So basically you just studied/worked on projects for a year, lived very cheaply in a shared flat, cooked your own food? Worth it do you think?
For that kind of money, I would rather go to a different country as well. Like Thailand. Find a nice place in a city with a co-working space. If you'd be ok eating asian food, life can be very cheap (1,5 USD a meal depending on where you buy the food). A nice apartment + gym + swimming pool can be rented pretty cheap as well, maybe starting around 300 USD a month and more expensive depending on the size of the apartm…
I'm not the traveling kind of guy. Also I have many close people here where I live.
Unfortunately, that 'safety' of a 'regular' income is almost entirely illusory as well. Employers stopped providing insulation from market fluctuations in the 1980s. If your market dips, your company will hemorrhage workers without a second thought. Your desire for a place you can 'settle down' will also be ruthlessly exploited, and if you don't jump to a different company every 4 or 5 years, you will rapidly end up…
that 'safety' of a 'regular' income is almost entirely illusory as well Sure, to an extent, but there are differences of degree here. If I work for Google and they go bankrupt, worst case I lose a month's salary and I'm unemployed. And the chance of that is probably below 5% per year (obviously depends on the company) If I take a year off to develop my indie game, the odds are much worse, I gamble a year's salary not…
Salary, healthcare, bonuses, and investment contributions and their performance over the next 30 years
Unfortunately, that 'safety' of a 'regular' income is almost entirely illusory as well. Employers stopped providing insulation from market fluctuations in the 1980s. If your market dips, your company will hemorrhage workers without a second thought. Your desire for a place you can 'settle down' will also be ruthlessly exploited, and if you don't jump to a different company every 4 or 5 years, you will rapidly end up…
that 'safety' of a 'regular' income is almost entirely illusory as well Sure, to an extent, but there are differences of degree here. If I work for Google and they go bankrupt, worst case I lose a month's salary and I'm unemployed. And the chance of that is probably below 5% per year (obviously depends on the company) If I take a year off to develop my indie game, the odds are much worse, I gamble a year's salary not…
You are absolutely correct about differences in degree, but I think you chose a pretty misleading example. It's not a matter of whether your employer goes bankrupt or not. Even if your employer continues to grow, if they don't grow as fast as they were predicted to grow, then they will throw employees out the front door without a second thought. If the market dips by 1%, then in order to still meet their goal of growing by 4% that quarter, they will 'cut the fat' and get rid of their employees (while holding on to their executives). Getting a job used to mean protection from fluctuations in the marketplace, so if the product the company makes suffers a bit in popularity, it just meant a reduced profit margin for the business that year. Now, a reduced profit margin is not an option. It's not even thinkable. Obviously the livelihoods of employees are dispensible in the face of that.
Have you seen A Dark Room? It's text. He ported a text game, that someone else had already designed and implemented, to iOS. This is not a huge amount of work compared to what most game development people do, and is not particularly challenging compared to what people are doing with 3D graphics, etc. I am pointing this out not to be mean, but to respond to your point: "those who work as hard as he does and are as sma…
Mildly Interesting RTS looks pretty good to be honest. Have you downloaded it? It's surprisingly a lot of fun. Solid review score too. Oh and totally give A Dark Room a shot. You may find it pretty okay. PS: I'm totally gonna frame this comment thread. I'm big fan Braid and The Witness. You? Not so much :-)
MIRTS is actually an incredibly shallow take on RTS. I remember playing an extremely similar game back in 2007 and I also remember thinking that game was extremely similar to design docs that I had seen people blogging about a few years earlier.
MIRTS is something I'd expect from a weekend programming jam. It's a minimal effort and it's not surprising that it did minimally well in the marketplace.
> So here I am with a disgusting $140,000 in total compensation. A sea of cubicals, souless sheep that want nothing more than to do their time and go home. We need to learn the art and skill of finding joy in any circumstance. This detached, negative view of your coworkers does nothing but signal your inability or unwillingness to become something apart from your selfish, personal desires. This entire generation is l…
> Can’t you see that your happiness is dependent on none other than yourself?
I agree with that but differ from your conclusion. I think it is our responsibility to keep looking until we find what makes us happy.
Yeah it doesn't make any sense at all. He grossed over 800k on a video game, loves programming, but after another three years he has to go back to his day job? It sounds like he's burning over 100k/year and lying about his expenses in this report. In any case, there's a lot of information left out.
I give you my Armchair Expert of the Year Award. Congrats :-) Must be nice to live in a world without having to give Apple 30%, insurance premiums, taxes, and royalties/partnership splits. Take this comment in good spirit. We all make mistakes. Nothing but love for you. Go build awesome things. Hire a CPA for all the math related stuff.
You're right; my post was a mistake. I regret that I didn't read the article too carefully before posting. Alarmingly, instead of getting ignored or downvoted, I got a bunch of upvotes. What gives?
I have never been directly employed at a large Silicon Valley tech company. Is it really that difficult to work on side projects on your nights/weekends while working at these places? To be sure, it would take longer to get your projects finished, but you would also be doing so with the benefit of a steady paycheck and health insurance. If you happen to hit the lottery with your finished project, great - quit your jo…
If you work at a big Silicon Valley tech company, odds are that your employment contract says that they own whatever you do on your own time, if it's at all related to anything the company does (not just stuff you work on at the company or using company resources; anything they do).
If you work at a big Silicon Valley tech company, odds are that you live in California where where such contract clauses are illegal.
I am curious as to why some people think being paid $140,000 a year is 'disgusting'? I live in Australia so the comparison is a bit different, but here electricians and carpenters will very frequently make over $130,000 a year. Traffic controllers can make up to $180,000 a year, which is an unskilled job with only two days training [1]. In the prime of their careers, dentists, lawyers and doctors can commonly make ov…
Many programmers hit their peak salary very fast. Making $140k a year for 35-40 hours of work a week Continuing to make that $140k 20 years later is also insane, but in the opposite direction, but that's not the situation the post was describing. As a programmer you're fantastically highly paid at the beginning of your career but often not at the middle and end.
I always tell that to young people that look at their peers and see them very well paid - not 140k here in Uruguay, more like 30k but most other young people would be lucky to hit 15k.
However, an accountant, doctor, lawyer or other professional will have an upwards trajectory while programmers have a tough-to-penetrate glass ceiling and will plateau VERY early (late 20s to early 30s) unless they switch to management or start their own company or move to the U.S.
If you work at a big Silicon Valley tech company, odds are that your employment contract says that they own whatever you do on your own time, if it's at all related to anything the company does (not just stuff you work on at the company or using company resources; anything they do).
If you work at a big Silicon Valley tech company, odds are that you live in California where where such contract clauses are illegal.
You're thinking of non-competes, which are very different. I would suggest talking with an employment lawyer if you work for a BigCo in Silicon Valley.
I think your parent is saying that when you actually measure whether your claim is true, it isn't actually correlated in the failure case. I remember reading something that corroborated this [1]. That source claimed that previous founders of successful companies had a much greater chance at additional success, but previous failures didn't increase your chances (ie. you don't, in fact, learn more from failure than suc…
Ycombinator has made a lot of money based on the idea that some people are better at creating start ups than others. They don't just bet on ideas they also bet on people.
Right. And that source isn't claiming that people are all equally good at founding startups. Rather, it's claiming that previous failures don't substantially make a person better at founding successful companies. (They do find a very small 2% effect, but that may be statistical noise).