

Thoughts on work and business by a just-hired, fledgling entrepreneur - cookiecaper

I've been thinking about my situation lately and wondered if HN had any input into it.<p>About a year and a half ago, I quit my job as a .NET developer to do full-time freelancing. I was attracted by setting my own hours, controlling my workflow, and the potential money involved, but I was most attracted by the freedom to arrange my day in whatever order was convenient and viable. I got a job with a well-funded local corporation whose IT manager decided he was unhappy with my overall performance and therefore not required to pay me. This was interesting, and I learned some good things from it (and by the way, my performance was on the level for what it was; I made it clear to the dude that I was brand new to Ruby and Rails and apparently he felt that meant I should have significant progress implemented within four days).<p>This wasn't my long-term plan ... I've never been a fan of working for the man, and freelancing allowed more leeway, but at its core it was the same; it required a consistent amount of work to be performed indefinitely in order to supply for my person and my family. That's not what I want; I don't want to bondsman this way, I need to be free to do what I want without having to worry about where the money will come.<p>This is a thing that I quite hate: if you want to sustain yourself, you have to trade your whole life to do it. It's eight hours a day, almost completely absolutely and rigidly, five days a week, for forty-sixty years until one saves sufficiently amidst it all to retire. That kind of life is anathema to me; eight hours a day of work (8-12 and 1-~5:30), six-eight hours for every other waking activity (~5:31-12), and then you have to sleep if you don't expect to pass at work (and therefore get fired). That's really not a fair trade.<p>I've had various ideas to attain passive income and become a free person. I've written a music site called Rhythm Reborn; there's a private demo available if anyone's interested in looking at it. I know that music sites are a dime a dozen, but this one has a different approach, and serves as a one-stop hub for all music; we even provide facility for bands to sign up and sell their wares, no label or bigwig approval necessary, along with local and regional features, and the whole thing is pretty cool. It's been ready for a soft launch for the last year or so, but my life has been too sad to do much; my love had left me alone, and I was intently focused on her, to the detriment of these endeavors. I was alright as long as I was able to help us, and I wanted to get this site up, and even reached out to potential users, but the response was flat and my emotional status was far too gloomy to carry through the discouragement. This thing could be really cool, but it's such an investment for the probable outcome of failure. If someone wants to buy the [antiquated, hit-and-miss, PHP] codebase for several hundred thousand dollars, let me know.<p>In summer, I started a general IT consultancy firm, but it didn't go very far, mostly for the same reason.<p>I've made three hundred dollars from the combination of these enterprises. I lived off of them for a year, with one or two spot jobs from Robert Half. This was a bad year, and I actually lived off of other people, not three hundred dollars.<p>I recently met and married my wife, and now I'm facing different challenges; I'm much better off than I was, but I can't stand working. I was recently hired at a local healthcare company, and this was good for a few weeks, but the novelty is far worn now. I wake up every morning and _dread_ going into that office; the first few weeks were good because I was shielded from the politics, my boss seemed cooler than he is, we were able to explore and play with Python a good amount, and so on -- that's all gone now. The employees there live in fear of the CEO, who seems bipolar; an accountant came in to warn us of the boss's potential presence with the line "Just to be safe; you never know if he'll laugh or fire you". He's demanding and tactless, and I'm honestly scared to interact with him. He continually contradicts himself but he'd fire anyone who brought this to his attention; a VP was chastised recently for developing a money-generating idea that wasn't directly under his purview. My immediate supervisor is just out of college and _easily_ persuaded; today marks the third change of frameworks, setting us back at least two weeks in a four-month timeline. Weekends are practically negligible, it's not nearly enough time to recover from the beating one endures during the week, and they're so full of leftover things that my servitude precludes that it's not really a rest anyway.<p>It's not bearable. I honestly think I'll die very prematurely if I can't figure something else out; homelessness and drifting will kill me and my wife while I attempt to get businesses off the ground, and that's not an option, and working eight hours a day at that awful place is just so utterly demoralizing. It seems like you can't win.<p>Well, actually, it seems kind of like only those out to make a fast buck can win. I've spent years attempting to develop good products while parrotsecrets.com's purveyor collects $400k/year on something sloppy and simple. AdSense and domain squatters make $15k/month while people who put real care and effort into their products wallow, and I'm sure there are people that are _actually_ passionate about parrots and have spent years cultivating their work, I'm sure there are people like that losing out to someone who spent a couple weeks throwing together a crappy eBook and salesletter about parrots. It's sad and depressing.<p>I've thought for a long time that this life, these artificial lives we've built for ourselves centered around cubicles and corporate cultures and other unnatural environments, are a big contributor to the developed world's dependence on SSRIs, but it just struck me this weekend what a major role it probably plays. Everyone in the West, those living in these diluted, sickening corporate-heartless-driven lives, needs to be sedated because a normal person just can't swallow the office job reality; no one cares about your opinion, days spent in tedious agony waiting for the hours wherein you're missing the sunshine and life to drone by, always kept down, discarded; the onerous slog, the awful drag of the workday -- it's just not something that a functional person finds kosher. People have to be doped up to accept this kind of culture.<p>It's not goal-oriented; it's a false construct and I'm not really sure how it entered general acceptability, but it's not cool. I'm not down with being glued to a chair, missing prime daylight hours, just because the people running my company couldn't find a real way to quantify the work they're paying for.<p>I _have_ to find a way out of this. I can't live this way, seriously. I fully expect death before forty if I can't determine a way to break this cycle.<p>I'm not sure exactly where I felt this would attain a natural and concise cohesion when I started, but I think I've about exhausted my comments and thoughts for now. I appreciate the outlet, even if this goes unread, and all comments are deeply welcomed. Thank you everyone.
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nostrademons
It's kind of an unfortunate fact of life that high rewards require high risk,
and high risk requires frequent failure. There's basically a continuum between
doing what you're told, never taking on any risk, and collecting a steady
paycheck, or shooting for the moon at every chance and falling on your face
each time.

FWIW, I had the same sort of existential crisis when I was about 13, and it
was so depressing I almost wanted to kill myself. However, the real working
world is _not_ (always) that bad. I found it helpful to think of every job as
a learning experience. When you've milked it for everything it's worth, move
on and find a new job. If you don't have any possible new jobs, quit and found
a company, take it as far as you can possibly go, and if that's not far
enough, go and get another job that'll let you work on the reasons you failed
as an entrepreneur.

This, BTW, is false:

"It's eight hours a day, almost completely absolutely and rigidly, five days a
week, for forty-sixty years until one saves sufficiently amidst it all to
retire."

Think about it this way: there are grad students that live reasonably
comfortably on $25k/year. A decent computer programmer can easily pull in
$75k/year. So for every year you work, you are "buying" two years of freedom,
if you're willing to live like a grad student. Work for a couple years, build
up skills, then quit and do what you want with your savings.

I know a bunch of people who've put this to really great use. I funded my
first startup - which I spent about 15 months full-time on - entirely with
savings from a couple years I spent at a financial software startup. A friend
of mine is a grad student in physics, and managed to save $20K on a grad
student salary (think about that for a second: making $25k/year and saving
$10k/year of it), then worked as a baker's apprentice for 6 months. An
innkeeper I once met worked in Silicon Valley for about 15-20 years, lived
like grad students with his wife and son, and then bought a sailboat, sailed
around the world, finally settled in Seward, Alaska, and bought an inn with
their savings.

The whole point of money is that you have a _choice_ of what you want to spend
it on. You can buy time as easily as you can buy things.

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larrykubin
Life is not that complicated. You get up, you go to work, eat three meals, you
take one good shit and you go back to bed. What’s the fucking mystery?! -
George Carlin

Seriously though, the freelancing thing isn't all that hard. Get really good
with a particular framework or get good at customizing your favorite open
source software or building a certain type of site. Find a few good clients
who consistently have projects who are willing to pay you around a 100 an
hour, work about 20 hours a week, keep your expenses low, live in Texas and
you'll have all kinds of free time and money to support yourself. It takes a
while to find good paying clients. Sure, freelancing may not be ideal, but
ultimately you need some income to pay the bills while you are developing your
passive income source.

Unless there's more to the story, it sounds like you had a bad experience with
one client, took on a project using a framework you weren't experienced with,
didn't finish executing on a music site, and are now sad and talking about
dying at the age of forty. From the age poll, it looks like you are 21. You
have all kinds of time and it will probably take many years and lots more hard
work to get where you want to be, and yes, it might even require working a
9-to-5 for a while. Keep chipping away.

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pmq
ISBN-10: 0887307280 ISBN-10: 0446677450

Read. Learn. Implement.

Contrary to popular belief, you are not the only soul born into the neo-
feudalist slavery of corporate America. Less than 10% escape within one
generation; you may need to develop a multi-generational plan. But if you
don't, nobody will. Nobody cares as much as you do.

You may not have written the rules, but you must learn to play by them if you
are to succeed in life. In truth, the laws are written against employees,
which is why you have correctly identified you must become an entrepreneur to
be truly free.

Don't give in. Don't give up. Maintain an open mind. Count your blessings.
Break the yoke of bondage for yourself and others.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
can we please try to add more rhetoric and emotionally charged words please?
As soon as I get a time-machine people like you are getting dropped off in
actual slavery days.

