Comment by ignoramous
6 years ago
You would love this essay by James Altucher: https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/work-prison/
Key point: Other entities may capture up to 80% of the value you create.
1. Your boss, their boss, and their boss.
2. Shareholders.
3. Vendors.
4. Other employees in the company.
5. Taxes.
Better off working for your own self.
Eh. The same person can dig for oil in north dakota, or they can go dig for oil in nebraska. You'll get a lot more oil in dakota (big tech) than you would be getting at nebraska.
Go do the best thing you can do right now. Expenses don't matter, the total gross profit is what does.
Except tech is nothing like oil. It's a knowledge based industry and the pace of innovation rapidly keeps breaking barriers to entry. It effectively enables a lot of other industries to move swiftly and get a lot done with fewer resources [0]. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Instagram scaled to 30M users with 13 engs [1], and WhatsApp to half a billion with 32 [2]. Oculus was started by a then 17yr old Palmer Luckey [3] for who, later, the great Jon Carmack would go on to work for.
[0] https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world...
[1] https://time.com/4299297/instagram-facebook-revenue/
[2] https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/four-numbers-that-explain
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Luckey#Oculus_Rift
Yay you're citing lottery winners, the most engineer efficient unicorns in the world, in a lottery that you can only buy 5-8 tickets in for your lifetime.
What I mean by 'go do the best thing you can do now', doesn't exclude working for yourself or starting that company that becomes your biggest thing also.
But if $500k/yr as a staff eng at bigco (north dakota) is your best thing, there is no shame in it. It's doubtful you can reproduce that although working for yourself in 'nebraska'.
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