5 ms·
but how exactly did you escape? Where do you get your work now?
by sdze 5y ago
but how exactly did you escape? Where do you get your work now?
- sillysaurusx 5y agoJust 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 agoBy 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 agoIronically, 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 agoIf 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.
- MereInterest 5y agoI don't think "lucky" dismisses answers, because excluding it entirely from an explanation assumes that the same work done by an individual will result in the same measurable output. Hard work drives the machinery of progress, but the efficiency of that machinery is up to luck. For me, I can look back and see a huge number of factors that contributed to that efficiency. None of them were under my control, and so I describe them as "luck". * Stable home life, with active teaching from two educated parents. At no point growing up did I need to expend effort worrying about what I would eat, or where I would sleep. Instead, I could focus on education and hobbies. * No financial need for a job during secondary education. My family's finances were stable enough that I didn't need to expend effort on a job. Instead, I could focus on advanced courses. * Didn't need to take on college loans. One of my parents is a professor, and so I had free tuition at their university. As a result, I could focus more on coursework during the school year, and STEM research programs during the summer. * Receiving a stipend while working on my terminal degree. This is typically only the case in STEM fields. I was lucky that my interest and talents led me to a more in-demand field. * Reasonable health insurance at all points of my life. From being covered through my parents' insurance (thanks Obama), to being covered through graduate student insurance (thanks to the student union), to being covered through my employers (thanks to being in a field where this is typical). I haven't had any major medical expenses, but I've had the safety net of having reasonable periodic care. * Interest in an industry that built desirable skills. My PhD ended up requiring me to build custom analysis software to perform large amounts of data analysis, which built skills that have been tremendously useful and in-demand. But I couldn't have predicted either the skills required or their broad applicability when I started on that path. Back in high school, I just knew which subjects I enjoyed more and focused on getting even better at them.
- k__ 5y agoIt's always a mix of luck and persistence. People always assume luck means something with the probability of a lottery win. I don't have a spouse, I payed for everything myself, but there was still much luck involved. Just not one in a billion kind of luck. I'm living in a shared flat, so I don't pay much rent, which allowed me to save more of my income, and the low rent allowed me to live much longer from those savings later. I could have gone 2-3 years without a job, simply because my costs of living were so low. That opened me up to much experimenting with jobs and also enabled me to turn down many bad jobs. Having low costs of living is luck, but you can have that much easier than you think. The odds are quite in favor of a freelancing developer. I focused on projects that went 3-6 months. This meant, I only needed to be lucky to get one or two projects a year. Again, you have to be lucky in some kind of way to get one of those projects, but if you write like 10 applications a month, and you only have to be lucky in 1 of those 120 applications a year, you're good to go.
- k__ 5y agoI 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.