This makes me feel pretty uncomfortable - maybe it's the sense of superiority the author puts across. A couple of the more irritating snippets:
In a regular 9-5 job you’re selling your time to an employer
Or, to look at it another way, you are collaborating with a number of colleagues to develop and sell software, and you are all sharing the income. See how that's the same thing, phrased differently? Attitude matters.
You can do whatever you want now. Everything is under your control. It’s not dependent on your boss, co-workers, or other departments. You decide what projects to work on. You decide when you want to work on them. You even decide whether or not you want to get out of bed every day.
You're not dependent on anything - except your customers or clients, your investors, your employees, third parties… the list goes on. Sure, you could choose to stay in bed, or leave for a week and do no work - but you'd have to consider what the implications would be for your services, your family, staff and so on. Sometimes, the illusion of freedom is more dangerous.
You get to put all your time and effort into only things you’re truly passionate about.
Nope - all of the grunt work still has to be done. Need a stupid feature for a large client? You'll probably be doing it. And you'll be doing all of that sysadmin stuff you hate too.
Selling your time for money to an employer will put a cap on the amount of money you can make... You are generating more money for their business than they’re paying you. That’s the only way they can run a profitable business. Which means you’re getting screwed.
It's a trade-off, isn't it? I think we can all accept that the self-employed will keep more of the value they generate. But the other side of the coin is that they're exposed to more risk. Not a bad trade-off, especially if you've got a family.
Most of the software you write at a company doesn’t ever ship.
I can count on one hand the number of features I've ever developed which didn't ship, and quickly. Maybe if you work at a dysfunctional company, this could be the case.
tl;dr: don't take a job at a rubbish company you're not interested in. Enjoy what you do - have you seen what the market is like for "developer time" recently? You can have your pick of companies, developing software for almost any imaginable market, and earn an impressive salary doing it.
Okay, maybe this works for you - and that's great, I'm all behind people finding work that suits their lifestyles. But I've got an awesome 9–5 job, where I am paid very well to work with great people on interesting products. There are a lot of other people in that situation, and I don't think that it's quite a clear-cut as the author makes out.
> In a regular 9-5 job you’re selling your time to an employer
> Or, to look at it another way, you are collaborating with a number of colleagues to develop and sell software, and you are all sharing the income. See how that's the same thing, phrased differently?
But it is clearly not the same thing phrased differently. The first is an accurate description of a wage labor relationship, the latter is an accurate description of the relation between members of a labor cooperative. You can imagine that the latter relationship is the case when you are in the former relationship, but self-delusion probably isn't useful or healthy in the long term.
> But it is clearly not the same thing phrased differently. The first is an accurate description of a wage labor relationship, the latter is an accurate description of the relation between members of a labor cooperative. You can imagine that the latter relationship is the case when you are in the former relationship, but self-delusion probably isn't useful or healthy in the long term.
I disagree that this is self-delusion, and that's a thoroughly unhelpful attitude - you are just choosing to emphasise a different set of facts, which does not invalidate the other.
There are absolutely loads of jobs out there for a talented developer at this point in time. You can essentially select any team you want, and name your price - the upshot is that this moves so much power away from employers that the relationship is pretty far away from wage slavery.
Yes, I find this kind of self deception about the nature of a job much more disturbing than having a negative attitude about having someone else tell you what to do and when to do it. You're collaborating with colleagues to build software for someone else to sell, over which you retain no rights, and you receive a flat rate in the face of growing profits.
That's the result if you work for a bad team, sure. In my case, I develop software that my colleagues sell and support (and they're nice guys.) I have input into what we build and how we do it. Yeah, I don't retain the rights, but I do get to publish a bit of open-source. And I know first-hand that I'm not alone in having a good working environment with an employer.
Your argument seem to be that it's better to be in charge - and sure, I think we'd all ultimately like that. But that comes with costs—in some cases, pretty large ones—and it's a mistake to gloss over them so lightly.
> That's the result if you work for a bad team, sure.
It's the result if you work for wage labor, period. You're not "sharing the profits", you're paid a negotiated rent for your time which is not dependent on the profits. Even if you get some kind of equity or profit-sharing component of your compensation, the basic relationship is still of time rent.
> And I know first-hand that I'm not alone in having a good working environment with an employer.
Having a good working environment with an employer doesn't change the basic relationship from "selling time to an employer" to "sharing the income", in the same way that having a good working environment with a slave master -- which undoubtedly there were slaves who did -- doesn't change the relationship from "being someone else's chattel" to "selling time to an employer".
And if you have to tell yourself a comforting lie about what the basic nature of the relationship is to be happy about it, I think that may be a signal that the "good working environment" isn't so good.
If you are really happy with what the relationship is, that you wouldn't need to misrepresent it.
>And if you have to tell yourself a comforting lie about what the basic nature of the relationship is to be happy about it, I think that may be a signal that the "good working environment" isn't so good.
Okay - I'll bow out here. I think you've probably latched on to a minor detail that's not really relevant — my main point being that focusing on "selling time to an employer" is only one interpretation of the employee-employer relationship. Maybe I could have described it as "charging a fixed rate to a client and doing interesting research" – the point is, in a market such as the current one for software developers, employment is as much under the control of the employee as the employer.
To be clear, I don't have any intention of misrepresenting or lying about my work environment, so please don't make such assumptions.
Actually the selling time version is not really accurate either. What you're selling is the product of your time and skill. And if you substitute "income" for "part of the income," well, the grandparent's phrasing is an accurate description of what is happening (in that no part of the description is untrue). You my prefer to emphasize a different set of facts, but that doesn't mean you get to say a true thing is not true.
I agree there are many benefits to having a job. I met and worked with some of the smartest people at my job. They all left to start their own company.
That doesn't mean there's no value in continuing to have a job. I just want to be clear that there are other options. In fact, 88 out of the 95 developers I know who have jobs are looking for those other options. I wrote this article for those 88 people.
There's nothing at all actionable about your article. Why bother when it just says "Hey do this thing I did" but without any further details or pointers?
I mean, it's really cool you did that, but what I've read of your blog is entirely fluff.
In a regular 9-5 job you’re selling your time to an employer
Or, to look at it another way, you are collaborating with a number of colleagues to develop and sell software, and you are all sharing the income. See how that's the same thing, phrased differently? Attitude matters.
You can do whatever you want now. Everything is under your control. It’s not dependent on your boss, co-workers, or other departments. You decide what projects to work on. You decide when you want to work on them. You even decide whether or not you want to get out of bed every day.
You're not dependent on anything - except your customers or clients, your investors, your employees, third parties… the list goes on. Sure, you could choose to stay in bed, or leave for a week and do no work - but you'd have to consider what the implications would be for your services, your family, staff and so on. Sometimes, the illusion of freedom is more dangerous.
You get to put all your time and effort into only things you’re truly passionate about.
Nope - all of the grunt work still has to be done. Need a stupid feature for a large client? You'll probably be doing it. And you'll be doing all of that sysadmin stuff you hate too.
Selling your time for money to an employer will put a cap on the amount of money you can make... You are generating more money for their business than they’re paying you. That’s the only way they can run a profitable business. Which means you’re getting screwed.
It's a trade-off, isn't it? I think we can all accept that the self-employed will keep more of the value they generate. But the other side of the coin is that they're exposed to more risk. Not a bad trade-off, especially if you've got a family.
Most of the software you write at a company doesn’t ever ship.
I can count on one hand the number of features I've ever developed which didn't ship, and quickly. Maybe if you work at a dysfunctional company, this could be the case.
tl;dr: don't take a job at a rubbish company you're not interested in. Enjoy what you do - have you seen what the market is like for "developer time" recently? You can have your pick of companies, developing software for almost any imaginable market, and earn an impressive salary doing it.
Okay, maybe this works for you - and that's great, I'm all behind people finding work that suits their lifestyles. But I've got an awesome 9–5 job, where I am paid very well to work with great people on interesting products. There are a lot of other people in that situation, and I don't think that it's quite a clear-cut as the author makes out.