helpfulanon

I am in a very similar place right now.

Similarly horrified that my only valuable skillset makes me effectively chained to the computer screen, forever.

Been self-employed so long that full-time employers see the experience as a disqualifier from hiring. Let a string of bad business deals put me in so much debt I have no hope of putting together the financial cushion or runway towards taking an extended break or re-skilling into another industry. Been taken advantage of so many times by tech industry titans that I trust no one. Turns out the root cause was partly a mental illness working against me my entire career that I only recently was diagnosed for, well into adulthood.

Completely deflated in confidence or ability. Burned out to the point where I can no longer even effectively fake enthusiasm for selling my abilities. Jaded hostility I can no longer control towards clients, peers. Hide away from socializing with anyone else with ties to the tech business because of social anxiety fears they'll judge me for my failure, or worse, I'll get drunk and lash out.

Therapists suggest a major career change but I have no skills in anything else that could pay my bills. All the attempts at shifting away to management, associated non-code skills tend to backfire.

When my checkbook is drained, it only refills with a half-hearted sales pitch to an old client, a grudging all-night session with a text editor.

Obligations to wife, sick elderly parents that keep me bound to where I live. Got somehow stuck in an absurdly expensive soul-crushing city with absurdly hight rents for absurdly tiny living spaces, that also happens to be critical for my wife's career. She's at the top of her game here. Leaving means she gives up her career.

I've been dreaming of living in the woods making furniture or something, being a tugboat captain, construction worker, a sanitation worker even. Welding, cutting bushes, mopping floors. It took 15 years to really truly drive home how badly I misjudged my ability to succeed in this business, what the consequences were for a career of being self-employed in something that didn't really motivate me to begin with. I need a paradigm shift in how I see my life, but it just won't seem to come.

Such a bleak comment. Ugh. Sorry. Anyhow, yea you're not alone.

This is a pretty good idea to implement for security in general, but isn't it a pretty exhausting amount of work just to avoid confrontation with a single person?

You could just put a lawyer in the mix, and make the employee sign a document that ensures all PII has been destroyed at time of firing, with a little more severance for the indignity of it all and clear consequences for non-compliance. If they're not an idiot, they'll do it

Eh, when they're dangling several months salary in front of you, signing a non-disparagement is a pretty hard thing to pass up.

Regardless it's pretty juvenile and self-destructive behavior to go around disparaging an employer for firing you to begin with. Getting a cash bonus for the self-censorship a rational adult should be exhibiting anyhow, is not such a bad thing

Bringing in an outsider to handle the "business" part of the business, especially when bestowed with a title like "CEO" over top of the original solo founder, is a recipe for a lopsided relationship. And it's somewhat unfair on your part to expect that another person can suddenly leap in with the same passionate drive you have for a product you built yourself for over a year. But honestly the fact that you're in different countries makes it that much worse.

Regardless, my understanding is that we're entering a dry period for capital in the tech business right now and investors are pulling back from tech startups in a big way.

If this is true, VCs are going to raise the bar quite high. A few years ago just the fact that you are in 2 different countries would be an automatic disqualification for many investors. And they can clearly see that not only are you collaborating remotely but you sourced someone and more or less put them in the driver's seat as your bizdev proxy.

I suppose the outlook was a lot more rosy back in Nov but it's frankly surprising that they even let you in the door in the first place. The investor gave you a very clear rational reason for backing out.

Your CEO's passion for your business isn't something you can force either. They see the risk as well. Unless your product is just mind blowing, which maybe it is given the interest, you're not going to raise money easily with this configuration.

You have a high bar in a difficult time, and a limp partner is the last thing you need. So yes you need to address this head on. Hopefully you can regroup, bootstrap a little longer and try again when you're on firmer ground

I'd add that the industry really does not celebrate nor embrace failure the way that we're told it does. For those of us without the cushion of prior success or financial runway, repeating attempts to "get back on the horse" is an embarrassing exercise in futility.

With a failed enterprise, you lower your value in the eyes of many gatekeepers and peers, especially those who never tried running their own business.

But after repeatedly attempting to jumpstart businesses without capital, and subsequent failures, eventually you are more or less cast as foolish.

And god forbid you start to become pragmatic or slightly cynical in the world of tech startups! Because the moment your idealistic optimism comes into question, your "cultural fit" is permanently deemed negative. And bonus catch-22, having led startups also puts "cultural fit" into question for big cos as well.

Basically the personality changes that result from repeated business failure can begin to taint and poison your business relationships, and that can follow you around forever like a little dark cloud you just can't shake.

Psychological stamina is something nobody tells you about needing as a prerequisite for being an entrepreneur, but most of us don't learn that lesson until it's far too late...

Same here.

Also would add a compounding series of negative results including depression, being almost shadow-banned from the business due to lack of optimism (no joke), then alcohol problems etc

I'd take a bet there are many many others on HN that can attest to this outcome, but lurk due to shame or emotional pain. Losing everything because of misjudgment is not an easy thing to admit to publicly, especially in a community so warped with the cult of survivor bias

I made this exact same move about 5 years ago and it was a total fucking disaster. All the things you count as accomplishments as an entrepreneur just look like arrogant showboating during an interview. People hiring for fulltime jobs don't like to hear about how much creative freedom you had in the past, it means you'll be a rogue / pain in the ass.

Product management sounds like the perfect setting for a creative yet technical cross-discipline entrepreneur, right? Nope. Most PMs have zero authority in an organization. They're far below engineers in some cases. Remember how you had a staff of 15 people? The people working for you are collaborators, not reports. The job is entirely about internal politics, compromising between business teams. It has been described to me as "holding an umbrella to keep management BS from distracting the engineers so they can work". You're literally holding a shit umbrella. It's completely thankless and unrewarding, if not somewhat degrading.

In my case I used my sales skills to manipulate a freelance client into hiring me onto their product team without doing any due diligence. It was a disappointing, frustrating ordeal that lasted exactly 6 months before they pushed me back to consulting. Not worth it.

Be an engineer. You get paid much more, have surprisingly much more respect in an org, and less frustration at work.

But word of advice, do yourself a favor and shrug off that ego and accept your fate. If you were successful as a self-employed person you wouldn't be looking for a job, right? Allow yourself to say goodbye to who you were. If you keep that chip on your shoulder and sell yourself the way you're used to, you set unreasonable expectations for yourself and everyone around you. When you fail, the failure stings that much more.

Taking a job makes you a part of that world. You'll be waking up every morning slogging your way to the office with everyone else, trying to impress your boss, climb the corporate ladder. If you were expecting a "retirement" you're in for unpleasant surprises. It's not that simple or easy. Your brain is hardwired for a different lifestyle, a different workflow. You've never been leashed before. You're not of that world. The only way to win is to let the self-employed ego die and rise again, a new citizen of planet cubicle

The problem is that Drs see medication as an easy win. They prescribe meds and the patient sees results. So that's all they do, prescribe the meds and tell you to take them all the time and you'll be fine.

But in reality the meds should only be used as augmentation in situations when it's hard to stick to a coping framework. But nobody tells you that, because it's complicated and doesn't always work. So they prescribe meds and ask you to depend on them instead

I had a similar situation - I didn't discover that I had ADHD until after an accident and possible brain injury brought it to my attention. Though my Drs were very skeptical that the accident caused ADHD, more that the shock threw it into overdrive.

After being diagnosed and doing some more thorough research I realized that ADHD had been present my entire life and may also run in my family, it just got much much worse after my accident.

What lazy drs, popular self-help and cheap internet content writing really botch when discussing ADHD is having us focus on the distraction portion and not the underlying reason for why - the portion of the brain responsible for executive function is diminished. This is a neurological problem. Part of the ADHD brain is malfunctioning.

Successfully coping with ADHD is more about learning mechanisms for how to react to stimuli without having the fully developed executive function abilities that others have. But people want to believe they don't have a problem, that they're not disabled. And the disorder doesn't manifest itself very visibly, so it's easy to deny, dismiss or ignore. So they write it off as an environmental problem, something that can be corrected with "proper thinking". This is false. It's a disability, and the solution is coping with the problem.

The amino acid L-Tyrosine is a dopamine precursor and has a mildly beneficial effect. It's available over the counter though I've had to order on Amazon since it's not often found in stores. When I'm off meds I'll take that, some multi vitamins and a few cups of coffee (which is essentially a homemade 5-hour energy)

I mentioned this in other comments on this thread but there is a video series that is really great by Russel Barkley - he talks about education and coping strategies for kids and adults that aren't totally reliant on on meds. Relying on lists and reminders are important for adults

Posted a comment about this as well - I also highly recommend watching this, Dr. Barkley's lecture altered how I view my myself

If you have ADHD or are close to someone with it, do yourself a favor, sit down and watch this lecture series by Dr Russell Barkely: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzBixSjmbc8eFl6UX5_wW...

It's geared a little more towards childhood ADHD, and it's quite long (I needed to be medicated in order to watch the whole thing, of course..) but this Dr is a fantastic expert on the topic and doesn't hold back on explaining the disorder in clear medical terms. He also does not sugar coat anything or tell you what you want to hear. It's a very pragmatic and thorough explanation of what ADHD means, and really opened up my eyes in many ways.

One of the important takeaways from that lecture is that ADHD is not simply attention problems, there are a myriad of related issues with executive function that are just not as apparent. Learning that ADHD is more than attention can fundamentally change your coping strategies. Well worth investing time into deeper education

Created a throwaway to say this since I don't want to give away my medical history..

Basically I struggled with these problems for most of my 20's. Then a year ago I started going into therapy with a psychologist, got tested for ADHD and was diagnosed. Meds changed everything when it came to procrastination. It used to be the cause of so much anguish in my life and today it's almost a non-issue.

Therapy really helped me decouple from the narcissism that had warped me into a compulsive fixation with benchmarking myself against other people. Humbling yourself is important. Spending time on non-code hobbies, with family, away from work and tech industry noise is important.

Not everyone can or should be running a software product, and that's ok. Not everyone is successful in their career at age 26. When your life is surrounded by these skewed values, all this survivor bias, it seems like not being on the frontpage of Product Hunt is a mark of failure. If you head out of the tech bubble, go somewhere with friends or family that have no association with this world, you'll realize that this value system isn't normal.

Also, keep in mind that the people who do run successful projects are often unhappy. Running a product is a lot of work and can be extremely stressful and exhausting. Success is a double-edged sword.

Edit: replaced a rant about wanting to be a successful entrepreneur. This guy just wants to be a good coder, I missed that.