Comment by scoofy
9 days ago
The point of doing something non-scalable is that you can enter and exit the market fairly easily. You don't need to be a tailor your whole life. You can make a living as a barber, electrician, teacher, or nurse.
I'm not saying it's easy! It's hard as hell. It sucks when your job gets automated. I'm just saying that aiming for something non-scalable means you're not always tilting at windmills, and the game can't be rigged against you.
Switching jobs from electrician to teacher to nurse will take around 3 to 5 years of education or apprenticeship in most countries. It also requires new licenses or certificates if you ever move country.
I'm trying to respond to this stuff in good faith. Yes, I agree with you. I don't see how this is relevant to the argument. If you are in a non-scalable industry that gets taken over by technology, that sucks. My point was being in the startup game in the first place.
"Becoming a teacher" takes years.
"Becoming a successful scalable business" has no known time frame. It either happens or it doesn't. And whether it does is not particularly correlated to how much time or effort you spend on it.
Almost typed the same thing in different words at the same time :)
Your above point can not be upvoted enough.
You do have to wonder what some people are thinking ;)
Good message from Taleb too, he may not be the most likeable or agreeable person in the world, but he is quite brilliant at synthesizing logical meaning from the inputs he does have.
2 replies →
>Switching jobs from electrician to teacher to nurse
The point is not to do that ever.
Just gain one of the skills like that and plant it firmly on your resume, before trying anything more risky.
Like starting a business, which might not actually cost as much or take as long to get a license.
And with no further delay needed before any future pivots, when you might need quick alternatives most.
Even if you only go back to teaching for a while to regroup.
All of those professions you've listed require about half a decade of dedicated training to be legally allowed to practice. For example an electrician takes like 7 years to become qualified, that's a full time apprenticeship, and it pays badly in the meantime.
A fact endlessly annoying to electrical engineers who legally can design their houses power system but not work on it.
(I mean I think a barber is quicker, but one of that list is also not like the others)
There are a lot of code issues you can run into when actually installing and repairing wiring that your average EE wouldn’t know much about at all. And just because you can design the power system for a building doesn’t mean you have any how to fish romex through a wall.
That’s like saying a mechanical engineer should necessarily be able to work as a machinist. Some of them can for sure, but it’s not something they are required to learn.
Also in many places anyone can do electrical work on their own house.
I'm not trying to say 'everything is fine, nothing bad is happening a world of recurring technology and industrial revolutions.' It's not. The way things are set up is bad.
My point is the author writes a column about how GPTs are ruining the ability for people to make scalable products, because when everyone can make one, nobody cares... my point is that that's not the result of GPTs. It's a result of survivorship bias skewing how we look at things.
When your business is a flywheel than needs to be running to provide a benefit to each user, then getting that flywheel running is a huge problem. The vast majority of non-scalable businesses, almost by definition, provide each customer with a benefit regardless of whether anyone else uses it. That is how you create basic, word-of-mouth, free "earned" marketing.
Half a decade is over in a flash. The current software engineering downturn is almost 3 years old now.
> For example an electrician takes like 7 years to become qualified
Using a similar playbook for what happened to SE (loads of good ~free info, bootcampification) you can drastically reduce the time to be economically useful, but that can only go for so long due to saturation. Especially residential electric work (or other trades) is no witchcraft that would require anywhere near several years of education/practice. And yeah, the legal system would have to cooperate, which will only happen when the pressure becomes high enough (see e.g. debates around "Meisterpflicht" in Germany).
That said if AI continues to progress like it currently does we may not get to that part.