I think a lot of people have realized their time is more valuable than money. Sure, you can make money through entrepreneurship. Even better than that is you're finally free.
It is very difficult, time consuming, and stressful to run a business. More so if you have employees. Self-employment does not always provide the freedom most people imagine.
I have gone back to employment myself, it's less stressful, and allows me a lot more time for my family. To be fair, I never had any significant success, I'm sure I'd be singing a different tune otherwise; so I guess the takeaway is "your mileage may vary". :)
Just quit! It's great. Turns out the door is right there. We can all walk through it.
To be less sarcastic, the answer is very likely that their spouse works. I put my wife through college, then she carried us the next four years, aka way too long. But now I'm making so much money in ML that it's actually hard to spend it, so it all worked out.
Another way to phrase it is "You know, the usual. You just have to get super lucky in life. Just don't be unlucky, duh."
Ironically, I realized that literally moments before your comment, and went to delete it. You're right for calling me out about that; thank you. My apologies.
> One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that you have to keep running it. And as anyone who runs their own business can tell you, that requires your complete attention. You can't just start a business and check out once things are going well, or they stop going well surprisingly fast.
It feels like a lot of these freelancing micro-entrepreneurship perspectives sort of ignore this aspect. It's hard to imagine people still doing it when they're 50. So the game seems to be to save up as much money as possible while you're young, or to get stable, traditional employment and be reasonably useful as you march towards 60. I'm still undecided on which is the better strategy, since saving up a lot of money often requires other sacrifices.
> It feels like a lot of these freelancing micro-entrepreneurship perspectives sort of ignore this aspect. It's hard to imagine people still doing it when they're 50.
Why do you say that? I’m asking this genuinely, as someone who is a) dipping my toe into freelancing and micro-entrepreneurship, and b) turning 50 next month :)
Personally I’m just looking for a way to find more enjoyment and meaning in my work, and to be able to balance my priorities in life a bit differently. Which is something I didn’t think much about when I was younger, but has come to be important to me as I get older. So to me, this sort of age actually seems like a natural time to want this approach.
If nothing else, you eventually reach a state of seniority where the types of freelance work available that require the knowledge you have by 50 are quite a bit fewer than the number of 50 year-olds in the world, given that is still well below an average human lifespan. So it may work quite well for you, but it can't work for an entire economy. If everyone tried, most would fail, even if they all had identical skills and knowledge.
Note k__2's actual answer ended up being technical writing and developer relations. There is always going to less demand for developer relations than for actual developers. So if you say a career path should be something like be a FTE salaried developer from 20 to 30, and then "graduate" or whatever to freelance developer, then to developer relations, that's fine as long as you're in the smaller tier of people who can do that, given the world is going to have roughly the same number of 50 year-olds as 25 year-olds in an OECD nation.
The reason this hasn't been a problem yet in software is software itself is still an immature industry, so rapid growth has meant there are always a lot more 25 year-old developers than 50 year-old developers. That won't stay true forever. As the industry matures and reaches a stable size, more senior people are either going to need to stay code monkeys or we're going to see severe organizational rot with an inverted pyramid org structure with more managers and architects and developer relations specialists than developers. That will be true whether or not the organization is a single company or thousands of individual contractors.
I don't think "lucky" dismisses answers, because excluding it entirely from an explanation assumes that the same work done by an individual will result in the same measurable output. Hard work drives the machinery of progress, but the efficiency of that machinery is up to luck. For me, I can look back and see a huge number of factors that contributed to that efficiency. None of them were under my control, and so I describe them as "luck".
* Stable home life, with active teaching from two educated parents. At no point growing up did I need to expend effort worrying about what I would eat, or where I would sleep. Instead, I could focus on education and hobbies.
* No financial need for a job during secondary education. My family's finances were stable enough that I didn't need to expend effort on a job. Instead, I could focus on advanced courses.
* Didn't need to take on college loans. One of my parents is a professor, and so I had free tuition at their university. As a result, I could focus more on coursework during the school year, and STEM research programs during the summer.
* Receiving a stipend while working on my terminal degree. This is typically only the case in STEM fields. I was lucky that my interest and talents led me to a more in-demand field.
* Reasonable health insurance at all points of my life. From being covered through my parents' insurance (thanks Obama), to being covered through graduate student insurance (thanks to the student union), to being covered through my employers (thanks to being in a field where this is typical). I haven't had any major medical expenses, but I've had the safety net of having reasonable periodic care.
* Interest in an industry that built desirable skills. My PhD ended up requiring me to build custom analysis software to perform large amounts of data analysis, which built skills that have been tremendously useful and in-demand. But I couldn't have predicted either the skills required or their broad applicability when I started on that path. Back in high school, I just knew which subjects I enjoyed more and focused on getting even better at them.
People always assume luck means something with the probability of a lottery win.
I don't have a spouse, I payed for everything myself, but there was still much luck involved. Just not one in a billion kind of luck.
I'm living in a shared flat, so I don't pay much rent, which allowed me to save more of my income, and the low rent allowed me to live much longer from those savings later.
I could have gone 2-3 years without a job, simply because my costs of living were so low. That opened me up to much experimenting with jobs and also enabled me to turn down many bad jobs.
Having low costs of living is luck, but you can have that much easier than you think.
The odds are quite in favor of a freelancing developer. I focused on projects that went 3-6 months. This meant, I only needed to be lucky to get one or two projects a year.
Again, you have to be lucky in some kind of way to get one of those projects, but if you write like 10 applications a month, and you only have to be lucky in 1 of those 120 applications a year, you're good to go.
I just quit and lived a year by my savings. Later I did a few web and mobile projects to pay the rent. Started blogging for marketing, but it turned out I'm reasonably good at it, so companies approached me and asked if I could write for them. So, I basically transitioned into technical writing/developer relations/education. That's what I'm doing to make money right now, and since every article is also an advertisement for my work, new clients find me online.
Is it? It is true that you need to look for new employers less often, but if you get laid off then you lose 100% of your income instead of just a part. A freelancer with 4-5 companies that regularly need some work done may have a higher chance of being fired from any one of those, but probably a much lower chance of being fired from all of them than a regular employee has from their single job.
The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer.
Yes, if you live in a country with good worker protection (in the US a lot of "salaried" work is effectively freelance).
> if you get laid off then you lose 100% of your income instead of just a part
Yes, if. With good protections and a solid company choice, such a scenario has a likelihood approaching zero.
> The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer.
I would say the freelancer has a higher impact of this, because their entire work history is filled with needing to find new work. That is the nature of doing work without an enduring relationship.
>Yes, if you live in a country with good worker protection (in the US a lot of "salaried" work is effectively freelance).
To extend this, in the US, this is pretty much every reasonably well paying position which falls into this category, so everything is gatekept by at-will, salary, anf exempt status. In principle none of these statuses are inherently bad. In practice, they're abused left and right by employers who have historically had the leverage when it mattered. At-will being highly standard anymore is sort of backfiring now during the pandemic with labor shortages now that labor has leverage for the first time in decades, so employers are getting a bit of the taste of the leverage they created against labor with people dropping and transitioning regularly to stay ahead of inflation or find better opportunities.
Could somebody please let the banks know that "work is being unbundled from traditional employment"? At least in Europe, I am afraid they still expect your employment to be quite traditional (or your collaterals to be quite valuable) if you want to get a loan.
When I've applied for a mortgage and things they've always just looked at my income not my employment. Like most people I've got multiple little incomes and you need to consider them all.
In the UK they looked at employment first, and some sort of secondary income separately.
> Like most people I've got multiple little incomes and you need to consider them all.
I was also a little skeptical about your usage of most here, but wasn't sure if that was because I am in a bubble. For the UK it looks like about 4% of people are in second jobs. Do you think this differs where you are?
In the U.S., if you can produce one or more W-2 tax forms (annual report of wages paid) adding up to about a full-time job, the banks check it off their list and move on to the next item. However if you are self-employed, they want multiple year copies of your detail business income tax form, and letters from your accountant or tax preparer stating that your business is profitable, viable in the future, etc (which is just the banks trying to meaninglessly off-load some of their risk to a 3rd party).
Yeah that is quite the downside. As someone living in the EU working a remote job for a foreign company on an hourly basis it's impossible to get a loan. Credit score doesn't exist and banks tell you to go fuck yourself if you don't have a full time job. Hell they even limit you to like 300€ per month on credit cards, I had to start using a prepaid card to actually pay for anything.
Sort of a side tangent, but what banks are looking for specifically is demonstrable collateral for a loan that they can get access to, and the risk landscape is such that they're very constrained in what type of collateral this is with regard to people without a lot of capital. They look for employment because that's where most of the risk can be offloaded to.
What would be nice to see would be forms of collateralized loans where the lender doesn't have to take custody of the collateral until default, which requires that they can actually take possession at a later date. We see this with homes, equity loans and the like, primarily because homes cannot be moved, but more importantly because lenders have a way to stop a sale before the loan is paid. With assets that can be moved around it is much harder, but imagine a scenario where for example, you can borrow against stock or a CD or something else, and the lender never touches the asset but becomes entitled to it if you default. This would significantly reduce lender friction and allow more people to take out loans with more different sources of income.
This is just another paean to making all white-collar work "gig" work, undermining the security and benefits of traditional employment, in favor of making better-looking numbers on balance sheets for startups. Don't buy into this. Some people can do it; other's can't. I could, but I don't want to. It's too much stress on my interpersonal skills. The single, biggest, best change we could make with employment in this country -- which would benefit employer and employee alike -- is to decouple health insurance from it. It'd be better to break it out and let us buy health insurance like car insurance, but we'll eventually get nationalized health care or socialized medicine or whatever you want to call it. Either way, this will alleviate a lot of pressure on companies on their hiring decisions, and on people who get locked in jobs because of health issues.
Directly to this question - paid sick leave (generally), limited protection from physical harm and healthcare (US). In Europe, extensive protection from the unemployment’s demonstrated nearly irreparable harms, including hunger and reduced lifespan.
Broadly - oh my goodness, this article is pure regulatory arbitrage amalgamated with some kind of hellscapish McKinsey/VC dross. Net - firms would like to reduce you to an expendable, unprotected line item without recourse to traditional employment law. There is nothing innovative or interesting here, a pure desire to extract maximum value from fellow humans without consideration or care for what we owe each other.
Enough of this shit, in particular the aggregation of labor for the purpose of building a surveillance sensor aperture for ads.
Exactly, on all points. For instance, I got hammered by COVID, and was almost useless for about 4 weeks. My boss was only concerned that I get better, and wasn't concerned that I go on some sort of short-term disability or FLMA. The person who wrote that article would have simply not paid me for that month, and not guaranteed work after I got better, which would have made the situation much more stressful, removed income at a time I needed it most to cover medical expenses, and added insult to injury. My company is very "woke," and I know a lot of people have problems with such things, but one very welcome outcome of this is that they really do put people first, and the bottom line second. In a pure gig economy, there's no chance of having a "human" relationship with your employer like this.
> For instance, I got hammered by COVID, and was almost useless for about 4 weeks. My boss was only concerned that I get better, and wasn't concerned that I go on some sort of short-term disability or FLMA. The person who wrote that article would have simply not paid me for that month, and not guaranteed work after I got better, which would have made the situation much more stressful, removed income at a time I needed it most to cover medical expenses, and added insult to injury.
Yup, and now add on family or other responsibilities. It's also a way to keep hiring 22-year olds right out of school who won't stand up for themselves and don't have the experience to ask to be treated better. Likewise, a great way to keep anyone with a family out of the workforce/desperate.
> My company is very "woke," and I know a lot of people have problems with such things, but one very welcome outcome of this is that they really do put people first, and the bottom line second.
Be careful with this; it can go either way: Either they're great OR the wokeness is a great cover for complete exploitation. One good way to figure out is to ask how they address disability; it's the one identity that can impact somebody's ability to produce, and it will tell you if they see their workers as people or if they're more interested in diversity check-boxes for the sake of funding/PR.
If you think about paid leave schemes like sick leave, vacation time, parental leave and the like, they're actually counter to ensuring people can afford time off. What's going on amounts to a company managed savings trust. What companies should be doing is making sure to pay people enough money when they are working to where they can afford to put some back for those times when they can't work (and won't get paid). This then puts the onus on the person to manage their finances adequately, and enables them to have more flexibility about when and why they take time off.
Instead we have a situation where people basically cannot be trusted to save for times when they can't work and that compensation is held in trust by the company, which then enables the company to manipulate with it and hold it over people's heads. People feel stuck at their job for this compensation just like with healthcare, to reference a point you made elsewhere in the thread, why not decouple them both?
IMO if we are going to have these paid time off schemes, they should be negotiable (in the banking sense) by law so that people who want to receive the compensation as money rather than time off can do so. Some companies do this, others do not, but these are part of our compensation, we should still receive it if we don't use it, like we otherwise would if we were just working for money.
No one is stopping companies from offering these kinds of arrangements. Just let us know when a company starts offering programming gigs, with no benefits, for +75-100% salary premiums over full-time employment for the same job, and allow us to choose which option we want. I'll wait.
If nobody were offering these types of arrangements there wouldn't be freelancers choosing to work in these types of arrangements. These arrangements do exist, they're not the norm but are becoming more popular, and I find it interesting that you argue against them then claim they don't exist. You didn't have to wait very long looks like, I can be snarky too if that's what you'd prefer.
Decoupling healthcare is just the first step, decoupling everything except monetary compensation is ultimately what frees people to work on what they want to work on.
The majority of people cannot be trusted to save for hard times, much less vacation. White collar freelancers with market power are not a model that is generally applicable to the broader white or blue collar population.
This also reeks of “unlimited PTO” which effectively results in individuals taking less vacation and other comparable benefits.
Can you let me know how someone should save for time off to recover from an unplanned pregnancy at the beginning of their career?
I can imagine a rather dark "Employees as a Service" future where we get paid only for each productive minute of automatically recorded work, as if humans were AWS Lambda instances or whatever
> I can imagine a rather dark "Employees as a Service" future where we get paid only for each productive minute of automatically recorded work, as if humans were AWS Lambda instances or whatever
And then people would be forced to pee into the bottles, poop into their work assigned bags, or wear diapers to continue working without breaks. What a horrible future it would be.
In my experience as somebody who's worked as a freelancer/for myself and also as an employee, I like that I don't have to find my own work. That tends to be its own job on top of the work I actually like to do. I also don't need to brand myself or maintain a bunch of public projects so I can work in a few months.
In addition, taking a few months and putting in almost no effort at work to focus on other parts of your life has a lot of value and that's really hard to pull off in the gig-type economy. The last few months, I've been giving very little at work due to some mental health issues (I've still done my job just fine, but the extra things I do to build my skills + benefit my company aren't getting done), which in the long term is going to do way more for my productivity and quality of life than chasing the next gig. This can also be true of health, or family (e.g. if a family member needs your help after surgery).
There are benefits and drawbacks to each work arrangement.
Take this with a grain of salt, though, as I don't work in tech, and the primary reason why is because I wasn't willing to forego all my other hobbies for it. Tech is for fun: The times I've to support myself with my tech skills I hated it.
A lot of the benefit of conventional employment in my experience is being more able to leave work at work. It's also, in some ways, more beneficial as you age and are more likely to accumulate additional non-work responsibilities. That said, this is only if you get DECENT traditional employment. I'd take gig work over what they do to retail and food-service workers ANY day of the week.
When you state "in this country", please specify what country that is. Despite the use of English as the lingua franca here we're amongst a geographically diverse group. I'm going to assume you mean the US. If that's a correct guess, as a European the US work standards frighten me. Health insurance so tightly coupled to work that if you get into an accident shortly after being laid off and don't have (expensive) private insurance you could be bankrupted by it. Two weeks vacation per year seems to be common and I've repeatedly heard that employees are being pressured to not actually use their full paid time off. Maybe I've just been too coddled by the working conditions here in Belgium but I simply can't imagine working in the US without going completely mad or sinking into a depression. I know that I pay incredibly high taxes, but a higher income at the cost of living in such a cutthroat environment simply doesn't seem worth it to me. And to be honest I consider my standard of living to be very high and comfortable, both in spite of and thanks to taxes.
This is a forum run by a US VC firm talking about US startups. One could almost forgive the assumption that people would understand that I was referring to the US. ;-)
It's tough to be an expert, to be well informed on how US medical care gets paid for. I'm no expert, but I know a little more than nothing:
So, for "bankrupted", yes, sort of ....
But the US has Hill-Burton hospitals, likely named after two guys in Congress who got the bill passed. With the Hill-Burton act, if are starting a hospital, then can get funding via the act. BUT: Have to accept all patients independent of ability to pay. Soooo, a large fraction of city hospitals are Hill-Burton. Then there are the medical school teaching-research hospitals -- again commonly or always, patients are accepted independent of ability to pay.
If someone really is broke, then they can qualify for Medicaid -- "never receive a bill for medical care."
For people old enough to be retired, there is Medicare. Part A covers a major fraction of hospital charges and is free. Part B covers physician charges, and is not free, maybe a few $hundred a month. There is another part for drugs.
For poor people, there is the HRSA (Federal Health Resources Services Administration) or some such -- clinics with sliding scale charges based on ability of patients to pay.
It goes on this way. It's a patchwork system. Not all the important details are really clear. E.g., there is a lot of over billing, that is, charging too much, and in this case the insurance company has a talk with the physician/hospital and negotiates lower charges. For drugs, the prices can vary enormously based on whatever.
There has been at least one effort to get the medical providers to publish a price list, i.e., to clear up the lack of cost information.
I don't know all the details, but my understanding is that it is very rare for medical care charges actually to bankrupt someone.
E.g., one approach is for a patient who owes big bucks to pay, say, $10 a month for 6 years -- then by laws of debts, the rest owed is forgiven, that is, not owed.
One way and another, in summary, from 50,000 feet up, generally, the US tries really hard not to have all of medical care run by the Federal government, or any level of government. E.g., there could be a system single payer where the there is only one entity that pays for anything about medical care; of course, that entity likely is run by the Federal government and gets a lot of tax money. Single payer has been proposed 220,872,879 times and rejected by that many times.
Some of the scare is that single payer would result in some or all of (a) taxes way too high, (b) too much just wasteful, silly, and unneeded medical care, (c) low quality of care and, thus, too many people hurt or dead, (d) too little capacity where too many patients die from waiting too long for care, etc. I don't know what if anything is right/wrong with (a) -- (d), but these are concerns commonly voiced.
Maybe the US could borrow from, at least learn from, Switzerland, England, ....
But actually bankrupt from just losing a job? I suspect that is actually not very common.
Oh, by the way, if fired, then commonly get to continue medical insurance coverage for some length of time.
This was an informative counter-argument to what I normally read about US healthcare, thanks for taking the time to share this info.
This site gives several survey findings related to medical bankruptcy. The data is complex and conflicting at times (like you would expect given something as complex as 300+ million people’s healthcare) but the number that the stats seem to fluctuate around is 1 million people. 1 million people declare bankruptcy a year due to medical-related costs. That’s 0.333% per year.
So there are a lot of people (1 million if you believe the data in that link) per year being affected by this.
> Oh, by the way, if fired, then commonly get to continue medical insurance coverage for some length of time.
tell me then, why do a bunch of my US friends not have health insurance? even the ones who left their jobs during the pandemic?
to be frank, it sounds like your income is too high for you to actually know what happens when dealing with this 'patchwork' (as you call it) shitshow system in real life, to try to get the care you need to survive.
> Some of the scare is that single payer would result in some or all of (a) taxes way too high, (b) too much just wasteful, silly, and unneeded medical care, (c) low quality of care and, thus, too many people hurt or dead, (d) too little capacity where too many patients die from waiting too long for care, etc. I don't know what if anything is right/wrong with (a) -- (d), but these are concerns commonly voiced.
why state all these downsides and try to play this sort of 'neutral' card by saying "I don't know what if anything is right/wrong"? all of these so called reasons (or fears/scares) are just completely irrelevant when we can see that all other global north nations have single payer systems.
let me repeat that: the US is the only country that doesn't provide universal healthcare to the working class.
can you help me understand why you posted this comment? to me it just looks like a laundry list of the many failed strategies used by the US govt and huge pharmaceutical corporations that have helped them scam the working class out of trillions of dollars in the form of medical debt and pharmaceutical drugs, etc.. i could probably find all this on some wikipedia page about the history of the US medical care system.
> tell me then, why do a bunch of my US
friends not have health insurance? even
the ones who left their jobs during the
pandemic?
I don't know anything about the
circumstances of your friends.
> to be frank, it sounds like your income is
too high for you to actually know what
happens when dealing with this 'patchwork'
(as you call it) shitshow system in real
life, to try to get the care you need to
survive.
Without going into my "income", it turns
out I know something about the US HRSA
system: They run clinics that can do
well providing primary care and then can
refer patients to more advanced care
when needed.
Charges vary but generally are low: At a
clinic, the really poor pay nothing. If
they have a little money, maybe the cost
is $20 a visit. With a little more, the
cost is $75 a visit.
> can you help me understand why you
posted this comment?
> If that's a correct guess, as a European
the US work standards frighten me. Health
insurance so tightly coupled to work that
if you get into an accident shortly after
being laid off and don't have (expensive)
private insurance you could be bankrupted
by it.
So, I wanted to add some information to
the issue of "bankrupted by it".
For your
> why state all these downsides and try to
play this sort of 'neutral' card by saying
"I don't know what if anything is
right/wrong"? all of these so called
reasons (or fears/scares) are just
completely irrelevant when we can see that
all other global north nations have single
payer systems.
The "fears/scares" I listed really are
"commonly voiced". Soooo, take this list
as the POLITICAL answer to why the US does
not have single payer, etc., not the
rational, economic, financial, moral,
medical, etc. but just the POLITICAL
answer for the post of user
using only what is rational, economic,
financial, moral, medical, etc. and
instead must at least include some of the
politics. Here define politics as using
false information, cherry picking
evidence, quotes out of context, lies,
manipulation to fool people!
Health care being linked to employment in the US is a form of 'golden handcuffs', a means to keep you at an employer and persist even though you're dissatisfied.
Some IT companies (especially startups, but it varies) do it with stocks or stock options as well, tying them to your employment.
Anyway, no civilized country should require you to be employed to be entitled to health care. Not making health care available to everyone, regardless of wealth or employment status, is classist eugenics.
There was a major change in this regard with the Affordable Care Act (now in place over 10 years). It eliminated the ability of insurers to deny health coverage if you have a pre-existing condition and have not maintained continuous creditable coverage. So the risk of leaving a job and losing health insurance is now much lower, since you can always get insurance later, or get it as an unemployed individual with a large subsidy if you don't have much total income. Neither of these things was true before.
> So the risk of leaving a job and losing health insurance is now much lower, since you can always get insurance later, or get it as an unemployed individual with a large subsidy if you don't have much total income.
tell me that these laws don't apply to you and that you've not had to struggle with them to get health insurance without telling me that these laws don't apply to you and that you've not had to struggle with them to get health insurance
I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me. If it matters, I have direct personal experience with this. In 2020, I voluntarily ended employer group health coverage, at the time of my choosing, because I knew that I could get subsidized coverage through CoveredCA, the California web site that serves both federal ACA (Obamacare), plus California's own version of the ACA (very similar to federal).
Through the exchange, without a struggle, I received insurance comparable to what I had before, no questions asked about my existing health condition, with a subsidy to help pay. The best I could have hoped for previously would have been up to six months only of COBRA coverage, at 102% of my employer's cost, no subsidy. And if I chose to go without any coverage at all for a few months, in the past I would have had to divulge any pre-existing "conditions" as part of the application process.
While I'm with you on decoupling health insurance from employment, I'm not too convinced that moving white collar work into "the gig economy" is bad. IMO the two things appear to go hand in hand.
The security benefits of being a company man are to be weighed by each individual against their own priorities. For some, doing whatever work a company needs how and when they need it in exchange for a secure paycheck or other benefits is the smart choice. For others, the lowered perceived security is worth being able to decide what to work on and how and when to work.
Generally speaking, if those security benefits that come with giving one entity a monopoly over your skills and productivity were as strong as they once were the gig economy wouldn't exist. The benefits IMO are overstated. In a world where these entities treat professionals as fungible, it only makes sense that the professionals treat those entities as fungible as well, and it is only fair, and freeing and empowering, if that sort of thing appeals to you.
This IMO is the biggest problem we have in this gig economy thing. It's not that people can choose what work they want to do and when, it's that the market is dominated by middlemen and rent seekers. Products like Uber and Upwork and the rest are marketed as platforms that people can network and professionals can find clients and people can find services they need. The vision is nice, but what winds up happening is these "platforms" cease to be platforms in short order and become a new employer masquerading as an unbiased order book to continue to skirt the responsibilities of a traditional employer.
There's a better way, a truly unbiased platform or set of platforms to enable people with services to offer and people who need those services to network with one another without the rent seeking. Perhaps that comes in the form of a non profit org, perhaps a distributed social networking system specifically targeted and certain kinds of work, I don't know, but I do know that if the middleman can be eliminated we can have something better than what we have now both in terms of gig work and traditional employment.
>When workers are unbundled from institutions, they lose access to many of the services and benefits that traditional employment conferred: income smoothing with automated tax withholding (i.e. a paycheck), healthcare, employer-sponsored retirement plans
In the U.S., self-employed workers who make a profit have the same access to retirement plans (401k, SEP-IRA) as employees, and also have the same ability to pay for health insurance with pre-tax dollars as employees. In fact, self-employed people can contribute far higher amounts to tax-deferred retirment plans than employees in most cases.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadI have gone back to employment myself, it's less stressful, and allows me a lot more time for my family. To be fair, I never had any significant success, I'm sure I'd be singing a different tune otherwise; so I guess the takeaway is "your mileage may vary". :)
Even when working remote, essentially being "on call" for at least 40h a week isn't a life for me.
To be less sarcastic, the answer is very likely that their spouse works. I put my wife through college, then she carried us the next four years, aka way too long. But now I'm making so much money in ML that it's actually hard to spend it, so it all worked out.
Another way to phrase it is "You know, the usual. You just have to get super lucky in life. Just don't be unlucky, duh."
To give a more substantive answer: http://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html
> One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that you have to keep running it. And as anyone who runs their own business can tell you, that requires your complete attention. You can't just start a business and check out once things are going well, or they stop going well surprisingly fast.
It feels like a lot of these freelancing micro-entrepreneurship perspectives sort of ignore this aspect. It's hard to imagine people still doing it when they're 50. So the game seems to be to save up as much money as possible while you're young, or to get stable, traditional employment and be reasonably useful as you march towards 60. I'm still undecided on which is the better strategy, since saving up a lot of money often requires other sacrifices.
Why do you say that? I’m asking this genuinely, as someone who is a) dipping my toe into freelancing and micro-entrepreneurship, and b) turning 50 next month :)
Personally I’m just looking for a way to find more enjoyment and meaning in my work, and to be able to balance my priorities in life a bit differently. Which is something I didn’t think much about when I was younger, but has come to be important to me as I get older. So to me, this sort of age actually seems like a natural time to want this approach.
Note k__2's actual answer ended up being technical writing and developer relations. There is always going to less demand for developer relations than for actual developers. So if you say a career path should be something like be a FTE salaried developer from 20 to 30, and then "graduate" or whatever to freelance developer, then to developer relations, that's fine as long as you're in the smaller tier of people who can do that, given the world is going to have roughly the same number of 50 year-olds as 25 year-olds in an OECD nation.
The reason this hasn't been a problem yet in software is software itself is still an immature industry, so rapid growth has meant there are always a lot more 25 year-old developers than 50 year-old developers. That won't stay true forever. As the industry matures and reaches a stable size, more senior people are either going to need to stay code monkeys or we're going to see severe organizational rot with an inverted pyramid org structure with more managers and architects and developer relations specialists than developers. That will be true whether or not the organization is a single company or thousands of individual contractors.
* Stable home life, with active teaching from two educated parents. At no point growing up did I need to expend effort worrying about what I would eat, or where I would sleep. Instead, I could focus on education and hobbies.
* No financial need for a job during secondary education. My family's finances were stable enough that I didn't need to expend effort on a job. Instead, I could focus on advanced courses.
* Didn't need to take on college loans. One of my parents is a professor, and so I had free tuition at their university. As a result, I could focus more on coursework during the school year, and STEM research programs during the summer.
* Receiving a stipend while working on my terminal degree. This is typically only the case in STEM fields. I was lucky that my interest and talents led me to a more in-demand field.
* Reasonable health insurance at all points of my life. From being covered through my parents' insurance (thanks Obama), to being covered through graduate student insurance (thanks to the student union), to being covered through my employers (thanks to being in a field where this is typical). I haven't had any major medical expenses, but I've had the safety net of having reasonable periodic care.
* Interest in an industry that built desirable skills. My PhD ended up requiring me to build custom analysis software to perform large amounts of data analysis, which built skills that have been tremendously useful and in-demand. But I couldn't have predicted either the skills required or their broad applicability when I started on that path. Back in high school, I just knew which subjects I enjoyed more and focused on getting even better at them.
People always assume luck means something with the probability of a lottery win.
I don't have a spouse, I payed for everything myself, but there was still much luck involved. Just not one in a billion kind of luck.
I'm living in a shared flat, so I don't pay much rent, which allowed me to save more of my income, and the low rent allowed me to live much longer from those savings later.
I could have gone 2-3 years without a job, simply because my costs of living were so low. That opened me up to much experimenting with jobs and also enabled me to turn down many bad jobs.
Having low costs of living is luck, but you can have that much easier than you think.
The odds are quite in favor of a freelancing developer. I focused on projects that went 3-6 months. This meant, I only needed to be lucky to get one or two projects a year.
Again, you have to be lucky in some kind of way to get one of those projects, but if you write like 10 applications a month, and you only have to be lucky in 1 of those 120 applications a year, you're good to go.
But, of course I hope to get rich before 50 etc.
The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer.
Yes, if you live in a country with good worker protection (in the US a lot of "salaried" work is effectively freelance).
> if you get laid off then you lose 100% of your income instead of just a part
Yes, if. With good protections and a solid company choice, such a scenario has a likelihood approaching zero.
> The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer.
I would say the freelancer has a higher impact of this, because their entire work history is filled with needing to find new work. That is the nature of doing work without an enduring relationship.
People get made redundant all the time, in economies all around the world, with all kinds of worker protections.
To extend this, in the US, this is pretty much every reasonably well paying position which falls into this category, so everything is gatekept by at-will, salary, anf exempt status. In principle none of these statuses are inherently bad. In practice, they're abused left and right by employers who have historically had the leverage when it mattered. At-will being highly standard anymore is sort of backfiring now during the pandemic with labor shortages now that labor has leverage for the first time in decades, so employers are getting a bit of the taste of the leverage they created against labor with people dropping and transitioning regularly to stay ahead of inflation or find better opportunities.
Most freelancers are now employed full-time (like permanent employee) and can quickly change job until they find one with good work/life balance [1].
[1] https://amaca.substack.com/p/how-i-got-wealthy-without-worki...
> Like most people I've got multiple little incomes and you need to consider them all.
I was also a little skeptical about your usage of most here, but wasn't sure if that was because I am in a bubble. For the UK it looks like about 4% of people are in second jobs. Do you think this differs where you are?
- Workers with second jobs UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... - Number of workers UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
What would be nice to see would be forms of collateralized loans where the lender doesn't have to take custody of the collateral until default, which requires that they can actually take possession at a later date. We see this with homes, equity loans and the like, primarily because homes cannot be moved, but more importantly because lenders have a way to stop a sale before the loan is paid. With assets that can be moved around it is much harder, but imagine a scenario where for example, you can borrow against stock or a CD or something else, and the lender never touches the asset but becomes entitled to it if you default. This would significantly reduce lender friction and allow more people to take out loans with more different sources of income.
Broadly - oh my goodness, this article is pure regulatory arbitrage amalgamated with some kind of hellscapish McKinsey/VC dross. Net - firms would like to reduce you to an expendable, unprotected line item without recourse to traditional employment law. There is nothing innovative or interesting here, a pure desire to extract maximum value from fellow humans without consideration or care for what we owe each other.
Enough of this shit, in particular the aggregation of labor for the purpose of building a surveillance sensor aperture for ads.
Yup, and now add on family or other responsibilities. It's also a way to keep hiring 22-year olds right out of school who won't stand up for themselves and don't have the experience to ask to be treated better. Likewise, a great way to keep anyone with a family out of the workforce/desperate.
> My company is very "woke," and I know a lot of people have problems with such things, but one very welcome outcome of this is that they really do put people first, and the bottom line second.
Be careful with this; it can go either way: Either they're great OR the wokeness is a great cover for complete exploitation. One good way to figure out is to ask how they address disability; it's the one identity that can impact somebody's ability to produce, and it will tell you if they see their workers as people or if they're more interested in diversity check-boxes for the sake of funding/PR.
Instead we have a situation where people basically cannot be trusted to save for times when they can't work and that compensation is held in trust by the company, which then enables the company to manipulate with it and hold it over people's heads. People feel stuck at their job for this compensation just like with healthcare, to reference a point you made elsewhere in the thread, why not decouple them both?
IMO if we are going to have these paid time off schemes, they should be negotiable (in the banking sense) by law so that people who want to receive the compensation as money rather than time off can do so. Some companies do this, others do not, but these are part of our compensation, we should still receive it if we don't use it, like we otherwise would if we were just working for money.
Decoupling healthcare is just the first step, decoupling everything except monetary compensation is ultimately what frees people to work on what they want to work on.
This also reeks of “unlimited PTO” which effectively results in individuals taking less vacation and other comparable benefits.
Can you let me know how someone should save for time off to recover from an unplanned pregnancy at the beginning of their career?
The majority of people do not make enough money to save for hard times.
People, no matter how poor they are, both need and deserve luxuries in their life, however small.
Pay people enough, and—surprise!—suddenly they can totally save for hard times.
And then people would be forced to pee into the bottles, poop into their work assigned bags, or wear diapers to continue working without breaks. What a horrible future it would be.
In addition, taking a few months and putting in almost no effort at work to focus on other parts of your life has a lot of value and that's really hard to pull off in the gig-type economy. The last few months, I've been giving very little at work due to some mental health issues (I've still done my job just fine, but the extra things I do to build my skills + benefit my company aren't getting done), which in the long term is going to do way more for my productivity and quality of life than chasing the next gig. This can also be true of health, or family (e.g. if a family member needs your help after surgery).
There are benefits and drawbacks to each work arrangement.
Take this with a grain of salt, though, as I don't work in tech, and the primary reason why is because I wasn't willing to forego all my other hobbies for it. Tech is for fun: The times I've to support myself with my tech skills I hated it.
A lot of the benefit of conventional employment in my experience is being more able to leave work at work. It's also, in some ways, more beneficial as you age and are more likely to accumulate additional non-work responsibilities. That said, this is only if you get DECENT traditional employment. I'd take gig work over what they do to retail and food-service workers ANY day of the week.
It's tough to be an expert, to be well informed on how US medical care gets paid for. I'm no expert, but I know a little more than nothing:
So, for "bankrupted", yes, sort of ....
But the US has Hill-Burton hospitals, likely named after two guys in Congress who got the bill passed. With the Hill-Burton act, if are starting a hospital, then can get funding via the act. BUT: Have to accept all patients independent of ability to pay. Soooo, a large fraction of city hospitals are Hill-Burton. Then there are the medical school teaching-research hospitals -- again commonly or always, patients are accepted independent of ability to pay.
If someone really is broke, then they can qualify for Medicaid -- "never receive a bill for medical care."
For people old enough to be retired, there is Medicare. Part A covers a major fraction of hospital charges and is free. Part B covers physician charges, and is not free, maybe a few $hundred a month. There is another part for drugs.
For poor people, there is the HRSA (Federal Health Resources Services Administration) or some such -- clinics with sliding scale charges based on ability of patients to pay.
It goes on this way. It's a patchwork system. Not all the important details are really clear. E.g., there is a lot of over billing, that is, charging too much, and in this case the insurance company has a talk with the physician/hospital and negotiates lower charges. For drugs, the prices can vary enormously based on whatever.
There has been at least one effort to get the medical providers to publish a price list, i.e., to clear up the lack of cost information.
I don't know all the details, but my understanding is that it is very rare for medical care charges actually to bankrupt someone.
E.g., one approach is for a patient who owes big bucks to pay, say, $10 a month for 6 years -- then by laws of debts, the rest owed is forgiven, that is, not owed.
One way and another, in summary, from 50,000 feet up, generally, the US tries really hard not to have all of medical care run by the Federal government, or any level of government. E.g., there could be a system single payer where the there is only one entity that pays for anything about medical care; of course, that entity likely is run by the Federal government and gets a lot of tax money. Single payer has been proposed 220,872,879 times and rejected by that many times.
Some of the scare is that single payer would result in some or all of (a) taxes way too high, (b) too much just wasteful, silly, and unneeded medical care, (c) low quality of care and, thus, too many people hurt or dead, (d) too little capacity where too many patients die from waiting too long for care, etc. I don't know what if anything is right/wrong with (a) -- (d), but these are concerns commonly voiced.
Maybe the US could borrow from, at least learn from, Switzerland, England, ....
But actually bankrupt from just losing a job? I suspect that is actually not very common.
Oh, by the way, if fired, then commonly get to continue medical insurance coverage for some length of time.
This site gives several survey findings related to medical bankruptcy. The data is complex and conflicting at times (like you would expect given something as complex as 300+ million people’s healthcare) but the number that the stats seem to fluctuate around is 1 million people. 1 million people declare bankruptcy a year due to medical-related costs. That’s 0.333% per year.
So there are a lot of people (1 million if you believe the data in that link) per year being affected by this.
Half of all GoFundMe's are now medical-expense related.
These are absolutely indefensible statistics about our current system. Literally, anything else (already in use in other countries) would be better.
tell me then, why do a bunch of my US friends not have health insurance? even the ones who left their jobs during the pandemic?
to be frank, it sounds like your income is too high for you to actually know what happens when dealing with this 'patchwork' (as you call it) shitshow system in real life, to try to get the care you need to survive.
> Some of the scare is that single payer would result in some or all of (a) taxes way too high, (b) too much just wasteful, silly, and unneeded medical care, (c) low quality of care and, thus, too many people hurt or dead, (d) too little capacity where too many patients die from waiting too long for care, etc. I don't know what if anything is right/wrong with (a) -- (d), but these are concerns commonly voiced.
why state all these downsides and try to play this sort of 'neutral' card by saying "I don't know what if anything is right/wrong"? all of these so called reasons (or fears/scares) are just completely irrelevant when we can see that all other global north nations have single payer systems.
let me repeat that: the US is the only country that doesn't provide universal healthcare to the working class.
can you help me understand why you posted this comment? to me it just looks like a laundry list of the many failed strategies used by the US govt and huge pharmaceutical corporations that have helped them scam the working class out of trillions of dollars in the form of medical debt and pharmaceutical drugs, etc.. i could probably find all this on some wikipedia page about the history of the US medical care system.
On your post
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29474353
> tell me then, why do a bunch of my US friends not have health insurance? even the ones who left their jobs during the pandemic?
I don't know anything about the circumstances of your friends.
> to be frank, it sounds like your income is too high for you to actually know what happens when dealing with this 'patchwork' (as you call it) shitshow system in real life, to try to get the care you need to survive.
Without going into my "income", it turns out I know something about the US HRSA system: They run clinics that can do well providing primary care and then can refer patients to more advanced care when needed.
Charges vary but generally are low: At a clinic, the really poor pay nothing. If they have a little money, maybe the cost is $20 a visit. With a little more, the cost is $75 a visit.
> can you help me understand why you posted this comment?
I was responding to user
try_again
and their post at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29472346
with in part:
> If that's a correct guess, as a European the US work standards frighten me. Health insurance so tightly coupled to work that if you get into an accident shortly after being laid off and don't have (expensive) private insurance you could be bankrupted by it.
So, I wanted to add some information to the issue of "bankrupted by it".
For your
> why state all these downsides and try to play this sort of 'neutral' card by saying "I don't know what if anything is right/wrong"? all of these so called reasons (or fears/scares) are just completely irrelevant when we can see that all other global north nations have single payer systems.
The "fears/scares" I listed really are "commonly voiced". Soooo, take this list as the POLITICAL answer to why the US does not have single payer, etc., not the rational, economic, financial, moral, medical, etc. but just the POLITICAL answer for the post of user
beckman466
at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29474353
Or can't give a good, rational answer to
beckman466
using only what is rational, economic, financial, moral, medical, etc. and instead must at least include some of the politics. Here define politics as using false information, cherry picking evidence, quotes out of context, lies, manipulation to fool people!
Some IT companies (especially startups, but it varies) do it with stocks or stock options as well, tying them to your employment.
Anyway, no civilized country should require you to be employed to be entitled to health care. Not making health care available to everyone, regardless of wealth or employment status, is classist eugenics.
tell me that these laws don't apply to you and that you've not had to struggle with them to get health insurance without telling me that these laws don't apply to you and that you've not had to struggle with them to get health insurance
Through the exchange, without a struggle, I received insurance comparable to what I had before, no questions asked about my existing health condition, with a subsidy to help pay. The best I could have hoped for previously would have been up to six months only of COBRA coverage, at 102% of my employer's cost, no subsidy. And if I chose to go without any coverage at all for a few months, in the past I would have had to divulge any pre-existing "conditions" as part of the application process.
The security benefits of being a company man are to be weighed by each individual against their own priorities. For some, doing whatever work a company needs how and when they need it in exchange for a secure paycheck or other benefits is the smart choice. For others, the lowered perceived security is worth being able to decide what to work on and how and when to work.
Generally speaking, if those security benefits that come with giving one entity a monopoly over your skills and productivity were as strong as they once were the gig economy wouldn't exist. The benefits IMO are overstated. In a world where these entities treat professionals as fungible, it only makes sense that the professionals treat those entities as fungible as well, and it is only fair, and freeing and empowering, if that sort of thing appeals to you.
It seems to me the platform is the entrepreneur, not the person logging into the app to try to hustle for fares.
There's a better way, a truly unbiased platform or set of platforms to enable people with services to offer and people who need those services to network with one another without the rent seeking. Perhaps that comes in the form of a non profit org, perhaps a distributed social networking system specifically targeted and certain kinds of work, I don't know, but I do know that if the middleman can be eliminated we can have something better than what we have now both in terms of gig work and traditional employment.
In the U.S., self-employed workers who make a profit have the same access to retirement plans (401k, SEP-IRA) as employees, and also have the same ability to pay for health insurance with pre-tax dollars as employees. In fact, self-employed people can contribute far higher amounts to tax-deferred retirment plans than employees in most cases.