Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are thousands of chainsaws and rocket engines ready to take your place.
Really? So why does everyone complain about engineering shortage?
[deleted]
I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
61–70 of 177 posts
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are thousands of chainsaws and rocket engines ready to take your place.
Really? So why does everyone complain about engineering shortage?
Because what they're really saying is that they don't want to pay more money.
By complaining about the "shortage" they encourage new entrants into the field and convince existing talent to accept lower wages.
It's purely marketing, IMO.
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are thousands of chainsaws and rocket engines ready to take your place.
Really? So why does everyone complain about engineering shortage?
To justify the H1B and similar quotas so they can import more foreign born labor so they can pay labor less.
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#64It appears it isn't going terribly well so far: https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ But, he doesn't seem discouraged. I'm guessing whatever equity he had means he has a fair amount of time to figure it out.
I don't want to be too harsh on this guy. He should be proud he pushed out 5 projects and he seems really really passionate about Keto. The fact he made even one dollar is impressive, it is always hardest at the start.
But some of the things he did make my head explode. He spent more than his total revenue ever on...testing software? He paid hundreds of dollars for every project on logos? He paid a developer thousands of dollars to develop a blog? Half his projects are free wordpress/(insert popular website builder) templates. He managed to burn 6k a month on rent/food while doing this? Even in New York that is kinda ridiculous, I did 2k a month in Brooklyn with my startup.
That said, the amount of traffic his blog gets is amazing. I think his biggest achievement was that. Hopefully he can direct that traffic towards future projects.
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad had just one job all his life, for 33 years. While he didn’t become rich, he did enjoy relative peace of mind, pension etc. Of course everything is relative, but there was a time where companies had a little bit of concern to their employees, however small it was. Those days are gone. These days, companies don’t even pretend. A very small percentage of people are going to do well, for the vast majority it is j…
Nonsense. Everywhere I’ve been employed cared about my wellbeing and when I was an employer, I cared about the wellbeing of my staff. Calling an employer/employee relationship slavery after a Googler complains he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.
Yeah, they might pay for your insurance, give you free food, but that's it. The ultimate motive is to make profit, by getting every bit of work from you.
You can sugarcoat it however you want, but to an employer, you are just a liability, not an asset, even when the "current" they call you as one. Because, the "next" they might not. The terms "employer", "they" are relative. As in the previous comment, "A company as a whole is a faceless, consciousness-less creature".
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad had just one job all his life, for 33 years. While he didn’t become rich, he did enjoy relative peace of mind, pension etc. Of course everything is relative, but there was a time where companies had a little bit of concern to their employees, however small it was. Those days are gone. These days, companies don’t even pretend. A very small percentage of people are going to do well, for the vast majority it is j…
Nonsense. Everywhere I’ve been employed cared about my wellbeing and when I was an employer, I cared about the wellbeing of my staff. Calling an employer/employee relationship slavery after a Googler complains he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.
I feel like you're underestimating how terrible Google's stack ranking system. It basically exploits you into doing more work than you should with the prospect of making more money, only to smack you back down and ask you to do 6 more month of back breaking work. More than you were hired to, mind you.
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, this trap is designed quite well, while warnings about it are not designed nearly as well, and many fall into it for n years.
I'm always surprised at how people fall in this trap. Businesses are inherently not there for your interest (income/livelihood), they exist to capture money/resources. They hire people to be the human face to make it appear otherwise (HR) and market (propoganda) to workers in similar ways products/services are marketed to consumers. If there's a position, businesses expect it contributes to their profit. If the posit…
Its not always zero sum. In the best case, a group of workers that could make 1x each on their own, combine and are able to make 1.5x each together, and get paid around 1.2x each.
The additional .3x is the corporate "profit" and is distributed in any number of ways depending on how the company is set up. Its still a rational decision for all of the employees to work there.
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#68It appears it isn't going terribly well so far: https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ But, he doesn't seem discouraged. I'm guessing whatever equity he had means he has a fair amount of time to figure it out.
It isn’t going well yet from a financial perspective, but he writes this: “People have asked me if I’m still happy with my decision to quit and start my own company. The answer is definitely yes. As someone who has always valued independence, I love being a solo developer. It makes a world of difference to wake up whenever I want and make my own choices about how to spend my entire day. This is how I want to live the…
As someone currently in a similar situation to the article author, I can wholeheartedly agree that regaining your own agency and being able to determine technology and product decisions is a huge relief and opens up greatly enjoyable and satisfying opportunities for growth.
Developing a product takes a lot of time and effort, especially for a small/solo team - and yes, by pure financial metrics it may seem like success is a long distance away.
In much of the world it also takes a degree of good individual (or family) fortune and savings to be able to embark on a journey like this, and I think it's important to be aware of that privilege.
That's not a criticism, but something worth keeping in mind especially when discussing and explaining these projects. Not everyone in society can make this kind of leap (despite what those who tend to profit from inspiring and leading bright young developers might tell us) due to the anxiety involved in paying recurring bills. This is even more true in the U.S. with the additional bundled decision complexity (HMO vs PPO, etc.) and financial cost of selecting and paying for healthcare, versus taking the gamble that you'll be one of the lucky members of society not to require medical care. Well-educated and well-compensated folks such as the audience of HN are likely among the people most able to take the risks required.
Anyway, despite the argument that this might not be an economically rewarding project at the moment: value creation is a different, harder to measure metric, and I'd argue the author is creating value for themselves and for their community they're building tools for.
(Upvoted both parents of this reply, since I think this is a really important and interesting trend and topic, regardless of any argument positions taken)
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense. Everywhere I’ve been employed cared about my wellbeing and when I was an employer, I cared about the wellbeing of my staff. Calling an employer/employee relationship slavery after a Googler complains he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.
Yeah, they might pay for your insurance, give you free food, but that's it. The ultimate motive is to make profit, by getting every bit of work from you. You can sugarcoat it however you want, but to an employer, you are just a liability, not an asset, even when the "current" they call you as one. Because, the "next" they might not. The terms "employer", "they" are relative. As in the previous comment, "A company as…
No, a company just a collection of people with a common goal. And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another. In a job market as good as the one in the US at the moment, that mobility is irrespective of skill level.
And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce.
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense. Everywhere I’ve been employed cared about my wellbeing and when I was an employer, I cared about the wellbeing of my staff. Calling an employer/employee relationship slavery after a Googler complains he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.
I feel like you're underestimating how terrible Google's stack ranking system. It basically exploits you into doing more work than you should with the prospect of making more money, only to smack you back down and ask you to do 6 more month of back breaking work. More than you were hired to, mind you.
If you are comparing it to slavery I think you are vastly overestimating how bad the promo process is.