5 ms·

I'm an Entrepreneur, Now Give Me a Job

29 points by by_Seeing 13y ago

ponyslayer 13y ago
This guy wants to have his cake and eat it too. From my count, he has had 3-4 jobs in 3 years. Why would you want to hire someone who can't even stick with his own company? So, this isn't a parable to apply to entrepreneurs in general. It only applies to quitters.
- doppenhe 13y ago
  I wouldn't go as far as calling him names but I do agree with the sentiment. In the corporate world its weird if you leave more than one job in a row before the 18 month mark, managers will start asking if the person is worth training and investing in. With more well defined jobs the day you get hired your essentially a net loss to the company costing in benefits, training , the recruitment process, etc etc. You start chipping away at that and in the end you are usually a huge gain in favor of the company - if you leave early you mess with the break even point.
  - by_Seeing 13y ago
    Yeah, I totally get where you're coming from. I'd say I'm young and figuring out what I want. After trying lots of things and learning tons, I've got a better idea of what I want. I'd like to believe that gives me advantage over other folks who took jobs as a matter of course. Mine is a choice, not a default.
    - bigchewy 13y ago
      that may be true but now you're acknowledging that you are likely a bad hire because you're still figuring out what you want to do and are therefore a high flight risk. Figure out what you want to do on your own dime, prove it, and then you'll be marketable.
      - by_Seeing 13y ago
        > After trying lots of things and learning tons, I've got a better idea of what I want. ^ that.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- WalterSear 13y ago
  Additionally, he's going from a booming industry to a hand-to-mouth industry where the top producers at a firm are often making four figure salaries. What's more, the design industry runs on freelancing. Consequently, direct-to-fulltime positions rarely open up for non-management positions, since most design firms have a cadre of long term contractors already waiting to make the jump. My wife was laid off from a design firm, and had 2 interviews in a year for full time positions. The rest of the time, she contracted. I had 3 interviews last week, and 2 this week and 3 more next week, with several companies in the wings. At the same time, since it's a freelance industry, there are always people trying to farm out contract opportunities, which suggests that the author isn't interested in finding paying work, just in finding a paycheck. Finally, even more than in software, you are your portfolio. It's really almost anyone cares about. If the author can't find >any< work, he should look there first. Finally, I call bullshit on 'any good employee will leave'. It's a very design culture thing to think that professional relationships are inherently competitive rather than cooperative in nature.
  - by_Seeing 13y ago
    Excellent analysis. I wouldn't have a problem finding freelance work, but as you noticed, that's not what I want. Naturally, I am freelancing to keep the lights on, but I've been down that road and it's tiresome. The author of the book I quote is trying to elucidate the point that you should hire people who are better than you. Don't be afraid that they might leave. He drives that point home with the rule that anyone good will leave, so go ahead and hire 'em anyway.
    - WalterSear 13y ago
      That's the design industry - it has nothing to do with the fact that you were working at start ups before. A designer who was working at design firms would be in exactly your shoes.
- by_Seeing 13y ago
  Trollers gunna troll.
cpursley 13y ago
I’m tired of the poverty..." & "Brooks is getting some air in Thailand..." Not sure what type of poverty he's talking about, but I certainly cant afford to fly off to Thailand at the moment...
- GuiA 13y ago
  This is something that I encounter frequently. Friends from high school I have on Facebook who are still in college/grad school, don't work, but spend their vacations in exotic places doing scuba diving. Or acquaintances who are working on their stealth mode startup and complain about how hard it is, but then go spend 1 week snowboarding in Tahoe because they feel like it. How does that work? Do those people have giant savings accounts, and am I just dumb with my money? Or do they do freelance work on the side? I have decent savings etc., but having followed the path of college -> grad school (where I worked as a research assistant) -> startup, I have never been to Asia/South America because I either have the time but not the money, or the money but not the time. My getaway has been driving to Santa Cruz for the Sunday once every few weeks. I feel like I'm missing out on something here- and I'm not ashamed to say that I'm a bit jealous of those people and that I wish I could do the same. Coding on a Thailand beach between a scuba diving session and an afternoon of surfing sounds pretty nice.
  - SteveGerencser 13y ago
    Don't be jealous. Soon you will be 45 with no debt, able to retire but working because you enjoy it and able to do anything you want any time you want without any real worry. Many of those friends will be 45, in debt to their eyes, or bankrupted at least once, and talking about lucky you are to be able to just up and go on a 10 day fishing trip to Alaska simply because you wanted to. They won't, however, understand that they could have had exactly the same life if they had chosen to delay the 'fun' just a few years. Guess how I know ;)
    - chronic25 13y ago
      Statements like these are meant to justify inequalities. Keep hoping you will have a better life later while I will have a great life now and an even better life later.
robomartin 13y ago
I've experienced this sort of thing first hand many years ago. After ten years running my own tech startup I decided to go get an engineering job and "depressurize". I could not land one. I did not understand what was going on until an HR person clued me in. The message was that with the Internet you can't escape your past. You can't dumb down a resume for the practical purpose of getting a job. If you've been an entrepreneur with any degree of success (or even failures) you are one search away from someone knowing as much about you as they care to. You typically run into two scenarios. The first is a manager --your would-be boss-- who, upon seeing what you've done feels threatened. A CTO might not feel good about hiring an ex-CTO as a rank-and-file engineer. The second scenario is that of a business owner who, upon learning about your entrepreneurial experience is concerned about hiring someone who might come in, learn the business and potentially become a competitor. Yes, there's also the concern about someone pulling anchor early to go off on their own in an unrelated direction. It costs a lot of money to bring someone onboard. My conclusion at the time was that in this fashion entrepreneurship can be a curse. It can be nearly impossible to land a "regular" job because of it. In my case, after much frustration I decided that my only path was to run my own show again and off I went.
- by_Seeing 13y ago
  Bingo
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- peterjancelis 13y ago
  On the other hand, if all it takes for the employer to be threatened is hiring one bright driven individual, than you don't want to work for such a business anyway. If you limit yourself to teams with a product that has "moat", your entrepreneurial streak won't threaten them. (Although the churn concern remains, so a lot of talk is needed to see how visions and plans for the future collide.)
kunle 13y ago
You're a designer. Designers solve problems by trade. Find a problem to solve. Someone will hire you to solve it for them. If you're unable to deliver, they'll fire you, but that's another story . . .
- by_Seeing 13y ago
  I suppose that's why I wrote this piece. Solving a problem in a lateral way.
ultimatedelman 13y ago
no portfolio, no personal site, just a twitter and instagram and a few links to ex-employers and a history of bailing... hmm...
- by_Seeing 13y ago
  http://lmgtfy.com/?q=brooks+hassig http://lmgtfy.com/?q=brooks+hassig
- WalterSear 13y ago
  A better title for this post would be,"I'm a Designer™. Where's my silver platter?"
awakeasleep 13y ago
This is a beautiful example of pure nonsense. Brooks, you sound like you were made for sales. Maybe try catering your resume towards those positions? Anyway, I'm an unfulfilled critic, so I don't know if your reading this, but here are the things that made my head spin about your post. 1) You editorialize a third party synopsis of your life into a headline without any indication that you're making a parody or something. "One accidental entrepreneur is finding it hard to" (This reminds me of someone during a manic episode) 2) You build your story out of clichés, but they seem incompatible with each other. (described as both "accidental entrepreneur" and "serial entrepreneur") 3) Totally ignore all important or interesting details that might indicate something about you or what your experience is. (leaving company i started for all the 'normal' and uncomfortable reasons? What?) 4) Generally weird stuff. Give me a job? If you're an entrepreneur, you'd know you wouldn't hire anyone with that attitude! Jetsetting in poverty? Anyway, best of luck. I'm sure you'll find somewhere you fit in. You sound like you're made out of enthusiasm, and that rocks. It'd be interesting to know more of the facts of your story- I think sometimes the more specific detail of a thing you can share, the more powerful it can be. (I bet one uncomfortable thing that happened to you would be cooler for me to read about than a two paragraph synopsis of the last few years of your life even!) Also I want to know how much money your parents give you =D
- trevelyan 13y ago
  Not intended disrespectfully, but you're too hard on the guy. I'd describe myself as an "accidental" and "serial" entrepreneur as well. The first bit means that you never expected to work for yourself. As for the "serial" part, if the companies you start aren't complete successes but aren't complete failures, it is easy to spend years trying to bootstrap multiple ideas. After you struggle along for several years regular employment starts looking pretty good (salary! vacation! benefits!), especially as you get older and want to start a family or buy a house or something. As for the rest, I agree with the parent poster that it is harder to get an institutional job after years of self-employment. Part of the problem is that entrepreneurship is like a black pool -- what people see in it is mostly the reflection of their own prejudices. I suspect this is actually one of unstated reasons there is such an emphasis on getting funding, finding accelerators, etc. and why there is such aversion to the idea of bootstrapping. At the least, people who make their businesses as institutionally respectable as possible and collect salary from investors during the process are rarely berated for taking a vacation before starting a new job! :)
7Figures2Commas 13y ago
While there are certainly companies that will not give bonus points for having once pursued an entrepreneurial path, I don't think entrepreneurship in and of itself is generally as problematic as it's made out to be here. Constructive criticism: I think the author's difficulties are probably more about his overall positioning than his history of entrepreneurial pursuits. For better or worse, positioning can mean the difference between getting lots of job offers and getting none. The first thing I noticed in looking at the author's LinkedIn profile, which is the first result when you Google his name, is that it tells me more about what he's done than what he has actually accomplished. That's not helpful because prospective employers don't just want to know where you've worked, they want to know what you've achieved. If I were the author, I would rewrite my job descriptions to focus on the tangible benefits realized by my contributions. Right now, I can't figure out what value the author has created for his companies/clients/employers because it's simply not described. Also, certain red flags simply aren't likely to be overlooked. Examples of these red flags include: 1. No full-time roles. 2. A history of job hopping (i.e. most/lots of stints under 18-24 months) 3. Jobs with overlapping dates. 4. Unexplained gaps in employment history. 5. No discernible career "path" (i.e. being all over the place in terms of what you've done). 6. Lots of moving around (geographically). 7. Bizarre job titles. 8. Job title progression that is inconsistent with a traditional development path (i.e. a jump from an entry-level job title to a senior-level job title in less than a year is likely going to be questioned). 9. Public musings in which you paint yourself as financially strained, burnt out, confused, etc. Obviously, you can not and should not lie about your work history, so when these sorts of red flags exist, there might not be an easy way to deal with them. But I don't get the impression that the author has really looked at his CV and made an effort to argue compellingly that he brings a lot to the table. So blaming his entrepreneurial past for his failure to find a job is, in my opinion, misguided. Finally, the author can't expect a good outcome if he's not where the jobs he's interested in are. If, say, I was interested in meeting the author for lunch next week to discuss a job opening, I would be unable to do so because he's in Thailand. And I, like most other employers, am not going to wait until "mid-September" for the privilege of interviewing him.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

29 points by by_Seeing 13y ago

This guy wants to have his cake and eat it too. From my count, he has had 3-4 jobs in 3 years. Why would you want to hire someone who can't even stick with his own company? So, this isn't a parable to apply to entrepreneurs in general. It only applies to quitters.

doppenhe 13y ago
I wouldn't go as far as calling him names but I do agree with the sentiment. In the corporate world its weird if you leave more than one job in a row before the 18 month mark, managers will start asking if the person is worth training and investing in. With more well defined jobs the day you get hired your essentially a net loss to the company costing in benefits, training , the recruitment process, etc etc. You start chipping away at that and in the end you are usually a huge gain in favor of the company - if you leave early you mess with the break even point.
- by_Seeing 13y ago
  Yeah, I totally get where you're coming from. I'd say I'm young and figuring out what I want. After trying lots of things and learning tons, I've got a better idea of what I want. I'd like to believe that gives me advantage over other folks who took jobs as a matter of course. Mine is a choice, not a default.
  - bigchewy 13y ago
    that may be true but now you're acknowledging that you are likely a bad hire because you're still figuring out what you want to do and are therefore a high flight risk. Figure out what you want to do on your own dime, prove it, and then you'll be marketable.
    - by_Seeing 13y ago
      > After trying lots of things and learning tons, I've got a better idea of what I want. ^ that.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
WalterSear 13y ago
Additionally, he's going from a booming industry to a hand-to-mouth industry where the top producers at a firm are often making four figure salaries. What's more, the design industry runs on freelancing. Consequently, direct-to-fulltime positions rarely open up for non-management positions, since most design firms have a cadre of long term contractors already waiting to make the jump. My wife was laid off from a design firm, and had 2 interviews in a year for full time positions. The rest of the time, she contracted. I had 3 interviews last week, and 2 this week and 3 more next week, with several companies in the wings. At the same time, since it's a freelance industry, there are always people trying to farm out contract opportunities, which suggests that the author isn't interested in finding paying work, just in finding a paycheck. Finally, even more than in software, you are your portfolio. It's really almost anyone cares about. If the author can't find >any< work, he should look there first. Finally, I call bullshit on 'any good employee will leave'. It's a very design culture thing to think that professional relationships are inherently competitive rather than cooperative in nature.
- by_Seeing 13y ago
  Excellent analysis. I wouldn't have a problem finding freelance work, but as you noticed, that's not what I want. Naturally, I am freelancing to keep the lights on, but I've been down that road and it's tiresome. The author of the book I quote is trying to elucidate the point that you should hire people who are better than you. Don't be afraid that they might leave. He drives that point home with the rule that anyone good will leave, so go ahead and hire 'em anyway.
  - WalterSear 13y ago
    That's the design industry - it has nothing to do with the fact that you were working at start ups before. A designer who was working at design firms would be in exactly your shoes.
by_Seeing 13y ago
Trollers gunna troll.

cpursley 13y ago

I’m tired of the poverty..." & "Brooks is getting some air in Thailand..." Not sure what type of poverty he's talking about, but I certainly cant afford to fly off to Thailand at the moment...

GuiA 13y ago
This is something that I encounter frequently. Friends from high school I have on Facebook who are still in college/grad school, don't work, but spend their vacations in exotic places doing scuba diving. Or acquaintances who are working on their stealth mode startup and complain about how hard it is, but then go spend 1 week snowboarding in Tahoe because they feel like it. How does that work? Do those people have giant savings accounts, and am I just dumb with my money? Or do they do freelance work on the side? I have decent savings etc., but having followed the path of college -> grad school (where I worked as a research assistant) -> startup, I have never been to Asia/South America because I either have the time but not the money, or the money but not the time. My getaway has been driving to Santa Cruz for the Sunday once every few weeks. I feel like I'm missing out on something here- and I'm not ashamed to say that I'm a bit jealous of those people and that I wish I could do the same. Coding on a Thailand beach between a scuba diving session and an afternoon of surfing sounds pretty nice.
- SteveGerencser 13y ago
  Don't be jealous. Soon you will be 45 with no debt, able to retire but working because you enjoy it and able to do anything you want any time you want without any real worry. Many of those friends will be 45, in debt to their eyes, or bankrupted at least once, and talking about lucky you are to be able to just up and go on a 10 day fishing trip to Alaska simply because you wanted to. They won't, however, understand that they could have had exactly the same life if they had chosen to delay the 'fun' just a few years. Guess how I know ;)
  - chronic25 13y ago
    Statements like these are meant to justify inequalities. Keep hoping you will have a better life later while I will have a great life now and an even better life later.

robomartin 13y ago

I've experienced this sort of thing first hand many years ago. After ten years running my own tech startup I decided to go get an engineering job and "depressurize". I could not land one. I did not understand what was going on until an HR person clued me in. The message was that with the Internet you can't escape your past. You can't dumb down a resume for the practical purpose of getting a job. If you've been an entrepreneur with any degree of success (or even failures) you are one search away from someone knowing as much about you as they care to. You typically run into two scenarios. The first is a manager --your would-be boss-- who, upon seeing what you've done feels threatened. A CTO might not feel good about hiring an ex-CTO as a rank-and-file engineer. The second scenario is that of a business owner who, upon learning about your entrepreneurial experience is concerned about hiring someone who might come in, learn the business and potentially become a competitor. Yes, there's also the concern about someone pulling anchor early to go off on their own in an unrelated direction. It costs a lot of money to bring someone onboard. My conclusion at the time was that in this fashion entrepreneurship can be a curse. It can be nearly impossible to land a "regular" job because of it. In my case, after much frustration I decided that my only path was to run my own show again and off I went.

by_Seeing 13y ago
Bingo
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
peterjancelis 13y ago
On the other hand, if all it takes for the employer to be threatened is hiring one bright driven individual, than you don't want to work for such a business anyway. If you limit yourself to teams with a product that has "moat", your entrepreneurial streak won't threaten them. (Although the churn concern remains, so a lot of talk is needed to see how visions and plans for the future collide.)

kunle 13y ago

You're a designer. Designers solve problems by trade. Find a problem to solve. Someone will hire you to solve it for them. If you're unable to deliver, they'll fire you, but that's another story . . .

by_Seeing 13y ago
I suppose that's why I wrote this piece. Solving a problem in a lateral way.

ultimatedelman 13y ago

no portfolio, no personal site, just a twitter and instagram and a few links to ex-employers and a history of bailing... hmm...

by_Seeing 13y ago
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=brooks+hassig http://lmgtfy.com/?q=brooks+hassig
WalterSear 13y ago
A better title for this post would be,"I'm a Designer™. Where's my silver platter?"

awakeasleep 13y ago

This is a beautiful example of pure nonsense. Brooks, you sound like you were made for sales. Maybe try catering your resume towards those positions? Anyway, I'm an unfulfilled critic, so I don't know if your reading this, but here are the things that made my head spin about your post. 1) You editorialize a third party synopsis of your life into a headline without any indication that you're making a parody or something. "One accidental entrepreneur is finding it hard to" (This reminds me of someone during a manic episode) 2) You build your story out of clichés, but they seem incompatible with each other. (described as both "accidental entrepreneur" and "serial entrepreneur") 3) Totally ignore all important or interesting details that might indicate something about you or what your experience is. (leaving company i started for all the 'normal' and uncomfortable reasons? What?) 4) Generally weird stuff. Give me a job? If you're an entrepreneur, you'd know you wouldn't hire anyone with that attitude! Jetsetting in poverty? Anyway, best of luck. I'm sure you'll find somewhere you fit in. You sound like you're made out of enthusiasm, and that rocks. It'd be interesting to know more of the facts of your story- I think sometimes the more specific detail of a thing you can share, the more powerful it can be. (I bet one uncomfortable thing that happened to you would be cooler for me to read about than a two paragraph synopsis of the last few years of your life even!) Also I want to know how much money your parents give you =D

trevelyan 13y ago
Not intended disrespectfully, but you're too hard on the guy. I'd describe myself as an "accidental" and "serial" entrepreneur as well. The first bit means that you never expected to work for yourself. As for the "serial" part, if the companies you start aren't complete successes but aren't complete failures, it is easy to spend years trying to bootstrap multiple ideas. After you struggle along for several years regular employment starts looking pretty good (salary! vacation! benefits!), especially as you get older and want to start a family or buy a house or something. As for the rest, I agree with the parent poster that it is harder to get an institutional job after years of self-employment. Part of the problem is that entrepreneurship is like a black pool -- what people see in it is mostly the reflection of their own prejudices. I suspect this is actually one of unstated reasons there is such an emphasis on getting funding, finding accelerators, etc. and why there is such aversion to the idea of bootstrapping. At the least, people who make their businesses as institutionally respectable as possible and collect salary from investors during the process are rarely berated for taking a vacation before starting a new job! :)

7Figures2Commas 13y ago

While there are certainly companies that will not give bonus points for having once pursued an entrepreneurial path, I don't think entrepreneurship in and of itself is generally as problematic as it's made out to be here. Constructive criticism: I think the author's difficulties are probably more about his overall positioning than his history of entrepreneurial pursuits. For better or worse, positioning can mean the difference between getting lots of job offers and getting none. The first thing I noticed in looking at the author's LinkedIn profile, which is the first result when you Google his name, is that it tells me more about what he's done than what he has actually accomplished. That's not helpful because prospective employers don't just want to know where you've worked, they want to know what you've achieved. If I were the author, I would rewrite my job descriptions to focus on the tangible benefits realized by my contributions. Right now, I can't figure out what value the author has created for his companies/clients/employers because it's simply not described. Also, certain red flags simply aren't likely to be overlooked. Examples of these red flags include: 1. No full-time roles. 2. A history of job hopping (i.e. most/lots of stints under 18-24 months) 3. Jobs with overlapping dates. 4. Unexplained gaps in employment history. 5. No discernible career "path" (i.e. being all over the place in terms of what you've done). 6. Lots of moving around (geographically). 7. Bizarre job titles. 8. Job title progression that is inconsistent with a traditional development path (i.e. a jump from an entry-level job title to a senior-level job title in less than a year is likely going to be questioned). 9. Public musings in which you paint yourself as financially strained, burnt out, confused, etc. Obviously, you can not and should not lie about your work history, so when these sorts of red flags exist, there might not be an easy way to deal with them. But I don't get the impression that the author has really looked at his CV and made an effort to argue compellingly that he brings a lot to the table. So blaming his entrepreneurial past for his failure to find a job is, in my opinion, misguided. Finally, the author can't expect a good outcome if he's not where the jobs he's interested in are. If, say, I was interested in meeting the author for lunch next week to discuss a job opening, I would be unable to do so because he's in Thailand. And I, like most other employers, am not going to wait until "mid-September" for the privilege of interviewing him.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]