Hacker News Reader

Comment by zelda420 | Hacker News Reader

Why do you hate the idea of someone trying to start a new business so much that you make 15+ comments on this thread?

This is ycombinator, you know the startup accelerator.

Because statistically it’s going to fail and even if you do make some side income, it’s not going to substitute even for an entry level enterprise dev job.

Also, the time one poster was spending “selling potatoes online” (literally not trying to be funny), he would be better off, spending that time doing interview prep and job hopping making more money.

You can take these numbers for YC investments and draw your own conclusion.

https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-life-and-death-of-y-co...

You can only job hop once in 2 years.

All that other time watching TV and commenting on YC can be used to learn to run a business.

Also the skills you'll learn by starting a very tiny biz - marketing, sales, resilience, communication, people-skills and delivery - will help you sell yourself at present and future job opportunities.

Also not everyone is in tech or wants to be in tech. /smh

> Also, the time one poster was spending “selling potatoes online” (literally not trying to be funny), he would be better off, spending that time doing interview prep and job hopping making more money.

this made me lol. you are being a dickhead so i will ignore that and defend myself in good faith.

i actually job hopped this year so i can make more money while spending less time selling my work to other people. it's going well for me, so good that i had enough free time to launch an ecommerce website selling sweet potatoes. this project was an experiment to see if there was a market for direct to consumer food and also a project to learn about shopify and google ads (for other business ideas which you frown upon so you might not see the value in this). it was also an attempt to work closer with farmers because farming and food is an interest of mine, and i'm from where they grow a lot of sweet potatoes.

so that time was spent learning and doing something interesting to me intellectually, which is never a waste of time. 20 hours of my free time (which, to remind you, i have extra free time to do this because of my overall career strategy where i earn a high hourly rate so i can work less hours each week) resulted in learning new skills. with 10 more hours of my time i've learned about food safety, organic regulations, shipping, managing physical inventory and cash, as well as learning about our food distribution system (which is totally fucked since there is a market for direct to consumer sweet potatoes). not to mention, the time spent has earned me over $100/hour.

can you please remind me, snarkily, again, why this was a waste of my time?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com