Jobs don't scale | Hacker News Reader

Jobs don't scale

romansnitko.posterous.com

37 pointssnitko36 comments

Good on you to have realized the inherent job scalability problem so early on in your life - you have just easily saved yourself several years of your life. The economical relationship between employer and employee is such that your employer takes upon himself all small and moderately-sized economical risks and in return collects most of the upside. There are exceptions such an outsized IPO (very rare) on one side and layoff (not so rare) on the other. In other words it's a risk swap not unlike car insurance or extended warranty. It's a great deal for someone who can't tolerate cashflow problems (e.g. who is in debt), but this sort of risk swap is unnecessary for someone who has a cash cushion to ride out the rough times. Many people voluntarily put themselves into such position e.g. by spending beyond their means - don't do that.

Your #1 goal is establish the cash cushion. Your #2 goal is to find a worthy idea. Once you have both you can burn cash to build business out of your idea. Here's how you do it:

1. Get a job and keep it. Reduce your burn rate and save money. You're ready when you have 18-24 months worth of burn rate stashed in the bank CDs (do not mess with the stock market - you are your high-upside investment).

2. While holding a job identify a group of people who have money, have problems, are willing to pay to solve the problems, you are able to solve the problems (it's in your domain), you can easily find and talk to. Bad choice examples: software engineers, teenage gamers. Good choice examples: middle-age middle-class women, small business owners. Business is not a legal entity and not even a product - business is a group of people whom you can reach and whose problems you can solve better than other people and who can pay you for it. Once you have that you've made it.

3. Talk to these people and verify the problem. Build a mockup of the solution and talk to them again. Try to sell the mockup on google adwords or any other channel you were going to use to reach out to your audience. This is a low-bandwidth activity that you can do while keeping your day job. Don't be afraid to drop one problem in favor of the another. In fact, strive for it - try to discover the most pressing problem your audience may have.

4. In a couple of years you should a solid idea about what to do, how to do it and how to sell it. You should also have enough cash to make the leap. You know the time is right when it doesn't feel like a "leap" anymore.

Also, read "Re-work" - it'll do you good.

Good luck.

Thanks for such an extensive advice.

This topic seems to cause some interest judging by votes. So if there is further interest I could write a blog post in greater depth about this subject, and then we could probably have a more targeted discussion in the comments for it.

Please do it. I'm more or less in the same situation of the OP, and your answer gave me a fantastic energy boost.

The problem is, that I want to make games.

At some point in the last 10 years I realized not only are video games a waste of time but transitivity working on building them is nearly as much a waste of time. They're fun, but ultimately are just entertainment. I still play them occasionally. But the entire gaming industry from the players up to the executives at the end of the day are just providing people means of escaping from reality. Beating a game is a false, manufactured sense of accomplishment: it's like getting a "participation" ribbon in the game of life. Fun, yes, but ultimately I think it becomes as satisfying to beat a game as it is to eat a pastry from starbucks: in either case you're consuming a wholly manufactured experience that provides slim to nil real value for your mind or your body.

In other words, there are much more interesting, difficult, and worthwhile problems to solve than how to build a better RPG or FPS. You're just not looking hard enough.

It sounds like you maybe played games too much (forgive me if I'm wrong there, obviously your one comment is not enough to know that). I don't think there's anything wrong with recreation for its own sake and games are a form of recreation. They're fun, and it's good to have fun things in your life. Just so long as they're not the only (or, I'd say personally, the major) thing in your life.

By creating games you are helping other people have fun and relax, that doesn't seem like a worthless thing to me.

You must be so much fun at parties!

I don't play video games either, but that hardly gives me the authority to deprecate them for creating merely a "manufactured sense of accomplishment." There are many people for whom games are the only practical release from daily drudgery and that alone makes their existence, and by extension their creation, worthwhile.

Not everyone aspires to solve "interesting, difficult and worthwhile problems." Sometimes we just want to have fun!

I never said everyone did aspire to solve interesting problems. But the point of this thread, as so many others, is what do you do with opportunity given to you to work on whatever you want.

I'm of the opinion that working on video games, generally speaking, is not much more rewarding both to yourself and society as it is to play them. If you had $500k, 2 years, and many ideas on how to make the world better, why would you waste it on building something that serves no purpose other than sheer escapism or entertainment?

I get a very negative reaction when I criticize certain pursuits as not being worthwhile, as has happened before, but it's due to a misunderstanding of context. I say this not in the context of life in general (as I said, I play video games and don't always work on interesting, difficult problems) but instead in the context of having the opportunity to change the world.

The truth is, these opportunities come across very rarely, and when they do, it's important to deeply consider how you spend your time. Sometimes you want to have fun, but that goes hand in hand with the fact that life is short.

I think that video games can be said to make the world better in some sense. My life is a little bit richer because of them - just like it is because of films and books and music. Maybe not in a philantropic sense of the word but I don't get the feeling that you are saying that he should be attacking AIDS or world hunger? And even if you are, the sun is going to explode one day, wiping out all legacy anyway.

I am not saying that you shouldn't try and do good, but I think that the kind of statement you are making provokes these questions.

I guess I'd rate making interesting videogames at considerably more worthwhile than many of the startup ideas we see around here. I mean, ultimately most web 2.0 sites are kind of a waste of time, except for the potential to get rich off them. If anything, social media is a bigger unproductive time-sink than videogames or TV are these days.

I do agree that building just another clone of an existing game (say, a new FPS with no real innovation) is a bit of a waste of time though, just like building a Twitter clone or reddit clone or something would be. But that's true in all media: most Hollywood films are derivative crap good for nothing but mindless entertainment, but that doesn't mean the entire idea of making a film is pointless.

Of course, others have talked about this at greater length: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/91012...

In the Scott McCloud-ian view of "ultimate goal of the art," I'm either trying to push the bounds of the medium, or developing a message within it. Right now I lean towards the medium, as I still feel there's a lot for me to learn.

I don't think I'm succeeding at it yet, but what if I do? What if others do?

"Ultimately just entertainment" comes from a linear mode of thinking about the nature of the industry and its potential for immediate utility. The utility of an entertainment medium stems from a balance between the inspirational and the functional - something that can say more about our world. Most of the products, just like most businesses, are going to completely fall flat at this. That does not subtract from the good ones.

I make games for a living, and I agree with what you're saying, but I would cast a net much wider than just games. Ultimately, a ton of stuff the Hacker News community is working on falls into the 'want' category - not the 'need' category.

I accept that what I'm doing isn't making the world a better place in any meaningful way. But I see you work as an engineer at Etsy, and I would suggest that you're in a glass house throwing stones.

What will people do once there are no more survival type problems to solve for anyone? If we can't play games with each other and socialize, life is going to be pretty boring unless we start introducing survival problems again.

Imagine a person who wants to work on large volumes of search data. How many opportunities in life does such person have? Not many: work for Google, work for Bing, work for Ask.com, and that's it.

By narrowing down your scope of interest you're making it a lot harder or even impossible to make money beyond wages.

Another point to consider is that you will do much better if you focus on a demographic instead of technology (like most geeks do). Ask yourself - do I want to make teenage gamers happy? Well, how about elderly gamers? What kind of games could they want to play? Something from their childhood? Something to play with grand-children? What kind of problems do they face - font size? Pace?

Demographics > technology.

If you want to design games, as opposed to working as an engineer on some small part of them, you probably are actually better off doing it indie, or finding an indie company to work for. If you work a normal game-industry job at a place like EA, you aren't really going to be designing games, but more likely will be debugging a texture mapper somewhere deep inside an engine, or something equivalent.

Plus, all the interesting stuff is happening in indie games anyway! --> http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html

"The problem is, that I want to make games."

Have you tried anything else? Everybody thinks they want to make games (at some point). But while the end product is more fun than most end products, the sausage making process ranges from the same to below average in enjoyability.

If you are going to enjoy being a programmer, you're likely to enjoy it working on any number of other things as well. If you can't stand working on those other things, you probably won't make it as a games programmer either.

I'm not trying to discourage your from going into game programming, I'm trying to encourage you to notice that there are any number of other fun problems and tasks out there. In particular, if you are on a small team, rather than a programming sweatshop, almost everything should ultimately be a fun task with at least some new element to it; if you are doing the same thing every day, you are a terrible programmer!

Not every programming job outside of gaming is a sweatshop job. For that matter, not every job inside of gaming isn't a sweatshop job. Unless game making is really truly your passion, and indeed, really truly your only passion, I really don't recommend it; you'll be competing in a market where supply is too high, and that means only one thing.

"The problem is, that I want to make games."

If you want to make games, make them. Don't let anyone tell you they are impractical and you should work on accounting systems or card games for grannies or whatever. It is not that they are necessarily wrong (or right), but it is your time and your life

Make some small games first. Only the actual making (especially completing) of games will teach you if it is something you want to do fulltime. You can think of business aspects once you have some tech chops.

Make some small games first. Only the actual making (especially completing) of games will teach you if it is something you want to do fulltime. You can think of business aspects once you have some tech chops

Want to see the 14th revision(Version 0.1.3) of an increasingly tricked out tetris clone? Or for that matter, want to see my in-progress network branch of my tetris clone?

I also have some experience with canvas and javascript, which will become the future of gaming.

I already took your advice and have some technical chops.

Some knowledge I am missing is mostly mathematics, less so web application development, and most importantly business acumen.

It doesn't really matter what you're working on, 99% of software is the same. A race condition is a race condition, and you've got to find it and fix it before you can go home. The environment you do it in, your cow-orkers and so on, is the only real variable.

This mirrors my personal experience very closely, and as such I think it's great advice. :)

Denis has just given you some of the best advice I've seen on HN in my year here. My few additions:

You don't have to quit the day job to build stuff. Building stuff can be low-bandwidth, too. Middle-aged middle-class women and small business owners have a lot of problems that can have a rough solution written in a week. (Think like "scheduling software for a beauty salon": it is a CRUD app. Not even a very difficult CRUD app. I don't know if it can be marketed in an efficient fashion but I'm absolutely positive there is no technical risk involved in making a prototype and shopping that around.)

There are probably other tiers of problems which can be solved in a month or three months. You can also gradually extend the v1.0 of your solution in terms of functionality or niches (salon scheduling... for massage therapists! Salon scheduling... with online booking! Salon scheduling... en español!.)

Having a cash cushion is excellent advice, but ramen profitability (or day job profitability) is even nicer. After that, the risk is truly minimal (if you have a profitable business selling salon scheduling, what is your main strategic risk -- people stop getting their hair done?) and your runway is infinite.

Incidentally, salon scheduling software presumably takes minimal time to maintain. You could probably build it and maintain it on, oh, call it five hours a week. That gives you a whole lot of time for pursuing other interests -- including perhaps a startup with larger ambitions or building the next great videogame, if you really want to do that.

Right, cash cushion is there to take you through the first few month until you become ramen-profitable which is the first major milestone. It also helps to calm to down the nerves for people who are exceptionally risk averse, like I am.

You sound like me 10 years ago...

I'm guessing you're in your 20s.

Take advantage of the mobility and freedom of choice that comes with having no little people depending on you to bring home the bacon, as when that happens your choices become somewhat less...

Not a bad thing, just a different thing :)

Tell me you're rich or something now ) Yeah, I'm 24.

...I want motivation, and marrying someone ain't gonna give me one.

Agreed. When I read that, I knew he was under 30 and not married. Personally, I find that marriage rather focuses you in a laser-like way on cutting out the extraneous regarding personal projects (i.e. those which do not make money). Depending on your personality, this may inspire more passion than working only for the benefit of your own interests.

The size of CEO's salaries seems to make this claim false on the face of it (http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/05/02/top-p...). Admittedly some of those people did actually found companies, but many also spent time getting an education, moving into an entry-level (ish) job, then climbing the ranks, building a career not just a job.

I understand the point, but there are other perspectives.

That all sounded a bit depressing..... but very familiar!

I suggest you get in the gym!

I go to the gym. I also run 3 miles every day and sleep full 8 hours. Not depressed, just saying what things really are.

on a similar note, a great article on why a fixed income is a 'sucker bet' - http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/09/a-fixed-income-is-a...

Not everyone is bursting with ideas all the time. Make enough contacts and meet people. Some travel may help, just like you said, it takes some effort.

Don't get me wrong but a relationship can help to get rid of the 'nothing excites me' mood.

nothing excites me. Nor technical problems neither a project itself unless it's my idea and my project and my business

...

So what's the problem, you're saying? Well, I have no good ideas to work on

With all due respect this post is kind of pointless. What motivates the author is more money and being wealthy. Well then go for it, build a company and be wealthy. Don't work on someone else's idea.

The mistake I see a lot of young programmers making is to not realize that when you are young all your capital is in your head. Don't squander it.

Kid, would you like some cheese with your whine?

If we never talk about anything that ails us we'll never fix it.

Jobs don't scale. No, really !? Am I the only one who's getting tired of meaningless headlines :|

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