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Too many people have been burnt by this before. All the reward goes to the boss and not the employees. I used to work 70+ hours and I didn't even get a thank
by nowherebeen 4y ago
Too many people have been burnt by this before. All the reward goes to the boss and not the employees. I used to work 70+ hours and I didn't even get a thank you. I will only work those hours nowadays if I am working for myself. If not, there is no chance I will do it. It's not nice to know you are being used for someone else's personal gain.
- WalterBright 4y agoStart your own business and you'll find out how much you're really worth!
- tester457 4y agoAnd yet it's still not a good measure. Most businesses succeed on luck and connections. A person's worth is contingent on neither.
- WalterBright 4y agoSuccessful businessmen make their own luck.
- incone123 4y agoI read this as a euphemism for corruption.
- WalterBright 4y agoIf you've convinced yourself you cannot succeed, you won't.
- tuyiown 4y agoYour fairy tales ignores all the people that tried correctly to build the their luck and yet ended in a worse situation by pursuing success based on incorrect world view. This is irresponsible.
- jasonkester 4y agoI’ve watched this argument play out many times here, and I can see you’re dedicated to winning it. Have a quick think about what will gain by successfully convincing the person trying to help you that success is impossible. Personally I’m really happy that I gave up making excuses and actually tried to improve my situation. Despite all your persuasive arguments and conviction that it’s all a pretty fantasy, it did in fact work. Here’s hoping we get to see you arguing the other side one day.
- jpmoral 4y agoTheir point isn't that success is impossible. It's that "If you work hard you will succeed." is a fairy tale and that it's irresponsible to assert otherwise.
- WalterBright 4y agoI never once wrote "if you work hard you will succeed".
- jpmoral 4y agoThat's something for the other poster then. It seems you both are talking past each other. I'm not trying to support one argument or the other, just clarifying to improve the discussion.
- Dudeman112 4y agoWhat do you think was the probability of success before you set out to do it? These kind of arguments would greatly benefit from people just saying what they think the actual number is Being able to disregard everyone who thinks it's 1 or 0 is quite handy
- jasonkester 4y agoI’m at 2 for about 15 now, in terms of profitable SaaS businesses to good, several month attempts. It took maybe six or eight tries to get the first one going, so I’d say I’m getting better with practice.
- sokoloff 4y ago“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” - Henry Ford https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/978-whether-you-think-you-can-or-you-think-you-can-t--you-re https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/978-whether-you-think-you-c...
- seventytwo 4y agoYou must be young…
- billyjobob 4y agoDepends how you define young. He has a few years left I would hope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright
- WalterBright 4y agoI'm not dead yet. In fact, I'm feeling much better!
- WalterBright 4y agoI wish. But my attitudes have been formed by my life experience, that of my friends and acquaintances, and my reading of history books. A common thread is if you believe you cannot succeed, you won't. If you blame your failures on others, fate, etc., you will not succeed. If you find yourself saying "it's not my fault" a lot, your life isn't going to go well. On the other hand, if you accept full responsibility for your failures, and do your best to learn from them, and are willing to try again, then success becomes probable. I know these views are very much out of fashion today. But they still will work for you, if you choose to implement them.
- bongoman37 4y ago[dead]
- speakfreely 4y agoI prefer to phrase it as "they do things to increase the probability of luck finding them".
- ReflectedImage 4y agoThey just put a lot of coins in the slot machine, it's nothing special, you just keep trying until something takes off. Of course, you will need to be rich to begin with to fund all these attempts.
- speakfreely 4y agoYou don't need to be rich for that. Even if you're struggling financially, going out to tech events where you could meet potential partners vs. sitting at home with your head down could be the difference between "getting lucky" and spending the rest of your life in a W2 situation. Business is about connections and rich people get a great head start on the rest of us, but the average person does a lot of self-sabotage, as well.
- ReflectedImage 4y ago"Business is about connections and rich people" Forget that nonsense, it's about starting with a large pool of money with which to bet.
- WalterBright 4y agoThere are plenty of books available on starting a business with next to no capital.
- ReflectedImage 4y agoThat's why the Silcon Valley Angel Investers give out books instead of funding rounds.
- danjac 4y agoOr they are lucky to be born into a wealthy family with connections and safety net (Musk, Gates etc)
- ReflectedImage 4y ago> Successful businessmen make their own luck. Let me shoot that statement down in flames for you! Successful businessmen have a lot of initial funds to pursue a lot of different ventures of which perhaps 1 will be a success. If you ever talked to the successful businessman types you will find they have lots of companies but only 1 will be the source of their money. The rest either lose money or break even.
- lupire 4y agoGoogle the name of the person you are replying to.
- parthianshotgun 4y agoAppealing to authority?
- ReflectedImage 4y agoI'm just telling you the pure mathematical truth of the situation. According to the maths, given people of identical skill and the same starting funds. Some small percentage of people will get lucky and accelerate out into riches whilst the rest will drop into poverty. The people who accelerated into riches can't tell you why they accelerated out into riches, since it was purely luck based to begin with. The more funds you acquire, the more risks you can take, the more money you can make. Taking risks doesn't make you rich, becoming rich makes you take risks. It's that way around.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoI think it's probably better said that they "prepare to capitalize on luck." Most people don't do that, because it is fairly costly to do, but it pays off when you eventually get lucky.
- WalterBright 4y agoMy dad always told me that people don't recognize opportunity when it presents itself because it comes disguised as work.
- csomar 4y agoIf you were lucky to make your fortunes, of course, you’d feel more comfortable if you think that _you_ did and not a roll of a dice. I did well for myself comparing to what I came from. I could probably do better. But at some point, I laid out how it all played out. The kicks that made me serious money were simply luck. By working and exposing yourself, you increase your luck surface. But that doesn’t change the fact: It’s luck. Now, if we are in a hot field like Tech, many more people are going to make it. That’s not because Tech people are amazing, but it’s because Tech is booming. Luck here starts to make sense only at the extremes (ie: becoming a Zuckerburg) but at a local area, because luck is abundant, your hard work matters more. We are all lucky (Tech people) to be in this very particular time.
- WalterBright 4y agoIf you had done nothing, luck wouldn't have found you.
- Gibbon1 4y agoObservation about work groups. The groups profit is often being created by the couple of workers who are underpaid.
- austhrow743 4y agoLuck maybe not but your connections are definitely a huge part of your worth.
- WalterBright 4y agoTrue. Go out and make connections.
- eulers_secret 4y agoYeah, but one can have many fulfilling connections with people who are no help to your business. Yes, connections are a part of “worth”, but the money you can make off them (or through them) is not necessarily.
- p0nce 4y agoNo they rely on a product that has market-fit.
- scarface74 4y agoStatistically this is the worse advice possible.
- WalterBright 4y agoYes, it's risky running your own business. But if you want to make it big, it's the best route. More risk, more reward. If you want to play it safe and have someone else take the risk, be an employee. But safe means less return. You can't have both safe and lucrative.
- monodeldiablo 4y agoI've known way too many lawyers, doctors, tech bros, and finance bros to believe in these silly platitudes. It might have once been the case that reward correlated closely to risk, but the economy has fundamentally changed faster than our attitudes. We believe that the US is still the meritocracy it was when we were young, but loads of economic studies show the US has steadily declined in this regard. More than ever, money circulates among the well-connected and wealthy. The real secret to getting rich today is to be born rich.
- epups 4y agoThe system doesn't have to be completely fair for it to work. Of course being born rich means you are likely going to be rich. However, if you're trying to climb the ladder, the advice you reject as a platitude is fundamentally true. Being an employee you're accepting a limited compensation and getting certain benefits in return, including safety. If you have marketable skills, nothing stops you from building up a business to sell these skills directly, at greater risk but also increased compensation if it succeeds. This is true for an enormous variety of fields, but especially tech.
- nosianu 4y ago> the advice you reject as a platitude If you claim that, how about your own comment? And with > nothing stops you from building up a business to sell these skills directly you pretty much completely ignore what OP wrote. Sure, you can claim "technically correct" because indeed nobody is stopping you. You just leave out the statistics about the result. What is stopping people is looking at their actual chances, so sure, you can technically claim they are stopping themselves. Only that it's highly misleading. I left awell-paid software job in the US and returned to Germany, opened a small business with a friend after looking around. We barely managed to sell it off at cost, leaving the next person to find out it really did not work (he saw everything but thought he could do better). Then I did freelance jobs, very highly paid. Also extremely unsatisfying. The especially well-paying corporate jobs especially so, more often than not what I had worked on was discarded after I left, because of company merger or internal politics leading to a stop on the project. Now I'm in a business started by a former CTO of a famous successful startup, where he made lots of excellent connections and also has the brand name recognition now. I only do tech now. And no, you can't just easily connect to the right people. Some few one-in-ten-thousand people can do that. Most people have the necessary connections through birth or from previous employment. Creating them from scratch is incredibly hard. When giving general advice about something and not to somebody specific for a specific situation, I suggest to always scale your advice, from "works for anyone" to "works for everyone". Many of those suggestion fall apart right then and there. How about if we already are in a situation where everybody does their very best? It's just that the equilibrium created from that is what we have now. Because the system does not work when "everybody" does it. You get a dynamic equilibrium with lots of losers and a lot of effort just not being worth it. Despite starting out with everybody highly motivated and adventurous. So "try harder" IMO has already happened long ago and we now are in a much later state of the dynamic system. What happens in the "everybody works hard" phase is a lot of pain and the winnings going to a few winners who sit at key points in the network.
- eastbound 4y agoI did start my own business! Man I’m worth much more than in companies, plus I’m having fun creating software, and I now understand all the incentives around my work instead of having to play politics, which, as a computer guy, is much more comfortable. HOWEVER, many who have tried to launch products have not met success. But I was happy to try and fail too.
- p0nce 4y agoI did start my own business, 8 years later I earn 2x what I was paid (not FAANG level by any means mind you), work perhaps 3x less, the work is a lot more enjoyable. I was a SE. You need to provision enough time (years) to hit market-fit, and plan for errors being made along the way.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ReflectedImage 4y agoLarge chance element. There are reasons why VCs invest in 50 startups with the expectations that one will succeed. You probably need to spam business ideas and see if you can find one that gains traction.
- hug 4y agoBoss makes a dollar, I make a dime, That was a poem from a simpler time. Boss makes a thousand while I make a cent, And he’s got employees that can’t make rent.
- lioeters 4y agoAw you got the late-stage capitalism blues..
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- josephd79 4y agoI feel the same way.
- kmlx 4y agoi think the idea was that the business owner takes all the risk, while an employee can simply change jobs. at least that was the idea…
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lupire 4y agoOwner takes no risk. With they are already rich so losing the business doesn't matter, or they are operating an LLC on a loan that discharges in bankruptcy.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoMost business owners actually do risk something, or at least give up possible guaranteed income to start their business.
- tw98521358 4y agoNot usually. Llc is a bad tax structure so successful businesses don’t often use it. Also if you ever take a business loan you are personally on the hook for the whole thing. Personal guarantees are the worst and you can’t really get out of them
- adrr 4y agoStartup employees take the same amount of risk by giving up salary for equity. From a strictly odds perspective, most early stage startup employees are better off working a corporate job and pocketing and investing the delta in cash comp.
- kmlx 4y agoyes, you are right, but startups are a niche in the grand scheme of things.
- fsociety 4y agoI have seen people pull crazy hours and then suddenly fired for performance reasons. It makes you look at the employee / employer relationship as a transaction. And within this transaction the boundaries are clearly defined. This job can be fulfilling and interesting, but unfortunately we are being squeezed to produce maximum orange juice. Companies dream of reaching and maintaining high growth rates and valuations. We should shift to valuing consistency over raw velocity. Long-term, I think this is the winning strategy.
- LightG 4y agoThe funny thing is, I work in finance and see these decisions up close. The owners explaining their decisons to me while keeping a straight face. Make no mistake, owners (no matter how progressive, with very few exceptions) will screw you over if it improves the bottom line or their remuneration. It's one of the worst aspects of my role. Owners straight up lying to my face about why they do things.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago> All the reward goes to the boss and not the employees. Make a mistake though and bosses are quick to point the finger directly at you. Credit and rewards for the higher ups, blame and discipline for the rank and file. Privatized gains, socialized losses.