

Risk it When You're Young - sophmonroe
http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2010/july/207174.html

======
patio11
There is nothing wrong with a year or three in industry. You'll be a _much_
better coder, get exposed to problem domains outside the typical purview of
twenty-something white and Asian males, build contacts, and improve your soft
skills such as how to wear a suit and talk to people older than you outside of
the teacher/student relationship. These things are enormously valuable.

If you're worried about getting spoiled by the huge paychecks, I recommend
being a Japanese salaryman. We would never dream of inconveniencing you in
that fashion. _grins_ Seriously though, if you put $4k a month towards your
student loans (or a savings account you solemnly promise not to touch) your
$80k salary will feel like, what, $20k or so after the tax differential?

~~~
Tichy
I wanted to "just try the industry for a year" before going back to school to
do a PhD. I have ended up being a "Java Enterprise Douchebag" for years :-(

I strongly advise against trying a normal job. Everything you could learn you
could learn faster by simply watching the movie "Office Space".

~~~
nirav
Agree with your sentiments on enterprise douchbaggery, you are probably
undervaluing what you have learned: You still have a chance to learn how to
milk the enterprise when roles are reversed.

------
zx77
Sure, risk it when you're young, but don't think that the older you get the
less risks you should take. It's just the opposite. The "old dogs, new tricks"
adage is a fallacy designed to keep people in line. Don't believe it! Take
risks when you're young, when you're middle-aged, and when you're old!

~~~
philk
I think you should actually take more risks as you get older because you have
a reduced amount of time to achieve things.

------
jswinghammer
I'm 30 now and just getting going on this. My startup is just starting to get
some nice sales traction.

I've never really understood the assessment of risk that people apply to
starting a company. If my company fails when I start full time on it then I'll
get a job in a week tops unless I decide to take some time off. My family
won't ever notice the difference except when I have to get the insurance
information changed with our doctors.

I have a wife who stays home with our daughter and another kid on the way.
Maybe I'm delusional but it really doesn't seem very risky to me.

~~~
keeptrying
What insurance did you change to for the startup?

~~~
dreepers10
For those of us in the US and over 30, I believe the $1600/mo health insurance
bill (which may or may not cover everything for a family) is the single
riskiest part of leaving the corp world, not the paycheck. It will likely stay
this way for the next few years until the health reform takes effect.

------
iamnot
[anonymously posted; skip to paragraph 9 for TL; DR.]

I cannot concur enough. I, perhaps, within me, have an entrepreneurial spirit.
However, I perhaps am different than most. I did not see any way to get into
any industry at all where I was: I got sucked into a game design curriculum
believing that since a big-name game company was helping with the structure,
my community college would be able to differentiate.

I ended up dropping out, selling my car, and moving six states north. I had no
idea what I was going to do. I knew a little bit of CSS, a little bit of HTML,
and a smattering of JavaScript - mostly gathered from cut-and-pastes. I had
been programming since I was six (starting with qBasic on my father's Gateway
machine - ostensibly, to cheat on qBricks: I had asked my father how to cheat,
and he handed me a qBasic manual. Off and on I'd programmed: lego logo
[robotics] in secondary school; computer science through AP comp sci in high
school, covering things as esoteric - back then, to me - as red/black trees).

But the only applicable knowledge I knew was how to make a site look good
given a mockup.

After that diatribe, having not gone through explicit training: I wish I had.
I do not know data structures, algorithms, and parsing the way I wish I did -
the best I did is generate parsing trees based on math input (up to parens -
no exponents there). The best datastructure I built was a red-black tree for
my final AP comp-sci grade: I never took the AP test. I may have kicked ass
with my sorting algorithm a year earlier (dad's book, Dragon Compiler Design,
helped - after he pointed me to a certain chapter), but I had barely a grasp
of what was going on in that class.

I have not taken a math course higher than college algrebra. Ask me to find
dx/xy given y=x^2 and I can barely do it: I've been teaching myselve calculus
over the past two months. It's been slow. Thank goodness for 'calculus made
easy' - a HN recommendation.

I could wax poetic about what I might have done or what I might have been. But
I won't.

You have had education I wish I had had, in retrospect. I have been
programming JavaScript (and studying aspects of functional programming I had
never even heard mention of 'til Hacker News) in a professional capacity since
I left (forcefully: I kept falling asleep building not-even-agency-of-record
landing pages for online university direct marketing; thankfully, my manager
recognized how bored I was in the role) my first position here.

I have worked for companies large and small. I have ideas I'm sure I could
never execute. But I am positive - and this is the [return to the beginning
for the TL; DR]

TL;DR: I am positive I would not serve the quality of code I do now, had it
not been for peers (mostly superiors) reviewing my code and commenting on how
it could be done better. This had never happened during school, as we were all
rushing to complete our assignments on time. This only happened when I was
working on a team that recognized that the work I was doing was valuable. And
that I was worth schooling on style, format, and efficiency.

I may be a (community! I'd started for an associates in arts - english!!)
college drop-out, but everything I've learned being a full-time front-end
(again: mostly JavaScript) developer has been surpassed again and again by
what I learned behind the desk. I don't think I would be the developer I am
now without some/most of the lessons taught to me. But I _know_ I would not be
the developer I am now without the peer involvement encouraged by working on a
team populated by programmers much, _much_ more knowledgeable than I.

Bottom line? Wish I would've gone to school, but shit I've learned
professionally is invaluable. Don't underestimate it, and don't think
'apprenticing' isn't worth shit. Because it is.

------
moolave
Definitely do the things that you're passionate about, because you will only
end up regretting and coming up with those "what-if" questions everyday. Do it
anyway.

They WePay founders are right in a way. You do give up (or do not adapt) a
certain lifestyle if you do choose the entrepreneurial path, but the long-term
rewards are endless.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I agree. As they say "In 10 years you will regret more things you have not
done than things you have"

~~~
billswift
"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the
things we did not do that is inconsolable." - - Sydney Harris

And I vaguely remember seeing another similar quote from Churchill.

------
awt
The sooner you risk it, the sooner you'll start learning.

------
kevinbluer
Steve Hafner (founder of Expedia, Kayak) sums it up perfectly with the theory
of a personal Drag Coefficient:

<http://startupatwork.org/video/concept-of-drag-coefficients/>

------
SwellJoe
This applies to almost everyone: It will never be cheaper than it is today.

The older you get, the more responsibilities you take on. When you have a
mortgage, a wife, kids, and car loans, you have to make your startup pay
really fast. When you have little debt, can crash on your parents couch (if
needed), and drive a crappy old car that is paid for, you can take extreme
risks, and the payback can be tiny for the first few months or even a couple
of years.

~~~
InclinedPlane
If you always live at the bleeding edge of your means then this is true.
You'll set yourself up on a treadmill of expenses and never get off.

However, if you live well within your means and you make smart financial
decisions then the reverse is true. Instead of building your debt you'll build
up your savings and your assets. Someone who's just getting out of college and
needs to spend money buying basic household goods, an automobile, and needs to
pay down their student loans is in a much worse position than someone with
savings who doesn't need to pay rent or a car payment because they've already
paid off their mortgage and their cars.

------
rubashov
I don't think it's responsible to advise people with negative cash to take big
risks. Risk is for people with no debt and a year or two of living expenses in
cash.

~~~
qq66
If you would truly be homeless if you went bankrupt, then yes, it's not
prudent.

But many of the people who would be in this position have a safety net if
things go bad. They can default on their debt, move in with a friend or
relative, and get a job and get back on their feet.

~~~
eli_s
I'm kind of shocked at how casually you say 'They can default on their debt'.
What a fcked up attitude.

~~~
necrecious
I thought one of the biggest advantage of US financial system is for people to
take risks with their business but can fail without a huge hit on their
future, i.e. bankruptcy.

Without this attitude, you'll have people that is a lot more hesitant to start
a business.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, there's been some research on this, showing a positive relationship
between how "forgiving" a country's personal bankruptcy laws are and the level
of entrepreneurship in that country:
<http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/ahn008v1>

