47 karma · joined November 1, 2024
Features are everything. Don't give me that bullshit about refactoring and generifying and DRY and TDD.
But with the amount of accountant overhead and government fees you have to pay per year (including to shut down your entity when you are done), it becomes a bit pointless and there aren't really magical tax savings to achieve that I know of unless you are like, really good at deducting things and surviving IRS audits. In any case, it is rare for corporations to even offer it, but maybe in some super niche areas I'm not aware of, there could be good advantages.
Still I think the hardest part is making and maintaining quality connections with people who value your skills :)
In the USA, if some big and usually "non tech" company like McDonalds or T-Mobile wants to staff a whole project with programmers, they will usually have a relationship with someone like Infosys, Tata, Slalom, perhaps even Hitachi or Tech Mahindra or Accenture/Deloitte. These companies all pay you like a regular employee so you don't need your own drafted employment contract or business entity.
If you howver have a github/youtube channel/website where you make and release your own software, and someone contacts you saying "hello we want to pay you to add more features and or fix some problem for us", then you will need a contract and usually a business entity unless you don't mind being personally sued into the ground.
Such reachouts are very very rare unless your software has gone viral in the right circles, but I personally know at least 20 people who make a full time living this way. It seems pretty unenviable, and corporations whose email domain you would recognize routinely pull support or play egregious games with the definition of done. No cure for life, I guess :)
EDIT: thank you for your well wishes though :)
Integrating with Linux/Windows display surfaces is disgusting however. KMSDRM is way, way better than the nightmare that is X11 and Wayland.
Examples are often the best way to do documentation, sadly.
Why must it be that they must live here, taking desk jobs and barista jobs from Americans? How many hundreds of thousands of Shockleys got their start working as baristas, nurses, and mechanics (yes I know they are not H1B)? Do you believe that any American who fails to compete with the entire world deserves it? Why can't I move to India and become Shockley over there?
Similar to how our country effectively relocated our entire manufacturing sector to the entire world (to externalize the environmental impact), only to enforce it with gunboat diplomacy to ensure that only the profits make their way home, I don't see any benefit in having the jobs located on US soil.
Politicians will say that there is a good reason to have the jobs here, but there isn't. It is much better for everyone if we just tax the owners of the company when they exercise their shares (something probably has to be done about the loaning loophole).
America should be a nation of suburban houses, spread quite far apart from each other, of people mostly working from home. Anything else is a legitimate nuissance.
And yet only Americans have to compete for housing and jobs in this context.
I ask you once again, why would I lose anything if Tesla was in the UAE?
1) All countries are free to come up with as strict or as loose immigration/tourist visa requirements as they like.
2) Companies can source remote labor from anywhere with zero government overhead.
3) Companies cannot source physical labor from abroad.
4) Reform local housing laws so that housing is not used for speculation/tied to employment.
Then communities can finally be communities, work can be work, and tourism can be tourism.
Most of the time, if I'm working in blender for example, I want some really sane prepopulated shader values and one size fits all rig values for sofas vs chairs, but sometimes I want to go crazy and make chairs out of glass and slime, etc.