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Comment by anon987 | Hacker News Reader

My view has been that someone always works for someone else. Even the most powerful board members answer to shareholders and entrepreneurs answer to their customers - lest they go out of business.

Tell me about why you don't think you have to answer to your customers.

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Customers are a constraint, to be sure, but so are the laws of physics. Customer preferences are just market conditions, and adopting to market conditions is closer to dealing with physical constraints in your product design than it is to being told what to do by your boss.

I mean, sure, in some sense you're "working for" your customers and "working for" a boss, but that's just using the same phrase to describe two fundamentally different relationships. Customers have no meaningful say in anything beyond buying your product or not; they can't dictate culture, they can't play politics, they can't drag you down with pointless meetings... etc.

Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent. Especially for consumer-oriented products, they're faceless. In a hierarchy, you have one immediate boss and a some bounded number of executives above them, all of whom operate more or less as a single entity. You can't just decide to ignore a segment of your management the way you can change focus to a different class of clients. And you have to deal with your boss one-on-one in a way that you can avoid for any individual customer.

And hey, customers don't misbehave in the same ways. They fundamentally can't micromanage or claim credit for your work. Any customer by themselves probably has relatively little direct power over you which means they have less latitude to be jerks and if they are, it's easier to deal with.

Obviously, this isn't true for all customers. If you're beholden to a small handful of large customers or you're consulting, the relationship is a lot more like having a boss. But for consumer-oriented products and any businesses that scale—basically anything you could reasonably describe as a product—having customers is completely different from having a boss.

Your customer may dislike your work, but you have power to change your work,just time and energy. Your boss may dislike you, but you can't have the time and energy to change enough to please him. Difference between engineering something and politicizing something.

I believe this is the most important difference, at least for me:

> Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent

This gives me freedom. Sure, it would be best if I just received a one billion dollar gift (I don't think small :P) but until then, having the freedom to choose what projects I'm willing to work on is amazing.

You could also formulate the issue in terms of "alienation," that is, the degree to which you feel a real relationship based on your own volition and desire... like, you aren't beholden to someone else's promises, you get to keep whatever profit you make, etc.

Even when running a business I don't think you necessarily have to answer to customers, and you are certainly not forced to answer to shareholders or board members if the company is not structured in such a way to necessitate that.

The only one or thing you absolutely have to answer to is the market, people can complain all they want about whatever they want, but so long as there are people who will open their wallet you really don't need to pay attention. This is completely different from typical boss-employee relationships, you're solving a problem in an autonomous fashion not following orders.

So how does customers!=market

As long as the market > 1, you can always fire a customer.

Ahh yes, this is a thought I've been struggling with for a while - thank you for the mental clarification.

Of course, employees can also always fire their boss, as long as there's another employer waiting.

Instead of micromanaging him to become a better boss :)).

Really important distinction: if you fire a customer you've lost some of your income; if you fire your boss (i.e. you quit) you've lost all your income.

Really important rider: neither loss of income has to be permanent.

but recovering from one is a lot tougher than the other

In the words of Bob Dylan:

  But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
  You're gonna have to serve somebody,
  It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
  But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

>"My view has been that someone always works for someone else."

Taking that thought exercise a step further--I've tried to think of professions where one truly is beholden to no other individuals.

The only thing that comes to mind is a securities trader. If you are trading, sure the markets change, but you can make money on the upside or downside, and you really don't have any "customers." Now in theory you can be part of a larger bank, and being a solo trader can be harder, but it is possible.

Are there any other careers where one truly is independent and accountable to ones self and nobody else?

Some artists get to a place where no fucks are given. If there's adequate money from royalties or an inheritance or donations or marriage - even if it's not much in absolute terms - then there's no external pressure to produce.

E.g. A composer called Conlon Nancarrow spent most of his life in Mexico, punching holes in player piano rolls to make music that was impossible for humans to play.

He was pretty much ignored until he was 65, by which time he'd been writing music with no audience for most of his life, making next to no money from anything.

His career finally took off in a big way when he got a MacArthur award at the age of 70.

Another would be professional poker player, an idea I toyed with for awhile. You have customers in the same way sharks have customers. Every other person at the table could hate your guts (though that's not optimal), but they'll still sit there and give you money, provided you're sufficiently skilled.

The two professions are pretty similar - they both involve a zero sum game you're playing against other people.

Market makers do make markets. That's not a zero sum game.

He's not talking about market makers.

Its more about minute-to-minute autonomy than answering to a person/customer per se. With the customer you still retain control over your day to day ... if I feel like going to the dentist on Tuesday, and then going to watch a matinee after lunch because I felt like it, I'll do it, and the customer will never know about it ... can't do that at most fulltime jobs.

The difference is when you work for someone, they can fire you and you can quit. 1 to 1 relationship.

When you have a business, you can have tens if not tens of thousands of customers. They can still fire you, but you can fire them as well.

What affects you more. Losing your sole source of income or losing 1/100th of your company's revenues?

I can manage bad customers. Bad management is a lost cause.

You don't have to do what your customers say. If you are right, they will probably catch on eventually.

Some companies never see their customers and are self-funded.

Market makers like Janestreet come to mind.

The truly wealthy (typically old/inherited money) have this freedom.

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