Good article, let money enrich your life and not define it.
Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
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Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
#72TL;DR: Yes. Get that money. Get lots of it. Poverty sucks.
I left rural Jamaica to come to Kingston, the capital, in 2005. After my first year in college, I got a summer job with a telecom startup run by an American. My student loan was not renewed for the 2nd year, so I had to drop out, and got a permanent position as a sysadmin at the company. The pay sucked, but I didn't care: The family member I was living with wasn't charging me rent, and I was having tons of fun setting up IPSec VPNs with other telecom providers, configuring pfSense firewalls, creating SIP trunks, etc. I'd sometimes stay at work till midnight, just exploring and learning, and be back at work at 8:30 the next morning.
I was transferred to another arm of the company 6 months later, but wasn't getting along with the management there, and was fired. But it was ok (I thought): I had no living expenses. I spent the next two years pottering about, trying my hand at a few different freelance initiatives, none of which really stuck. That was also when I discovered that I was very creative, at least design-wise. After those 2 years, my father died. No life insurance.
This, dear reader, is when reality started to set in. This is when I got the slap upside the head that said, "Hey! Fool! You need to start making money."
I'd applied for a job a few weeks before his death, and I got the job, doing a mixture of bizdev, system administration, and graphic design (perhaps I'm one of those fabled 'designgineermarketers' :) ).
Immediately, I began getting strange brown envelopes in the mail, containing sheets with tabulated data on them, and a strange claim that somehow, I owed them money.
I was later to find out that they were called 'bills.'
The family member also started charging rent. About time.
The student loan people called. Time to pay the piper.
I'd been bitch-slapped. By reality. It hurt.
I was 23.
I looked back at all the time I'd wasted. All the money I'd wasted. How I'd been a burden to family.
I'd been a typical HN-reading, Ayn Rand-quoting, John Galt aspiring-libertarian. Slowly, I began to realize the role of luck and circumstance. I used to look down on the poor, writing them all off as lazy and not willing to work. "How dare they be poor and have a TV!", I used to think.
I changed my tune. A bitch-slap will do that to you.
I knew what real wealth looked like. The startup I had worked for had tanked, but the founder and I were good friends, and he was independently wealthy. He owned 4 Mercedes, and lived in a house so far up in the hills that the road wasn't even paved. We would drive around and he would tell me about his life, how he had been rich as a teen pop star in Britain, but squandered it all and was broke by 20. He went to America with nothing, but built himself up through determination and cleverness. He built a telecom switch for the cost of a PC, and loaded Asterisk (open source telecom software) on it. Re-sold it for US$6,000. It felt 'wrong' to me, but he taught me that it doesn't matter what you think it's worth, it only matters what they think it's worth.
He died 4 months after my father. His family didn't know where all the money was. To this day, he has not been buried. That was over 2 years ago.
Money.
Money affects our lives in so many ways that it's difficult to overstate. Wanna help out that friend? It's gonna cost ya. Wanna take care of your parents? Ditto. How many great relationships have been ruined because one party had to leave due to work? How many marital squabbles are about money? How many friendships are ruined? And don't gimme that crap that if they were good relationships, they would last. If you have a friend that is down on his luck for an extended period (say a year or more), that gets old real fast. He'll expect you to pay for dinner. And movies. And gas. And liquor at parties. Soon you're gonna start resenting him. If he had money, it wouldn't be a problem. It's just circumstances.
How many lives are wasted in poverty?
Is it any surprise that I want money? Is it any surprise that I have dedicated the next few years to the getting of money?
Whew. I need to stop. Or this will happen again: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025537
Edit: grammar
Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coming from academia myself, I'd have to say you've been deceived on both counts, there. At an institutional level academic research is all about the money, and the prestige used to bring in more grant money and student-loan money. For instance, I know a professor at a top-tier US university who received an award last year purely for being in the select group who had made the school $1M by bringing in large governmen…
There's a difference between money for the university and money for yourself. I think the poster was trying to point out that taking an academic job is not the path to riches. For example, I made more at around five years in to working at Microsoft than I will as a professor unless I manage to make full professor at a top university _and_ run my own lab. Undergraduate starting salaries in this field, from top-tier in…
I think it's terrific that you're making choices based on what really interests you, rather than optimizing your income. You're obviously the kind of person pclark was talking about, and that's admirable.
I do think, though, that if the institution's executive goals are more along the lines of "make money" while an individual's are more "do cool stuff to change the world," he or she is setting himself up for an enduring conflict which can be hard to negotiate, or even to keep track of at times, because the institution will have so much influence over their life.
Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
#742 quick stories: 1. My fraternity brother's father (a successful doctor) took the two of us out to dinner. He asked what I was studying. I told him computers. He said, "Good. As you know, I want John to study medicine. But if he didn't want to, I would want him to pursue computers. But definitely not law. I don't want my son spending the rest of his life chasing dollars." Strange remark. But somehow, it really left a…
> But definitely not law. I don't want my son spending the rest of his life chasing dollars." Strange remark.
That is a strange remark indeed, but I suppose I could understand that sentiment coming from a doctor whose main interaction with lawyers involves "ambulance chasers" trying to squeeze money out of his practice.
Most lawyers don't do that kind of work and aren't in it for the money, although a law degree will mostly guarantee you a comfortable middle class life. I know quite a few who work for the government in tiny crappy offices and who will tell you that going to law school was the biggest mistake of their lives. Law is a surprisingly misunderstood profession.
Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
#75I think what swombat's calling out here is the difference between the social nature of startups, where everybody wants to look cool and do and say the right thing, and the actual nature of startups, where if you're not growing eyeballs exponentially or making something somebody actually pays you for then you're dead.
The startup world is a social community just like any other guild or clan. We have leaders, common dreams, mantras, and so on. It's become quite popular for really rich guys to tell us how it's not about the money. When I first heard this I took it at face value. Then I realized what they were really saying was you can't just focus on the money. That's a big difference!
Part of the danger in hanging out in places like HN is that it's easy to pick up on all the social cues of the startup world and miss out on the practical nuts and bolts of it. So we'll get our nerd on and discuss esoteric programming concepts. Or we'll rant at company X and praise company Y for basically doing the same thing. Or we'll vote up an essay by famous startup icon even if it's not that worthwhile. More to the point we'll praise one startup idea because it's "cool", then we'll shun another because it's unpopular in our social group.
I love making things people want. People show me they want them by paying me. I need the money, so this works well for everybody. Once I don't need the money, I'll still love making things people want. At that point, however, I need to be really damn sure I'm actually doing something that has value aside from just a bunch of people in my peer group telling me how awesome my idea is. And before I get there, the last thing I want to do is use their opinions as any sort of useful metric at all on what I should be doing. Money is a much better temporary proxy.
Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
#76Perhaps it's wrong place to ask, but ... Does anyone have an idea how to get this "hunger for money"? I get no pleasure from earning money and almost no pleasure from things I can buy. I find it hard to motivate myself to get rich despite the fact that I consciously know that it could make my life bit easier.
I don't know. I for one enjoy many material things that I'm not yet able to afford on a consistent basis, and that keeps me pretty motivated.
Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the HFT people are more likely to sock their winnings away. Anyway, "I take money from people so that I can increase the national GDP by spending it" is not much of an argument for a socially valuable way of life.
Sock money away where, in their mattress? No, in the bank, money market, investments, etc. thereby increases the available funds for others to start businesses, take out loans, provide liquidity to the market. "Take money from people", you mean engage in a mutually beneficial and agreed upon transaction where you take money and give a product or service... yea not the same as theft.
I don't agree with "mutually beneficial" in either case, and "agreed upon" is murky in the case of HFT and at least somewhat misleading in the case of domain squatting.
And "I take money from people to increase available funds for others' business purposes" is not much of an ethical argument, either.
Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
#78Amen!
Whenever I ask "startup" people - "how does it make money?" - I often get odd looks. The same people are usually on the look out for funding.
Yes, it is honourable to run a business for love and passion of the idea. However money pays the bills and keeps you in the game longer.
It is not so honourable to ask for money from investors when you haven't considered how your idea will generate revenue.
Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
#79Amen!
Whenever I ask "startup" people - "how does it make money?" - I often get odd looks. The same people are usually on the look out for funding.
Yes, it is honourable to run a business for love and passion of the idea. However money pays the bills and keeps you in the game longer.
It is not so honourable to ask for money from investors when you haven't considered how your idea will generate revenue.
Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
#80Perhaps it's wrong place to ask, but ... Does anyone have an idea how to get this "hunger for money"? I get no pleasure from earning money and almost no pleasure from things I can buy. I find it hard to motivate myself to get rich despite the fact that I consciously know that it could make my life bit easier.
Money == Freedom
Don't you want freedom?