Why I Stopped Selling My Time for a Living | Hacker News Reader

Why I Stopped Selling My Time for a Living

blog.goodsense.io

30 pointssherm8n61 comments

This makes me feel pretty uncomfortable - maybe it's the sense of superiority the author puts across. A couple of the more irritating snippets:

In a regular 9-5 job you’re selling your time to an employer

Or, to look at it another way, you are collaborating with a number of colleagues to develop and sell software, and you are all sharing the income. See how that's the same thing, phrased differently? Attitude matters.

You can do whatever you want now. Everything is under your control. It’s not dependent on your boss, co-workers, or other departments. You decide what projects to work on. You decide when you want to work on them. You even decide whether or not you want to get out of bed every day.

You're not dependent on anything - except your customers or clients, your investors, your employees, third parties… the list goes on. Sure, you could choose to stay in bed, or leave for a week and do no work - but you'd have to consider what the implications would be for your services, your family, staff and so on. Sometimes, the illusion of freedom is more dangerous.

You get to put all your time and effort into only things you’re truly passionate about.

Nope - all of the grunt work still has to be done. Need a stupid feature for a large client? You'll probably be doing it. And you'll be doing all of that sysadmin stuff you hate too.

Selling your time for money to an employer will put a cap on the amount of money you can make... You are generating more money for their business than they’re paying you. That’s the only way they can run a profitable business. Which means you’re getting screwed.

It's a trade-off, isn't it? I think we can all accept that the self-employed will keep more of the value they generate. But the other side of the coin is that they're exposed to more risk. Not a bad trade-off, especially if you've got a family.

Most of the software you write at a company doesn’t ever ship.

I can count on one hand the number of features I've ever developed which didn't ship, and quickly. Maybe if you work at a dysfunctional company, this could be the case.

tl;dr: don't take a job at a rubbish company you're not interested in. Enjoy what you do - have you seen what the market is like for "developer time" recently? You can have your pick of companies, developing software for almost any imaginable market, and earn an impressive salary doing it.

Okay, maybe this works for you - and that's great, I'm all behind people finding work that suits their lifestyles. But I've got an awesome 9–5 job, where I am paid very well to work with great people on interesting products. There are a lot of other people in that situation, and I don't think that it's quite a clear-cut as the author makes out.

> In a regular 9-5 job you’re selling your time to an employer

> Or, to look at it another way, you are collaborating with a number of colleagues to develop and sell software, and you are all sharing the income. See how that's the same thing, phrased differently?

But it is clearly not the same thing phrased differently. The first is an accurate description of a wage labor relationship, the latter is an accurate description of the relation between members of a labor cooperative. You can imagine that the latter relationship is the case when you are in the former relationship, but self-delusion probably isn't useful or healthy in the long term.

> But it is clearly not the same thing phrased differently. The first is an accurate description of a wage labor relationship, the latter is an accurate description of the relation between members of a labor cooperative. You can imagine that the latter relationship is the case when you are in the former relationship, but self-delusion probably isn't useful or healthy in the long term.

I disagree that this is self-delusion, and that's a thoroughly unhelpful attitude - you are just choosing to emphasise a different set of facts, which does not invalidate the other.

There are absolutely loads of jobs out there for a talented developer at this point in time. You can essentially select any team you want, and name your price - the upshot is that this moves so much power away from employers that the relationship is pretty far away from wage slavery.

Yes, I find this kind of self deception about the nature of a job much more disturbing than having a negative attitude about having someone else tell you what to do and when to do it. You're collaborating with colleagues to build software for someone else to sell, over which you retain no rights, and you receive a flat rate in the face of growing profits.

That's the result if you work for a bad team, sure. In my case, I develop software that my colleagues sell and support (and they're nice guys.) I have input into what we build and how we do it. Yeah, I don't retain the rights, but I do get to publish a bit of open-source. And I know first-hand that I'm not alone in having a good working environment with an employer.

Your argument seem to be that it's better to be in charge - and sure, I think we'd all ultimately like that. But that comes with costs—in some cases, pretty large ones—and it's a mistake to gloss over them so lightly.

> That's the result if you work for a bad team, sure.

It's the result if you work for wage labor, period. You're not "sharing the profits", you're paid a negotiated rent for your time which is not dependent on the profits. Even if you get some kind of equity or profit-sharing component of your compensation, the basic relationship is still of time rent.

> And I know first-hand that I'm not alone in having a good working environment with an employer.

Having a good working environment with an employer doesn't change the basic relationship from "selling time to an employer" to "sharing the income", in the same way that having a good working environment with a slave master -- which undoubtedly there were slaves who did -- doesn't change the relationship from "being someone else's chattel" to "selling time to an employer".

And if you have to tell yourself a comforting lie about what the basic nature of the relationship is to be happy about it, I think that may be a signal that the "good working environment" isn't so good.

If you are really happy with what the relationship is, that you wouldn't need to misrepresent it.

>And if you have to tell yourself a comforting lie about what the basic nature of the relationship is to be happy about it, I think that may be a signal that the "good working environment" isn't so good.

Okay - I'll bow out here. I think you've probably latched on to a minor detail that's not really relevant — my main point being that focusing on "selling time to an employer" is only one interpretation of the employee-employer relationship. Maybe I could have described it as "charging a fixed rate to a client and doing interesting research" – the point is, in a market such as the current one for software developers, employment is as much under the control of the employee as the employer.

To be clear, I don't have any intention of misrepresenting or lying about my work environment, so please don't make such assumptions.

Actually the selling time version is not really accurate either. What you're selling is the product of your time and skill. And if you substitute "income" for "part of the income," well, the grandparent's phrasing is an accurate description of what is happening (in that no part of the description is untrue). You my prefer to emphasize a different set of facts, but that doesn't mean you get to say a true thing is not true.

> Actually the selling time version is not really accurate either.

No, that's exactly what wage labor is by definition.

I agree there are many benefits to having a job. I met and worked with some of the smartest people at my job. They all left to start their own company.

That doesn't mean there's no value in continuing to have a job. I just want to be clear that there are other options. In fact, 88 out of the 95 developers I know who have jobs are looking for those other options. I wrote this article for those 88 people.

> I wrote this article for those 88 people.

There's nothing at all actionable about your article. Why bother when it just says "Hey do this thing I did" but without any further details or pointers?

I mean, it's really cool you did that, but what I've read of your blog is entirely fluff.

Seriously - this guy was paid a full-time salary and most of his time was apparently free to use as he chose - and he chose to spend it preparing for lunch & browsing the internet

His problem was he had no drive or personal work ethic. Where he could have been learning just about anything, he seems to have just frittered his day away.

So his solution is: He's going to start a business where he can take vacation anytime he wants? Based on his 2 years experience surfing cat videos?

I don't think we'll be hearing about his IPO any time soon.

This seems to only be true for very, very few start-ups, all of which are small, ie, single employee.

The moment that there's a second person, your life begins to depend on their schedule, involve their input in plans, etc. Even if you're the boss, it's a terrible habit to just declare you're leaving without taking in to account how it will impact other people. I'd argue you're probably /more/ restricted in many start-ups than you are in a typical office environment, where you're just one of many, because of how important you, personally, and your involvement is likely to be to the whole team/company.

Many of the points also only apply to people who are doing software for execution on servers or apps or similar projects. If you're working on embedded hardware, for instance, it becomes much, much harder to just take your laptop and work somewhere else.

I can only speak in the context of software companies. But there are many companies who have completely distributed teams and thrive. My favorite is Buffer's story: http://joel.is/post/54284926855/questions-i-ask-myself-about...

I have a tough time relating to the attitude toward being employed (as a programmer) that gets thrown around here. I know many employers are exploitative. But you don't have to work for an evil mega corp.

I work for a company where I can count the employees on one hand. All my code is used (unless I throw it away or refactor it). The work is interesting, the problems are challenging and semi-novel. I get to learn things every day.

What I'm saying is, I actually love my job. If you get paid to program and you're not loving it, you can go find a company doing something interesting without a lot of corporate crap. There's also the possibility you don't actually like programming, so.

This is not to say a startup is not an option, but there are plenty of other options with less skin in the game.

> I know many employers are exploitative.

By definition, they're all exploitative, even the one you work at.

If they gave you the proceeds of your labor, they'd be out of business, and if they don't, they're exploitative.

The only 'logically fair' form of organization of labor is a cooperative, and that only when everyone contributes according to their share.

You say I'm being exploited; I say you have adopted a viewpoint designed to create maximum unhappiness in the reality I live in.

Potato; potato.

I'm not saying you should be unhappy about it. Hell I do the same thing. Just don't go in with rose colored glasses like they employ you out of charity. Businesses are there to make a profit, and being employed entails giving up some of that profit.

I do sell my time for money. Directly. As a contractor I have an hourly rate and people take me on as needed. The money is good, I like meeting new people and what I really, really like is working on a project, seeing it ship and then going on to something else entirely.

Although it's also awesome that I get paid for every minute I work, if the client wants overtime I get paid more, if they don't I'm out the door at 5. I set my own vacation allowance and when an email comes in from a client at 3am to tell us how awesome the product is I don't care.

So IMHO, go the other way start selling your time for a living. Stop pretending you give a crap about anything but yourself and cold, hard cash, go contract!

Well, as a contractor you can start selling outcomes instead of selling time. So for example, you're able increase sales for a business by 9% in a month. That's a whole lot of freaking money. Suppose it only takes you 5 hours of work. Maybe you're an expert at conversion rate optimization. Your client won't blink if you tell them it will cost $X0,000. That's way better for you than charging $200/hr for 5 hours.

Charging by the hour, as the basal form of hourly wage employment or in contracting, is just the worst case scenario when you have no other metrics to effectively predict and judge performance on.

But that means you have to take the fall if you aren't good at whatever alternative payment criteria you agree to. It just ends up being the default because it is somewhat safe, but if I were ever doing contract gigs I'd definitely rather charge by feature than by hour.

That's up to you. There's a well established contract market here in the uk that does not work that way.

I see that as consultancy, not contracting. An equally valid and even more lucrative occupation I will probably get into sooner or later.

I go to clients who have a project in mind, they need a team to do it, usually full time for several months, but don't need them post-delivery. I get paid, I get to do novel work, and I get to get the f*ck out on time :)

Freelancing, consulting, contracting, it's all the same thing in my opinion. It's just how you want to present yourself. Obviously, going at it as a consultant will net you the most amount of money. But it's only because of how your client will view you. Brennan from Planscope has successfully addressed all these problems and helped people make a ton of more money: http://blog.planscope.io

That is not anything like what I do for a living. I don't approach people with business solutions that will help them, hell, I don't care about business solutions. I work on specific projects that clients already want but don't have or want the people for.

I think just saying "do X or Y" doesn't properly acknowledge people will walk different paths.

If you have an idea you are passionate about (like the OP) and think you can make a living off of it, you only get one life, you might as well take the plunge. If you can't, and you want the freedom of contracting, go for that. If you want to work in a team on one project for years under direct supervision (because let us be honest, not everyone is a self-motivated workaholic) that is fine too.

More important is that people realize options exist, and that while your parents and grandparents might have been 9-5'ers who hated their jobs but did it due to a lack of marketable skills to attract revenue in a different way, the immense communication potential of the Internet lets you get a much larger audience for your talents to find yourself a niche with you in charge.

It might be off topic, but I read some posts about people working while traveling around. How does that work with taxes? I am currently working in another country, but still in the european union, and quite a hassle to get all that bureaucratic stuff done for just 3 months. I imagine it must be more complicated if you don't even have a work permit at start. Do you just do it illegal/unregistered? Are tax laws more tolerant at the places you choose? Doesn't it matter?

Depends on how you do it. Are you working for yourself? Or for an employer? If its an employer, yes, you're going to have to handle a bunch of tax red tape.

I'm a US citizen. Assume I have a webapp. I develop this app as I travel, have paying customers, etc. It doesn't matter I'm in the middle of nowhere Africa, because I'm accepting payments with Stripe into a US-based business checking account, which I then run payroll from into a US-based personal checking account. I then pay my taxes electronically from this account.

In that case, your taxes are pretty straightforward.

I hate to burst your bubble...but it does matter. Not for purposes of U.S. taxes, but for purposes of whatever countries you are in while you were traveling. If the app is even moderately successful, those countries could treat your app's income as wholly or partially subject to their income taxes. (This is not much of an issue with Canada, EU nations, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or S. Korea. It is very much an issue with most other countries, especially South American and African countries.)

It depends heavily on the tax laws of the countries in which you are traveling, the type of work you perform, and the amount of such work in proportion to work performed elsewhere.

There's a reason that so many multinational companies hold their board meetings in the Caymans, with a quorum of directors physically present. It's not because the Caymans are a great vacation destination (they are) but because they must hold the board meetings there to satisfy location requirements arising from the company's tax structure. (See e.g., the Dutch Sandwich structure and the Double Irish structure.)

> If the app is even moderately successful, those countries could treat your app's income as wholly or partially subject to their income taxes.

How would you suggest they treat it as income if your business is incorporated in US (Delaware preferably)? It doesn't become foreign income based on where you wrote the code.

Also, how are countries in South America or Africa going to know where your business income is derived from when all your financial transactions occur with the US?

The issue is that performing business activities in a country, under current intentional tax conventions, gives that country jurisdiction to tax the income arising from that activity. So yes, under international tax law as it currently stands, your app's income does become foreign income based on where you wrote the code.

In practice, most countries require a certain "level" of activity to subject a foreign enterprise to taxation (i.e., the US and all EU nations). And at any rate, we have treaties with most countries worth visiting which generally define the type and extent of activities that could give rise to taxation in the foreign country (see, e.g., "permanent establishment"). Thus, it is unlikely that simply writing some code for your app in the EU would result in an EU nation trying to tax your app's income.

However, not all nations require a substantial threshold before they try to tax business activity. Such countries will tax income arising from any activities performed in that nation by a foreign entity. (For example, Peru and Venezuela have both generated headlines about this recently.) Worse, these countries will frequently try to lay claim to all of the income that arises from the activity, even if only a minor portion of it can be "sourced" to activities performed in that country. This isn't usually a problem for a US resident/company--U.S. courts won't enforce such foreign tax levies--however, many nations are willing to enforce the tax levies of other countries. Netherlands, in particular, is a danger on this front. The Netherlands has friendly relations with a good many countries which the US is not friendly with, and a Dutch judgment enforcing a foreign tax lien stands a good chance of being enforced by other member nations of the EU.

As for your second point: say you blog about how you traveled while coding the app...or you give an interview to that effect. All it takes is one person in that country's tax authority to stumble upon the blog post/interview, and they'll try to go after you. (This doesn't mean they'll go as far as seeking a judgment, or that such a judgment would succeed, but foreign legal difficulties aren't something you'll ever want to deal with if you plan on letting your app get acquired.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is how it goes: you have an LLC in the US, use it for your work, pay taxes there. You travel on tourist/business visas and work on your laptop. No taxes in the countries you work out of.

I guess it might seem a bit shady, but since you're working on your laptop with no help/input from the host country (consider the laptop a "tunnel" back to your home country or wherever your company is registered), why would you bother to go through all the bullshit required to get actual work visas everywhere (the bureaucracy is really nuts).

Besides, you pay local taxes when you shop, rent an apartment, etc.

You're wrong. Depending on the laws of the country in which you perform the work, you could be liable for taxes on the income attributable to that work. Location in this context is defined very simply: the physical location of the employee performing the work (see, e.g., the OECD Model Treaties). This definition avoids all of the technological complexities of remote working (i.e., VPN into another country, or through multiple countries). It has also been adopted by the vast majority of countries which you would want to visit.

I.e., for example, if you code a $1 million project for a client, half in the US and half while traveling in France, you could owe France income taxes on 50% of that 1 million. (However, if that income is also taxable in the U.S., you generally would be protected from double-taxation by virtue of the tax treaty between the two nations.)

Moreover, depending on the amount of time spent working in a country, you could be in violation of your visa, which could result in civil or criminal sanctions (most likely fines, but possibly including revocation of your visa).

This issue is a very real concern, and multinational companies go to great lengths to avoid dealing with it. The EU has been aggressive about auditing companies on this issue, going so far as to demand detailed records about the physical location of directors during board meetings or about company operations conducted by traveling employees.

Yes, that's all true if you go by the law - in reality most freelancers working and traveling do what I said and don't declare anything to the customs/host country. It is harder to do if you're employed by a relatively large company, though...

That's basically it. You stay for three months at maximum, you pay taxes in your birth country, and your official address is usually that of a family member's when abroad.

Some places are pretty easy to get extended visas and they look the other way if you have money in the pocket.

As I learned on HN a few weeks ago, you can essentially 'buy' EU residency from Latvia. I'm sure there's similar deals in other EU countries.

https://www.rietumu.lv/en/residence-permit

This is seriously a first world country's software engineers problem. Anyone of my friends who is not currently employed as software engineer would do anything for that schedule and $100k/yearly salaries. I think sometime people just take too much things for granted; we are just happened to love what we do and get paid/spoiled a lot by this industry. Imagine this industry is not needed; I am sure you would be begging to have this flexible office hours.

From my point of view, work is the place I get PAID to learn something news from other. Someday, I stayed until 8pm or work on weekend. Does that mean I was forced to or get paid overtime? No, I stayed because I have the urge to learn and solve the problem. Now, if you think about work from that perspective then it wouldn't be so bad now, would it?

FWIW, I am not criticizing anyone but just simply giving my point of view and how fortunate I felt to be pampered from this industry. And just maybe, my view is different from others because I just graduated from college and always eager to learn.

Love what you do and do what you love!

I think there's something to be said for the general concept. Something to consider is risk vs reward though. If you're comfortable doing sales and the technical part or maybe even harder good at delegation and have some financial resources, you might be able to pull this off. A job is pretty consistent though and frankly can be less demanding even if you are learning new skills or working with smart people.

That being said, I think collaborating on open source still can give you that part of work you might be missing. There are positives and negatives to both lifestyles. Some are better at certain parts of the field than others.

I personally had a product take off, and and now backpacking in the valley for as long as I want. I've been able to meet one new customer a day (literally) for the past few weeks.

What they DON'T tell you is what it can take to get to that. It's ok to talk about the idea of not selling time for money AS LONG as you don't sensationalize it. Everyone has their preferences.

Oh stop it. Get over yourself, already.

I've run my own software business for over a decade now and I still have a boss. It's called The Free Market.

I can decide I'm above doing certain tasks, but my customers can also decide to go to my competition if my company isn't taking care of their needs. And sometimes my customers need things that I really don't feel like doing.

But I do them..because they are my customers; they pay the bills. They are the boss.

If I felt competent enough to call myself a "10X developer, marketer and entrepreneur", I'd consider becoming a consultant. But I'm not anywhere near that stage yet, and there's a lot I can learn (and am learning) where I am right now. So, the argument can be a decent one (self-employment brings certain benefits that are inimical to working for a salary), but there are also trade-offs involved.

The beach again? It must be the 5th time I see the beach presented as some kind of ideal workplace and I just don't get it. I'd rather spend my time at the beach resting, swimming and reading a good book, and then get the work done in a place with consistent lighting, real mouse & keyboard, fast and stable internet, a second screen, whiteboards, etc.

Also, startups are hard. Making twice your corporate salary by working on a laptop at the beach with a spotty internet connection sounds like a scam ("my aunt makes $5000/week on the laptop") and there's a reason why it does. It's not impossible - not much is impossible with startups really - and you might just make it if you're very lucky and very talented, but you're stacking the deck against you in a game already more than difficult enough.

Finally, how are you going to fund all these travels and living expenses unless your startup is profitable from day 1? With all this money saved from the evil corporate job I guess.

This is way too black & white.

I'd actually kill (almost) for the schedule on the T-shirt. Which isn't to say that I disagree with the post, but the author had it pretty good!

The problem for most white-collar workers is that the actual work demands are low, but the emotional overhead of subordination and mandatory presence is as bad as ever. The T-shirt describes someone for whom the work demands are low, presumably because of a defective office culture that leaves everyone enervated.

Easy jobs are usually emotionally harder than difficult ones, if that makes sense. Most white-collar environments boil the work down to triviality (the executives take the fun stuff, and the challenging projects aren't attempted, being "too risky") and become similar to prisons: mandatory presence beyond purpose.

Jeez, what's your schedule like?

I think it's common to work 9:00-19:00, 9:30-20:00. That's my schedule (working at a bank). Sometimes I also have to connect in the middle of the night if there's a problem in some other time zone. I haven't ever heard of a programmer working 9-5 in Tokyo.

Well, the post's schedule didn't have any work in it, maybe the dude actually has to do some work as well as show up 9-5.

I would be fired if my day looked like that. I can understand how you feel after working a 9-5, or in my case, a 9-8 because I work at a bank, and anything lower, you look lazy!

6am wake

6-7 - shower/prepare for the day

7am breakfast

8am prepare 6 meals for the day (bodybuilder)

9am leave for work

10am get in

10 - 10:30 - check mail, prioritize mail, i dont get much mail

10:30 coffee run - everyone in the office sees this as their last opportunity to fuck about for 15 minutes

11 - 8pm - literally just code, if I get up, it has to be accounted for

8pm - 1am - go to classes to finish a useless degree i dont need because my employer requests it

Then at about 1am I like to fantasize about creative ways to kill myself, then sleep.

I can't wait to save enough money for 3+ years of funding my own shenanigans. T-minus one year to go!

Good luck OP. Technologists are the modern day bohemians.

> 11 - 8pm - literally just code, if I get up, it has to be accounted for

> 8pm - 1am - go to classes to finish a useless degree i dont need because my employer requests it

This right here would be making me look for another gig ASAP.

The money is really great, I work with people that are also really great, and the job is actually really fun. It's more impressive than any other gig I could find. I'm learning faster than I have ever before as well.

I wouldn't drop this gig for another in the world, at least not until my contract is over.

To each their own. I could never imagine needing to account why I'm getting up from where I'm working. IT/developer jobs are a dime a dozen for the foreseeable future.

Not to be too blunt, but why are you working in that environment? There is absolutely no shortage of high-paying jobs for developers.

Pay / prestige / connections / its fun.

Where is lunch? Dinner? Why six meals? Why wake at six when you apparently start at 10 or even 11? It is a crazy day, probably very bad for your health.

Constant stream of clean energy from clean foods. Food is fuel.

Why no, my god, food is food, and our stomacks are very used to a few meals a day, and even arguably some fasting times to times.

Not to say our stomacks would not get used to this constant stream sh*t, but it could very well be extremely harmful as well, and I'd not experiment it on me even for billions.

Also, from where I live (China) and where I come from (France), when we see the obesity catastrophe in the US we can't help thinking the "let's eat things all the time" thing it a major culprit. See, we, normal people, we do not need to open the refrigetor's door and eat something when going back home, when waking up in the night, during the ads when watching movie, when walking from one room to the other, etc. We just eat three meals a day as did our parents and GP and that's it.

You got this riled up over a stranger eating 6 meals a day?

Yes, it is a side effect of empathy and compassion, I guess.

Not to nitpick, but I don't see any physical activity in that schedule even though you say you're into bodybuilding and need 6 meals a day. If that schedule is literally how your days go then you probably don't need 6 meals.

For the months leading up to production, I had to prioritize and remove certain things, one of them being the gym. Post-production I'll have more time. Still sticking to the same diet plan.

That is completely unsustainable on sleep alone. I'm guessing your in your early 20s, your taking some sort of stimulant on the side or doing a lot of mentally light work.

Dude, you don't need to wait to live your dreams. Email me! blog.goodsense.io/contact.

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