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can confirm, it's as simple PG says "just build something people want" it will open many doors :)
by intelVISA 3y ago
can confirm, it's as simple PG says "just build something people want"
it will open many doors :)
- zerr 3y agoWhy would you want to become a wage slave if you've already built something that people want (thus can monetize it yourself)?
- tylerfontaine 3y agoHN moment. Software jobs, especially at the kinds of FAANG companies largely being discussed here, are quite a stretch for the term "wageslave." Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, even those who've tried it before.
- zerr 3y agoGolden handcuffs if you will :)
- bdcravens 3y agoBuilding is the easy part.
- kaashif 3y agoUsing the word "wageslave" to describe 300k TC office workers is out of touch at best and downright offensive at worst.
- ericsoderstrom 3y agoI do think it's still true in my experience that someone with the the capabilities to build useful things on their own tend to not stay very long at these giant companies, unless for specific visa reasons
- johnnyanmac 3y agodepends entirely on the person. The startup life isn't for everyone, especially people with families that value stability and life balance over the idea of millions.
- deckard1 3y agoah, yes. The American Dream of living in a 50 year old shitbox fixer that costs $2M in the suburbs of Cupertino. If you can make that much remote out in Nebraska then sure, fine. There are people doing a lot worse. But when doing much better looks like that, what even is the point?
- pb7 3y agoLiving in Nebraska when you have the means to live in civilization is a punishment. Why would someone choose to live in a place where the nearest restaurant is a Denny’s 45 mins away?
- opan 3y agoQuiet and peaceful, cleaner air, you can play loud music and stomp around without upsetting neighbors, and for many people most of their time is spent on a computer anyway.
- pb7 3y agoThe quality of my life is not defined by stomping around or playing loud music. It’s having access to and making use of amenities. What the hell good is money to me if I have no goods and services to spend it on? Maybe most of your time is spent on a computer.
- GlassOwAter 3y agoThe quality of my life is not defined by how close I am to fast food diners or other frivolous goods and services.
- pb7 3y agoNeither is mine, which is why I live in a place that has amazing restaurants with cuisines from all around the world. There's nothing frivolous about food or any other good or service that enhances one's quality of life.
- Clubber 3y ago>downright offensive at worst People are so easily offended these days. Having said that, if you work for a company and you get fired and blacklisted, you still don't eat. If you work for a wage, you HAVE to work for somebody or you starve. If you work for somebody, that somebody has a lot of sway over how your life looks. Better be good at kissin' ass. Also, if you don't think the US healthcare industry will take every penny of your life's earnings upon your eventual and inevitable deterioration, you're fooling yourself. FWIW, I'm a wage slave too.
- Eisenstein 3y ago> If you work for a wage, you HAVE to work for somebody or you starve. You really don't. There is no way you can starve in the USA unless you do it on purpose.
- jononor 3y ago5 million households in the USA constantly have poor food security. About double that had intermittently poor food security. I do not think they are doing it on purpose.
- Eisenstein 3y agoAnd if they went to any hospital starving they would get fed. Please note the literal use of the word 'starve'.
- pb7 3y agoYou’re a wage slave when you work for yourself too, probably even more so. You can’t even completely take a week or two off in most cases. Your work eats your entire life.
- Clubber 3y ago>You’re a wage slave when you work for yourself too, probably even more so. It certainly can be like that especially early on. Hopefully you would grow enough to hire good people to manage the business. If you work for somebody though, that will never happen.
- geodel 3y agoHuh, its like calling couch potato is offensive to someone is offensive who watch TV and sit in couch all day because their TV is 77" OLED, couch is full grain leather and beer artisanal. If someone with 300K+ TC gets offended by this term, playing world's smallest violin for those snowflakes would be most appropriate.
- namdnay 3y agoOffensive as in “offensive to real wage slaves”
- coeneedell 3y agoIt’s more about the people making 30k a year putting up fencing and barely scraping by watching those 300k a year SWEs complain about how they’re wage slaves.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoRunning your own business kinda sucks. I did it and failed and it was extremely painful. Now I’m building my dream product working for a philanthropist who pays my wages. SO MUCH easier than doing it myself.
- afavour 3y agoYour hilarious perspective on highly paid FAANG jobs aside: because now that you’ve made it and demonstrated there is a target market it’s trivial for the billion dollar company to make their own version and eat your breakfast. If they’re offering you the chance to join them as they do so it’s very often in your interest to do it.
- ska 3y ago> you've already built something that people want (thus can monetize it yourself) The part in brackets isn't something to hand wave about. Depends a lot on how you want to spend your time, also.
- gretch 3y agoIf you care about achieving a particular mission, you could view joining a large funded organization as an opportunity to achieve that mission with higher likelihood or speed. For example, if you had an idea about planting trees via drones and a big company said "come to our company and we can get this launched at scale as early as 2026". Then you think about how long it would take to do it on your own and you'd still have to convince investors and hire people and stuff. If at the end of the day, what you care about is planting more trees quickly, you should probably join that big company. (of course there are risks too, where they cancel the project or divert its direction). And also, not every startup found cares about achieving some grandiose mission. Some just want to get rich which is totally fine.
- zerr 3y agoDecoupling an income from the time spend on work.
- nlunbeck 3y agoSomething I've noticed over the past 5 or so years is a "hobby project" is increasingly becoming the standard. Your GitHub portfolio is almost as important as your resumé itself in many cases. It starts the conversation and grabs attention with potential employers, but doesn't act in lieu of a technical evaluation. Almost every competitive applicant at the intern level has some tool or webapp that they've built out extensively.
- sjf 3y agoDo you actually have any evidence for this? While having zero personal projects is probably a red flag, in my last job search I saw almost no clicks on links to projects. From personal experience, most hiring managers are so busy they barely even read the resume. They are definitely not going to comb through someone's github submissions.
- returningfory2 3y agoThis has been my experience on the hiring side too. Nowadays almost all resumes have a link to GitHub, but 80%+ of the time the accounts have been dead for months/years. My favorite was a candidate whose GitHub was totally empty - they had just created an account, done nothing on it, and still included it in their resume!!
- teunispeters 3y agoAll my GH contributions have been to private/corporate work. sigh yet another barrier. All my contributions before that were before github existed. Since then, I don't know what to work on in public as it's not actually that obvious where to find interesting problems when web is not one's domain. But I guess that's the perils of being an older programmer.
- nathan_douglas 3y agoThat’s… what I was afraid of. I’m hiring too, but few of my applicants include a GH link. I’ve never seen a GL link, much less Gitea, etc. And mind you, I’m looking. Hard. I’ll often Google the person to see if I can find a GH account for them. I hit rarely, and it’s weird. Today one of my applicants had a GH profile and a README, a couple dozen projects in various stages of abandonment, etc, and I was deliriously happy. I’m not very experienced in hiring (this is the first opening that I’ve written the JD for, reviewed the applications, wrote the tech interview questions, etc), but we’re clearly doing something wrong. We have a few great applicants (mostly from here and Reddit) and a whole lot of low-effort, low-value noise.