New college grads: Don’t sell your time for a living
andrewchen.co
andrewchen.co
Instead, take everything you have (inexperience, limited funds, lack of domain expertise, etc.) and invest it in making "something."
If all else fails, which it most likely will, join a startup, ideally one filled with a bunch of other young people trying to learn how to make "something" too.
i do think there is wisdom in joining a startup run by veterans out of college. at least then you get the experience in running a startup.
if you join a big company, you get educated in the skills needed to succeed at a big company, which unfortunately are very different to the skills needed to doing something on your own.
i do like his quote though that it will take about 10,000 hours to get good at anything...
The individual maker/consultant/contractor model of living is fine.
Then there is the model where you employ other people to do things for you and leverage their skills (and your risk) to get more money. For obvious reasons that can't work for everyone but it is a very reasonable plan for some people.
And finally you can be part of someone else's business. This can actually be a very rewarding thing. My point to prove this is that we could not have placed men on the moon without a massive organisation with a lot of people following other peoples plans.
Blanket advice just smothers individuality. We don't need simple solutions today.
For a counter-factual to the article, consider a Subway franchise. The people who really make things in that business are the sandwich line workers getting paid $8/hour. Everything else is in support of that core productive function.
So why don't you want to be a "maker" at Subway? Because while the sandwich line workers are the ones making things, it's the store owner that has the leverage--he gets other people to make things for him. You want to be the guy with the leverage, not (necessarily) the guy making things (though sometimes, if what you make is valued/rare enough, you have a lot of leverage).
No matter how many people get served, or how well, or how many sandwiches get made, or how many bags of chips and cups of soda are up-sold, or how many other people worked with you that day, your pay won't change. The only thing that changes your pay is how many hours you were there.
As for the employer/owner of the store, what does he get paid for? The amount of sandwiches, chips, and soda sold. So the employees sell their time, but the owner sells sandwiches.
This also perfectly describes the relationship between startup founders and VCs.
Well, if others want to control the means of production, let them go out and take out loans, burn through their life savings, and crib money from friends, family and fools, to take a chance on a business that might or might not succeed, possibly leaving them broke, penniless and destitute. Let them figure out how to promote and market the business, design all the processes needed to make the business work, and develop the ulcers and headaches that come from stressing over the possibility that the business might fail and you might have to lay off your entire workforce, putting good people... people that you hired, trained, trusted, and worked, sweated, laughed and bled alongside.. out of work.
Because "owning the means of production" IS a total cakewalk after all. Just retreat to your robber baron mansion, burn a few thousand dollar bills for heat, and march down to the (store|factory|plant|refinery|etc) every few days and kick the shit out of the lazy workers who are probably stealing from the company anyway. Oh, wait, did I say "march"? I mean, "be driven by your chauffeur in your Rolls Royce Silver Ghost". Because all business owners have chauffeurs and a Rolls Royce.
Your average failed start-up entrepreneur probably doesn't even get an acqui-hire, but he certainly doesn't wind up "broke, penniless and destitute" either. Solving this kind of problem is in fact the entire point of joint-stock companies as we know them: the founder comes on-board as a majority shareholder, a capital-adding founder, and with a salary paid by the company (once it has any money at all, but why are you founding a company if you have no personal runway?). His personal survival becomes separate from the company's survival, through that wondrous mechanism of investment.
But of course, if what we're really talking about is 1-3 cofounders and a small but growing group of investors beginning a joint-stock company in a fashion explicitly designed not to personally endanger anyone, then there's no reason you couldn't run the whole thing as a Mondragon-style cooperative in the first place, with some charter modifications to allow for issuing equity.
Now, you could say we need to give the founders an outsized reward for their outsized risk, but after multiple rounds of investment diluting their share ownership, VCs and accelerators and other investors taking spots on the Board of Directors and then further dilution of the founders' individual ownership and control of the firm by the time it reaches any kind of Liquidity Event...
Well, it ends up looking less like we're giving outsized rewards to the founders specifically, and more like we're giving outsized rewards to an investor class within a large collective enterprise that could, if the founders were clever and lucky, contain the founders as a large or dominant component.
But of course, there's also a dozen ways for the founders to wind up basically proletarians in their own company.
So while I do think the cooperative model could do more to honor founding entrepreneurs, I can't say it does distinctly worse than our current model of investor-driven enterprise, ie: capitalism.
then there's no reason you couldn't run the whole thing as a Mondragon-style cooperative in the first place, with some charter modifications to allow for issuing equity.
I'm not real familiar with the Mondragon Corporation specifically, but from looking at the Wikipedia article[1] just now, it sounds pretty interesting. I'm a fan of the idea of employee owned collectives and cooperatives (both for profit and non-profit), and see them as just as much a desirable part of our overall society / economy as "traditional" corporations. Maybe more so.
Being a libertarian / voluntaryist / anarcho-capitalist / $pick_your_label, I find the modern corporation problematic, in that it explicitly breaks the premise of "liability for the outcome of your actions" for the individual investors. Arguably that's a good thing, because it makes it easier for people to pool their capital and more or less allows for the existence of the modern mega-corporation. Arguably it's a bad thing, because it allows for the existence of the modern mega-corporation.
In either case, I'd love to see worker owned collectives, and /or private coops replace both many traditional for-profit companies AND many government agencies / services.
In general, we can actually make a lot of progress on what I would call "engineering socialism" once we get our brains out of the "individual capitalism versus government socialism" paradigm, a paradigm they only got trapped in by the peculiarities of the Cold War.
It's interesting that if you want sandwiches made, you don't necessarily have to make them yourself. In fact, it will be slower. Yet getting into a position where you can incentivize other people to make them for you is quite tricky, but rewarding.
The business model has nothing to do with how the corporation pays it's employees.
A professional-level graduate career gives a ground to hit running after college, and in terms of steps in the direction of one day managing one's own affairs it provides experience, connections, and a chance to build up savings.
Going straight from school to no job and making "an app, blog, table, YouTube channel, or video tutorial" is very unlikely to lead to equivalent success, and don't let survivorship bias trick you otherwise.
The people I admire are those who have worked professionally but even in cases of soul-destroying office politics, bureaucracy, and mismanagement, have never given up on their "plan", slowly moving in the direction they want and eventually being in a position (e.g. financially, domain-experience, network) to break free and do it their way.
In the case of many HNers, I observe a movement from salaried employee to consultant with the freedom to work on their own stuff to...well a tonne of interesting things. I think that kind of approach is much more likely to succeed than the extremism and anti-"job" mentality of the submitted article.
There's no harm for a college grad to wait a few years before doing a startup once they've built up savings and a positive reputation.
It's worth noting that very few Computer Science students my year created a startup relative to the amount of CS students who instead decided to work for a large startup/Microsoft/Google/Amazon.
http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2012-sur...
An unfortunate dynamic. At http://www.thinkful.com/ I've encouraged our interns to consider how much savings or debt they'll have upon graduation. It's something they basically never consider, and immediately when they do all sorts of priorities change about their spending habits, goals, etc.
Well worth the exercise.
Most people out of college are not in a position to forego a job to vaguely "build something". The issues are numerous: money, knowledge, ability, a realistic world-view, etc. I'd suggest the opposite to most smart engineering grads: sell your time (i.e. get a 9 to 5 job) and invest the money, knowledge, and free time you get into learning how to build things.
"That'd be nice, but I live in New York".
That's why that Onion headline is so brilliant: you HAVE to do the thing you love on nights and weekends until you get good enough at it to attempt to do it full time. In the meantime, you have to pay your rent, you have to buy your food and have a social life and a girlfriend and all those other things that make life pleasant.
This is called being an adult and getting a job, much like the other 99% of the adult population. Some of us just end up being happier with what we do than others. Some people don't care about what they do at all as long as their non-work life makes them happy.
Besides that, not everyone has the right attributes for self-employment. I suspect that much of what makes traditional employment painful is bad coworkers/bosses. Do we expect these same people to be successful running their own enterprises?
Also: don't fall into the "be passionate" trap. Be passionate about your life, and don't conflate your work with your life. Keep your job out of your life, and if possible, consider yourself unemployed from 5pm to 9am.
It's not like this everywhere, but these spots in the industry exist, and if you're halfway decent at what you do, they will want you also.
As rayiner said also, entrepreneurship is also "selling your time" - you're just trying to sell it at a very high price with no guarantee that anyone will end up paying you for that time.
There is also no guarantee in entrepreneurship that you'll spend a substantial portion of your time doing things you enjoy. A lot of startup life is thankless toil. Putting together a startup is a lot more than writing some code and slapping together some designs - as a founder you will go neck-deep in territory you do not enjoy, whether that's sales, marketing, business development, design, or something else.
If your start-up turns into a successful business with real customers, you almost certainly won't.
At the start up I worked for, I watched as the founder quickly became too important to do much if any technical work. Can't very well spend time sitting and futzing with algorithms when you're busy making PowerPoint presentations and poring over contracts.
Why? because to succeed, an entrepreneur needs to be more than a great software developer (or whatever other product you want to create and sell). An entrepreneur needs a number of business skills, like crafting policies, schmoozing vendors, wooing customers... Those aren't my strong suits.
I am perfectly content to let someone else handle all the business stuff, and pay me an agreeable salary to handle the software end of things. That gives me the freedom to shine at design, development, user-education, and self-improvement. If someone who doesn't know me wants to dismiss that as "selling my time," well, that's his problem, not mine.
Our students at http://www.thinkful.com often find themselves a couple years out of school, languishing in their 1st jobs since college, wishing and yearning for more.
Unfortunately, incredibly talented people take the safest job they're offered because they have crazy college debt. A couple years later they're totally unfulfilled and want more.
Planning how to "not sell your time for a living" while in college (or before) is just as important as not being compelled into a "steady" job at the point in your life when you should be exploring new things.
it took getting hit by a car going 50mph for me to really have this sink in. We shouldn't need a potential near death experience to convince us to abandon our vanity and achievement chasing and do what we really want to do.