/is the security and benefits of traditional employment?
  - sklargh 5y ago
    Directly to this question - paid sick leave (generally), limited protection from physical harm and healthcare (US). In Europe, extensive protection from the unemployment’s demonstrated nearly irreparable harms, including hunger and reduced lifespan. Broadly - oh my goodness, this article is pure regulatory arbitrage amalgamated with some kind of hellscapish McKinsey/VC dross. Net - firms would like to reduce you to an expendable, unprotected line item without recourse to traditional employment law. There is nothing innovative or interesting here, a pure desire to extract maximum value from fellow humans without consideration or care for what we owe each other. Enough of this shit, in particular the aggregation of labor for the purpose of building a surveillance sensor aperture for ads.
    - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
      Exactly, on all points. For instance, I got hammered by COVID, and was almost useless for about 4 weeks. My boss was only concerned that I get better, and wasn't concerned that I go on some sort of short-term disability or FLMA. The person who wrote that article would have simply not paid me for that month, and not guaranteed work after I got better, which would have made the situation much more stressful, removed income at a time I needed it most to cover medical expenses, and added insult to injury. My company is very "woke," and I know a lot of people have problems with such things, but one very welcome outcome of this is that they really do put people first, and the bottom line second. In a pure gig economy, there's no chance of having a "human" relationship with your employer like this.
jmbwell 5y ago
Does this describe actual entrepreneurship, or does it describe working for a number of platforms instead of working for a single employer? It seems to me the platform is the entrepreneur, not the person logging into the app to try to hustle for fares.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  This IMO is the biggest problem we have in this gig economy thing. It's not that people can choose what work they want to do and when, it's that the market is dominated by middlemen and rent seekers. Products like Uber and Upwork and the rest are marketed as platforms that people can network and professionals can find clients and people can find services they need. The vision is nice, but what winds up happening is these "platforms" cease to be platforms in short order and become a new employer masquerading as an unbiased order book to continue to skirt the responsibilities of a traditional employer. There's a better way, a truly unbiased platform or set of platforms to enable people with services to offer and people who need those services to network with one another without the rent seeking. Perhaps that comes in the form of a non profit org, perhaps a distributed social networking system specifically targeted and certain kinds of work, I don't know, but I do know that if the middleman can be eliminated we can have something better than what we have now both in terms of gig work and traditional employment.
PopAlongKid 5y ago
>When workers are unbundled from institutions, they lose access to many of the services and benefits that traditional employment conferred: income smoothing with automated tax withholding (i.e. a paycheck), healthcare, employer-sponsored retirement plans In the U.S., self-employed workers who make a profit have the same access to retirement plans (401k, SEP-IRA) as employees, and also have the same ability to pay for health insurance with pre-tax dollars as employees. In fact, self-employed people can contribute far higher amounts to tax-deferred retirment plans than employees in most cases.

I think a lot of people have realized their time is more valuable than money. Sure, you can make money through entrepreneurship. Even better than that is you're finally free.

zivkovicp 5y ago
It is very difficult, time consuming, and stressful to run a business. More so if you have employees. Self-employment does not always provide the freedom most people imagine. I have gone back to employment myself, it's less stressful, and allows me a lot more time for my family. To be fair, I never had any significant success, I'm sure I'd be singing a different tune otherwise; so I guess the takeaway is "your mileage may vary". :)
- Flankk 5y ago
  I don't disagree. I think people are looking for change regardless.

k__ 5y ago

I quit my last employment in 2013 and never looked back. Even when working remote, essentially being "on call" for at least 40h a week isn't a life for me.

sdze 5y ago
but how exactly did you escape? Where do you get your work now?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Just quit! It's great. Turns out the door is right there. We can all walk through it. To be less sarcastic, the answer is very likely that their spouse works. I put my wife through college, then she carried us the next four years, aka way too long. But now I'm making so much money in ML that it's actually hard to spend it, so it all worked out. Another way to phrase it is "You know, the usual. You just have to get super lucky in life. Just don't be unlucky, duh."
  - WJW 5y ago
    By pre-dismissing any answer from k__ with "they were just lucky" you automatically miss out on any real answer they might have given.
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      Ironically, I realized that literally moments before your comment, and went to delete it. You're right for calling me out about that; thank you. My apologies. To give a more substantive answer: http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html > One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that you have to keep running it. And as anyone who runs their own business can tell you, that requires your complete attention. You can't just start a business and check out once things are going well, or they stop going well surprisingly fast. It feels like a lot of these freelancing micro-entrepreneurship perspectives sort of ignore this aspect. It's hard to imagine people still doing it when they're 50. So the game seems to be to save up as much money as possible while you're young, or to get stable, traditional employment and be reasonably useful as you march towards 60. I'm still undecided on which is the better strategy, since saving up a lot of money often requires other sacrifices.
      - kevinmcconnell 5y ago
        > It feels like a lot of these freelancing micro-entrepreneurship perspectives sort of ignore this aspect. It's hard to imagine people still doing it when they're 50. Why do you say that? I’m asking this genuinely, as someone who is a) dipping my toe into freelancing and micro-entrepreneurship, and b) turning 50 next month :) Personally I’m just looking for a way to find more enjoyment and meaning in my work, and to be able to balance my priorities in life a bit differently. Which is something I didn’t think much about when I was younger, but has come to be important to me as I get older. So to me, this sort of age actually seems like a natural time to want this approach.
        nonameiguess 5y ago
        If nothing else, you eventually reach a state of seniority where the types of freelance work available that require the knowledge you have by 50 are quite a bit fewer than the number of 50 year-olds in the world, given that is still well below an average human lifespan. So it may work quite well for you, but it can't work for an entire economy. If everyone tried, most would fail, even if they all had identical skills and knowledge. Note k__2's actual answer ended up being technical writing and developer relations. There is always going to less demand for developer relations than for actual developers. So if you say a career path should be something like be a FTE salaried developer from 20 to 30, and then "graduate" or whatever to freelance developer, then to developer relations, that's fine as long as you're in the smaller tier of people who can do that, given the world is going to have roughly the same number of 50 year-olds as 25 year-olds in an OECD nation. The reason this hasn't been a problem yet in software is software itself is still an immature industry, so rapid growth has meant there are always a lot more 25 year-old developers than 50 year-old developers. That won't stay true forever. As the industry matures and reaches a stable size, more senior people are either going to need to stay code monkeys or we're going to see severe organizational rot with an inverted pyramid org structure with more managers and architects and developer relations specialists than developers. That will be true whether or not the organization is a single company or thousands of individual contractors.
- k__ 5y ago
  I just quit and lived a year by my savings. Later I did a few web and mobile projects to pay the rent. Started blogging for marketing, but it turned out I'm reasonably good at it, so companies approached me and asked if I could write for them. So, I basically transitioned into technical writing/developer relations/education. That's what I'm doing to make money right now, and since every article is also an advertisement for my work, new clients find me online.
  - ziggus 5y ago
    What's your retirement plan?
    - k__ 5y ago
      If everything goes downhill, I have a bunch of retirement funds I paid into. Then there is family and friends. But, of course I hope to get rich before 50 etc.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

roschdal 5y ago

Being employed in one company is more stable and less risky, than being an individual freelance-worker.

cadamson 5y ago
How?
WJW 5y ago
Is it? It is true that you need to look for new employers less often, but if you get laid off then you lose 100% of your income instead of just a part. A freelancer with 4-5 companies that regularly need some work done may have a higher chance of being fired from any one of those, but probably a much lower chance of being fired from all of them than a regular employee has from their single job. The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer.
- krageon 5y ago
  > Is it? Yes, if you live in a country with good worker protection (in the US a lot of "salaried" work is effectively freelance). > if you get laid off then you lose 100% of your income instead of just a part Yes, if. With good protections and a solid company choice, such a scenario has a likelihood approaching zero. > The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer. I would say the freelancer has a higher impact of this, because their entire work history is filled with needing to find new work. That is the nature of doing work without an enduring relationship.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > a likelihood approaching zero People get made redundant all the time, in economies all around the world, with all kinds of worker protections.
  - Frost1x 5y ago
    >Yes, if you live in a country with good worker protection (in the US a lot of "salaried" work is effectively freelance). To extend this, in the US, this is pretty much every reasonably well paying position which falls into this category, so everything is gatekept by at-will, salary, anf exempt status. In principle none of these statuses are inherently bad. In practice, they're abused left and right by employers who have historically had the leverage when it mattered. At-will being highly standard anymore is sort of backfiring now during the pandemic with labor shortages now that labor has leverage for the first time in decades, so employers are getting a bit of the taste of the leverage they created against labor with people dropping and transitioning regularly to stay ahead of inflation or find better opportunities.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lou1306 5y ago

Could somebody please let the banks know that "work is being unbundled from traditional employment"? At least in Europe, I am afraid they still expect your employment to be quite traditional (or your collaterals to be quite valuable) if you want to get a loan.

chrisseaton 5y ago
When I've applied for a mortgage and things they've always just looked at my income not my employment. Like most people I've got multiple little incomes and you need to consider them all.
- Balero 5y ago
  In the UK they looked at employment first, and some sort of secondary income separately. > Like most people I've got multiple little incomes and you need to consider them all. I was also a little skeptical about your usage of most here, but wasn't sure if that was because I am in a bubble. For the UK it looks like about 4% of people are in second jobs. Do you think this differs where you are? - Workers with second jobs UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/timeseries/ycbw https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... - Number of workers UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/november2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sdze 5y ago
    Same here in Germany. They even check employment duration.
- PopAlongKid 5y ago
  In the U.S., if you can produce one or more W-2 tax forms (annual report of wages paid) adding up to about a full-time job, the banks check it off their list and move on to the next item. However if you are self-employed, they want multiple year copies of your detail business income tax form, and letters from your accountant or tax preparer stating that your business is profitable, viable in the future, etc (which is just the banks trying to meaninglessly off-load some of their risk to a 3rd party).

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

This is just another paean to making all white-collar work "gig" work, undermining the security and benefits of traditional employment, in favor of making better-looking numbers on balance sheets for startups. Don't buy into this. Some people can do it; other's can't. I could, but I don't want to. It's too much stress on my interpersonal skills. The single, biggest, best change we could make with employment in this country -- which would benefit employer and employee alike -- is to decouple health insurance from it. It'd be better to break it out and let us buy health insurance like car insurance, but we'll eventually get nationalized health care or socialized medicine or whatever you want to call it. Either way, this will alleviate a lot of pressure on companies on their hiring decisions, and on people who get locked in jobs because of health issues.

cadamson 5y ago
What are/is the security and benefits of traditional employment?
- sklargh 5y ago
  Directly to this question - paid sick leave (generally), limited protection from physical harm and healthcare (US). In Europe, extensive protection from the unemployment’s demonstrated nearly irreparable harms, including hunger and reduced lifespan. Broadly - oh my goodness, this article is pure regulatory arbitrage amalgamated with some kind of hellscapish McKinsey/VC dross. Net - firms would like to reduce you to an expendable, unprotected line item without recourse to traditional employment law. There is nothing innovative or interesting here, a pure desire to extract maximum value from fellow humans without consideration or care for what we owe each other. Enough of this shit, in particular the aggregation of labor for the purpose of building a surveillance sensor aperture for ads.
  - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    Exactly, on all points. For instance, I got hammered by COVID, and was almost useless for about 4 weeks. My boss was only concerned that I get better, and wasn't concerned that I go on some sort of short-term disability or FLMA. The person who wrote that article would have simply not paid me for that month, and not guaranteed work after I got better, which would have made the situation much more stressful, removed income at a time I needed it most to cover medical expenses, and added insult to injury. My company is very "woke," and I know a lot of people have problems with such things, but one very welcome outcome of this is that they really do put people first, and the bottom line second. In a pure gig economy, there's no chance of having a "human" relationship with your employer like this.

jmbwell 5y ago

Does this describe actual entrepreneurship, or does it describe working for a number of platforms instead of working for a single employer? It seems to me the platform is the entrepreneur, not the person logging into the app to try to hustle for fares.

betwixthewires 5y ago
This IMO is the biggest problem we have in this gig economy thing. It's not that people can choose what work they want to do and when, it's that the market is dominated by middlemen and rent seekers. Products like Uber and Upwork and the rest are marketed as platforms that people can network and professionals can find clients and people can find services they need. The vision is nice, but what winds up happening is these "platforms" cease to be platforms in short order and become a new employer masquerading as an unbiased order book to continue to skirt the responsibilities of a traditional employer. There's a better way, a truly unbiased platform or set of platforms to enable people with services to offer and people who need those services to network with one another without the rent seeking. Perhaps that comes in the form of a non profit org, perhaps a distributed social networking system specifically targeted and certain kinds of work, I don't know, but I do know that if the middleman can be eliminated we can have something better than what we have now both in terms of gig work and traditional employment.

PopAlongKid 5y ago

>When workers are unbundled from institutions, they lose access to many of the services and benefits that traditional employment conferred: income smoothing with automated tax withholding (i.e. a paycheck), healthcare, employer-sponsored retirement plans In the U.S., self-employed workers who make a profit have the same access to retirement plans (401k, SEP-IRA) as employees, and also have the same ability to pay for health insurance with pre-tax dollars as employees. In fact, self-employed people can contribute far higher amounts to tax-deferred retirment plans than employees in most cases.