Where is the freelance path?
Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
161–170 of 632 posts
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#162Missed the all important contractor. More money, more control over types of projects taken but little control over actual project.
Can you talk more about this. Roughly where in the world do you live? How do you find work? How deep is your backlog? How many customers do you have?
I'm in Canada and contracting for the government pays well.
I personally do the full time job plus contractor gigs. My contracts come from referrals, places and people I worked full time for and from being number #1 for a specific search term locally for a number of years.
I have found work on upwork, craigslist and angellist as well. Usually starts off as an employment position but changes into a contract.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are bootstrapping, and you are starting a company in an area that does not need the top tier of engineers (which is most of them, regardless of how they talk about hiring the best), I'd consider starting someplace low cost. I think college towns in the midwest / rust belt are untapped resources, or areas that used to have strong technically focused companies that moved away. I've personally seen founders boots…
Just an irrelevant side note - what do envision when you think of 'Uber for cats'? - A cat sharing service? - A 'cat on demand' service that allows you to reap the benefits of cat ownership without having to worry about acquisition and maintenance costs? - A taxi service for cats? I could envision paying for all of those, under the right circumstances. So such a company would likely have at least a few dollars of rea…
I am deeply concerned now that my random comment might end up as a VC funded startup.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Um, what's cheaper than a studio? Anything with one or more bedrooms is going to be more expensive. Perhaps you're not familiar with American apartment terminology or I'm missing something? A studio apartment is as cheap as you can get normally.
what's cheaper than a studio? Splitting a several-bedroom apartment several ways. For example, where I live [1] a studio is $1,700 but one room in a 3br is $1,100. [1] http://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices
Depends on where you live. When I looked into splitting a place here in LA, it was only $100 less than if I stayed in my studio, with less amenities. I'm lucky, as I'm rent-controlled, but even people I know that live in 4-bedroom houses in not great areas are paying only a little less.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#165> Often times there are hard barriers preventing people from starting a company. In these cases my best advice is to move to a tech hub (preferably the Bay Area) and work for a tech company until you can save the money I had to laugh there. Moving to the Bay Area will reduce your ability to save money, not increase it. I was probably saving 40-50% of my salary when I worked in Nowhereville, Florida. With the housing…
Saying it's impossible to save is misleading and it's laughable how often this myth about the Bay Area is perpetuated on HN. Unlike a lot of places in the US, the Bay Area has all of the following:
* a meaningful degree of racial diversity (makes a big difference if you're not white)
* comprehensive public transit (yeah, yeah BART and MUNI suck, but where I've lived in the US previously, they didn't even exist)
* an abundance of job opportunities in tech
* nice weather
I'm able to save 40% of my income and I don't even work at a high-paying company like Airbnb, Google etc. I live in a new apartment with one roommate in an area that's only a 25 minute commute to my office in SF via public transit.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also: Even though there are many top-tier engineers in those hotspots, just how gettable are they if you're hiring in SV/Seattle/NYC? Based on my purely anecdotal experience, engineers that would be easy no-hires in Chicago get scooped up into senior roles in the valley because everyone there is so desperate to hire anyone who can fizzbuzz. It's the best area to be in if you're one of the best... and also if you're o…
> Based on my purely anecdotal experience, engineers that would be easy no-hires in Chicago get scooped up into senior roles I left a Chicago Loop job 3 years ago for a fully remote startup, moved to Tampa, moved from that fully remote startup to a Tampa-based org, and Chicago recruiters get in touch 2-3 times a week offering full relo expenses. There literally is an insane amount of demand and people with very littl…
Greetings from across the bay in St Pete
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#167> Often times there are hard barriers preventing people from starting a company. In these cases my best advice is to move to a tech hub (preferably the Bay Area) and work for a tech company until you can save the money I had to laugh there. Moving to the Bay Area will reduce your ability to save money, not increase it. I was probably saving 40-50% of my salary when I worked in Nowhereville, Florida. With the housing…
Here's my counter-anecdote. I hesitate to do this but I think it's nice for aspiring software engineers to have details. I moved to San Francisco in 2006 straight out of college to work at Google as a SWE. I was $27k in debt (student loan + credit card). My rent was $1450 at the time (2 bedroom with a roommate in a nice part of town), and I took out a $26k loan to buy a car. I'm not particularly frugal. I did well at…
$1,450/2BR in SF is the giveaway that this is a dated, and no longer even remotely likely, anecdote.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but to say that it was because of some innate wealth misses the mark I'm not sure it misses the mark. All data show that wealth carries over multiple generations. That doesn't mean that non wealthy can't make it, just that wealthiest will, on average or even probably some p95 and up metric. And wealth should be put into perspective, its often more to do with the surrounding education of the wealthy. If your surroun…
certainly i'm not saying that prior wealth does not play a major factor or isn't strongly correlated, but it is not a prerequisite by any stretch, which was my interpretation of the comment.
I have the same background as you. Crimea, not Moscow.
Americans will never understand. Our parents stood in breadlines. We are making six figures in America.
It's not about wealth. It's about a culture that respects hard work, education, and opportunity.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#169> Often times there are hard barriers preventing people from starting a company. In these cases my best advice is to move to a tech hub (preferably the Bay Area) and work for a tech company until you can save the money I had to laugh there. Moving to the Bay Area will reduce your ability to save money, not increase it. I was probably saving 40-50% of my salary when I worked in Nowhereville, Florida. With the housing…
80k* %50 = 40k vs. 160k * %35 = 56k Bay area in a nutshell. You can have higher savings rates too, I do around %40 and I could save even more. Working at a startup does make it harder, usually it's better to work at FANG. You also learn a lot and realize the difference between 'facebook does this dev practice because it's huge so it has to vs. it's the better practice'
Pre or post-tax, and at what standard of living? Weather aside, you can get significantly better housing/schools/daycare/whatever for that 80k elsewhere than you can for 160k in the Bay Area. If you're young and single this is probably a non-factor, but for people >30 it can be significant.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#170Missing from the strategies for the first two (really all three): come from wealthy background.
not really. my family moved to the states from moscow when i was 7. we spent all our money that we got from selling a crappy apt on the move itself. we lived on food stamps, had to learn english, my parents (both with technical university degrees) went to community college and worked low wage jobs to pay the rent, bills and tuition. we had a super old used ford that was rusting everywhere a vehicle can rust and the d…
I'm afraid of survivorship bias. Just because you made it, it doesn't mean that others who fell in the same situation would. That's where statistics come handy.
Don't forget that you have lived through a period of growth in the US. It might not happen again for this generation.
What if the fundamentals changes, and the situations/opportunities you have been through are no longer there?
We like to think we make our choices and ourselves. But most of the time we are driven by whichever random events come in our way.