This job can be fulfilling and interesting, but unfortunately we are being squeezed to produce maximum orange juice. Companies dream of reaching and maintaining high growth rates and valuations.
We should shift to valuing consistency over raw velocity. Long-term, I think this is the winning strategy.
Yes, connections are a part of “worth”, but the money you can make off them (or through them) is not necessarily.
Of course, you will need to be rich to begin with to fund all these attempts.
Business is about connections and rich people get a great head start on the rest of us, but the average person does a lot of self-sabotage, as well.
Forget that nonsense, it's about starting with a large pool of money with which to bet.
I did well for myself comparing to what I came from. I could probably do better. But at some point, I laid out how it all played out. The kicks that made me serious money were simply luck. By working and exposing yourself, you increase your luck surface. But that doesn’t change the fact: It’s luck.
Now, if we are in a hot field like Tech, many more people are going to make it. That’s not because Tech people are amazing, but it’s because Tech is booming. Luck here starts to make sense only at the extremes (ie: becoming a Zuckerburg) but at a local area, because luck is abundant, your hard work matters more. We are all lucky (Tech people) to be in this very particular time.
This is irresponsible.
Personally I’m really happy that I gave up making excuses and actually tried to improve my situation. Despite all your persuasive arguments and conviction that it’s all a pretty fantasy, it did in fact work.
Here’s hoping we get to see you arguing the other side one day.
These kind of arguments would greatly benefit from people just saying what they think the actual number is
Being able to disregard everyone who thinks it's 1 or 0 is quite handy
This is the real and _only_ way to improve their chance of success, just telling that «you have to create your luck» or other non-sense, is just dangerous advice that exists only based on survivor bias and does nothing but improving the risk of destroying lives.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/978-whether-you-think-you-c...
A common thread is if you believe you cannot succeed, you won't. If you blame your failures on others, fate, etc., you will not succeed. If you find yourself saying "it's not my fault" a lot, your life isn't going to go well.
On the other hand, if you accept full responsibility for your failures, and do your best to learn from them, and are willing to try again, then success becomes probable.
I know these views are very much out of fashion today. But they still will work for you, if you choose to implement them.
Let me shoot that statement down in flames for you!
Successful businessmen have a lot of initial funds to pursue a lot of different ventures of which perhaps 1 will be a success.
If you ever talked to the successful businessman types you will find they have lots of companies but only 1 will be the source of their money. The rest either lose money or break even.
According to the maths, given people of identical skill and the same starting funds. Some small percentage of people will get lucky and accelerate out into riches whilst the rest will drop into poverty.
The people who accelerated into riches can't tell you why they accelerated out into riches, since it was purely luck based to begin with.
The more funds you acquire, the more risks you can take, the more money you can make.
Taking risks doesn't make you rich, becoming rich makes you take risks. It's that way around.
HOWEVER, many who have tried to launch products have not met success. But I was happy to try and fail too.
You can't have both safe and lucrative.
It might have once been the case that reward correlated closely to risk, but the economy has fundamentally changed faster than our attitudes.
We believe that the US is still the meritocracy it was when we were young, but loads of economic studies show the US has steadily declined in this regard. More than ever, money circulates among the well-connected and wealthy.
The real secret to getting rich today is to be born rich.
If you claim that, how about your own comment? And with
> nothing stops you from building up a business to sell these skills directly
you pretty much completely ignore what OP wrote. Sure, you can claim "technically correct" because indeed nobody is stopping you. You just leave out the statistics about the result. What is stopping people is looking at their actual chances, so sure, you can technically claim they are stopping themselves. Only that it's highly misleading.
I left awell-paid software job in the US and returned to Germany, opened a small business with a friend after looking around. We barely managed to sell it off at cost, leaving the next person to find out it really did not work (he saw everything but thought he could do better). Then I did freelance jobs, very highly paid. Also extremely unsatisfying. The especially well-paying corporate jobs especially so, more often than not what I had worked on was discarded after I left, because of company merger or internal politics leading to a stop on the project.
Now I'm in a business started by a former CTO of a famous successful startup, where he made lots of excellent connections and also has the brand name recognition now. I only do tech now. And no, you can't just easily connect to the right people. Some few one-in-ten-thousand people can do that. Most people have the necessary connections through birth or from previous employment. Creating them from scratch is incredibly hard.
When giving general advice about something and not to somebody specific for a specific situation, I suggest to always scale your advice, from "works for anyone" to "works for everyone". Many of those suggestion fall apart right then and there.
How about if we already are in a situation where everybody does their very best? It's just that the equilibrium created from that is what we have now. Because the system does not work when "everybody" does it. You get a dynamic equilibrium with lots of losers and a lot of effort just not being worth it. Despite starting out with everybody highly motivated and adventurous. So "try harder" IMO has already happened long ago and we now are in a much later state of the dynamic system. What happens in the "everybody works hard" phase is a lot of pain and the winnings going to a few winners who sit at key points in the network.
Let's look at statistics then. In the US, it seems that about 30% small businesses are successful enough to last over 10 years [1]. Your personal failure in one particular venture is not out of the norm, but your rant against entrepreneurship is totally wrong.
By the way I don't think anyone is arguing that the system is fair, that people who don't start businesses are lazy, or that everybody can make it. I don't know where you came up with these arguments. All that has been argued is that trying to start a business on your own is a risk/reward trade-off strategy that can pay off, and often does.
[1] https://www.fundera.com/blog/what-percentage-of-small-busine...
Most “independent business owners” who own franchised locations for instance have owners who work 50-60+ hours a week, and have spouses and their children providing free labor.
If you look at the net income of most franchise locations, they average around $60-$70K berz
And no I’m not just throwing out financial terms. I’m a proud MBA dropout (undergrad in CS)
How would that have turned out if you invested that money in your own store and opened it in February 2020? What happens if you open your store next to a store like Walmart or in a mall next to one of the major chains and they closed or moved reducing foot traffic (saw that plenty of times)?
If you can save up enough money to open a store, you can also save up enough money to go to technical school and learn a trade that is a lot less risky.
Nobody said that. Nothing human is 100%.
> How about if we already are in a situation where everybody does their very best?
Strawman, because nothing human is 100%.
If you are a CS major, can successful “grind leetCode” and get an offer at any of the major tech companies, you can get an offer in the mid $100s minimum. In five to seven years you can get $350K+.
Realistically, what are the chances of your own business having that income trajectory?
Taking a bigger risk could result in a bigger reward or also result in a bigger failure. Be safe doesn't necessarily mean less return, it means less return only if your risky bet pays off, if your risky bet fails you are likely better off yo have played it safe instead. Not sure what that has to do with what one is "really" worth as you put it.
Yeah, it does. You can see it in stocks & bonds every day. More risk means more potential upside. Less risk means less upside. Across all the investments.
You pay more for a new car because it comes with less risk. You pay less for a used car because it might be a clunker.
Making yourself a one man consultancy or contractor is also a business and has a decent success rate if you’re actually good
A Saas business, startup, or similar? Yeah much lower probability
But even in the latter case if you don’t have much living expenses it can make sense to make a modest living and enjoy your day to day much more.
Bottom line as with so many things in life: don’t do it for the money
First you have people who call themselves “consultants”. But they are really just staff augmentation. Those “consultants” are a dime a dozen and all in, can’t command a premium and would probably be better off working a full time job.
You can find some just as good overseas and a lot cheaper.
Then you have your actual strategic consultants who have “a seat at the table” and talk with people who control budgets. They can charge a premium.
After working with both as a tech lead between 2016-2018 is what made me pivot to getting experience in “cloud” and specialize in “application modernization” - enterprise dev + cloud + “DevOps”.
You have to both have a network and find companies willing to do C2C contracts. Those are also some of the first people to cut during a downturn. You saw that a lot right after Covid.
I now work in the cloud consulting department at AWS. It’s a full time position and my compensation structure is like SDEs.
I would hate to be constantly hustling for clients and take care of all of the other minutiae that I have an entire organization to handle.
My impression is that you can pretty easily beat fulltime pay doing fulltime staff aug, except faang salaries. Of course it helps if you have a spouse with health insurance.
But in this new market, hard to say I guess
I’ve worked a lot longer as a developer. But because of bad career decisions until 2008, I ended up doing a career reset.
My first experience with staff augmentation type contracting was in 2011-2012. The company I worked for went out of business and was sold for scraps and I got a contract working with one of our customers.
Local tech salaries for my skillset were in the low $100s - standard mid level C# developer. I couldn’t push above $60/hour. At 1800 hours a year, it was a wash. But no health insurance - I was also married.
The next time was in 2016. I purposefully took a contract to perm job to get my first tech lead experience. I couldn’t find contract jobs for more than $70/hour. That translates to about $126K which was a little below average for senior dev in my area ($135K - $150K). But a racked up on hours.
When I was hired full time, we were paying the contracting agency $90/hour and the contractors were making $70.
Looking at one of the sites I use to use (https://www.matrixres.com/job/java-developer-424), it still seems like your average enterprise dev is still getting $70/hour.
I’ve seen the same numbers on other sites.
Statistically, you have much more chances of making money if you don’t have deadweight in your company.
I’m making about 6x as a software founder as what I used to earn in a company.
That was a poem from a simpler time.
Boss makes a thousand while I make a cent,
And he’s got employees that can’t make rent.
Make a mistake though and bosses are quick to point the finger directly at you. Credit and rewards for the higher ups, blame and discipline for the rank and file. Privatized gains, socialized losses.
The owners explaining their decisons to me while keeping a straight face.
Make no mistake, owners (no matter how progressive, with very few exceptions) will screw you over if it improves the bottom line or their remuneration.
It's one of the worst aspects of my role. Owners straight up lying to my face about why they do things.