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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

So many "how I did my own thing" stories out there remind me of that old "How To Draw An Owl" meme[1]. It's always: 1. I quit my job one day and decided to [do a startup | independently contract] 2. Fast forward a few years and [I sold to Google! | I've got 5 contracts and I set my own schedule!] I mean, great work, and congratulations, but I think you skipped a few steps there.

1: http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/572/078/d6d...

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First study wildlife drawing, then practice sketching birds in your spare time a few years. Get a job in the pacific northwest for a famous worldwide bird-sketching platform. They only want you to sketch goldfinches all day, but that's okay, it's a job. Every now and then you draw two larger circles and wonder what might become of them. In the fullness of time you'll level up, get really good, be a level eight Director of Finch Sketching and the pay and options are really flowing. Save those up, you'll need them.

Then, someday, an owl will come along that, you realise, you have to draw, and that if you don't at least try drawing this owl, you will regret that omission the rest of your life.

Then, and only then, do you quit your high-paying job sketching finches and spend the next two years on the damn owl.

No, he didn't. This is how you get from two circle to an owl.

"All the money I made that didn’t go into the rent of my 1 room apartment and food went in to computing hardware and books. No world wide web back then to get information from. And computer gear was expensive back then! A 160K floppy drive? That’s 900 bucks please! Aka 4 months of savings."

So this guy in Amsterdam happens to be a prodigious programmer who reads lots of books and lands a sequence of full time jobs due to people seeing potential in him. After several years, he quits his well paying job to start a business at 22 much to the vexation of his mother.

This feels like the ending to Jobs (2013). Where's the rest of the story?

You describe him as if he happened to be a genius who was discovered by the right people. My interpretation of the article was that he worked hard to become skilled at code and through persistence and determination managed to convince people to take a chance on him.

Exactly this. He applied for all jobs he could find for 2 and a half years. If this is not determination I don't know what is.

It's not about the steps only, the alleged lessons to draw from these stories are often based on survivorship bias. Successful persons often have no clue why they were successful and they also tend to overestimate the influence of their own skills and work and underestimate the influence of random events like meeting the right person at the right time.

This is a great comment, and after thinking about your question, I think the answer is: acquire a mentor to teach you how to draw an owl. "You should found your own company, and I’ll give you a couple of hints."

(That's actually actionable, and maybe I should look into that...)

I mean, sometimes you just have to draw the fucking owl.

People want a nice little checklist of how to start a business, but that isn't how it works.

I'd like to thank HN for that. HN gave me a bunch of information/reflex/frameworks to understand how to create a company and how to understand various signals, and my first solopreneurship has been successful for 4 years.

Having started five-six new organisations by now, there is in fact a checklist I use these days. The first item is: do I have a salesperson I trust to work with onboard as collaborator? Without this I don't do anything. Viable ideas I am never short of. Then the rest of the checklist starts. But I am on mobile, and not able to easily elaborate right now.

Or the Feynman method of problem solving:

1) Think about the problem. 2) Write down the answer.

Isn't there a "write down the problem" step? I think it's immensely important.

Yeah there is! No wonder it never worked for me.

The Feynman method is a deeper form of rubber duck debugging. If you remove the rubber duck, it won't work.

I think the owl drawing image is an apt simile for starting a business. Because the part in between is not something you can really teach. It takes lots of practice and erasing and rework and trial and error. If you want a step by step process, join a franchise.

Doing contract work isn't that hard.

I simply quit my job, searched for job websites which also had contract projects, wrote a few emails and got my first project.

This I repeated when I was half through the project.

Where is the big jump here?

>> Where is the big jump here?

Here:

>> I simply quit my job,

"Quit my job" is not a thing most people would prefix with simply.

What else could be said about this step? Either you quit or you don't.

This is not good advice for hard-working, dedicated programmers who wants to start their own company. Foregoing a salary is scary enough that you don't need to discourage wannabe entrepreneurs even more.

One doesn't have to. Start part time?

That's actually great, but not always possible.

Maybe save by living frugally for a while, as the OP did?

I think the point people are trying to get across with those stories is that quitting your job is by far the most important step.

I'm pretty sure that's extremely well know. I still wouldn't advise ever quiting your job and starting a company. The risk to reward ratio is so far out of whack the math will never work out.

I, and many other bootstrappers entirely disagree. The only risk you run is missing one year of income, typically. You can uh, usually just get another job.

> The only risk you run is missing one year of income, typically. You can uh, usually just get another job.

I left a great job to strike out on my own. After years of effort, two business plans, one failed partnership and moderate success with the second attempt, I would much prefer to have a steady paycheck with good benefits again. It's harder to break back into my previous career path due to the gap this created on my resume. It's not safe to assume that you'll find work as soon as you're ready to switch back to a corporate gig.

Is there some way you can spin that "gap" as an advantage?

Indeed, "CEO of failed 2-4 person startup" got a friend of mine all sorts of opportunity, now he's CTO of a more promising startup.

And then "CTO of a failed 10-15 person startup" will get him an even better position.

Is your local job market that bad? I basically took a 1 year and a half break and I got a job within 3 months, after interviewing with 6 (I think?) companies.

And this is in a small (albeit rich) European city of about 400k people.

As fellow southern European, with regular trips to the Mediterranean area, I would say even here that would be quite bad for anyone on the south or eastern countries.

except Romania, you land a job in IT in less than a week if you have minimal experience. The OP can confirm, he lived a considerable time there ( not sure where? Bucharest maybe? )

So how to search for a IT job in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia and get one in less than one week, specially when living outside the capital?

Because I want to share those tips with a few friends still looking for one after several months unemployment.

If your job market is really bad, not much you can do locally.

However, in IT we have flexibility:

* try freelancing

* create an OSS portfolio

* try remote companies

* try jobs for which you're overqualified

if it really is that bad.

And if it is that bad for IT folks, I pity most non-IT people, to be honest.

It is really that bad.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268830/unemployment-rate...

Between 10 and 23% for the countries I mentioned.

Also getting an IT job currently might mean having to move into the capitals, as other cities have even less offers available and obviously there is not enough jobs on the capitals for everyone.

Let me reply to this too. The lands you mentioned are excelling at other things: tourism. Normally 10-30% of the workforce serves tourism in this countries. Romania, while being a gorgeous land, full of virgin places of untouched beauty, is more known of the horde of programmers ( and crackers, script kiddies too ) that are now earning a boatload of money because they are just that good. So in IT hubs like Cluj or Iasi ( even Bucharest ), they are always in demand.

I don't really suggest to leave that countries and move to Romania to pursue an IT career, but unless you want to waist time or move to tourism, it is an option. UK was an option, now is kind of gone. Germany is really in demand but the language barrier is really hard to pass, same with France and or Netherlands. Romania is wasy because you are expected to speak just English and for the daily life is a Romance language, you can learn it quite fast.

That is all fine and dandy when one is single, young and willing to leave the country.

Bucharest. What gave me away? :p

The city I was mentioning is in Western Europe, though. I think that if you have work experience and you're decent at presenting your skills, most employers don't really care about gaps in employment. Just have a good story ready for the gap period.

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Are you saying that finding a job in 3 months is bad? Maybe I need higher standards :)

Might be, depending on what savings one has and which running costs need to be paid each month.

In any case, maybe I expressed myself badly, however I don't know anyone personally, that was able to get a job in less than 6 months after being unemployed, some of them took even a bit longer than that.

I see that people downvoted my original comment, oh well.

I did find a job quite easily, IMO, after 1 year and a half out of the job market. Maybe I was really lucky or my local market is really robust. Dunno.

No you can't, not every place of the world is a Silicon Valley hungry for developers.

Many of them is already quite hard to even have one in first place, let alone getting back with a hole on the CV not 100% related to the bullet points they are looking for.

But Silicon Valley is so hungry for developers, there are ample remote opportunities for capable developers.

Which requires:

- broandband internet access

- having to work on a completly different timezone

- having to care care of social security and other regulations on their own

- bypassing the local work laws regarding vacation days and work hours

None of those are major obstacles (and I speak from experience as someone who does remote work for clients in Silicon Valley, while living in a completely different timezone), but regular Internet access of some kind is required.

Depending on the structure, that isn't true, though. To start a business, the most important part is the starting of that business, even if you stay at your current job at the beginning.

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