Why Full-Time 9 to 5 Jobs are Risky | Hacker News Reader

Why Full-Time 9 to 5 Jobs are Risky

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42 pointsbadernator24 comments

The obvious fallacy is that this is comparing a stable, successful, established business to a risky job. He’s also assuming it’s difficult to get a new job, but ignoring the difficulty of establishing a stable single-person business.

Successful, stable businesses with multiple diversified clients don’t come easy. It’s rare to have a single-person business with a product that scales to many customers. Once you scale it, you likely need to bring on employees, which means you now have significant financial obligations to make payroll every month. That’s hardly low-risk.

If you’re the type of person who can build a successful single-person business with multiple customers, it’s not exactly difficult to find a high paying job doing the same work for someone else.

You don’t start a business because it’s easier or less risky than a day job.

>The obvious fallacy is that this is comparing a stable, successful business to a risky job.

Hmm... the point being made is that all jobs are inherently risky. There are factors beyond your control.

You can't work harder or smarter to keep a job when the world turns against you.

The economy, a new manager, changes in structures, business direction and so on can leave you high and dry. Your previously secure middle managers job can vanish over night.

It's happened to me and many people I know.

Further to this, there is no such thing as a career at a company. You don't have anything. A job title is temporary and once you are out, you are out and that's that.

You might never get a decent position in a company again. You just don't know... full-time work is risky!

> Hmm... the point being made is that all jobs are inherently risky. There are factors beyond your control.

You don’t control all of the factors in your own business, either. You listed the economy as a risk for full-time employment, but it’s an even bigger risk for small businesses. Big companies tend to have large war chests to ride out recessions, or even take advantage of recessions.

With a small business, the company’s bank account isn’t that far removed from your personal bank account.

Being in control of everything also means that everything is your problem. That’s a two-edged sword.

> You might never get a decent position in a company again.

That would be extremely uncommon. Moreover, if you’re not qualified to get a job in the industry, I don’t see how you’re going to be successful running your own business in the industry.

Running your own business is more difficult and more work than getting a job in an industry.

"Since most full-time jobs involve a single employer — it’s a one single point of failure — meaning, you just need your employer to fire you to lose your income.

With a business, you usually have more than one customer and in the majority of cases: tens, hundreds, thousands, and even millions of customers who are your revenue source"

This claim is so overly superficial that it's not helpful. The percentage of businesses that fail is way higher than the percentage of people that get laid off in any given year, typically. And it's not like businesses haven't struggled to survive during COVID-- just as much as any employee has lost their job. Losing 20% of your customers can be the difference between the company surviving or not, it's not like that just means you lose 20% of your profit.

It is also misleading because a lot of businesses, especially small ones, do have a single point of failure: Get banned by your payment provider or payments frozen for some reason and you are done. Get dragged into a lawsuit by a customer, done. Have your restaurant fail a health inspection, done (well, far too rarely, but happens).

And COVID-19 also shows that larger businesses can be more resilient to unforeseen catastrophes, although I would hope something COVID-19-like to be rare enough not to matter too much.

I think there's an error in the analogy. Finding a new job is like finding a new customer, not like your business failing.

Maybe this is why people park themselves in Silicon Valley in spite of soaring rents and other issues?

When your employer lays you off there, you simply go get another one.

When this happens in, say, Pittsburgh, PA, your options aren't quite so numerous.

I agree with this mostly but to play devil's advocate: If you are good enough to build a product that people are willing to pay for, would it be really that hard to get a new job if you lose your current job?

Many people view businesses as risky when in fact it is not entirely true. I wrote this quick piece to explain my thoughts on why 9-5 jobs aren’t diversified and are in fact riskier

A lot of business are just a few customers away from being unprofitable. That being said, people do often underestimate their chances of being laid off.

Do you think you might be understating the probability of failing in business, and overstating the odds of getting laid off? It's not like many businesses haven't closed their doors during the COVID pandemic.

I also doubt the percentage of startups that fail in a given year would compare well against the number of people that get laid off in a given year.

And having 100 customers doesn't help if losing 10 means the business is no longer profitable.

Just because you work a 9-5 job doesn't mean that all of your risk is tied up in the fate of a single employer, subject to their whims.

For most people, if something happens to their current employer, they can go get another one! In this economy especially, with a decent skillset you can probably go get another job in 2-4 weeks.

The real risk is much closer to _how many employers exist that might hire you_. If there are only a couple of businesses that need people with your skillset then that's a problem. If your skillset has a wide demand though then it's fine to only collect your income from one source at a time. If one employer dries up go take your skills elsewhere.

I've taken a couple not-entirely-unsuccessful cracks at running a small business and worked for others in the same vein and can tell you that, at least for a software business, the dirty secret is that a lot of businesses out there are totally dependent on 1-3 large clients.

Established businesses, on the other, hand often do have a diverse customer base and other means to overcome economic headwinds, and they can be seen as a mechanism that bundles those things for you and gives you a portion of that security.

There are even publicly traded companies that, for instance, build their business entirely on say, customized solutions for Microsoft software. They might have diverse customers, but they are very dependent on the ecosystem that is controlled by another company.

Or the App Store of course!

I don't have this problem where i get laid off, run out of savings, and cannot find a new job ever again. Some businesses close down for good. You can accumulate enough liabilities to prevent yourself from doing business again. You can still get a job afterwards though..

"With a full-time job, you might be fired due to external circumstances (such as COVID-19)"

Many businesses went under. External forces affect you perhaps more as a business owner but have some control over the response.

This seems to ignore the costs of acquisition

Getting one source to supply 100% of your income is easier than getting 100 sources to supply 1% each. Eventually the cost of management outweighs the benefits of distributed risk.

Taleb wrote an analogy to this in “Antifragile” when he introduced a banker and a London cab driver to illustrate a similar conclusion. It was (for me) one of the key insights I took from that book.

Yes! This is where revelation came from for me.

The difference is that to succeed at getting a new job you need to be skilled at one thing. To succeed at starting a new business you need to be skilled at a dozen unrelated things.

Obviously the people who work in your company should then quit and create their own stable businesses.

One pays you $5, the other pays you $100k

Not always true. Depends on the product.

There is a lot of Indie Hackers who make more than a 100k a year on their products (check out indiehackers.com for case studies)

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