Start by doing both. Organically build your personal business to the point where if forces you to quit your day job because it's better in all ways.
Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
#62I have 2 full time jobs and working for my startup. 1 job provided stocks, my startup provided crypto, and my monthly income overall is 15k. It's hard to handle everything but key is to prioritize and do as much as possible in a day. Nobody blames me if I hang on a task, because everybody has multiple jobs as well - it feels like an unspoken acceptance between people. For context, I'm living in Romania
Re: Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
#63How do you find consulting gigs without using recruiters?
I had a lot of trouble with this. . I'm not a speaker at conferences nor am I someone who gets coffees with ex coworkers regularly.
Re: Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't balanced anymore.
Users of a site run by a startup accelerator might be prone to lean towards a certain one of these answers.
But again, a lot of these users would have seen both sides of the coin and so I guess that makes them the best audience to participate in that poll
Re: Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
#65I would much much rather have a normal job! If I worked for myself, I would have to waste significant amounts of time running a small business. As part of a larger organization, someone else can deal with all the tedious nonsense involved in getting paychecks to show up regularly, leaving me free to focus on the engineering work I actually care about.
Re: Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
#66It's not surprising that at this point the poll is at 21 vs 22. Competition will ensure that incentives remain more or less balanced between the two options (the less freelancers there are, the more they can charge, and the less full timers there are, the more they will be paid). Unless we lived in a world where one of them was so much easier to attract talent to that the other just died off. For specific people in s…
> It's not surprising that at this point the poll is at 21 vs 22. >Competition will ensure that incentives remain more or less balanced between the two options (the less freelancers there are, the more they can charge, and the less full timers there are, the more they will be paid). I agree that competition prevents one side from being too lopsided, but there's no reason why it would result in a 50-50 split. For inst…
The difference between freelancing and employment is spurious to begin with and is really only differentiated to make collecting taxes easier for the government. Which also means that the government is known to reclassify freelance agreements into employment agreements to suit their favour. 50/50 might be closer to the norm if buyers and sellers had more freedom to choose.
Re: Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
#67I'v done both. I'v nominally worked for myself, as half-owner and company director. I'm a huge geek, with mental health symptoms that could be mistaken for autism and ADHD but are actually due to trauma from having terrible parents who I removed from my life decades ago. The customers were clueless disorganised nitwits. Their upper management was out playing golf, so we had to try to get their disgruntled office staf…
> I'm a huge geek, with mental health symptoms that could be mistaken for autism and ADHD but are actually due to trauma from having terrible parents who I removed from my life decades ago.
I have a similar background. Can I email you?
Re: Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
#68I've done both. 18 years working for companies big and small and 5 years consulting. It would be a no-contest vote for consulting if there was affordable healthcare.
Even without affordable health care I'll vote "Work for yourself" but the margin is smaller.
$23,000 per year for healthcare is a tough pill to swallow.
(I live in the US obviously)
Re: Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
#69If you are employed you are trading stability for upside.
When you work for yourself and specially if you work on products that are not capital intensive and have insane economies of scale (as in Software) the upside is gigantic.
I'm employed and I regret every minute of it. The only reason why I'm still employed is because I'm the sole provider for my family and haven't been able to take time off because I realized the mistake way way too late in life.
Re: Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?
#70Option 3: form a worker owned co-op and distribute profits between members instead of shareholders and management.
What happens if you need capital? If employee A only has $1k to spare, but employee B has $10k to spare, should everyone's contributions be capped at $1k? Your model could work for businesses that aren't capital intensive (eg. consulting shops), but won't work for anything that requires a runway.
That capital doesn't have to be reflected as a percentage of ownership does it? What if they were structured as loans to the company which are paid back with interest separate from dividend payments from ownership? Then people who "invest" financially into the company still get rewarded for it, but they can't just buy up all the profits with an ownership position. I'm not deep into this area, so I don't know what sort of regulatory (or otherwise) hurdles this approach would face.