Poll: Should you work for yourself or take a full-time job?

I suspect the majority of people should aim for a full-time job. Working for yourself (excepting certain industries where it’s very much the norm, say plumbing) is an additional skill set that can take quite the time to acquire.

However, if you find yourself with the opportunity you may want to avail yourself; laid off and you can consult for six months while looking for new work? Could be an opportunity. But many who try it eventually go back to salary work because of any number of externalities.

It’s also not a binary decision; when getting hired you can ask for carve outs for side work that doesn’t involve your day job - or you can become a notary public or a real estate agent and just offer your services to friends and family.

option 3: work part time for yourself and part time for others

(sounds like your definition of "work for yourself" is already compatible with this option but mixing or time-slicing both angles in a more conscious way can be very rewarding.)

For the most part nobody "should" anything.

In general, if you're entrepreneurial, yeah, work a part time job and build something.

If you're all in in developing professionally for the corporate ladder, go grab a full time job.

drop out and be a criminal. it's really the most fulfilling option

Different at different times of your life. I'm mid 40's. Have done some work for myself, largely career for other people culminating in c-suite roles.

Now using all that knowledge running on my own startup (and loving it...) which I'd tried to get up and running 10 years ago. The skills gained over the last 10 years absolutely invaluable for launching the startup with much greater success than version 1 :)

You are always working for someone—whether you have one big customer, a few medium-size ones, or many tiny ones.

More customers is in some ways more sustainable, because losing a single customer is less of an impact and you are more likely to have a well-oiled up-to-date process for getting new customers.

Perhaps a bigger differentiator is not employment vs. self-employment but whether you can do something you enjoy doing while getting compensated for it and living a balanced life—which is possible in either arrangement.

Work for yourself but you won’t get work life balance until you’ve built something stable. You’ll have much higher satisfaction but you also have much higher risks.

If you are risk adverse or just want something steady so you can enjoy a work life balance, go take a job, work your 9-5, don’t quiet quit but don’t go above and beyond.

Nothing beats working for yourself. That said, if you have a family or dependent people, make sure you arrange some sort of financial security before doing anything adventurous

Option 3: form a worker owned co-op and distribute profits between members instead of shareholders and management.

Pay, work-life balance will suffer if you work for yourself. You will have to think about many more things than just coding and accrue more expenses (taxes, business structure, marketing).

I work for myself and love it but it isn't for the faint of heart. If you want to work for yourself I recommend first working for other people for 5-10 years—basically, get paid to learn your industry. Then when you can't rise any farther, that's the time to go work for yourself.

Note I'm a person who's relatively less motivated by money, and my idea of successful self-employment is to be a consultant with a very good work-life balance. If you're trying to start a billion-dollar company this advice isn't for you, but I wish you the best of luck.

I wish I could get a job that pays well, offers camaraderie, fulfillment, and opportunities to grow. I have tried many times to fit in. In a 35 year career the longest I ever held a job was 4 years. I finally figured out that I was not employable. Happy to be working for myself.

It's not surprising that at this point the poll is at 21 vs 22.

Competition will ensure that incentives remain more or less balanced between the two options (the less freelancers there are, the more they can charge, and the less full timers there are, the more they will be paid). Unless we lived in a world where one of them was so much easier to attract talent to that the other just died off.

For specific people in specific circumstances one might be a bit better (small kids at home, difficulty selling your services, etc'), but the differences between people's preferences aren't that huge, so we should expect the poll to be about 50-50.

First I traded time for money, working in tech, saved a small fortune.

Now, run my own saas, trading money for more time.

I currently do both.

I have a small SaaS that I work on one day a week.

The last 4 days I work a job.

The SaaS pays by far the highest hourly and feeds my hunger to create.

The job gives me fulfilment socially and makes me feel part of something.

It feels like I should double down on one. But I really enjoy both, so why?

My wife got laid off a few years back and started her freelance marketing business out of that. She loves it. She's really anti-meeting and bullshit and this allows her to just do her job (copywriting) 90% of the day. Maybe because her parents were small business owners, she is fine dealing with the small business busywork (quarterly taxes, business generation).

Most of her business started with former coworkers who know she's good hiring her, and then that work expanding, and now her website has good SEO and she gets more offers than she can accept.

Some of her other friends attempted freelancing but weren't able to get too much business or didn't like it for whatever reason. YMMV I guess.

I always tell her she should start an agency (hire people beneath her) to make more money, but she hates agencies and is happy with how things are. Only downside is it's a little harder to make heaps of money this way, since she can only raise her rates so high.

At times I hate my full time job. But when I tried to be a freelancer, I went broke. I will not risk this again.

This is like asking, "should I cook for myself or go out to eat?" I don't mean to be that guy, but your initial opening "I know it will depend on the person" says it all. I don't really understand why one take a poll about this except, possibly for academic reasons.

Understand that, even if the poll results are heavily skewed towards one side, it says very little about reality. Both the audience and respondents are self-selecting. And the answers more reflective of what the respondents want to believe (or want others to believe) than what actually is.

Instead, perhaps you should think about why you feel the need to ask in the first place? Is it self-doubt? Perhaps a desire to fit in? Do you feel as if you don't control your own life? Are you seeking affirmation for a choice you already made? Are you seeking "evidence" to support an argument? Once you know yourself, you will be able to answer this question and many others much more easily.

IMO, a good understanding of one's self cannot happen without brutal honesty. Which requires stepping back and making hard observations without the interference of one's ego. This is quite difficult, but is certainly do-able. Best of luck.

I didn't vote and I'm surprised that I don't see a comment about this topic: it's heavily context-dependent, and at different stages in someone's career the pendulum may swing from one side to the other. I believe that I would enjoy working for myself, and I kind of did so for a few years as a contractor, but what I really would enjoy is providing a software product or service that people paid for and where I had full creative control. I believe that working at a job provides many benefits: If the company is big, you may work on problems at a scale or magnitude that is difficult to stumble into on your own. You may find mentorship, teaching, or growth opportunities when working at a company that will be harder to find when working for yourself. You'll find it easier to get your code reviewed when working on a team than on your own. You'll probably enjoy a much wider variety of social interactions in your day job if you're working at a big company than on your own. You will get a lot more independence and the chance to really own your success and your failure if you work on your own. You'll get a much bigger piece of the pie if you find huge success on your own. And finally (yeah right, this list could go on ad nauseam) you'll be much more likely to enjoy a steady paycheck, paid right when you expect it, if you work for a company.

Both? :sweat:

I'v done both.

I'v nominally worked for myself, as half-owner and company director.

I'm a huge geek, with mental health symptoms that could be mistaken for autism and ADHD but are actually due to trauma from having terrible parents who I removed from my life decades ago.

The customers were clueless disorganised nitwits. Their upper management was out playing golf, so we had to try to get their disgruntled office staff to stop looking at facebook for five minutes and cooperate with us to get things done.

I handled complicated technical stuff but had to leaving talking to the customers to someone else.

It depends on your personality.

I'm too honest and bad at manipulating people to be a good salesman or executive.

Sales is a totally different skill set and psychopathic personality disorder to making the technology work.

I’m almost 50. I worked for myself for about 10 years then I return to government. Between taxes, insurance, business fees and forms, once I hit 45 I swore I would never work for myself again. The freedom is great, but consistency, and someone else managing the numbers and overhead, it’s so much easier.

It’s a terrible choice to make: Freedom versus Security, but I think we deserve both.

Work for yourself is always superior. The nature of employment is akin to slavery. Master-slave, lord-serf, employer-employee. When the US was founded, people largely worked for themselves as craftsmen and farmers. People were probably a lot happier then than today, for obvious reasons, less oppression.

People that do work for themselves often present themselves as victims, being responsible for more in some ways. But the freedom is regained, and sense of liberation. I've offered these individuals many times to simply apply and get a job working for someone else to quench their victimhood. While I'm sure it's happened many times, I've never personally met a taker on that offer.

Unless someone had a terrible experience and couldn't make it work while being self-employed, most people intrinsically know that having your boss be "survival" rather than an actual talking head (who will cut you as soon as you're not profitable just the same), is superior. There's more upside financially doing this as well, rather than locked in a situation where the only reason you're there is because you're creating more value than you accept in pay. Self-employed people always get 100% of the fruits of their passion and labor back.

Keep in mind the HN bubble is real.

Right now, its 74 votes for FT, 113 Work for Yourself.

"Work for yourself" is a fine answer if you have enough in savings that you can take the risk of not having work. HN has a greater proportion of people that can do that.

I question how many people voting for FTJ would actually prefer WFY but don't have that level of financial security.

Work for yourself if you can make it viable then it will be a lot more rewarding and grow you as a person as opposed to being a voiceless number in some open plan office just counting the days to your next holiday.