I'm happy for the author and wish him success. But the assumption that being a good developer can make you rich is misleading.<p>Reading PG may create the impression that building a successful company is an engineering-like process, deterministic and repeatable. It is not. It's a chaotic process that cannot be reliably planned. Thinking "Zuckerberg coded a PHP app, I can code a PHP app" is like thinking "That old lady bought a lottery ticket. I can buy a lottery ticket.."<p>Building a smaller business that supports a few people is a different story (and a worthy goal unto itself). But that's not "sitting on a goldmine".<p>EDIT: Just wanted to add I have huge respect for this guy, building a business while supporting a family. My beef, such as it is, is with simplistic picture of startups often painted in HN. The actual people giving it a go, you have to respect.
It's interesting, when Hacker News first started (and was called "Startup News"), I used to make ra-ra comments like this all the time. Like the author, I had little practical experience in actually succeeding at entrepreneurship. And yet they'd be voted up <i>really high</i>. Once in a while, some old salt like, say, the guy who founded Digg or the guy who founded Symbolics would reply and say "You're naive and ignorant. You won't think so poorly of jobs once you've run your own company for a while" (in nicer terms, of course). But by and large, Startup News loved wild-eyed optimism.<p>Now, the vast majority of comments hold that same sort of "Well, it's more complicated than that, and I'm quite happy with my 9-5" view. Sometimes even my own.<p>I wonder if that's representative of the economy changing, or if it's representative of the site's audience changing. If it's the former, maybe it means that now is a good time to found a startup.
I have an excellent job where I get to work with lovely people and solve interesting problems. I'll leave the admin, business development & marketing to folks who are better skilled at such things for now, thank you very much.
For me, the answer is that the large organization I'm working for actually lets me have a larger impact than I could likely have working on my own.<p>So long as my debit card keeps working and I keep building up savings, the quantity of compensation doesn't matter too much to me. What matters to me is how much I positively impact the world, and on that front improving a mature product with a ton of users has a much bigger bang for the buck than scratching small itches in small niches, no matter how profitable they might end up being.
"No, seriously, a @#$% goldmine! Never in modern history has it been so easy to create something from scratch, with little or no capital and a marketing model that is limited only by your imagination."<p>ie, high supply. Lots of competition.<p>It's getting to be like writing novels. Lots of people do it. The barriers to entry are low. But few can make a living at it.
For me, the answer is: I like programming. If I did my own thing, I'd have to do all that other non-programming crap, too. Suddenly I wouldn't be a programmer anymore. Meh.
If I really wanted to, sure I could scrounge up the extra free time to pursue my ideas. But then my entire life would be my day job and my side project, at the expense of absolutely everything else.<p>There is nothing wrong with that if that is what is important to you. But I also value friendships, exercise, reading, relaxing, cooking, etc. A nice balanced life is crucial for good health and well being. I would argue for most people, the cost of completely throwing away all balance in your life would not match the reward that your product would bring once launched.
Protip: if you're a founder or aspiring to start a company that may one day employ others, try not to write blog posts that question why anyone would ever work for you.
I find that these really strong "screw employment!" kind of opinions like this tend to come from people who haven't really been successful following the path they espouse — it's always "aspiring" entrepreneurs, as this writer puts it. Either this kind of attitude is unhelpful or reality tends to temper it.
It is interesting how much this blog post is not relevant to my status.
I always wanted to create my own startup, and nearly always had pet projects for this purpose on the side. It is no news to me that starting a startup is a cool thing.
I dont' watch TV, and I don't need a Palsma TV. But I have a family to care about, I live in a quite poor country and I need a day job.
I think I am a good developer, but I don't think my knowledge is a goldmine. They pay approximately $2000 per month for even very very good developers in my country. This is not a goldmine.
I made 3 projects to the sellable product phase in my life, and all failed.
The first was too ambitious and I could not keep up with competitors like google. (natural language translation from english to my mother language)
The second was an Indie game: The critics said it was done professionally, but it was not especially playable, it was not fun enough.
The third was not ambitious enough: This was a small software for the consumer market (language learning), It got lost amongst the thousands of small shareware tools on download.com and also there were free products which were partially competitors.<p>I start to lose my energy. (Having a boring day job for years is not fun.) Of course I build something again on the side. I think it is a better idea than the previous ones. I cannot stop. But I will never ever will have the optimism like the OP.
Wow, 20 hours? Personally I don't think I can realistically create much on the side with a full time job. I tend to be extremely tired at the end of the work day. So I think my only option is to quit my job again :-(<p>Maybe it is also my sleeping patterns just don't align with jobs. Today I simply had to sleep around 9pm (home from the job at 8). Slept till perhaps 11pm. Now I feel reasonably fit, but to be at the office in time, it is time to go to bed.<p>I experience this kind of pattern frequently.<p>In fact I sometimes wonder if the biggest mistake of my life was trying to adapt to other people's schedules (also girl-friends who want to go to bed "early" etc). Thereby I wasted most of my productive hours.<p>My typical work day at the office is painful because I tend to be tired...
I was a full-time programmer. The job I was in was draining my energy and programming became really boring. While I had the job, I worked on the side developing websites. I also had a bunch of pet-projects for fun - hopefully people will use them and I can earn more money. But fast forward a few years, programming wasn't fun anymore. I was too tired to finish my projects.<p>So, I quit my job and moved to a non-programming job. The pay as of now, is not that high, but I am happier. The job is fairly easy on the brain. That means less stress and I have more time to think while I am at home coding my personal project.<p>Maybe my programming job sucked or it was something else. I could go on like this until I finish my personal project.
I do contracting to pay the bills while I build my own web app. It is difficult but by working 80 hours a week I'm making progress. Hopefully the sacrifices I have made are worth it in the end.
"Myth #1: I don’t have any time"<p>If you think this is a myth, you need to re-examine what you want from life. Everyone needs time to relax. Playing games, surfing the web, going to the gym... Everyone does it differently, but everyone needs it.<p>You can give up your 'free time' for a while and work on something, but it will eventually crash in on you and you will start hating your life.<p>I have too many hobbies. Every once in a while, my hobbies will start to run my life and I'll start getting depressed. When that happens, I stop and decide which of them are things I really want to do, and which aren't. I prioritize my hobbies. That relieves the stress again and I can relax.<p>If you can really relax while working on a programming project, then go ahead. But when it starts to stress you out due to a deadline or other outside influence, it stops being fun and starts stressing you out.<p>Being stressed out will affect everything you do and it will all go down in flames.<p>I have a few programming projects that I'm working on in my spare time. Nobody knows about them, so there's no pressure to finish them. I just have fun with them and work on them at my leisure. As soon as I release them to the world, they are going to get very stressful. Yes, someone else might think of the same ideas first and beat me to it, but I'm taking my time, doing it right, and I'll release when it's convenient for me. If that turns into something big, I can quit my day job. If not, not.
Colleagues. I get to meet and work with a bunch of interesting and talented people, without asking them to marry me (which is what many here likens the co-founder experience to).<p>Also, my employer has a quite significant sales and client management staff. I don't enjoy sales or client management much, and consequently I'm not good at it (or maybe it's the other way around), so I'm happier when other people do that for me.<p>I might do a start-up one day. But until then, this is a pretty sweet deal.
Reminds me of C.S. Forester's memoirs about writers. Forester found it easy to create plot ideas but hadn't enough time to write all of them. He had (later successful) friends who, once given a plot, could quickly flesh out a full story. They, on the other hand, had little ability to conceive plots! So he passed ideas to them and they did the rest.<p>We're all different. Some can see all aspects of a project, others can beautifully manage the startup, some can hone a roughly-hewn project to perfection, and still others can document a project beautifully. They're all useful.<p>Not everyone can do everything well, nor is it necessary. Man is a social animal for a reason: groups can do things that no single man could do.
Just cos you can write code doesn't mean you can start a business:<p>1) You need a decent idea. This is the "cheapest" bit, and actually even this is quite hard. what businesses or consumers want (and how they want it) is usually quite different to what you'd naively think.<p>2) Can you really execute it well? Most ideas will require more than the skill set of one developer.<p>3) Do you have a route to market? This is the hardest. You can have the best executed product in the world, if you've got no way of selling it it's worthless. And this doesn't just mean oh I'm going to sell it to telcos - it means which telcos, and WHO at these telcos? Are you going to be cold-calling a massive company trying to find the right person to speak to about your product? (if so, good luck!)<p>4) Are you prepared to work ridiculous hours for sod-all pay, and go through all the stresses, uncertainties and ups-and-downs that starting a business involves? There's a lot to be said for a regular, essentially risk-free check every month.<p>Yes: you can start a software-based business with little more than a PC and an internet connection. But so can everyone else: there's no advantage here.
At the beginning of the learning curve, there's little better for grasping topics than hearing someone else explain them. I've learned more (almost entirely by virtue of genius co-workers) in the first 6 months of my current, first, developer job than I did in ~2 years of self learning and freelancing.
The thing that struck me in this post is: "it's all about money". (the goldmine aspect)<p>I think money is an especially a bad motivation for starting your own product.<p>So if its about being creative, doing lots of different projects, having an influence on what your working on and where the product is going: you can do this working for the right company as well.<p>Of course the level of control is higher when you're running your own company, but so are the risks.<p>Isn't the important question: is the process important, i.e programming & working on interesting ideas, or is it the end result that counts, i.e having a successful product that is generating an income for you and where you have total control over?
Posts like this that advocate working on your start up by squeezing hours out of your day ignore the switching costs involved. Even when I do decide to turn my hour TV-time into an hour of project-time, it takes a while to get back into the flow and remember what it is I was working on. With start up and shut down, I end up exchanging an hour of TV-time for 20 mins of productive work.
1. Just because you build it, doesn't mean they will come. There's something called marketing, promotion and luck.<p>and<p>2. Development and business/marketing skills are very very different.
I'm working for someone else precisely because I'm a developer. I like developing. I don't like running a startup.<p>Is it really that hard to understand?
All this naysaying and negative, defeatist thinking: this is exactly why you will not succeed in a startup. Positivity is a necessary -- albeit not sufficient -- factor in creating something new.