Are you built to be an employee? | Hacker News Reader

Are you built to be an employee?

hackernoon.com

61 pointsspringmissile89 comments

Open articleView on HN

"if you truly want to have money, you will"

That's called the just-world fallacy. https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/07/the-just-world-falla...

It's amazing how many people believe that Just World nonsense. Truly staggering.

I don't think it's bad to desire it, or to try and work toward making it more of a reality.

It is a harmful belief to hold when it affects policies that keeps underprivileged people that way.

Right, it makes absolutely no sense to believe in it now, when it clearly does not exist. But I don't think it's a bad thing to work toward, and actual just world.

No, of course not. An actual, genuinely real just world would be amazing.

But that would also include eliminating luck or random chance, which just ain't happening.

Not eliminating. Just recognizing it more.

We're in that weird in-between period where the land of equal opportunity is quickly slipping away, but people still believe it exists.

It's no different from a caste system or any other class system that justifies our lot in life as deserved. It just has its own uniquely American flavor to it that is based on America's own fundamentalist religion (individuality and the belief in equal opportunity for all). The fundamentalist belief that America "is fair to all" can't be broken, so we develop rationalizations to bridge the gap between expectations and reality.

Don't most religions basically teach this? "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth"?

I believe that Garrison Keillor said it best:" The Gospel is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

Many 'prosperity' gospel folk forget the second half for a few years and don't plan correctly. Then they end up as the first half without any comfort.

What a fancy way of saying, "fuck you if you're poor".

The author really needs to understand that his experience is not everybody's, and replace "you" with "I".

He has a repertoire, a college education, a job history, he's white, he's young, he's a man, he probably has no kids, he's able-bodied, he has a support system... so yeah, if this represents you, you will probably do okay if you quit your job. This probably represents a lot of his audience, too. But he's certainly not talking about everyone, he's talking himself and generalizing it to everybody else.

He did not say "you will have money" but "if you want money" of course some people don't desire money, and that's fine

I don't really agree with you. In my opinion the author says so about people who are in the same position as him.

And in this case I also think it is true, if your only goal is money, then you will not spend it and waste it on anything, which will results in more money

Worth highlighting this bit from the link:

>“Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. To a lesser but still significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to ‘feel less of a need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social victims.'” – Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez from an essay at The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

Of course.

"I'm successful in life. It must be because I'm a Good Person, who deserves success because I'm inherently better/more motivated."

The promise that "if you want to make money, you will" seems fantastical. The idea that everyone has the skills to run their own business if they just BELIEVE hard enough is a tad ridiculous. He's had success, sure. Would you have success? Would you have as much success as you would as a mediocre employee?

The perfect example: people who get promoted to management. Most suck.

That's a whole other problem [1]. Most bad managers I've met were actually quite good at the jobs of the people they are managing. Managing requires a whole other set of skills though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Some of worst managers that I have met sucked at the jobs of the people they were managing. But they were good at pretending in an environment where upper management is also clueless. Or simply they were promoted to take them out of the jobs they sucked at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle

Fair enough. It would seem that a feedback loop exists where managers who promote staff to be managers because they are bad at their jobs, would create more managers who are likely to promote staff to be managers because they are bad at their jobs, which would create...

While I agree that the statement about wanting to make money is somewhat a fallacy, I agree with the authors sentiment that you must never let a job hold you hostage, no matter how dire a situation becomes. Once you start down the road of "I don't want to be here but I need to be" you're only setting yourself up for misery.

> I agree with the authors sentiment that you must never let a job hold you hostage, no matter how dire a situation becomes.

Unless you need that job to keep your health insurance which keeps you or your family member alive.

Or you just had a kid, your wife is not working, and there’s only your income paying the mortgage keeping you in a home, and you have a 6 month window only to find something else if you quit, in a small tech market.

One of the worst things about rich people is their incredibly damaging refusal to admit the primary cause of their wealth is blind luck.

Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity. Don't use blind luck as an excuse.

The amount of those two vary widely in the rich population. More importantly, most people outside of it will never see any good opportunity on their lives. And even more important, a lot of preparation requires a good amount of opportunity.

> Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity

Plus location of birth. I'm pretty sure being born in a developed country, as opposed to somewhere like the DPRK, qualifies as blind luck.

That would be part of the opportunity part, right? That's literally where phrases like "land of opportunity" come from.

Not always, though, for example, a refreshing interview with Hank Green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2-4MwCzJdA

Partially true. It's not luck they chose to participate in the arena. However, luck is very much involved in succeeding once you are in the arena.

It can largely be luck that they have the resources to participate in the first place, however.

You make your own luck. If you never put yourself into a position, you'll almost never get lucky. There's a certain luck involved, absolutely, but that luck is not blind.

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson (supposedly)

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison.

You miss 100% the shots you don't take. -Wayne Gretzky

Neither this statement nor any variations thereof have ever been found in Thomas Jefferson's writings

https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/i-a...

Hence the "supposedly", although I suppose it's silly to think I could avoid the famous HN pedantry.

I agree with you to an extent, but thing like being born in somewhere like North Korea are going to seriously limit the amount of opportunity you can create for yourself.

Is that an indictment against the author?

Science seems to support this view. From https://tedsummaries.com/2014/09/05/paul-piff-does-money-mak... :

> Paul shows us footage of a psychological experiment – a rigged 2 player monopoly game where they randomly pick one player to be more wealthy. The wealthy player starts with more money, gets double the income for passing GO, and moves more often. [...] After the game they were asked why they won – and they’d talk about their own actions & strategy, rather than reflecting on the advantages given at the start.

Jesus, that sounds like a few billionaires I know.

Blind luck implies it was a metaphorical dice roll in which the person had absolutely no impact, which is demonstrably false. Sure, there are plenty of folks on trust funds or with large inheritances who basically won the genetic lottery. There's nothing wrong with that, but that's not who we're talking about.

Even people like Gates, Musk, etc would probably agree they had a healthy amount of luck. Being in the right place at the right time, starting a conversation with the right person, being in the right college course or being at the right college. But saying that the primary cause of wealth is blind luck eliminates almost all the personal agency and hard work that actually goes into being a successful person. Maybe they wouldn't have gotten where they are without some luck, but the same amount of luck + being lazy would leave them just as poor (or worse).

Being rich allows you a good few more rolls of the dice. If I was to quit my job and fail at a startup, that would be me back to stage 0. I would need to work my way up the ladder slowly. If my parents were rich, they could just give me another 100,000 to try out my next business.

What I learned about this concept "if you truly want to have money, you will" is that I just don't truly want money.

Sure I still need money for food and stuff, but that is the sole motivation. I don't actually WANT it. It stays in the way and is just a means to an end.

I don't want to think about money, I want to use my mind for more interesting stuff.

Accepting that money is just money put my mind at ease.

The irony is that to truly be able to not think about money, you have to have enough of it for your expenses to be paid on autopilot. To have that, you essentially need to have enough to retire on, which requires a lot of money, which requires thinking a lot about how to make that money.

That is just your money focused mind at work. There are other ways.

Some trivial suggestions:

- becoming a monk

- begging for food

- steal for food

- roam the open land and life with the animals and eat what nature provides

- die

Some of these are not really attractive, but they show how it is possible to life in a way where you can truly not think about money.

But making the "not wanting to think about money" much less strict will also work.

"you have to have enough of it for your expenses to be paid on autopilot" Having a job helps here. If it makes enough money, you don't need to think about it.

"enough to retire on" Solutions:

- having kids

- gamble that pension is enough

- delegate your future problems alltogether to your future-self

- never stop working

If you truly don't want to think about money, "enough to retire on" wouldn't be a concept for you anyway...

> "enough to retire on" Solutions: > - having kids

Whoa, no. I've had 3 over the last five years. Total expense of well over a quarter million so far, and we live in a fairly cheap city in flyover country.

[EDIT] small expenses that nevertheless add up to several thousands over the first 5 years: clothes, diapers, food, formula (YMMV), toys, furniture (cribs, beds, dressers); large expenses: housing (need more space and in decent school district, both = $$$), cars (3 kids basically = at least one van required, no getting by with only tiny, cheap cars), medical, lost wages of wife staying home for ~1.5yrs, daycare/school after that.

in the long term it can work out. can. and not a suitable solution if it doesn't work out short or mid term, yes.

God, considering how much that'd be worth if invested it'd have to be a hell of a payoff from my kids to make up for it. Plus we're nowhere near done spending yet, and could easily spend a lot more.

[EDIT] by which I mean we could spend more to improve their prospects and educational outcomes, especially on housing or directly on school itself. The sky's the limit on that stuff, at least until you reach absurd levels of wealth at which point it does taper off (i.e. it becomes easy to afford the very best, and there's nothing more expensive than that)

yea.. having kids while wanting their best probably doesn't go very well with "not wanting to think about money" in our society/economy

having kids can be a good reason to change that attitude.

The annoying thing about startup jobs in particular, though, is that "having a job that makes 'enough' money" this month doesn't guarantee the business (and thus your job) will still be in existence next month.

And so, if you care about eating (by being paid, by having a job), and you work for startups, you have to think about a bunch of things like improving your resume, paying attention to the company's ups and downs, etc. ...because you need to be able to recover from your money-source disappearing out from under you. You can't really just join a startup and "drift along" doing your job, the way an employee of a bigcorp can.

I'm super into not thinking about money right now, and am acutely aware that I am only able to do so because I don't desire more than a modest lifestyle, have cheap hobbies, and a stable high paying job. If you have sufficient privilege, I highly recommend trying it out, it is very freeing.

"However, let me promise you this: if you truly want to have money, you will."

Well, that's very nice of him. I'm confused, though: how do I send him my application for the money he's promised me? Is an email enough?

If you truly want it, you will find answers to this questions and let actions follow. If you only ask those questions and do nothing to reach your goal, you wont reach it.

That is the point of this statement.

But he promised me.

I understood the point of his statement. It was a stupid statement because in fact it's not enough to "truly" want something -- it's helpful but not enough.

It was an insulting statement because it sets him up to tell anyone who fails that they didn't truly want it. There's little more offensive than someone telling someone else that he knows their mind better than they do.

But the thing that I was really objecting to wasn't the insult or the stupidity, it was the rhetorical flourish of "promising." As obviously he has nothing on the line here, and if anyone was dumb enough to believe him, and they failed, he'd be out exactly nothing.

Yea, that is hardly something that can be promised. Actually I didn't recognize that he stated it as a promise on first reading.

Hm.. interesting, you made me notice that in my interpretation "truly wanting" something implies letting it follow actions. And not letting it follow actions implies not truly wanting it.

Then how different making money is from every other endeavor I'm familiar with. In everything else people do, from playing a video game to getting a graduate degree to playing sports, there is the possibility of failure.

But apparently it is inevitable that you will make a ton of money. Unless, apparently, you don't want to.

Self discovery is important, it is also self discovery so that makes it unwise to generalize. This statement stuck out though:

"You’ll also need to have something that motivates you more than financial security, which is an immense force."

Granted it is a bit ambiguous (what does 'which is' refer to? your motivation or financial security?) but assuming that it is saying that you need a purpose in life other than accumulating cash then I would agree. I have observed that people who have some goal other than cash, are much more likely to be happier with their life.

I attribute that happiness to the definitive quality of making progress regardless of your remuneration. Versus the challenge of score keeping by how much one is getting paid and observing that there are always people making more or opportunities that pay more. I think that sets up a feedback loop in some people where they are constantly disappointed.

For some it must be like driving down a crowded freeway and only seeing the spaces in the traffic up ahead that they could fit into, being angry at the drivers around them who are preventing them from moving forward into those spaces, and ignoring the progress they are making down the road.

Why is it that articles from Hacker Noon are so terrible?

One can have a regular job, work hard, and get to enjoy life with flexibility too. There are a ton of bad assumptions/statements in this article.

Startups are wonderful, freeing experiences. You can build exactly the company and culture you want, balancing so many of the things that you didn't have control over at a bigger company.

Then you get customers.

Customers don't care if you're burnt out.

Customers don't care if you're transparent and fair to your colleagues.

You get grace periods when you're first starting out, or first signed a couple contracts, or after delivering a few key efforts.

But at the end of the day, customers are where the pressure comes from, because they are the sustaining force of your business.

this has been my experience exactly and a great summary. starting your own business vs being an employee is not about being your own boss, it's about trading one boss for many bosses (your customers, your investors, the bank, etc).

Exactly this. I've worked at numerous startups and they're all the same. They all eventually fail, or become an actual company. I'd love to see what the author's "amazing work hard, play hard startup" looks like in a year, two years, etc.

I take immediate issue with the idea that not working unpaid overtime makes you "not a good employee". A good employee should take care of themselves, and do what they can to avoid burn out, so they can continue to be productive.

a good employee negotiates his work and the schedule in good faith. nothing about hanging around the office until 8pm makes you a good employee

Simple solution -- go contract 1099 or W2. They have to pay you for every hour and you get paid more if you have the right set of skills and live in the right area.

Not so simple. For one, I need health insurance. And, especially now in the US, trying to strike out on your own while needing that is quite dangerous.

If you go W2 contract you are working for a consulting company. You can buy health insurance through them.

The thing is, in my experience nobody really wants to be an employee, because to be an employee is to be someone who has to sell their time for a wage. What people really want who want to own their own businesses and set their own hours is to own the means of production - to own their own labor. This is not some fringe phenomenon, it's the story of human existence in the modern world.

That said, this guy sounds astoundingly entitled and probably does not realize that every person working weekends in retail is thinking the same thing, but doesn't have the money to pursue it.

I've hired lots of people that used to run their own businesses and want to go back to being an employee.

Are you sure they want to or did they just go out of business? If you were the person hiring them then they would probably feel compelled to present themselves as enthusiastic about wanting to be an employee. You are probably not getting their true feelings. It feels pretty wretched to admit defeat and go begging for your job back but you do it with a smile if you've got mouths to feed.

I'm pretty sure at least a few people genuinely wanted to. they ended up being pretty happy as they ended up working at our company for many years.

I have no idea how long you've been working, but for myself, my wants and desires have changed pretty significantly over the years. Plenty of people (not just in technology) want change in their career, and are more than willing to trade off the freedom of running your own business with the freedom of being an employee, and not having to worry about the 10 zillion things you have to worry about when you're running the show.

I've also hired plenty of technologists that had similar experiences with management. Do anything long enough, and the grass on the other side starts to look a whole lot greener.

I would dearly love to be an employee right now.

There are tons and tons of people who want to be employees and have absolutely no desire to be their own boss. They find freedom in choosing where to work and where to put their efforts. I strongly disagree with this idea that everyone is a secret entrepreneur.

You can still retain ownership of your career and be an employee.

>I want a culture that promotes living to work. I want employees to feel so excited by their work that it’s no longer a chore, but enjoyment

Lifestyle businesses?

There's not a lot I know about them -- basically a business with high enough margins that 6 hour days and trips are the norm. It sounds nice, but probably requires a good amount of already developed skills/connections to get that margin high enough to afford the lifestyle.

I suppose working with a minimalist/off-the-grid community also counts as lifestyle employment.

Give it six months and his startup will either fail, or have enough work that this isn't feasible anymore. He's very young and thinks he's going to do what a million other companies haven't been able to do yet. Good luck bud.

You aren't half a pessimist, are you? I'll call you "practical" or "realist" if you'd prefer your ego stroked. It's been almost 2 years and we've only sustained growth so far. Good luck to you, too. Try coming across as less pretentious though.

I think a better question would be are you built to run your own business? Assuming the answer to the preceding question is yes a good follow up question would be what kind of business do you want to run?

I quit my well paying corporate Job about 2 years ago to go work on my own software product. I spent about 6 months working on this part time while doing contracting then ended up focusing full time on my own consulting/contracting business.

Along the way I have made a number of mistakes and met with people in similar situations. Here are some random observations from my journey so far:

- It's very easy to spend a lot of time building a software product that nobody really wants (Duh).

- It's really easy to spend a lot of time building a software product that makes a small amount of money but not enough to justify your time.

- It takes a long time to build a SASS business, budget at least 24 months. If you are later on in your career, 24 months of little to no money is a big opportunity cost.

- Contracting/Consulting is at least 50% about selling & marketing yourself effectively.

- It's really hard to work on a product part time even if you can devote about 2-3 days a week to it. Context switching costs a lot.

- Finding a cofounder who complements your skillset, who you can trust and is actually willing to go all in for 12 months is hard.

I think a lot of HN people conflate starting a company with coming up with a brilliant new product or service and building it around that. If you are at all entrepreneurial but lacking ideas, it might be worth your while doing a little contracting to see what it's like. Doing so might even provide you with some inspiration.

A question for those who are irked at the "If you truly want to have money, you will." comment in the article. Where do you draw the line between circumstance and personal engagement?

I used to find those sort of comments naive. A big part of that was because of what I thought was a reasonable thought experiment. In particular if every person tomorrow was replaced with Elon Musk. What would happen? Well not a whole lot - you'd certainly have Elons flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets. After all it would be literally impossible for everybody to be the CEO and entrepreneur. And so if we can even Elon scrubbing toilets, how could it ever be reasonable to suggest that everybody could succeed if they just tried harder?

What changed my view has been life experience. Even if the number of individuals that can achieve great things is a sort of zero sum game, I don't think that the lack of possibility of success is the thing holding individuals back. What does seem to hold individuals back is them, for whatever reason, never seeming to understand what it takes to succeed. People will try to find a better job or whatever, but rarely will they try to independently monetize what skills they already have, or teach them skills with that goal in mind. That is not to say these people are lazy -- many will work themselves to the bone even when it's not really expected of them (the "overtime as a badge of honor" as the article phrases it), but it's like the idea of spending some of that energy to try to do their own thing is something that just doesn't seem to register with them.

And I think that's what this article is really hitting on, all be in an unintentionally less than tactful way. And I also think that's why there's about a million different derivatives of the quote from just as many successful individuals that 'doors don't open themselves.' And of course once you fail, which you will - try again. The advice is so ubiquitous that I think people no longer even think about the wisdom within. We can even go back to the one Shakespeare quote most every person knows: "To be, or not to be, that is the question."

My worry, and I suspect I'm not alone, is I'm cut out to be neither an employee nor self-employed.

Such is the lot of the anxiety-ridden terminal malcontent trapped in late-era corporatism.

Perhaps early retirement should then be your goal? If you work in tech, you can do it in 10 years or less.

I've wasted a lot of time learning that "owner" vs. "employee" is the wrong distinction. It's a hold-over from the industrial-era mindset of union/employee vs. management.

In today's economy, many employees out-earn "owners". Employees even get stock at many places. And even if you start the place, you're going to have to give up a lot along the way if you want outside capital or good talent.

Stop wasting time thinking about being "an owner" and start thinking about, how can I deliver the most value to the greatest number of other people, as THEY define "value", in the shortest amount of time? That's a better approach.

After working for startups, "work hard, play hard" is a red flag phrase.

Employees are employees instead of entrepreneurs because they don't want the headaches of running a business. They want to do the work that they enjoy doing and have the energy at the end of the day to socialise, spend time with family and pursue other interests. Don't expect employees to be as interested and excited about [revolutionising|disrupting|dominating] industry X as you are, because they don't have the financial and social incentive an owner or executive has.

It's fake and soul-destroying that modern corporate culture forces employees to feign being over-enthusiastic about the company's success for fear of getting fired.

David Mitchell put it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LiDTKEF1ek

Working for businesses that are "fast paced and agile" is my red flag. No management or no desire to be good at IT because "we're not an IT company". So you're always short changed, behind and not meeting their needs, when they haven't even been defined.

Oh and Sally & Chuck saw you leave early the other day, we can't have that. Even though you're putting in 50-60 hour work weeks. Oh Sally & Chuck are admin assistants as well, so their opinion matters in this company that runs like your high school social groups did, except less efficiently.

>..."work hard, play hard" is a red flag phrase.

In my experience, it appeals to a certain segment of employees. That is, young single employees who get most of their social interaction at work. In that context, it seems to make some sense to work long-ish hours and also stay "at work" late attending company parties and such. They don't really have anything to go home to, so work becomes like a second home.

But for employees with more attachments, I agree. Then you just want to put in your time doing something you like and go home.

It's the author here. There's a lot of feedback and I appreciate it all. A few things to note:

1) I'm not rich and I'm not yet successful (not by my own definition anyway). I am pretty much self-sufficient.

2) To the people who are complaining about poor people not having the same opportunity... My target audience are people who have access to the internet. If you can access the internet, you have access to wealth. That's my opinion, anyway.

3) Work hard, play hard. It's good, as long as it's not you working hard and somebody else playing harder because of it.

4) I haven't come from a rich background, I'm not university educated. You can't complain about me coming across as generalizing and then assume I'm a privileged white male.

5) There's plenty of tone in the article that suggests generalization. I appreciate the feedback and I apologise if it seems way too over-generalised but opinions in this area are quite hard to condense into a few words.

6) I still stand by the "if you truly want to have money, you will". If you're reading this, you're on the internet. If you're on the internet then you have access to free education and skills for you to build your own success.

Thanks

6) Anybody that doesn't have money doesn't want it, then?

Or are you playing games with the "you" bit? Anybody that doesn't have money isn't part of "you"?

It's a very complex issue hidden under a very basic mask. It's targeted at the readers. If you're reading a medium post, chances are you can at the very least afford internet. If you can afford internet, the opportunity is there and it's just not being taken. Maybe you don't like working on the internet and you'd prefer to have a job because that makes you happier. That's fine, too. Also, you're assuming that everybody who doesn't have money "truly" wants it. I disagree.

> I am pretty much self-sufficient.

You do realize that being "self-sufficient" enough to quit your job makes you wealthier than a vast majority of people on the planet? Even people that "can afford internet".

Good luck in your endeavors, but you have a lot to learn.

You do realize that I'm only self-sufficient because I made a business to sustain myself. I wouldn't be self-sufficient if I didn't make that business. Everybody has a lot to learn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com