Go, minimal

Should I freelance? Should I start my own company?

I’m not going to write about the unlimited earning potential or risk-to-reward ratios or entrepreneurship and combining the factors of production because a) its boring, b) money is a terrible motivator, and c) if you were interested in such things you probably already own a real estate, commodities trading, or financial services company.  Here are some reasons why I decided that day jobs are not for me:

1. You control how successful you are. There is no layer of management to take credit for your work, no bureaucracy to prevent you from ever getting noticed by someone “who matters.”  I believe that if you are persistent and put yourself out there, you will go as far as your skills and abilities will take you.  Many talented people enter the workforce only to languish in mediocrity and make excuses.  I’m sure there are a few corporate ladders out there that are fair and accessible at all rungs, but most are not so why take the risk?
2. You will never again ask, “Why should I work any harder if the only reward for completing a project early is boredom?” In poor corporate environments, there is no motivation to get your work done any faster than the schedule set by a project manager who usually has very little technical knowledge.  If you happen to finish something early, you are either rewarded with nothing to do or useless mundane tasks (you know, that one project that is constantly passed on to the latest sucker and never completed).  Of course you can’t leave early because that would look bad so you effectively become a good seat warmer.  When you work for yourself, the reward for being good at what you do is you can either move on to your next client and make more money or take the rest of the day off.
3. If you start in your spare time, while employed, you have very little to lose. Got a great idea for a product?  Feel like your department is so inefficient you can actually do your job and freelance while at work?  Put your effort where your mouth is and jump in.  Just replace some of that Internet browsing with a little bit of coding time.  You’re supposed to enjoy building things anyway, right?  You’ll be surprised how far you get in no time.  How many times have you heard someone say, “I could’ve written Twitter in a week!” or “I built that exact iPhone app in Java back in college on a hangover!”  It doesn’t matter that Facebook already exists.  If you feel you can build a better version called Bobbook and Bobbook gets even 10% the success of Facebook, wouldn’t it have been worth it?
4. You can have a week night to yourself and still be productive the next day. Your brother from Albuquerque only visits once a year and you want to show him a good time.  An old college buddy is passing through on their cross country bike trip.  Its your friend’s birthday, you know, the one who is really good at peer pressuring everyone to stay out and have one more drink.  So you go out and about your third Appletini in comes that dreaded thought, “Should I call in sick tomorrow?  Well let’s see… I have 3.25 sick days left this year…” and you order that fourth Appletini.  Except you forgot that you were supposed to use those days as a part of your vacation to The Maldive Islands next month so you trudge into work the next morning with a horrible hangover and waste an entire day being a zombie.  No boss would understand the logic behind, “listen I actually enjoy my work and being productive, but my brother was in town last night and I had a few too many drinks so if you’d just let me sleep in a bit I would get much more done in those 4 hours than if I had to come in at 9AM and be a zombie for 8 hours.”
5. You control your own time. Let’s say your true passion is crocheting doilies for antique couches or doing speed runs of text-based dungeon crawls.  Its very hard to make a living with either of those talents, which is why you’re a PHP developer, a much more employable skill.  Plus PHP is still pretty high on your list of things you enjoy.  However, you get all your work done in 2 hours everyday and you spend the rest of your time on crocheting message boards dreaming of rushing home to try out a new stitch.  If you worked for yourself you could use that motivation to learn how to write higher quality code more efficiently so you can do the same amount of work in less time and end up having more time to spend with your kids or doing dungeon crawls, whichever your true love may be.
6. You will never have to think, “If I do THAT for you as well, what the *$%@ do YOU do?!?!” about your boss. You do all the actual work already, but then your boss asks you to handle the client phone calls while he’s gone.  Then as your reward for handling them so well, you now get more calls from your boss’ client than your mother.  Upper management needs a status report about your project or a quote for something new.  Since you are the technical expert, your boss asks you to write it up and send it to him for revision.  It sits in boss’ inbox for three weeks and gets forwarded on untouched.  The boss’ golf buddy needs a site for his daughter’s wedding, golf buddy pays boss $10k and a box of Cubans for the favor, you end up doing the work for $0 extra pay.  There’s a meeting with a potential new client and boss wants you to go sell the company to them.  In the end, you feel like you’re pretty much running the entire place anyway, so its time to steal all his clients and start your own company.

1. You might never make more money per effort hour with your own company. Back when banks and financials still existed, people would be jealous of 28-year-old “financial analysts” who made $115k/yr + $20k bonus. The twenty-something would inevitably start telling you how they work 100 hours per week and then proceed to make comparisons to the hourly wage of a Starbucks “barista.” Most developers I know have a pretty relaxed work life. They spend a large part of their day chatting online, reading Slashdot, checking XKCD, or doing some form of “research” on the Internet. While its never quite the “fifteen minutes of real, actual, work in a given week” of Office Space, you will work a lot less at a full-time job than if you started your own company.
2. The Fred Flintstone/Homer Simpson feeling. You know the intro to The Flintstones/The Simpsons when Fred/Homer is at work and the 5 o’clock Pterodactyl/whistle goes off and they drop the pile of rocks/radioactive rod they’re working on to hurry home to their families?  I’m sure you all have felt that weight coming off your shoulders after a day of long, useless meetings or the sigh of relief after staring at the clock for hours because you have absolutely no work to do whatsoever.  With a job you get to put your work life completely on hold for the night/weekend/holiday and not have to think about it until the next morning.



3. You don’t have to worry about things like accountants, lawyers,  bookkeeping, filing annual reports, etc. You love to come up with inventive solutions to problems.  You love to code.  Sometimes you might even enjoy sending emails if you are helping someone out with your technical knowledge, but there’s no way in hell you’ll enjoy paying someone to file your taxes, paying someone to protect your interests, keeping track of all your income/expenses, or paying the government to keep your company name in existence.
4. You won’t have to think about “networking” or attending “networking functions.” If you are in the technology field, chances are your personality skews towards introverted and you have a slight to complete disdain for the lack of logic and/or intelligence exhibited by some humans.  Luckily, part of your boss’ job is to create and remove the co-workers with which you converse about the lack of logic and/or intelligence exhibited by some humans.  Try to imagine meeting such like-minded people all on your own?  The ironic part is that networking becomes one of those things you have to think about once you’re on your own.  The best way to kick start your startup is to meet as many people as you can while employed or find one of those rare species of humans who are technically-inclined and actually don’t mind being around people.

In a very predictable way to get you to come back, I’ll post the other six reasons why you should not start your own company, as well as reasons why you should start your own company in separate posts.