10 ms·

Too many people have been burnt by this before. All the reward goes to the boss and not the employees. I used to work 70+ hours and I didn't even get a thank

Too many people have been burnt by this before. All the reward goes to the boss and not the employees. I used to work 70+ hours and I didn't even get a thank you. I will only work those hours nowadays if I am working for myself. If not, there is no chance I will do it. It's not nice to know you are being used for someone else's personal gain.

WalterBright 4y ago
Start your own business and you'll find out how much you're really worth!
- scarface74 4y ago
  Statistically this is the worse advice possible.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Yes, it's risky running your own business. But if you want to make it big, it's the best route. More risk, more reward. If you want to play it safe and have someone else take the risk, be an employee. But safe means less return. You can't have both safe and lucrative.
    - monodeldiablo 4y ago
      I've known way too many lawyers, doctors, tech bros, and finance bros to believe in these silly platitudes. It might have once been the case that reward correlated closely to risk, but the economy has fundamentally changed faster than our attitudes. We believe that the US is still the meritocracy it was when we were young, but loads of economic studies show the US has steadily declined in this regard. More than ever, money circulates among the well-connected and wealthy. The real secret to getting rich today is to be born rich.
      - epups 4y ago
        The system doesn't have to be completely fair for it to work. Of course being born rich means you are likely going to be rich. However, if you're trying to climb the ladder, the advice you reject as a platitude is fundamentally true. Being an employee you're accepting a limited compensation and getting certain benefits in return, including safety. If you have marketable skills, nothing stops you from building up a business to sell these skills directly, at greater risk but also increased compensation if it succeeds. This is true for an enormous variety of fields, but especially tech.
        nosianu 4y ago
        > the advice you reject as a platitude If you claim that, how about your own comment? And with > nothing stops you from building up a business to sell these skills directly you pretty much completely ignore what OP wrote. Sure, you can claim "technically correct" because indeed nobody is stopping you. You just leave out the statistics about the result. What is stopping people is looking at their actual chances, so sure, you can technically claim they are stopping themselves. Only that it's highly misleading. I left awell-paid software job in the US and returned to Germany, opened a small business with a friend after looking around. We barely managed to sell it off at cost, leaving the next person to find out it really did not work (he saw everything but thought he could do better). Then I did freelance jobs, very highly paid. Also extremely unsatisfying. The especially well-paying corporate jobs especially so, more often than not what I had worked on was discarded after I left, because of company merger or internal politics leading to a stop on the project. Now I'm in a business started by a former CTO of a famous successful startup, where he made lots of excellent connections and also has the brand name recognition now. I only do tech now. And no, you can't just easily connect to the right people. Some few one-in-ten-thousand people can do that. Most people have the necessary connections through birth or from previous employment. Creating them from scratch is incredibly hard. When giving general advice about something and not to somebody specific for a specific situation, I suggest to always scale your advice, from "works for anyone" to "works for everyone". Many of those suggestion fall apart right then and there. How about if we already are in a situation where everybody does their very best? It's just that the equilibrium created from that is what we have now. Because the system does not work when "everybody" does it. You get a dynamic equilibrium with lots of losers and a lot of effort just not being worth it. Despite starting out with everybody highly motivated and adventurous. So "try harder" IMO has already happened long ago and we now are in a much later state of the dynamic system. What happens in the "everybody works hard" phase is a lot of pain and the winnings going to a few winners who sit at key points in the network.
    - bdbdjdndk 4y ago
      > more risk, more reward... Be safe means less return. You can't have both safe and lucrative. Taking a bigger risk could result in a bigger reward or also result in a bigger failure. Be safe doesn't necessarily mean less return, it means less return only if your risky bet pays off, if your risky bet fails you are likely better off yo have played it safe instead. Not sure what that has to do with what one is "really" worth as you put it.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        > Be safe doesn't necessarily mean less return Yeah, it does. You can see it in stocks & bonds every day. More risk means more potential upside. Less risk means less upside. Across all the investments. You pay more for a new car because it comes with less risk. You pay less for a used car because it might be a clunker.
    - ReflectedImage 4y ago
      Taking more risk is the same as saying start with a lot of money so you afford to take more risk.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      What do you consider “lucrative”? Even when you hear anecdotes on HN after accounting for survivorship bias about posters who have their small “lifestyle business” rarely do they talk about netting in the mid $150s - the amount that a fresh college grad can get by “grinding LeetCode and working for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) let alone the amount that you can get as a senior dev at the same question.
    - tw98521358 4y ago
      Not everyone is a polymath like you. Some people are best at a company because they either can’t handle the business end or handle the people management or possibly the technical end. You have to be good at all 3 to make it. Or just lots of luck
  - eastbound 4y ago
    Is it? How much deadweight does a company have to carry: Testers, PMs, consultants, CxO jets, they’re all useful but how much? How much money would you make if you could deliver a service while not putting 70% of the profit feeding the fruitflies? Statistically, you have much more chances of making money if you don’t have deadweight in your company. I’m making about 6x as a software founder as what I used to earn in a company.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      You consider testers dead weight?
  - granshaw 4y ago
    Depends what kind of business Making yourself a one man consultancy or contractor is also a business and has a decent success rate if you’re actually good A Saas business, startup, or similar? Yeah much lower probability But even in the latter case if you don’t have much living expenses it can make sense to make a modest living and enjoy your day to day much more. Bottom line as with so many things in life: don’t do it for the money
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Let’s talk about “consulting” and what the word actually means. First you have people who call themselves “consultants”. But they are really just staff augmentation. Those “consultants” are a dime a dozen and all in, can’t command a premium and would probably be better off working a full time job. You can find some just as good overseas and a lot cheaper. Then you have your actual strategic consultants who have “a seat at the table” and talk with people who control budgets. They can charge a premium. After working with both as a tech lead between 2016-2018 is what made me pivot to getting experience in “cloud” and specialize in “application modernization” - enterprise dev + cloud + “DevOps”. You have to both have a network and find companies willing to do C2C contracts. Those are also some of the first people to cut during a downturn. You saw that a lot right after Covid. I now work in the cloud consulting department at AWS. It’s a full time position and my compensation structure is like SDEs. I would hate to be constantly hustling for clients and take care of all of the other minutiae that I have an entire organization to handle.
      - granshaw 4y ago
        I agree with everything except the staff Aug part. Anecdotal I know but I myself found a subcontract(!) as my first solo gig that easily beat my previous fulltime jobs pay, which weren’t peanuts either. And this was just Rails web dev. My impression is that you can pretty easily beat fulltime pay doing fulltime staff aug, except faang salaries. Of course it helps if you have a spouse with health insurance. But in this new market, hard to say I guess
        4y ago
- tester457 4y ago
  And yet it's still not a good measure. Most businesses succeed on luck and connections. A person's worth is contingent on neither.
  - p0nce 4y ago
    No they rely on a product that has market-fit.
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    Observation about work groups. The groups profit is often being created by the couple of workers who are underpaid.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Successful businessmen make their own luck.
    - incone123 4y ago
      I read this as a euphemism for corruption.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        If you've convinced yourself you cannot succeed, you won't.
        tuyiown 4y ago
        Your fairy tales ignores all the people that tried correctly to build the their luck and yet ended in a worse situation by pursuing success based on incorrect world view. This is irresponsible.
        jasonkester 4y ago
        I’ve watched this argument play out many times here, and I can see you’re dedicated to winning it. Have a quick think about what will gain by successfully convincing the person trying to help you that success is impossible. Personally I’m really happy that I gave up making excuses and actually tried to improve my situation. Despite all your persuasive arguments and conviction that it’s all a pretty fantasy, it did in fact work. Here’s hoping we get to see you arguing the other side one day.
- eastbound 4y ago
  I did start my own business! Man I’m worth much more than in companies, plus I’m having fun creating software, and I now understand all the incentives around my work instead of having to play politics, which, as a computer guy, is much more comfortable. HOWEVER, many who have tried to launch products have not met success. But I was happy to try and fail too.
  - p0nce 4y ago
    I did start my own business, 8 years later I earn 2x what I was paid (not FAANG level by any means mind you), work perhaps 3x less, the work is a lot more enjoyable. I was a SE. You need to provision enough time (years) to hit market-fit, and plan for errors being made along the way.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ReflectedImage 4y ago
  Large chance element. There are reasons why VCs invest in 50 startups with the expectations that one will succeed. You probably need to spam business ideas and see if you can find one that gains traction.
hug 4y ago
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, That was a poem from a simpler time. Boss makes a thousand while I make a cent, And he’s got employees that can’t make rent.
- lioeters 4y ago
  Aw you got the late-stage capitalism blues..
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
josephd79 4y ago
I feel the same way.
kmlx 4y ago
i think the idea was that the business owner takes all the risk, while an employee can simply change jobs. at least that was the idea…
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lupire 4y ago
  Owner takes no risk. With they are already rich so losing the business doesn't matter, or they are operating an LLC on a loan that discharges in bankruptcy.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Most business owners actually do risk something, or at least give up possible guaranteed income to start their business.
  - tw98521358 4y ago
    Not usually. Llc is a bad tax structure so successful businesses don’t often use it. Also if you ever take a business loan you are personally on the hook for the whole thing. Personal guarantees are the worst and you can’t really get out of them
- adrr 4y ago
  Startup employees take the same amount of risk by giving up salary for equity. From a strictly odds perspective, most early stage startup employees are better off working a corporate job and pocketing and investing the delta in cash comp.
  - kmlx 4y ago
    yes, you are right, but startups are a niche in the grand scheme of things.
fsociety 4y ago
I have seen people pull crazy hours and then suddenly fired for performance reasons. It makes you look at the employee / employer relationship as a transaction. And within this transaction the boundaries are clearly defined. This job can be fulfilling and interesting, but unfortunately we are being squeezed to produce maximum orange juice. Companies dream of reaching and maintaining high growth rates and valuations. We should shift to valuing consistency over raw velocity. Long-term, I think this is the winning strategy.
LightG 4y ago
The funny thing is, I work in finance and see these decisions up close. The owners explaining their decisons to me while keeping a straight face. Make no mistake, owners (no matter how progressive, with very few exceptions) will screw you over if it improves the bottom line or their remuneration. It's one of the worst aspects of my role. Owners straight up lying to my face about why they do things.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> All the reward goes to the boss and not the employees. Make a mistake though and bosses are quick to point the finger directly at you. Credit and rewards for the higher ups, blame and discipline for the rank and file. Privatized gains, socialized losses.

WalterBright 4y ago

Start your own business and you'll find out how much you're really worth!

scarface74 4y ago
Statistically this is the worse advice possible.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Yes, it's risky running your own business. But if you want to make it big, it's the best route. More risk, more reward. If you want to play it safe and have someone else take the risk, be an employee. But safe means less return. You can't have both safe and lucrative.
  - monodeldiablo 4y ago
    I've known way too many lawyers, doctors, tech bros, and finance bros to believe in these silly platitudes. It might have once been the case that reward correlated closely to risk, but the economy has fundamentally changed faster than our attitudes. We believe that the US is still the meritocracy it was when we were young, but loads of economic studies show the US has steadily declined in this regard. More than ever, money circulates among the well-connected and wealthy. The real secret to getting rich today is to be born rich.
    - epups 4y ago
      The system doesn't have to be completely fair for it to work. Of course being born rich means you are likely going to be rich. However, if you're trying to climb the ladder, the advice you reject as a platitude is fundamentally true. Being an employee you're accepting a limited compensation and getting certain benefits in return, including safety. If you have marketable skills, nothing stops you from building up a business to sell these skills directly, at greater risk but also increased compensation if it succeeds. This is true for an enormous variety of fields, but especially tech.
      - nosianu 4y ago
        > the advice you reject as a platitude If you claim that, how about your own comment? And with > nothing stops you from building up a business to sell these skills directly you pretty much completely ignore what OP wrote. Sure, you can claim "technically correct" because indeed nobody is stopping you. You just leave out the statistics about the result. What is stopping people is looking at their actual chances, so sure, you can technically claim they are stopping themselves. Only that it's highly misleading. I left awell-paid software job in the US and returned to Germany, opened a small business with a friend after looking around. We barely managed to sell it off at cost, leaving the next person to find out it really did not work (he saw everything but thought he could do better). Then I did freelance jobs, very highly paid. Also extremely unsatisfying. The especially well-paying corporate jobs especially so, more often than not what I had worked on was discarded after I left, because of company merger or internal politics leading to a stop on the project. Now I'm in a business started by a former CTO of a famous successful startup, where he made lots of excellent connections and also has the brand name recognition now. I only do tech now. And no, you can't just easily connect to the right people. Some few one-in-ten-thousand people can do that. Most people have the necessary connections through birth or from previous employment. Creating them from scratch is incredibly hard. When giving general advice about something and not to somebody specific for a specific situation, I suggest to always scale your advice, from "works for anyone" to "works for everyone". Many of those suggestion fall apart right then and there. How about if we already are in a situation where everybody does their very best? It's just that the equilibrium created from that is what we have now. Because the system does not work when "everybody" does it. You get a dynamic equilibrium with lots of losers and a lot of effort just not being worth it. Despite starting out with everybody highly motivated and adventurous. So "try harder" IMO has already happened long ago and we now are in a much later state of the dynamic system. What happens in the "everybody works hard" phase is a lot of pain and the winnings going to a few winners who sit at key points in the network.
  - bdbdjdndk 4y ago
    > more risk, more reward... Be safe means less return. You can't have both safe and lucrative. Taking a bigger risk could result in a bigger reward or also result in a bigger failure. Be safe doesn't necessarily mean less return, it means less return only if your risky bet pays off, if your risky bet fails you are likely better off yo have played it safe instead. Not sure what that has to do with what one is "really" worth as you put it.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      > Be safe doesn't necessarily mean less return Yeah, it does. You can see it in stocks & bonds every day. More risk means more potential upside. Less risk means less upside. Across all the investments. You pay more for a new car because it comes with less risk. You pay less for a used car because it might be a clunker.
  - ReflectedImage 4y ago
    Taking more risk is the same as saying start with a lot of money so you afford to take more risk.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    What do you consider “lucrative”? Even when you hear anecdotes on HN after accounting for survivorship bias about posters who have their small “lifestyle business” rarely do they talk about netting in the mid $150s - the amount that a fresh college grad can get by “grinding LeetCode and working for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) let alone the amount that you can get as a senior dev at the same question.
  - tw98521358 4y ago
    Not everyone is a polymath like you. Some people are best at a company because they either can’t handle the business end or handle the people management or possibly the technical end. You have to be good at all 3 to make it. Or just lots of luck
- eastbound 4y ago
  Is it? How much deadweight does a company have to carry: Testers, PMs, consultants, CxO jets, they’re all useful but how much? How much money would you make if you could deliver a service while not putting 70% of the profit feeding the fruitflies? Statistically, you have much more chances of making money if you don’t have deadweight in your company. I’m making about 6x as a software founder as what I used to earn in a company.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    You consider testers dead weight?
- granshaw 4y ago
  Depends what kind of business Making yourself a one man consultancy or contractor is also a business and has a decent success rate if you’re actually good A Saas business, startup, or similar? Yeah much lower probability But even in the latter case if you don’t have much living expenses it can make sense to make a modest living and enjoy your day to day much more. Bottom line as with so many things in life: don’t do it for the money
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Let’s talk about “consulting” and what the word actually means. First you have people who call themselves “consultants”. But they are really just staff augmentation. Those “consultants” are a dime a dozen and all in, can’t command a premium and would probably be better off working a full time job. You can find some just as good overseas and a lot cheaper. Then you have your actual strategic consultants who have “a seat at the table” and talk with people who control budgets. They can charge a premium. After working with both as a tech lead between 2016-2018 is what made me pivot to getting experience in “cloud” and specialize in “application modernization” - enterprise dev + cloud + “DevOps”. You have to both have a network and find companies willing to do C2C contracts. Those are also some of the first people to cut during a downturn. You saw that a lot right after Covid. I now work in the cloud consulting department at AWS. It’s a full time position and my compensation structure is like SDEs. I would hate to be constantly hustling for clients and take care of all of the other minutiae that I have an entire organization to handle.
    - granshaw 4y ago
      I agree with everything except the staff Aug part. Anecdotal I know but I myself found a subcontract(!) as my first solo gig that easily beat my previous fulltime jobs pay, which weren’t peanuts either. And this was just Rails web dev. My impression is that you can pretty easily beat fulltime pay doing fulltime staff aug, except faang salaries. Of course it helps if you have a spouse with health insurance. But in this new market, hard to say I guess
      - 4y ago
tester457 4y ago
And yet it's still not a good measure. Most businesses succeed on luck and connections. A person's worth is contingent on neither.
- p0nce 4y ago
  No they rely on a product that has market-fit.
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  Observation about work groups. The groups profit is often being created by the couple of workers who are underpaid.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Successful businessmen make their own luck.
  - incone123 4y ago
    I read this as a euphemism for corruption.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      If you've convinced yourself you cannot succeed, you won't.
      - tuyiown 4y ago
        Your fairy tales ignores all the people that tried correctly to build the their luck and yet ended in a worse situation by pursuing success based on incorrect world view. This is irresponsible.
        jasonkester 4y ago
        I’ve watched this argument play out many times here, and I can see you’re dedicated to winning it. Have a quick think about what will gain by successfully convincing the person trying to help you that success is impossible. Personally I’m really happy that I gave up making excuses and actually tried to improve my situation. Despite all your persuasive arguments and conviction that it’s all a pretty fantasy, it did in fact work. Here’s hoping we get to see you arguing the other side one day.
eastbound 4y ago
I did start my own business! Man I’m worth much more than in companies, plus I’m having fun creating software, and I now understand all the incentives around my work instead of having to play politics, which, as a computer guy, is much more comfortable. HOWEVER, many who have tried to launch products have not met success. But I was happy to try and fail too.
- p0nce 4y ago
  I did start my own business, 8 years later I earn 2x what I was paid (not FAANG level by any means mind you), work perhaps 3x less, the work is a lot more enjoyable. I was a SE. You need to provision enough time (years) to hit market-fit, and plan for errors being made along the way.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ReflectedImage 4y ago
Large chance element. There are reasons why VCs invest in 50 startups with the expectations that one will succeed. You probably need to spam business ideas and see if you can find one that gains traction.

hug 4y ago

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, That was a poem from a simpler time. Boss makes a thousand while I make a cent, And he’s got employees that can’t make rent.

lioeters 4y ago
Aw you got the late-stage capitalism blues..
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

josephd79 4y ago

I feel the same way.

kmlx 4y ago

i think the idea was that the business owner takes all the risk, while an employee can simply change jobs. at least that was the idea…

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lupire 4y ago
Owner takes no risk. With they are already rich so losing the business doesn't matter, or they are operating an LLC on a loan that discharges in bankruptcy.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Most business owners actually do risk something, or at least give up possible guaranteed income to start their business.
- tw98521358 4y ago
  Not usually. Llc is a bad tax structure so successful businesses don’t often use it. Also if you ever take a business loan you are personally on the hook for the whole thing. Personal guarantees are the worst and you can’t really get out of them
adrr 4y ago
Startup employees take the same amount of risk by giving up salary for equity. From a strictly odds perspective, most early stage startup employees are better off working a corporate job and pocketing and investing the delta in cash comp.
- kmlx 4y ago
  yes, you are right, but startups are a niche in the grand scheme of things.

fsociety 4y ago

I have seen people pull crazy hours and then suddenly fired for performance reasons. It makes you look at the employee / employer relationship as a transaction. And within this transaction the boundaries are clearly defined. This job can be fulfilling and interesting, but unfortunately we are being squeezed to produce maximum orange juice. Companies dream of reaching and maintaining high growth rates and valuations. We should shift to valuing consistency over raw velocity. Long-term, I think this is the winning strategy.

LightG 4y ago

The funny thing is, I work in finance and see these decisions up close. The owners explaining their decisons to me while keeping a straight face. Make no mistake, owners (no matter how progressive, with very few exceptions) will screw you over if it improves the bottom line or their remuneration. It's one of the worst aspects of my role. Owners straight up lying to my face about why they do things.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> All the reward goes to the boss and not the employees. Make a mistake though and bosses are quick to point the finger directly at you. Credit and rewards for the higher ups, blame and discipline for the rank and file. Privatized gains, socialized losses.