Comment by noobermin
8 hours ago
I'm very sympathetic to this standpoint, but an obvious retort is why don't the engineers become their own boss and do better? What's stopping them?
8 hours ago
I'm very sympathetic to this standpoint, but an obvious retort is why don't the engineers become their own boss and do better? What's stopping them?
I'd imagine it's access to capital and resources. I suspect many engineers/professionals (especially in eg consulting or manufacturing) would start their own business if they have the financial stability to do so.
A lot of market forces tend to "naturally" create monopolies/oligopolies. For eg if you're the biggest steel plant you can operate efficiently and keep moderate margins, beating any plants not as big (economies of scale). An independent guy (or even the entire team) can't just open a new steel plant shop down the road, even if the current one sucks.
Haven't software engineering salaries been like 200K for almost a decade? With very little actual need in capital requirements relative to a host of industries with expensive equipment, I'd say of the class of workers most poised to start their own businesses, I'd say you guys are the best placed.
To be a bit honest, I'm a computational scientist who's never seen anything near 100K and likely never will. It's hard to imagine not having around 4 times my salary and not being able to start something myself.
To start a $100M software company you need 5 engineers and 5 laptops.
To start a $100M hardware company you need $500M.
Software is a tragedy of the commons situation where anyone smart enough to engineer is smart enough to learn pointers and objects instead of shear stresses and voltage fluxs.
Nevermind that software pays much more with a much lower barrier to entry.
It gets sucked up into housing. So if you're in your early 50s that's fine as you probably brought very cheap. Mid-40s and under? Unlikely unless you were extremely lucky. I'm 45 by the time I've been able to buy housing it has always been peak despite having very high earnings at times.
> I'd say of the class of workers most poised to start their own businesses, I'd say you guys are the best placed.
I think your premise is significantly correct; things like launch HN (and even YC startups) are heavily software biased. I suspect you'll find about a hundred product hunt products for every physical kickstarter/indiegogo.
You might be surprised how easy it is for some people to make 200K and end up in debt...
In most companies and industries it’s closer to 100k to start.
That's basically the meme, right: You rail against corporations and yet you work for one. Curious.
Anyway in general, corporations are sticky. They save resources through scale and collaboration. Famously this is a problem for free market true believers because if you believe that the market is the most efficient mean of organizing people then you would expect firms to operate internally as free markets (or disappear). There is a whole body of work about it,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
In practice you can't just become your own boss and compete against firms.
Most people in fact do not work for corporations. But small companies rarely get into the news do they?
The vast majority of people working for small companies do not earn much.
I don't have the link to the US census bureau in front of me, but I think as of 2018 more than 50% of employees worked for firms with >500 employees.
And, of course, there's nothing preventing a small/medium business from incorporating, either. "Corporation means big, small business is a different thing" is common shorthand but not actually how it goes.
Engineering and running a company are very different skill sets. Engineers are often not good at Marketing, networking, sales, ...
Even if you are good at those, for many companies, it's more about connections than about the ability to build stuff. So if you don't know the right people, it is very difficult to get a foothold.
Sorry I should have specified, engineer here means software engineer/software developer.
You missed the question entirely.
Marketing, networking, and sales are the job. Or a large part of it. If you don't have connections, knowing how to make connections is part of it.
Accept that there are other skills besides engineering, and they can be just as challenging to learn, and just as opaque from the outside of you don't understand it.
I have AuDHD - there is no way I'm running my own company. I'm a good developer but I need someone else to have the idea and run the business and I can lead a small team to bring it about.
Given I'm now in my mid-50s, things are looking grim. And I'm not getting paid SV silly money. I'm not even getting paid US dollers.
Managing things often requires a different skillset, some want to avoid solving meatspace problems, some are not destined to be good at it.
Capital.
what?