Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silverback_VII | Hacker News Reader

When I read this, I ask myself, why don't people usually work as hard for themselves as they do for these exploitative systems? Large companies may be like giant insects sucking out your life energy. However, I've noticed that people often manage to get up in the morning for these 'insects' but struggle to do so when it's about themselves.

View on HN

Dealing with the uncertainty of starting your own business is even worse.

Few actually make it and most who try and fail are pretty miserable later on.

The daily grind is also miserable, but it's a predictable misery.

I do side gigs occasionally and if I were to live off this, I would fail - first and foremost because until recently I was too afraid to charge people amounts that make it worth it for me.

The default human brain certainly thinks as you do, otherwise, people would exhibit the same or greater work ethic when it comes to their own stuff. However, I genuinely wonder if this is true.

The saying "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" seems reasonable at first glance, but it could also be something someone tells you to prevent you from seeking a better place beyond his influence.

On your own, there's thousands of directions and ways where trouble can come that at least have a small chance of really happening.

Joining a larger entity insulates you from most of these directions and ways of trouble, well until the higher levels.

I don't think anyone would argue that having the resources of large corporation gives the average worker capacity to be significantly more economically productive than they would be working for themselves - meaning there's fairly few people who could earn enough to make a decent living self-employed. Even if that weren't the case, we're social creatures and a big part of our motivation stems from our wanting to be seen as contributing towards shared goals and working as part of a team: when that motivation isn't there on a regular basis a good many of us aren't likely to work nearly as industriously as we would otherwise. So yes, it's not hard to believe a company that generally treats its workers poorly is still able to make them more economically productive than they would be solo - what's more dismaying is when they seem able to sustain higher levels of productivity from their workers than other businesses that do in fact treat their workers well, enabling them to offer more in remuneration and various other perks. But not necessarily hard to understand why it happens - the former may simply have chanced upon a better business model or got a lucky early foothold in a market and continues to do well based on that. How sustainable that is in the longer term is open to question.

Do you have a source for the claim that companies that treat workers badly are able to extract more productivity from them? Or is it just that companies that are enjoyable places to work don't need to pay as much to retain workers? Or you mean that "worker oriented" companies don't prioritise productivity at worker's expense? Maybe I misunderstood your point there. Edit: you also have to take into account shareholders sucking the value out of companies, generally companies pay as little as they can get away with rather than the opposite

I didn't make such a claim in general, only that it's not so hard to see how there can be such cases. Generally I'm skeptical that it makes long term business sense to either underpay or disrespect workers.

> I don't think anyone would argue that having the resources of large corporation gives the average worker capacity to be significantly more economically productive than they would be working for themselves - meaning there's fairly few people who could earn enough to make a decent living self-employed

I'd say it entirely depends on industry, if it allows you to buy a bunch of expensive machinery that makes work of worker more efficient - solo craftsman can't afford and don't have volume to pay for say fancy CNC router - sure it can.

But on the other end, like programming, generally the bigger company is the more levels of indirection and waste happens, and small team can vastly outpace in per-developer productivity a big team.

Now when that team needs to buy 10 million worth of hardware to train their AI stuff that flips back to "corporate with bigger resources enhance productivity

> why don't people usually work as hard for themselves as they do for these exploitative systems?

Choice.

They don't have a choice about getting up and going through the M-F slog. They have to so that they can afford to live.

For personal projects, people have choice and can weigh in all of the other things their lives need. Including recovery time from the M-F slog. Their contributions to personal projects are not coerced.

The power of systems and how we behave is very intriguing indeed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com