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Comment by cloutchaser | Hacker News Reader

That's probably true, but it's not the point. People choose to become employees, and are taken care of in an extremely risk free way.

Just ask any freelancer how different it is to being an entrepreneur, even that change is a massive difference, you have to actually invoice and chase clients for payments, you have to take risk in whether you will actually be paid for work, etc.

Now just take it a step further for someone who is risking their capital, reputation, and time on creating something new, that might only make any revenue in 12-16 months, or never. And it might bankrupt them, lose their reputation etc. At a minimum that's 12-16x more risk than even a freelancer.

Oh and if insane people like myself didn't take this risk, the world would probably still be a foraging bunch of tribes. And you get hated for it for getting rich by exploiting people...

You have no idea about life, to be honest.

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> You have no idea about life, to be honest.

And you do? Everyone only has a small slice of what life is like. That is the life that you yourself lead. FYI I was a freelancer, chasing clients and invoices sucked, and was a waste of my time and skills.

You obviously have very strong opinions on how great entrepreneurs are, it is also coming across as "employees are lesser" as well which is not right.

There is nothing wrong (and a hell of a lot good) with not wanting to be a person that doesn't chase up invoices and worry about payroll, it lets you focus on doing a good job. Specialisation is a great thing, and would not be possible if everyone was busy marketing their own business/self.

> At a minimum that's 12-16x more risk than even a freelancer.

So they should get 12x the reward as the average? The average US wage is about $55k, so that would be, for a successful entrepreneur, 660k (and $0 for an unsuccessful one). I don't think anyone has a problem with this I certainly don't. I do have an issue with the ultra rich, like Bezos who have made 7.5 Billion a year since Amazon was founded, or 278,406 times the average wage from 1994 (26,939). Did he take 278,406 times the risk that an employee did. No. No he did not.

> Oh and if insane people like myself didn't take this risk, the world would probably still be a foraging bunch of tribes. And you get hated for it for getting rich by exploiting people...

And if everyone wanted to be an entrepreneur we would also still be like this. People need to actually do the day in day out grind work that is building things. 99% of this is done by employeed people. If everyone tried to do their own thing that would severely limit what can be done. You really need to stop looking down on your (and all) employees.

edit: fixed maths - Bezos has too much money for my math skills.

> There is nothing wrong (and a hell of a lot good) with not wanting to be a person that doesn't chase up invoices and worry about payroll, it lets you focus on doing a good job.

It has everything to do with this. Not wanting to be that person is fine. But then don't complain about people willing to take a lot more shit earning more than you. Generally, the stuff less people want to do (but is valuable to society), is better paid.

> like Bezos who have made 7.5 Billion a year since Amazon was founded, or 278,406 times the average wage from 1994

The guy created 400,000 jobs during the covid crisis, when most other businesses were either shut or going bankrupt. That's 1% of the US population. Going by your $7.5bn a year, that's $18 per new employee that year. You think he doesn't deserve that?

> Going by your $7.5bn a year, that's $18 per new employee that year

400,000 * 18 = 7.2 million, not 7.2 billion.

Damnit. Fair point. Doesn't quite make the same point as before :) But still. 400k jobs is insane for 1 company.

:) It's not just the 400K jobs; I think that Amazon's logistics capabilities helped make the practicalities of soft lockdowns and limiting your outside trips substantially more bearable in the early part of the pandemic.

Amazon's deliveries avoided literally billions of in-person interactions during the peak uncertainties of C19. Bezos didn't start Amazon with that in mind, but it sure did help when called upon.

Then, people had the unmitigated gall to complain that Amazon made a lot of money during that time period. Well no shit; they provided a ton of value to hundreds of millions of people...

> The guy created 400,000 jobs during the covid crisis,

No he didn't. The business he founded did, the investors that invested in this business did, the customers that paid for services did. The people that made all of that happen were employees. He is not solely responsible for anything. For a long while he was responsible than many others in the organisation, but ever since he hired another person he was never responsible for anything on his own.

The idea that one person solely, directly lead to 400,000 people being employed is farcical. Did he really create a job spec, position, interview and do the paper work for 500 people each calendar day for two years?

No he does not deserve the money he has.

> So they should get 12x the reward as the average? The average US wage is about $55k, so that would be, for a successful entrepreneur, 660k (and $0 for an unsuccessful one). I don't think anyone has a problem with this I certainly don't.

That's not how averages work. If 1 in 10 of entrepreneurs succeed at all and 1 in a million succeed notably, all of those millions of $0 outcomes flow to the 1 in a million (or 1 in 50 million?) success cases to make the average come out to whatever it is.

If it worked like you suggest and 10% succeed, you'd have 10 @ $660K and 90 at $0K for an average of $66K.

Yes you're quite right.

I don't think it takes away from my point, that some people have far outsized rewards for the risks they take.

The failure that is being talked about is the fact the we reward risk-taking much more than we reward effort. No one is saying there was no risk involved, rather what we're saying is the proportion of how much we reward risk vs. how much we reward effort is skewed in favor of risk. And the magnitude of this skew is unhealthy to society and leads to results that I (and others, clearly) don't consider fair.

To that I would add that the only risk we're rewarding in this way is the risk to capital. While we do pay more for jobs that are more risky in terms of safety, it's close to impossible to become a multi-millionaire by risking your life in your job. I would say that kind of risk is higher than the one taken by entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs and investor have an easier (though not easy) path to getting outsized rewards for their risk.

It's OK to reward risk, and it's OK to reward effort, and it might even be OK to reward risk more than effort. But by how much more?

I like how you've laid this argument out. Really useful perspective. Copied for further thought. Thanks.

> You have no idea about life, to be honest.

Fuck you buddy. You have no idea what I've done, what I've staked, what I won or lost, who I protect or what any of this means to me.

You're trying to justify keeping people out of your successes whilst complaining that they don't support you (and your business). How could they possibly deliver at the level you're expecting without the reward? Why bother?

Your narrative is as old as time and it’s always the same, and every time society listens to people like you seriously it ends up optimistically as zero innovation over regulated society, pessimistically genocide against anyone who’s ever accumulated anything (google kulaks).

So no, you have no idea of life or history.

> Your narrative is as old as time

So's yours. You're arguing that only might is right and that only greed works. You're simultaneously complaining that the people you're explicitly locking out of your chosen success path don't support you. Show me how you support them and I'll accept some of the rest of your argument.

> and it’s always the same.

Let me correct that for you: previous attempts to systematise broader opportunity have been corrupted by power. The bigger the attempt to make things fair, the further it's been corrupted. Those who don't care about fairness have abused the system for their own ends.

I still live in hope we can develop a system that decouples power from leadership, enables more people to have greater power over their own development, and better rewards collaboration and co-ownership. I acknowledge the failures from the past but I refuse to accept this is the only way life can be.

> So no, you have no idea of life or history.

I'm fairly interested in history and I have _a lot_ of ideas about life.

> People choose to become employees

People really don't have the sort of freedom to make choices that you're assigning to them. There's a thousand mitigating circumstances that limit peoples' options and can preclude the sort of risk taking that you're valorizing and shaming employees for not taking.

I don't think it's fair to shame them, but I think it is fair to observe that they, factually, did not take those risks.

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