It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur, and will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business.
These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
If you aren't a shoo-in at FAANG and you want to make that kind of money, your best bet is to learn how to start and run a business. I don't mean try to launch a billion dollar social app that needs venture funding. I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.
> instead of learning how to start and run a business
Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.
Especially if you start hiring other people, your liability then increases 10 fold as now anything can happen with them (sick leave, absenteism, low performance, sabotage, etc) but you're still bound to the same deadlines you agreed with your customers or you'll get sued for damages by them.
As an employee you have some basic rights and protections from the state on the limits your employer can squeeze from you, more or less, depending on where you live. As a contractor or company however, you don't, and can be fully liable in court for your failures to deliver regardless of your personal circumstances. Unless you know what you're getting into and have the know-how, experience, or mentorship, it's not worth it in most cases.
My primary goal is to maximize my income with the least amount of stress possible, and FAANG hits that spot just right.
I guess you can say I could maximize further by switching to finance or starting my own business, but the amount of extra stress is just not worth it at the moment, personally.
Doesn't sound like you get it. You ask why people have an aversion to starting their own business and people are giving you reasons that you don't want to accept.
I've done both. Working FAANG is way easier than running your own business. Orders of magnitude less stress. That's why some people can "rest and vest" at FAANG.
It is not about stress. You are asking to pick between a) do same job at a different company for 2-3x income, or b) learn to do something different for a chance of smaller/same/or bigger income than in the previous case. First option requires passing somewhat stressful interviews and then it is all familiar territory. Second option has more unknowns.
> First option requires passing somewhat stressful interviews and then it is all familiar territory. Second option has more unknowns.
The most you'll ever make at a job is based on one conversation you had months or even years ago. Your income will only ever increase at steps every 6 - 12 months and, in the best case, linearly and in the worst case never increasing beyond inflation.
With a business, yes your income may be stagnant or slower, but your income isn't capped, can change rapidly, and can change on a dime rather than waiting on the next review cycle or whatever.
If you have the stomach for it, a business will long-term always give better returns for your work than a job.
Your liability is. Worst case scenario is you don't get hired, or you get hired, and then get fired. That the worst that can happen. FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.
Let's watch how the Crowdstrike scenario unfolds in the coming months, when they'll probably get lawsuits up the ass for the damages they caused. Get your popcorn ready.
>And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.
Sure, but not everyone can get there, the same how not everyone can become a successful football player despite so many successful examples. There's too many variables. Usually, the right connections are your most valuable asset as one man company, and not everyone has them.
CrowdStrike is a publicly traded company; no one is coming after the founders or the CEO for money they have cashed out via stock sales, prior to the event. So it's not a great example.
A better example is simply having your business evaporate overnight while you have a building/offices to pay for, employees to pay, etc. Which happened to someone I know back in the early days of Windows NT: his servers and desktops that he built, worked under NT but then a service pack for NT 3.51 broke everything; overnight his contract with a large local hospital went away; that a few months later the next service pack fixed the issues, meant nothing to his former customers. He went from making the equivalent of $250K today to approximately zero.
Crowdstrike is essentially on the level of a FAANG, so I don't think this is remotely comparable to the type of business I mentioned.
The likelihood of a one-person SAAS getting sued into oblivion is pretty low, especially if you aren't providing something as fundamental as security services to banks and airlines.
If you are a tiny business, you just need an indemnity clause. If you have employees, you pay for E&O insurance.
Im not saying any of this is obvious, but if you are applying to work at a FAANG, I will assume you are both smart enough and ambitious enough to do a bit of research.
First, you don't really know whether that'll hold up in court until it happens.
Second, by the time you're done with the court case, you'll have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy. Not only is that stressful by itself, it's also a big distraction from running the business, and every day you are busy with the court case you'll wish you were spending time working your business. The smaller you are, the more impactful distractions are.
This ignores the fact that nothing is stopping someone from suing you personally today, small business owner or not.
There are two types of people who sue:
- rational actors who have acted in good faith, exhausted all avenues of recourse, and feel like the courts are their only hope for some sort of resolution.
- irrational actors who sue for weird personal reasons, can’t be reasoned with, refuse all attempts to come to a reasonable settlement, etc.
You definitely want the first type of person as a customer.
Again, nothing is stopping anyone from suing you personally right now.
Not everyone lives in a litigious society like the US. Here in Europe if you try to sue an employee for work related stuff you'll be dismissed pretty quickly on the grounds that you need to be suing the company instead.
It's totally understandable if you don't want to sell/market your business or you just don't want the unpredictability which is probably greater than with a larger company. But, oh no, I might be sued should almost certainly not be a major consideration relative to other factors.
> FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.
So? Worst case, the business folds and you start it again.
This is like being worried about being fired, and people telling horror stories about so-and-so who got fired. They’re fine. You’ll be fine.
The whole point of an LLC is to prevent people from going after the corporation’s owner. They have to go after the corporation itself. It’s in the name: limited liability corporation. And sure, if you end up harming someone physically then they might have a case against you, but most of us don’t run into that problem.
> Because the stress and risks of running a small business as a solo inexperienced first time business owner are insane compared to a regular 9-5.
Believe it or not you get over this. It’s kind of like the fear of going up on stage to give a presentation. Some people get an addictive rush, these are usually serial entrepreneurs who just love to be in charge because they have no problems with risk/stress tolerance (mostly). You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera. Hiring/firing is hard for people but you have no choice and certainly you’re not beholden to give people jobs. People are there to work, do their best at the moment, your job is to ensure them they’re looked after adequately and your door is always open to them if they have to talk to you.
Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig. Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well. The CEO will shit test you in almost everything you do and say and this is the grilling you will need, because they expect you to be capable of running things in their stead.
> these are usually serial entrepreneurs who just love to be in charge because they have no problems with risk/stress tolerance (mostly).
More accurately, they have made enough money from a successful venture that they can afford to fail and their risk/stress is lowered. I know serial entrepreneurs who failed several times in a row. Without some form of safety net along the way (an exit, taking money off the table in a later round, simply nice cashflows they were able to bank for a few years), they all seem to burn out.
I don’t see much evidence of actual experience in this comment. Maybe you have a lot of experience and aren’t very good at conveying it but honestly, it sounds like you have thoroughly drank the startup koolaid.
> Believe it or not you get over this.
This screams either a lack of experience or a lack of meaningful social relationships. Many people never get over this - it is incredibly risky and stressful being a solo founder.
> You get better at handling the stress as you get more comfortable with where your business lies and what value you offer, et cetera.
Again, not true. Some people can do this and others can’t. Fundamentally, it depends on actually providing value, being aware of the value you provide and being able to quantify that. Those are three difficult skills and many people cannot acquire them.
> Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.
Absolutely no. Many people should not attempt this. In fact, I’ve been doing this for around thirty years and I think the majority of people should avoid it. People with young families, credit card debt and spending problems have no business going out on their own.
> Failing that, you should strive to make it to VP-suite of your company where in most cases you’ll be tasked with running an arm of the business - the risks are there but it’s more of a simulated environment as well.
No, people should strive to make a living, pay their bills and find something approaching happiness.
Not to mention the existence of society literally depends on massive large coordinated efforts. It would be completely impractical to operate a society where everyone was an independent small business owner. Imagine trying to operate the global logistics system, or plan, build and operate off-shore oil wells. Being part of a team is a valid and honorable thing.
As an entrepreneur, you can leave anytime you want, but of course, you can't leave the responsibility aside.
With an employer not offering remote, you can set your own rules around it. You can work from Bali, if you want and your customers are OK with it. But i agree , the small business route is certainly not for everyone.
I politely disagree. If you think “hours spent at desk” correlates with performance, I don’t really know what to tell you.
I do work late, and over my career have absolutely pulled all nighters and weekends and been on the redeye, but that’s when I stretch or flex, and it’s simply not sustainable.
Of course there are. In my 20 years of experience I've never worked in a place which would expect people to work overtime. (this wasn't in my selection criteria BTW)
Most of people I know work 37 hour weeks and use sone kind of flex system where hours above 37 per week are saved and spent at later time. The only person keeping track of your time is yourself.
You can get over it if you dig the day-to-day of running a business. But not everyone digs it.
Everyone should attempt to start a small business or a side consulting gig.
No they shouldn't because as an endeavor it just doesn't appeal to lots of people.
The "everyone should try and become good at the stuff I think is fun" tone of this response is just weird, and grossly out of touch with observations of human nature.
LLCs limit your financial liability, but you can still work thousands of hours on a business and end up making nothing. If you work the same thousands of hours as an employee, you will make money.
When you start up a business from scratch you quickly become familiar with bank requirements for a personal guarantee. The LLC will not protect you from personal financial exposure in the full amount of all your business credit facilities, loans, leases, etc.
Working for a big company in the US is massively underrated. Over time, most people working in these companies will be much better off financially and with less stress/health issues.
The silicon valley/tech bubble over-romanticizes entrepreneurship without realizing its NOT for everyone.
For every 1 success story you hear about entrepreneurship, there are 50-100 that fail. The stress and anxiety is not something everyone can or should take if they have the opportunity to coast at FAANG and make $500K+.
How many businesses make $500K in revenue in the US? Not many? [1]
I am paraphrasing here, but I really agree with how Scott Galloway put it: The US corporation is the greatest wealth creating vehicle in history. Way safer and easier to build wealth working at Google.
Giving "StArt a BusZineaSs BRO" as a blanket advice is very disingenuous.
Started a business doing 1M annual recurring. I have plenty of reasons why it’s more advantageous.
• When times get tough, cofounders playing chicken to see who can take the lowest salary
• Giving yourself the lowest pay to prevent income loss of your employees
• Always having to hunt for sales to maintain your survival (which is typically nebulous and subject to when they feel like signing)
• HR and always trying to figure out how to not get sued
• Losing big customers or big customers going out of business
For any one of those bullet points there’s a coulda woulda shoulda, but again, just taking your 400k from a well established company that isn’t fighting for its survival every day is not inherently inferior to the heroics and cortisol required to operate a business.
Just went through a lot of these, and can confidently say: way way more dangerous to own a company than be a part of one. Significantly less fun, however. I believe it comes down to personality type.
Startup guy who’s now at FAANG. I’m technical technical technical (IC track). I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing.
Get to work with excellent SWEs, PMs, PgMs, etc.
In startup land I was doing so much, pitches, recruiting, coding, landing page design, dev ops, pretty much the full stack.
In FAANG land I can just focus on existence proofs and then there’s a whole support structure helping that happen and bringing the product to market.
You could argue that setting up this pipeline is the goal of a startup, but it’s a LOONG road. The opportunity cost is immense. It’s immensely difficult to recruit. You have to effectively pause your life. Scary to have children with startup level uncertainty.
At a certain $$ where you can live a comfortable life, enjoy 95% of what you do day to day, get to be in an environment with top notch colleagues, it’s a tough sell to start something from scratch with all that risk.
> I love building products. Prototyping to find PMF and then spinning that up into a staffed project, then onto the next new thing.
How many products you have actually finished and worked on and polished over years if they produced something valuable in the end?
That defines the actual realised value of the business. Jumping from one product to another does not mean that all of them were constantly producing revenue or were success. It might look good in the CV but what was end result?
Hit and miss. It’s pretty equivalent to % of finding product market fit in startup land.
Mostly worked on internal products. One HUGE hit, a few moderate hits, and quite a few failures.
The calculus for projects at a large bigco are different from a startup though.
It’s not necessarily clear bottom line revenue, especially for innovation teams. Crypto, for example, bigco needs at least some folks working on it to build an understanding of the technology, market, pain points. Some of these projects are started with literally no intention of profitability, but as an explicit build-to-learn.
There’s a wide spectrum of SWE interest and capabilities. Some folks love the creativity of greenfield new product exploration. Others love the focus of crafting a perfectly scalable, maintainable system. These are really just points along a product lifecycle.
I understand myself enough and am unapologetic about getting “bored” easily, and need to be constantly working on creative things.
Others at the other end of the spectrum have a visceral reaction to that. They can’t do what I do, and I can’t do what they do.
> I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.
Profitable software-based ideas are increasingly difficult to find. Thousands of people are exploring every niche and trying to start startups in them, which is great, but competition is fierce and unexplored niches are shrinking.
And of course, it's still not straightforward even if you find a relatively unexplored niche. Most people I see who have attempted startups had extensive family support or personal wealth from exits as an employee of a company that had an IPO.
People say this but I don’t buy it at all. If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago. The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
I think there are probably several hundred HN readers who would be happy to tackle those problems. Boring is probably not the issue, but obscure is, assuming these problems exist. If they're difficult to discover that the problem exists, that's a challenge. Further, if the problems exist but are highly unique in each case, there may be a reason it's solved in a one-off way by Excel or scripts rather than a scalable product. The use of Excel isn't inherently ripe for disruption. There are plenty of problems to be solved that just can't be solved profitably. It would be no better than solving a problem that someone has but is unwilling to pay for.
Your comment reminded me of a cool little project I found a few years ago re: niche problems and smaller solutions - the target demo being soldiers who (very generally) have some disposable income to spend on a small app that can improve their professional QoL was kind of genius imo.
There was (still is, though the website is now dead) a really cool website/app that a fmr Air Force soldier made called AFI SWiM[0] that extracted 'Shall, Will and Must' references from Air Force publications which blew up in popularity among the target demo. The dev recently(ish) wrote a blog post[1] how it surprised him to see the app[2] had gotten around ~20k downloads, though I am unsure if the app was always priced at $1.99 (which would be just under $40k).
I like the idea of developing a problem solver for a niche market, though finding and monetizing it definitely is pretty tough.
Imagine if this app was B2B instead of B2C, or if it pivots to B2B in the future, or if it's acquired. Imagine also future passive income with little maintenance. And his project seemed like a side project written over a few months.
Still risky, but the expected value is comparable to a stint at a salaried job IMO, once you find a decent market opportunity. Not to mention the qualitative value of self-employment, and that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs.
We can play this game all day, but the fact is somebody put a ton of work into a project and made about what they could have made in a month at a FAANG.
Not really. FAANG people have to show up to get that salary. It's not apples to apples to compare this to salary because the app was built once then continued to make money without additional work.
Salary requires constant effort and work. I will take working 60 - 80 hours for a week to make $40k over working 320 hours to make the same.
Imagine investing the FAANG money into dividend ETFs and living off those in a few years.
> that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs
You aren’t seriously comparing the risk of self-employment to the risk of being layed off by one of the most stable companies of the world during a downturn after a 15 year bullrun, are you?
50% of those places are using excel and outdated tech because they have 0 budget to spend on tech no matter how good the replacement (in fact even if it is cheaper, approving the alternative is too painful a process), "their problem" is not that nobody had solved their actual problem but trying to convince someone upstairs to approve spend on an alternative solution.
Big sample size issue here. I don't know why anyone would want to share that they have a profitable one person business, as it only invites competition. The people actually doing that are almost certainly going to keep it a secret.
If you know of some boring, obscure market niches that are also likely to be profitable, meaning the cost of customer acquisition is easily less than the profit per customer, and is scalably solved with a software product, please either share with HN readers, or at least offer to sell them to us.
They say ideas are worth nothing, but not to me. If you really have some good ideas (see definition above), I would be interested in buying them at a reasonable price.
Here's one that I have dealt with personally: paying taxes as an American that lives abroad (and wants to use the foreign income exclusion) is a nightmare filled with misinformation and tedium.
I don't know if this is actually a market worth pursuing, but I do know that I paid some company $500 to fill in a form for me and help figure out the process. They probably spent an hour or two on my case.
With the increase of dual citizens, digital nomads, etc. this seems like a growing market to me.
I too used Greenback once. The truth is that if one has a relatively simple situation, e.g. salaried employee, then it is entirely realistic to do this oneself. With more complexity (other types of income like interest, capital gains,...) it can be more time consuming, but still doable.
I am not a professional, so seek and pay for professional advice, if that is what you need. I've been doing my own taxes as an American living abroad for ~a decade. If anyone is in a similar situation and has questions, feel free to pm me. Because financial/tax advice from strangers with no professional credentials on the Internet is always a good idea. :p
> If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago.
Which just proves the immense value of Excel and the relatively bad value proposition of custom-made software.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
1. Yes, which is why it’s increasingly hard to start a business as a pure software engineer. To put it harshly, most software engineers don’t know enough about the real world out there to solve its problems. Many choose to create software for other software engineers for this reason, and that market is fierce.
2. Another issue is that only those specific businesses might have those problems. Even if you know about them, solving them might not be a good business case. Solving them must be lucrative enough to allow for a small target audience, or the problem needs to be common enough to allow for economies of scale, which brings us to back to point 1.
I used to work in internal IT at a Fortune 500 working with different departments in the company to turn Excel spreadsheets and Access97 tools into web apps with real databases. The problem is that the companies/departments where this is the case all have their own workflows and business processes, and 99% of the time are completely unwilling to consider change. It'll be really challenging to develop software that can be sold to multiple companies even when they ostensibly do the same thing.
I’ll add to that: in many industries/domains the incumbents are benefiting from the status quo and have no interest in upending it, while others have accepted some of these as “hard facts”[0].
I’m working on one such problem in the healthcare space, as an outsider. In early stages, so we’ll see if it goes anywhere.
>their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
And the problems were so important that somebody, anybody, stepped up to the plate with a digital solution as soon as it was barely possible.
Sometimes you have to admire that effort to a greater degree than a more technically advanced alternative.
I'm sure some of these are ripe for transition to a truly more effective approach in every way but often there is no fooling them trying to provide anything less.
And disruption itself can be the enemy in some things like this.
There is limitless opportunity outside of the webtech/adtech bullshit bubble. Go create a hardware startup, it's never been easier. It's still harder than adtech bullshit was 10 years ago, but the turnkey manufacturing industry is faaaar better than all the "hardware is hard" weekly blogspam would lead you to believe.
Any hints on how to even begin looking into this? There's a plethora of content on starting SaaS projects but can't say I've ever come across any for hardware.
That's gonna depend on your skills and what you think is interesting to pursue. Generally speaking you'll want to learn how to, at a minimum, model stuff and 3d print it, and how to design PCBs. I strongly suggest FreeCAD and KiCad for those tasks respectively.
I like making hardware and SW that goes with it... I'm just not sure how you validate the market need for something like that and what hw more exactly to build. I feel there is already so much stuff...
I haven't read this elsewhere so it may be non-validated but you shouldn't imagine customers of a product as entirely captured nor cohesive. Inside of the customer pool are going to be people who are displeased with the product for sometimes disparate reasons but not enough to find a different product because this one is "good enough".
To make this example very simple, a product may produce orange widgets. It's good enough for most people but one group wishes it made a more yellow widget while another group wishes it made a more red widget. The orange widget isn't the ideal case, it's a compromise to serve the most people.
If someone came in and made a product that produces very yellow widgets and focuses on the yellow widget market, you could serve those people very well despite being having a smaller pool.
In other words, your product doesn't need to go toe-to-toe with the orange widget product that has a revenue of $1B, you only need to pick off the yellow widget people to get a revenue of, lets say, $10M and you are eating very well.
I also think the opportunity to build small but helpful gadgets is bigger than finding the perfect SaaS idea. But it’s still not exactly easy to come up with something new. Whenever I see an ingenius product I think to myself „This was obvious, why haven’t I thought of that?“, but oh well.
A comment, the one I am responding to, that would fit much better in the "hopeful" bucket than in the "realistic" one.
I, like many others, hold a white-collar job in a technology company, not FAANG, with a salary between 300 and 400K per year, with lunch breaks, paid vacation days, good health insurance, and the opportunity to work from home at least 75% of the time.
At the end of my workday, which I have not found to be stressful in at least 3 years, I am fresh, hydrated, and ready to spend late afternoons, evenings, and nights pursuing my interests, taking care of the kids, and maybe learning French at last.
I see guys running fairly successful local businesses, both physical and digital. Assuming you have a choice between the two paths, a brief look at the physical condition and a conversation with me and the business owner would quickly lead you to prefer one of the two paths.
I might be privileged, lucky, in an unusual situation. But the same is true for the successful local entrepreneur running a plumbing business with profits equivalent to those of experienced people working in tech.
As someone who has been self-employed for over 20 years, done the startup thing (including going through YC in the very early days), I totally understand why people would not want to.
There are real downsides to owning your own business. It’s probably been 15 years since I had a day where I didn’t check my email.
Most people are Indians, not chiefs, and I think that’s actually an evolutionary adaptation that’s built into us. Someone may want to be the best programmer they can be rather than the best at managing employees, setting business strategy, dealing with taxes and other paperwork, etc.
In general, one-person shops have real downsides for both owners and customers. As an employee, I've often been in situations where I simply haven't been reachable for extended periods of time which obviously isn't great for a customer either absent a fallback. Fallbacks of various sorts are available but probably not at "the SaaS is down" level.
> your best bet is to learn how to start and run a business
Startups are so hit and miss. It's really really hard to make $500k a year at a startup. There's many years of zero, near zero or sub-intern salary. After that there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Classic businesses can get a substantial salary sooner than a startup, but do have a ceiling. If you're selling a well known need (plumbing, consulting, etc), there's competition and a ceiling at hours worked.
Having done both, a FAANG job is infinitely less effort than running a company. Also lower stress, lower risk, and immediate rewards/pay. I still have more fun starting companies though!
That's a really informed comment from both sides of the exact fence.
>there's either failure or a big payout that dwarfs the FAANG salary.
Tech or not I think it usually doesn't dwarf anything but if it comes close, a little bit low or high, that's a huge milestone above failure.
In that case it might allow you to maintain readiness for an incredible bonanza which might be within reach only from beyond that point, and that can be what dwarfs the "big payout".
IOW depending on the situation, occasional big payouts that really just even things out may not be very life-changing even if they are big, but it can give you more rolls of the dice at things that can't be approached any other way.
You make it sound so easy. I've ran small businesses for most of my career and I've never made more than a quarter of what I currently make working as a contractor (ironically, for a business I once started, now owned by someone else). And most of the time I earned 5-10% of that.
Good to get your message, I have some of the same experience.
I do better as a consultant/contractor for a client who is a previous customer from when I had my own facility. Fundamentally I used to provide the paperwork (the deliverable/invoiceable product) and supported everything needed to generate it, including any free advice which goes along to smooth the flow. Now I'm paid to help their paperwork achieve and maintain value with none of mine in the mix at all, but I'm basically doing a lot of the same stuff when I'm on site.
As a contractor aren't you now a small business operator of a different type, perhaps much smaller?
I would estimate in more of the exact same business in so many ways very few ever come close to that.
Maybe even doing some of the same things under different degrees of ownership and responsibility, and this could be a good example of way different compensation when the only difference is the underlying arrangement.
I'm not sure how I made it sound so easy, because presumably getting a 250k job at a FAANG isn't easy either. Which is what my point was - if you're going to deal with the time and stress to get one of the most desirable jobs, why not use that same time and effort to build a business?
Except, it kinda is for people that have the right background and are well suited to it. That is, the reason I think you're getting a lot of pushback is that many folks are just inherently risk averse. There are people who are smart, know how to work hard, and know that if they have a path laid out in front of them, they can succeed.
For entrepreneurs, there is simply much more variability. You can be smart, work hard, do everything right, and still fail in unexpected ways due to things outside of your control.
I don't think entrepreneurship is bad at all, but it's not surprising at all to me that people who want to go the FAANG route aren't well suited to starting their own business.
Getting a 250k job at FAANG is P hard. There is a finite set of tasks that you have to execute to get a job at one of those.
Starting a business is NP hard. At the end of the day, you have to convince people to give you money in some form and way, and that is not a guarantee. You could land on a lucrative idea, or you could do trial and error, failing every time.
Furthermore, once you have either, maintaining a FAANG job is much easier than maintaining a business.
Because it's a lot more predictable. Put in the necessary effort and you are almost guaranteed to get a FAANG job. And the best part, it's completely clear where that effort needs to be directed. Yes, you need to have the smarts, but for a business that pays as much you need to have a lot more than that, plus luck. I'm all for entrepreneurship and personally couldn't work for one of those companies, but with FAANG salaries being this high I don't think those people are making an irrational choice at all.
You have to find a business that makes sense for you (you know it, you want to put up with it, etc). You then have to execute. All the while hoping that you don't get struck by lightning (something kills your business), while also hoping to get struct by lightning (you become wildly successful). God forbid you need job security (family, health care, etc.).
Contrast this to going into a job, where what you do is laid out for you, you just have to execute. With insurance. With job security.
Even as someone who has run a startup and still has the itch, it's a no brainer.
Different skillsets involved. You will eventually have to give up programming and focus on developer sales/marketing/recruiting skills.
Very rare to see businesses where you're sole developer and salesperson unless you are the main SME on a niche field/technology you probably developed.
Also A LOT of FAANG is immigrants who can't start a business in the US or children of immigrants whose parents put strong pressure on them having an upper middle class job.
Yes. This is a bit reductive, but literally everything is out there for the taking -- you just have to go out and get it!
Anecdotally, I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of formally-educated people I've encountered in life are more allergic to this idea than the opposite.. I don't have any solid theories as to why, exactly, but it's curious nonetheless.
Because a lot of people don't want everything resting on them. Takes a special kind of person. I know I ain't one. My dad owned his own business with a 100 employees and it was miserable growing up
What sees you discount the obvious? That is, formally educated people end up in formal education because they have a proclivity towards not wanting to have to go out and get it. They want someone else to hand it to them. Which is, after all, what the "formal" part of formal education describes.
The problem is identifying what to go out and get. Because most people will go out and get the wrong thing and end up burning themselves out of future endeavors.
> so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee
It seems like you are vastly underestimating the effort (and risk) it takes to start a successful SaaS that brings its founder $500k+ annually.
You're right about everything if you can actually start and grow that business, but you're glossing over how difficult that actually is to do, and the fact that you have to start from $0 income.
> It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur
I like coding. I don't want to run a business, and these are very separate skills. This is like asking why an IC doesn't want to become a people manager.
Nothing interesting. No matter what people say, starting a business is incredibly difficult and takes a certain amount of luck. I've done 3. Failed at all 3. Made $0. Some people aren't cut out and are better off being employees.
Because I am happier as a great employee. I have a large family and have chosen base salary over stock when it comes up for example. I make a great salary and we can afford to have a lot of fun. We took four months and traveled in an RV. I have 7 lids and they all have a sport so we do lots of Soccer, Field Hockey, Softball, Baseball, etc. That is expensive and time consuming but I am at 99% of their games.
I can't do that as well while starting and running a company.
> There's plenty of CEOs (non-founders) who are billionaires.
Being a business owner doesn't necessarily mean being the founder.
No CEO is becoming a billionaire by collecting a paycheque. They might become a billionaire by accepting the right stock offer in lieu of wages, but that makes them the business owner again.
Did you go to all of the trouble of writing that comment because you wanted us to laugh at you? All of those people are clearly in that position because they are business owners.
Granted, Catz seems to have recently sold off a large stake of her ownership. But the cash proceeds of that sale still came from being the owner at one point, not from a salary. Nobody becomes a billionaire off a regular paycheque.
Hell, even FAANG software developer compensation is really only notable because the total package includes becoming an owner of the company. The wage portion isn't that much different than any other random tech company.
Absolutely. FAANG wages are certainly competitive, but not out of line from what you can make in any old Poducksville software company. It is the becoming an owner of FAANG that sets them apart financially.
While true, I'd suggest if someone's career choices are primarily motivated by a desire to become a billionaire, they are not making rational career choices anyway and are likely to be unswayed by, you know, evidence.
There is an opportunity cost to starting a new business. Depending on market and your experience it can take several years before you get anywhere close to earning the same level of income as a mid to senior level FAANG employee. There is also the time commitment to dealing with everything outside of being an IC (taxes, healthcare, finance, marketing, disputes, legal).
To anyone exploring starting a new business I would keep the day job and suffer until you get to a point where the business is on a good clip and you can dedicate all your time to it. Otherwise spending 20 years at FAANG and enjoying your life is really not a bad way to live, in fact its a dream to 99% of the planets population.
One is basically guaranteed, as long as you learn and play the game; the other, to put it simply, is not. It takes an order of magnitude more effort and savviness to make a successful business than grind Leetcode and work at FAANG for 30 years. And even then, the FAANG employee is likely to outearn you.
How do you get the startup capital to do this? At least in the area where I have know how it would cost at least a million to get the space, hardware, raw materials, and employees to start turning out products. Then you would need money for marketing and logistics.
Depending on where you are, you can often find gov support to start your business. (Here in Canada, this support can be grants, loans or event free experts time.)
When it's gov monetary support, you usually have to bring 50% of the total amount.
Otherwise, you can contact incubators like YC.
If they approve your idea and grant you money, you can then easily apply for loans at banks because you've been vetted by a well known company.
After all that energy spent, you will understand the quote :
> Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.
> will instead put in so much effort to optimize being a well-paid employee, instead of learning how to start and run a business.
Being an employee is still running a business. The separation you are trying to draw isn't meaningful.
That particular line of business is one of the few businesses out there with a near-guaranteed customer base, though. That's a highly attractive trait for someone operating a business. With small risk comes small reward, of course, but it is no surprise that most businesses venture in that direction.
I don't think this works out well for most people anymore. I mean that was true a few years ago when things were booming even, but now you're almost guaranteed to have a very hard time. I know someone that is over-employed and has over half a dozen jobs (yes you read that right, and it's been verified); most of them are at entrepreneur owned companies and they are all struggling right now, hanging by a thread with a skeleton crew.
I agree with you, but I also understand that some just don’t know that entrepreneurship could also yield those salaries and more. Some can’t handle the uncertainty that of entrepreneurship. Some have been entrepreneurs and after an exit do decide to work for someone else.
As for myself, I can’t wait to free myself from these chains called salaried employment. (I don’t mean to offend anyone)
They're probably 2-3x the guy running a local plumbing business doing remarkably fewer hours. And of course it's more accessible. The average guy running a plumbing business is probably 30 something, while people can hit 300k at faang a year or two out of college with like one good promotion.
I worked with a guy who went to a public university - not a top 25 public university but in the ballpark. He was hard-working, smart and "got it", but he wasn't at the level of some super-geniuses I met coming out of school. He worked with us (Fortune 100, non-FAANG, non-tech, non-big metro) as a junior SWE for a year and did not get promoted as he desired. He jumped ship for a FAANG-adjacent company after a year working for us, and his TC jumped from <$100k to over $200k. Two years later he was promoted to senior and his TC is now over $300k.
He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.
That wasn't the question, the question was a 500K faang job vs. a local plumbing business making a comparable amount of money.
I think it's very easy to start a failing plumbing business. I think it far less accessible to start a plumbing business that competes with a FAANG salary.
Put another way: how many people do you know who started their own consumer-facing, bootstrapped business, of any kind and who take home $3-500,000 as CEO? My answer is, like, two and they're both lawyers who didn't start making that kind of income until their mid thirties.
Edit: It would not, at all, surprise me if even in the trades the most common path to business ownership was to take over someone else's already existing business, which would I think cut even further into this point since it would mean the most common path to entrepreneurship is optimizing employment in a small business context.
I think getting a FAANG job is difficult, but for the median 30 year old (who has around $5,000 saved up and limited or no external safety nets), starting a business as your primary source of income is a really good way to bankrupt yourself and not much else, and valorizing that path is actively harmful.
I mean, that's what I'm trying to do (the business, not the monetary milestone), but something to be mindful of is that on Indie Hackers only 12 people out of 17,000 in the community got to $10k MRR.
Granted, this is Indie Hackers, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the general idea still applies. Getting to $10k a month, let alone making $250k a year (so ~$20k/month) is really hard, probably about as hard as making $250k a year as an employee, maybe even harder.
To me it's always been a matter of personality. As an introvert, I can't picture myself doing the kinds of social interactions required to sell a business on my own.
I feel like layoffs are easier to ride through with just a limited amount of money saved.
A barely new small business will have tougher time surviving a bad economy.
> but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business.
I know a guy who ran a successful plumbing business around Northern VA.
Took home around 300k per annum. I used to bang his daughter.
He worked hard, though, and had a couple of other guys working jobs independently under him, on top of his work. He was mostly corporate and construction work, but a couple of those guys under him also did residential, and he mostly supervised.
I'm far less than his TCO but also don't have to get elbow deep in shit and work remotely from my basement. Respect the hustle, but I think I'm winning in terms of work-life balance and QOL.
> It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur
It’s not like nobody wants that, the scarce thing is having a good business idea unless you want to go into consulting.
> And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
That’s kinda stretching it. Higher FAANG-level salaries are enough to reach financial independence, which is pretty much „unlimited“ territory for most normal people. On the other hand, most businesses are not hyper successful. It‘s not like becoming a millionaire entrepreneur can be taken for granted.
It’s interesting that you don’t seem to understand this. Survivorship bias or something else?
While running a small business can be incredibly fulfilling and teach you a ton of adjacent skills that you wouldn’t learn as a SwEng at a FAANG (sales, marketing, …), I find it infinitely more stressful than regular employment.
There’s just so much more responsibility resting on your shoulders. Holidays have never felt the same since I left employment in 2011.
No regrets here, just saying this path is not for everyone and not as accessible as you might think.
I don’t see why so many people try so hard to be a professional football player when they could just as easily start a business launching rockets into space.
The one has got nothing to do with the other. Running a small business is far more sales and marketing, and if you are lucky enough to get to the point where you need to hire someone, then HR, managing suppliers and fuck me don’t get me started on fucking customers.
These salaries listed are great salaries, no doubt, but they are not dramatically more than say, a guy running a successful local plumbing business. And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
If you aren't a shoo-in at FAANG and you want to make that kind of money, your best bet is to learn how to start and run a business. I don't mean try to launch a billion dollar social app that needs venture funding. I mean a SAAS that solves a boring problem for other businesses with money to spend.