6 ms·

I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies. I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good sal

by canpan 6mo ago

I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies. I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions). But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
junofan 6mo ago
Wait til you find out what customers do to figure out the lowest. There’s a little more accountability.
jimbokun 6mo ago
What you describe is the reason the web site you posted it on exists.
tombert 6mo ago
I've considered it myself; I don't want to make a business doing contract work again, because I did not enjoy that. If I were to start my own business it would have to be a product. I have plenty of interesting projects that I work on in my free time, but I'm not sure any of them are monetizable, or at least not monetizable enough for a venture capitalist to throw money at me (especially since most of them do not involve AI). I could probably think of something that could be monetizable if I really tried but if I don't actually enjoy the work I'm doing on the side for fun then I'm probably not going to do a particularly good job on it. Though even if I did have some brilliant project that I could sell, I have no idea how to go about finding VC investors. And even if I knew how to find these investors, I think I would ultimately be too afraid to actually commit to it. Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on. Sometimes it depresses me to think about it, but hard to feel too sad for myself when I still have a high salary job that involves me staring at a computer screen all day.
- mykowebhn 6mo ago
  Forgive me for saying this, but I think you may be drinking too much of the kool-aid. If some of your projects are monetizable, couldn't you move forward without VC help? Perhaps related, why do you need to be worth billions of dollars? I feel your visions for what you want your future self to be are highly unrealistic and you're probably setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness. Sorry for the bluntness, but I think one could be happy on a lot less.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    I was being a bit joking and hyperbolic about the billion dollars, though obviously that wasn’t communicated clearly. I don’t really need a billion dollars. I don’t think anything I have right now is very monetizable; most of the fun stuff I work on now ends up being formal methods stuff, which is cool but hard to make any money with. I guess what I was saying is that I think I am ultimately think I am too cowardly to just go for it and make my own company. I don’t think I am capable of purposely avoiding income for N months for a project to pick up.
    - mykowebhn 6mo ago
      Ah, okay. I didn't realize that. My bad!
      - tombert 6mo ago
        Given that two separate people didn't understand the joke, clearly bad communication on my end. I do not accept your "my bad!", and instead insist on it being my bad.
- saghm 6mo ago
  > Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on I can't tell if you're wildly underestimating how many circumstances are outside of your control or just have an extremely high opinion of how much of an outlier you are (or maybe this isn't meant seriously and just went over my head), but I think that there are vanishingly few people (if any) in the world whose only impediments to a high likelihood of becoming a billionaire are self-imposed. I don't think that even extremely smart and charismatic people are particularly likely to do that. For every one that reaches that level of wealth, there are far more who try and fail, and it's not always because they weren't willing to work on shady things or weren't smart enough; some factors are just beyond the ability of an individual human to overcome, and you might just be lucky or unlucky.
Ferret7446 6mo ago
That was always the "winning game". Only problem is that's a lot of work. The more things change, the more they stay the same; if you want more money, work harder. People who don't want to work harder complain that other people make more money because they either don't understand or are in denial about the amount of work the people they envy put in. Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.
- mememememememo 6mo ago
  Define work harder. I think it is worth defining as it is ambiguous and could mean one or more of: 1. Longer hours at work 2. Same hours working but adding time learning 3. Ruthless optimization of time at work. 4. Working smarter (which probably means learning new skills). 5. Doing stuff that makes you uncomfortable. E.g. honest feedback, applying 2 levels above current, hand up to lead messy project etc.
  - davidkuennen 6mo ago
    Write down 10 of your TODOs that generate income. As per natural law, it's likely that 1-2 of those TODOs will have 80% of the impact while the other 8-9 will have almost no impact. Now here comes the interesting part. You propably already know the 8-9 tasks that have almost no impact, but as per another law, those are also the easiest tasks (checking mails and such). On that list the TODO that feels like the biggest hassle and you least want to do will likely have the biggest impact. Sit down and just do it. Now, without delay. That already makes you more productive than 98% of your colleagues.
- afavour 6mo ago
  In software engineering it isn’t necessarily the winning game. FAANG salary vs self employed isn’t that a case of “work hard and it’ll come”.
- ralph84 6mo ago
  Work harder on the right things. Digging holes in your backyard with a shovel is hard work but nobody is going to pay you for it.
Unbeliever69 6mo ago
Probably not the answer you want to here but I'll share my perspective. Three years ago my wife and I sat down and optimized our finances so I could soft-retire and focus on a few of my life goals while simultaneously working on ways to generate income without the stress of being in the employ of others. It was tough work which mainly involved paying down a lot of debt so we can live more lean. We did a lot of optimization and of course some compromise and lifestyle changes. Fortunately, my wife earns enough for us to still live comfortably on a single income. Now I am her part-time personal assistant which has taken a big load off her plate and reduced her stress significantly. A lot of this work is clerical: writing emails, grants, curriculum/lessons (she's a teacher), ordering supplies, working with spreadsheets, doing misc. graphic design and other office work. I also take care of the household, finances (mostly) and pets. In my spare time I pursue my lifelong passions (writing, game design, and programming), but with each of these my focus has been channeling those passions into generating income. This is not a requirement of my soft-retirement, but rather a choice I made to create balance between us. Overall, we are much happier and fulfilled and have managed to carve out a life where we work meaner and leaner without huge sacrifices. In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.
- LeonTing1010 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- shrubby 6mo ago
  Wonder what you'd do with your passion in a just world where everything of creativity (okay almost) would not need to be turned into a income. I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard. How sorry can life be?
  - Gareth321 6mo ago
    We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting. Until we have very highly capable robots to do these jobs, we need some way to incentivise doing work which few others want to do, or are capable of doing. Right now we use money as the incentive. On top of that, there are things people do which bring a lot of value to others. They invent new things, for example, and sell them. Others buy them. We also want to incentivise that, even though it's not easy, and not everyone is capable of doing that. I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.
goodpoint 6mo ago
It's not the winning game at all.
martin-t 6mo ago
I wonder if the solution is democracy. Most countries used to be hereditary dictatorships ("kingdoms") just a few hundred years ago, then people picked up rifles (and guillotines) and changed that. Now, since we already have some semblance of democracy at the top layer of power, maybe we could revolutionize the lower layers without the risks inherent to picking up rifles. I don't see why we should be controlled by sociopaths[0] 8 hours a day, quite often against our interests. --- The other part of the solution is automatically and continuously redistributing ownership of the company according to hours worked and skill level. This of course has to be required by law, otherwise those sociopaths at the top have so much leverage that if you ask for anything other than money during negotiation, you'll get laughed out of the room. [0]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Aurornis 6mo ago
> I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies. Building a successful set of tiny companies is very hard. Unless you get lucky with the exact right idea, execution, and market timing it’s really hard to build a single business that pays as well as our tech jobs do. Building multiple companies is even harder. I think everyone sees the survivorship bias examples like the levels.io guy or a few of the app developers who got rich and thinks it must be easy because their businesses were simple. The indie hacker communities are filled with people trying to follow in their footsteps and not getting anywhere despite years of hard work. The levels.io success story is not something that is easily replicated because his signups depend so heavily on his huge Twitter presence, where he pushes his sites under the guise of friendly information sharing. People without Twitter audiences try all the time to replicate his success and then wonder why they’re not getting signups like he does.
gsibble 6mo ago
It is. I am a fractional CTO running my own consulting business and I make 3-5x as much as I ever did working for one company. And all my clients are very happy.

by canpan 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

junofan 6mo ago

Wait til you find out what customers do to figure out the lowest. There’s a little more accountability.

jimbokun 6mo ago

What you describe is the reason the web site you posted it on exists.

tombert 6mo ago

I've considered it myself; I don't want to make a business doing contract work again, because I did not enjoy that. If I were to start my own business it would have to be a product. I have plenty of interesting projects that I work on in my free time, but I'm not sure any of them are monetizable, or at least not monetizable enough for a venture capitalist to throw money at me (especially since most of them do not involve AI). I could probably think of something that could be monetizable if I really tried but if I don't actually enjoy the work I'm doing on the side for fun then I'm probably not going to do a particularly good job on it. Though even if I did have some brilliant project that I could sell, I have no idea how to go about finding VC investors. And even if I knew how to find these investors, I think I would ultimately be too afraid to actually commit to it. Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on. Sometimes it depresses me to think about it, but hard to feel too sad for myself when I still have a high salary job that involves me staring at a computer screen all day.

mykowebhn 6mo ago
Forgive me for saying this, but I think you may be drinking too much of the kool-aid. If some of your projects are monetizable, couldn't you move forward without VC help? Perhaps related, why do you need to be worth billions of dollars? I feel your visions for what you want your future self to be are highly unrealistic and you're probably setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness. Sorry for the bluntness, but I think one could be happy on a lot less.
- tombert 6mo ago
  I was being a bit joking and hyperbolic about the billion dollars, though obviously that wasn’t communicated clearly. I don’t really need a billion dollars. I don’t think anything I have right now is very monetizable; most of the fun stuff I work on now ends up being formal methods stuff, which is cool but hard to make any money with. I guess what I was saying is that I think I am ultimately think I am too cowardly to just go for it and make my own company. I don’t think I am capable of purposely avoiding income for N months for a project to pick up.
  - mykowebhn 6mo ago
    Ah, okay. I didn't realize that. My bad!
    - tombert 6mo ago
      Given that two separate people didn't understand the joke, clearly bad communication on my end. I do not accept your "my bad!", and instead insist on it being my bad.
saghm 6mo ago
> Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on I can't tell if you're wildly underestimating how many circumstances are outside of your control or just have an extremely high opinion of how much of an outlier you are (or maybe this isn't meant seriously and just went over my head), but I think that there are vanishingly few people (if any) in the world whose only impediments to a high likelihood of becoming a billionaire are self-imposed. I don't think that even extremely smart and charismatic people are particularly likely to do that. For every one that reaches that level of wealth, there are far more who try and fail, and it's not always because they weren't willing to work on shady things or weren't smart enough; some factors are just beyond the ability of an individual human to overcome, and you might just be lucky or unlucky.

Ferret7446 6mo ago

That was always the "winning game". Only problem is that's a lot of work. The more things change, the more they stay the same; if you want more money, work harder. People who don't want to work harder complain that other people make more money because they either don't understand or are in denial about the amount of work the people they envy put in. Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.

mememememememo 6mo ago
Define work harder. I think it is worth defining as it is ambiguous and could mean one or more of: 1. Longer hours at work 2. Same hours working but adding time learning 3. Ruthless optimization of time at work. 4. Working smarter (which probably means learning new skills). 5. Doing stuff that makes you uncomfortable. E.g. honest feedback, applying 2 levels above current, hand up to lead messy project etc.
- davidkuennen 6mo ago
  Write down 10 of your TODOs that generate income. As per natural law, it's likely that 1-2 of those TODOs will have 80% of the impact while the other 8-9 will have almost no impact. Now here comes the interesting part. You propably already know the 8-9 tasks that have almost no impact, but as per another law, those are also the easiest tasks (checking mails and such). On that list the TODO that feels like the biggest hassle and you least want to do will likely have the biggest impact. Sit down and just do it. Now, without delay. That already makes you more productive than 98% of your colleagues.
afavour 6mo ago
In software engineering it isn’t necessarily the winning game. FAANG salary vs self employed isn’t that a case of “work hard and it’ll come”.
ralph84 6mo ago
Work harder on the right things. Digging holes in your backyard with a shovel is hard work but nobody is going to pay you for it.

Unbeliever69 6mo ago

Probably not the answer you want to here but I'll share my perspective. Three years ago my wife and I sat down and optimized our finances so I could soft-retire and focus on a few of my life goals while simultaneously working on ways to generate income without the stress of being in the employ of others. It was tough work which mainly involved paying down a lot of debt so we can live more lean. We did a lot of optimization and of course some compromise and lifestyle changes. Fortunately, my wife earns enough for us to still live comfortably on a single income. Now I am her part-time personal assistant which has taken a big load off her plate and reduced her stress significantly. A lot of this work is clerical: writing emails, grants, curriculum/lessons (she's a teacher), ordering supplies, working with spreadsheets, doing misc. graphic design and other office work. I also take care of the household, finances (mostly) and pets. In my spare time I pursue my lifelong passions (writing, game design, and programming), but with each of these my focus has been channeling those passions into generating income. This is not a requirement of my soft-retirement, but rather a choice I made to create balance between us. Overall, we are much happier and fulfilled and have managed to carve out a life where we work meaner and leaner without huge sacrifices. In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.

LeonTing1010 6mo ago
[flagged]
shrubby 6mo ago
Wonder what you'd do with your passion in a just world where everything of creativity (okay almost) would not need to be turned into a income. I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard. How sorry can life be?
- Gareth321 6mo ago
  We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting. Until we have very highly capable robots to do these jobs, we need some way to incentivise doing work which few others want to do, or are capable of doing. Right now we use money as the incentive. On top of that, there are things people do which bring a lot of value to others. They invent new things, for example, and sell them. Others buy them. We also want to incentivise that, even though it's not easy, and not everyone is capable of doing that. I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.

goodpoint 6mo ago

It's not the winning game at all.

martin-t 6mo ago

I wonder if the solution is democracy. Most countries used to be hereditary dictatorships ("kingdoms") just a few hundred years ago, then people picked up rifles (and guillotines) and changed that. Now, since we already have some semblance of democracy at the top layer of power, maybe we could revolutionize the lower layers without the risks inherent to picking up rifles. I don't see why we should be controlled by sociopaths[0] 8 hours a day, quite often against our interests. --- The other part of the solution is automatically and continuously redistributing ownership of the company according to hours worked and skill level. This of course has to be required by law, otherwise those sociopaths at the top have so much leverage that if you ask for anything other than money during negotiation, you'll get laughed out of the room. [0]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Aurornis 6mo ago

> I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies. Building a successful set of tiny companies is very hard. Unless you get lucky with the exact right idea, execution, and market timing it’s really hard to build a single business that pays as well as our tech jobs do. Building multiple companies is even harder. I think everyone sees the survivorship bias examples like the levels.io guy or a few of the app developers who got rich and thinks it must be easy because their businesses were simple. The indie hacker communities are filled with people trying to follow in their footsteps and not getting anywhere despite years of hard work. The levels.io success story is not something that is easily replicated because his signups depend so heavily on his huge Twitter presence, where he pushes his sites under the guise of friendly information sharing. People without Twitter audiences try all the time to replicate his success and then wonder why they’re not getting signups like he does.

gsibble 6mo ago

It is. I am a fractional CTO running my own consulting business and I make 3-5x as much as I ever did working for one company. And all my clients are very happy.