Bullets on quitting my job to work on my product

Some random stuff I was thinking about right after quitting

• The industry you’re in plays a bigger role in your success in life than how good you are in that industry.

• Taking a job is selling Head Real Estate: When someone is paying you a lot to help them solve a problem, they’re not just paying you to stay at the company, they’re paying you to let their problem consume your life.

  • As programmers, we think while we’re asleep.
  • We find solutions to problems at the least expected times.
  • You cannot work or think about two problems at the same time because of that reason.
  • When you’re getting paid lots of money, it’s the equivalent of paying rent for real estate inside your head → as you get better at what you do, you’re raising your cost for rent.
  • The type of the real estate is the business domain.
  • The size of the real estate is how invested you are in the problem, which is correspondent to how good you are at what you do.
  • When someone is paying you a high rent, they do that because you’re good, which means because you allocate the majority of your head real estate to their problem.
  • You can’t expect to take high rent and give them less, no way out of this.
  • No way not letting a problem take a lot of your head AND be good at what you do
  • This seems to hold true in everything, the more head real estate you can allocate to a problem, the better solutions you’re going to have for it, and the higher you get paid in the process.

• As you become better at understanding the bigger picture of building and delivering software to customers (Lego pipeline), you become worse at your main job. Like Lego, jobs in tech reward you the most when you know a lot about a very specific part of the pipeline. And less when you’re more of a generalist.

• The problem creates a story you can tell. Most people do lots of money but never have a story, it’s not only boring, it’s the single most thing I wouldn’t like to die without.

• Most people who did things worth telling (i.e. have interesting stories), their stories are almost always made possible because of one simple concept that we often underestimate: Compounding.

  • Compounding can make 10 years feel like so little time.
  • If you’re working on one problem for 10 years, the person who you’re becoming in the process is different from a person who has worked on 10 separate problems, one for every year.
  • They say you have to constantly outgrow your company in order for it to thrive.

• After switching enough times between problems to work on, an existential take has eventually been drawn on me, as if it’s telling: “but what are you really about?”

  • After I’ve worked on many projects, with fluctuating paydays, it is becoming ridiculously absurd to keep switching again & again.
  • Not only because it resets compounding, or because I probably cannot point out to a specific work that I can call “a fruit of my labor,” but because the meaning behind any work is liquidified as soon as I switch to another, so suddenly the last few months or few years are not making any sense, except for the money.
  • (I would’ve said, and maybe for the people, but as the nature of this specific industry is fast-paced and quick turnarounds, and because we’re mainly remote, you don’t get to connect with as much or as deep with people like you do at an office job.)
  • So after I switch jobs or projects or companies, in hindsight, the previous experience instantly feels like a waste of time.
  • How would I switch problems snappingly like that? Aren’t we supposed to work on a problem as long as we could in order for us to have any meaningful output?
  • Now I’m supposed to be equally invested in an entirely different problem in a short timespan and still be as good? How’s that possible?

• People do not have to die at 80, people could die at 30 - I mean literally, not just a metaphor – we recently lost a friend to a car accident.