Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

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That’s hilarious, I was about to respond in some grumpy fashion about how it’s basically impossible for anyone to get any useful information or advice out of this article. I didn’t even notice this timeline.

Not even year into a career and the author already doesn’t like it.

I mean, it’s entirely possible that your first job just sucks. It’s entirely possible that your first company just sucks. I’d just look for a different job if it was me.

Dropping everything and becoming a particularly vague brand of entrepreneur isn’t going to work. A huge percentage of companies who have really serious complex business plans and even seed capital still fail. And here’s a junior-level person thinking they’re just going to start a successful business in a selection of vague categories (e.g. email marketing - I don’t know if the author has any clue how mature and complex this product segment really is. You can buy some fantastically complex email marketing software for like $20/month).

But I’m trying not to be grumpy. Good luck author. I’m guessing we’ll be seeing you in the cubicle in 6 months.

I'm 28 and virtually every single male I talk to in their 20s has this deep resentment of working for a corporation. It personally used to resonate with me, but it turns out I like money much more than freedom.

"You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for."

- Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)

Advice given to a main character who's (spoilers?) smart and thoughtful enough to be deeply bored by and unhappy with anything like a normal career, while also easily doing well at such a job while hardly trying, but who also believes deeply that he's meant for something more artistic and intellectual and adventurous but is both entirely unmotivated to actually make that happen, and also probably not that smart.

And yes I felt attacked when I read the book :-)

Entrepreneurship is far less free, too.

If you own a business, can you really just take two weeks off and ignore your customers?

Can you just clock out after 8 hours?

Can you get sick or go on maternity/paternity leave and just come back to work to a functioning business?

Salaried work is highly appealing. It really doesn’t have to feel like corporate slavery.

Right? It's very hard work being an entrepreneur and if you take time off and that results in your customers going unserviced, then you certainly will feel the consequence of "setting your own schedule".

If you have everything automated and your business is growing and customers are happy and loyal, well then you can take time off because by all indications you've put in a lot of hard work and intelligent design to achieve that.

For me, I actually enjoy the grunt work and the meetings and corporate BS in exchange for a quite stable paycheck and societal approval. It only leaves me with just enough free time for personal projects so that they can forever remain theoretical and unfinished and unfocused, as they deserve to be, because actual implementation into a robust and profitable platform is a quick way to kill personal interest in a subject ;)

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