I have built two startups while working fulltime and raising 2 kids. The first startup failed once my co-founder left town, after the business model and app were about 90% completed. My 2nd/current startup is http://targetmobi.com.
My schedule M-F for the last 3 years has been:
7am wakeup, feed kids etc. 9am - 5:30 work fulltime. 5:30 - 10pm family time. 10pm - 1am Startup time!. Yes thats 5-6 hours of sleep! Trying to do a startup on the side with children has been very challenging for me. Maybe its the biz models I am trying to tackle. Maybe building simple iphone/ipads apps would have had a better ROI.
Thanks for sharing this inspiring story. Having been to India previously, I can imagine somewhat what you and your parents have struggled to overcome/achieve.
"They slogged their whole life to get us decent education"
I bet that is probably an understatement from what I know of hard-working Indian people.
Sure they might make more later on, but I'm not interested in giving up that much time for 1. something thats not my project and 2. for so little per hour
1) The $125,000 is a starting salary, which will go up substantially if the hire proves successful. There are lots of future earnings to consider when working in this type of position.
2) The psychological perception of the work and income. Does the person realize or care that he is working 50 hours a week @ $25/hour, or does the person care that he is making $125,000 annually? I am not a behavioral economist (IANABE?), but I'd have to imagine that this is a huge factor -- the salary vs. hourly mindset.
I believe its 100 hours a week, which frankly sounds absurd.
My comment is not ignoring either of your points since:
1. I state the salary will go up.
2. The point of my comment was to realize that making 125K is not much if you are working 100hr/week and have no time to enjoy it, thus a high salary might seem great but looking at it on an hourly basis can be useful etc.
In life, generally you can have more money or more time, rarely can you have both. I would rather have more time personally.
Some people may be very interested in time smoothing. That is spending time now, with the expectation of spending less time in the future because of present time invested. I think PG has talked about this in regards to startups. Work really hard for a concentrated number of years to reap large financial rewards and have the option of never working again.
Regarding the time/money trade off, that is, as you mention, a personal preference. I'd assume the type of person looking for a big law/finance/consulting job is the type of person who places much more weight on having lots of money and being part of the money culture, than enjoying downtime.
I really like this quote:
"The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’."
I couldn't help but hear a loud 'cha-ching' in my head when reading this. I makes sense though, having a lot of money in the bank enables a business to make bold moves. I think its a delicate balance between making more sums of money and being more profitable.
Silly side note and stupid metaphor warning - if someone is right-handed, they never think to cut off their left hand just because they get less return or use out of it. Only when someone if forced to choose between the hands would they ever say, ok cut off my left hand and save my dominate hand. Thats like an extreme situation!
But in business, these companies make extreme moves like this, exiting whole biz sectors/markets, eliminating depts, segmentation etc. Add to this, that the bar is continuously raised, so if the factory quota for last year was x this year its x + 10. Thus 5-10 years later the exec's are surprised when the factory is not meeting "quota" and shutter it in the name of profitability.
Profitability is one issue, but I think the trend toward over optimization and greater year-over-year ROI is also to blame.
I have a social science degree from UC Berkeley and am a self-taught programmer / Entrepreneur. I currently work as a Senior Software Developer. The best programmers I have worked with over 7 years have not been comp sci / engineering majors, while most of the mediocre programmers I have worked with have a degree in CS or MIS - totally anecdotal I know, but thats been my experience.
To a certain extent, what you study in college and what you eventually pursue as a career are generally not the same. Anyone with more than a few years in the field will understand that. Experience trumps a degree after 2-3 out in the field and you can set your own course.
Feel free to disagree, just let me know how many years of work experience you have.
I highly suspect your observations are a result of cognitive bias. You are much more likely to remember the degree of a programmer if it's something incongruous, so it's the philosophy degrees that stand out in a sea of CS degrees.
Also, a programmer's having a CS degree is much less likely to come up. You note his degree--which is similar to so many others--and don't think of it again, unless, perhaps his performance is poor. Poor performance doesn't match what you expect--or, more likely, what you think others expect--of a CS major, so you remember that it was a CS major that wasn't particularly good.
While people with degrees/diplomas may not be good at programming, they at least have something tangible to show potential employers, while people without one need to be more ... creative.
It reminds me on the focus on grades - ALONE - in my country. An absolutely atrocious metric, but a metric the institutions can understand, at least.
After college I started doing some web development on the side, which really took off. I spent like 100's of late nights hacking and learning. I think there is really no other way to get good or learn things but through hard work. You can either be forced to do it (like via a degree or taking classes etc) or just force yourself on your own. I started doing simple thing than got excited to do more and more complex features, apps, systems etc. Now I do lots of System Admin and DBA, product management etc. I know many people that have followed the same path: studied X but now do Y.
"they at least have something tangible to show potential employers"
Maybe, depends on the organization. I worked for a startup where we passed over a lot of CS resume's b/c they had no tangible experience, no interesting side project, nothing they were hacking on, nothing that stood out, including people with Ivy league CS degrees.
I am 29 years old. I thought the same thing as you until about age 25 when someone explained to me that CC's are a great way to build your credit rating. Since I avoided getting a credit card for so long...I had no credit and a very low credit rating! Whereas my wife who had had a CC for 10 years already had great credit. As a result, we had to utilize her credit rating when getting car loans/ home loans etc until my credit rating improved! Without good credit you can really get owned (bad loan rates) when pursuing a loan for any reason.
Why were you pursuing these loans in the first place?
Did you really need to get a car loan or did you just not have the cash to buy the car that you wanted. Could you have bought a little less car, paid cash, and have been payment free? Or could you have stayed in what you had, saved up, and then paid cash.
Same with a home. Did you need to buy a home? Or did you want to buy a home.
My point here isn't to indict your decision making, so please don't take my questioning as a personal attack.
My point is that this idea of borrowing money to make purchases has become so engrained in our thinking that very few people stop and question it.
There are cases where a clear need exists and sometimes the only way is to borrow money. I've been there. But the messages we hear on a daily basis don't talk about borrowing to satisfy needs; rather they serve to support the idea of borrowing to satisfy wants.
"Why were you pursuing these loans in the first place?"
As much as I wish I had $250K in the bank....
"Did you need to buy a home? Or did you want to buy a home."
LOL - as a married father of 2 kids in the Midwest I find this quite a funny comment. After renting for many years and dealing with horrible landlords ex: coming home on a cold winter Friday night to find my apartment bedroom with no windows with a little note stating "Be Back on Monday" - sleeping in a sleeping bag as a result.
So yeah, we "needed" our own home.
Also, given it is a great time to buy home (great rates, low prices, we got a tax credit in 2009 too) it felt like we would be stupid not to capitalize on purchasing a piece of earth/dwelling etc. Now we have a fat veggie garden, doing a remodel etc. Sometimes we regret it but overall it was the right decision for us.
Unless mammy and pappy or granny and grampy have the dough, or you sold your last company to Google, I'm guessing if you choose to buy a home, you will be calling your local loan officer and after the meeting wishing you had established some credit.
> LOL - as a married father of 2 kids in the Midwest I find this quite a funny comment. After renting for many years and dealing with horrible landlords ex: coming home on a cold winter Friday night to find my apartment bedroom with no windows with a little note stating "Be Back on Monday" - sleeping in a sleeping bag as a result.
> So yeah, we "needed" our own home.
This might be semantic wankery, but you didn't "need" to buy a house, you needed a place to live without a shitty landlord and - unfortunately, I would argue - the easiest, most feasible way to do that where you lived was buying a house.
Agreed. I have never been in debt in my life (not even student loans), and I really REALLY don't want to start now. That said, it still remains to be seen whether I can make enough money to afford to buy a house without a loan when the time comes that I decide that's what I want.
I'm completely with you on car loans (why pay so much interest for something that depreciates in value so quickly; you're losing out twice).
But for the majority of people it is simply not possible to buy a house without either making massive life changes or getting a loan. I don't think that becoming a life-long renter is a smart choice either.
For a fair number of people it is simply not possible to get their finances in order without massive life changes. Doesn't mean they shouldn't do it, for values of "shouldn't" such as "wouldn't be better off and happier, five or ten years down the road".
Firstly, there is a lot less security in renting. I can be evicted with a months notice. While I'm young that's part of the trade off but when I have a family I wouldn't appreciate that level of control over my life being in the hands of my landlord.
The second reason is the fact that when I fully own a house I will feel more financially secure. I won't have to worry about making rent payments for the next X years of my life and I'll feel better prepared for unforeseen circumstances. I might be able to achieve the same security by investing my money in other areas; but I much prefer investing in something tangible.
A mortgage is essentially a huge long-term bet, renting is a smaller, shorter term bet. The owner is betting that everything lines up nicely: the value of his property stays put or rises, nothing bad unexpectedly happens to the property, undesirable people don't move in around it, a whole-sector bubble doesn't pop. As a renter, there is no commitment: if the house is outdated you can move to a newer one with far less hassle; you don't have to worry about cost of maintenance; if you move during a bubble you can move once again when the bubble pops and pay less. The owner may end up with a property in 20 years if everything goes well, but a renter will never be underwater.
A rating that turns out negative for people that have never needed any credit is a silly rating. Let me guess, indirectly it's the credit card companies doing the rating?
It actually makes sense. You're thinking of credit rating like it should be a blacklisting system, penalizing people who abuse it. But instead it's a whitelisting system, giving more privileges to people that have demonstrated trustworthiness. If you never play the game to begin with, then you have no credit rating, and therefore nobody knows if they can trust you.
A while back I interned with a company called Rapleaf that was trying to do the same thing for the internet, by tracking your social footprint (based on your email), figuring out information about you and, more interestingly, how long that information has been on the internet, as well as figuring out your social graph. I'm not quite sure if this is still the same stuff they're doing these days (they may be focused more on just providing data about people rather than providing "trustworthiness"), but at the time the idea was the longer someone's identity has been on the internet, and the more trusted friends they have, the more trustworthy they were. The example as to why this would be useful is a photo sharing site. If you build a new site that allows people to upload photos, you're going to need to impose a cap on the number/size of photos, or you'll very quickly end up being used as a storage provider for porn sites. But if you have a way of rating the trustworthiness of a new sign-up, you can offer them much more space because you're pretty sure they're not trying to use your site improperly. A blacklisting mechanism would be completely useless, because people would just create new accounts to get around it. But a whitelisting mechanism completely prevents that.
Like I said, I'm not sure if Rapleaf is interested in the trustworthiness thing anymore. I suspect they've found that simply selling information about people is a lot more lucrative. But the original idea was and still is a worthwhile concept.
The optimal way to play any "reputation" system is to build up an exemplary rating until you've unlocked all the "trusted-people-only" privileges, then suddenly exploit them all at once and disappear. In the case of credit ratings, this means being an exemplary debtor until one day you're trusted with a huge loan and you default.
This clearly still happens. It's a fundamental fact about how debts work and it's a central element in many confidence tricks (for example pyramid schemes). So credit ratings only benefit the lenders if the amount they save on loans to suboptimal players who default at random exceeds the amount they lose to organized people who exploit the system.
My schedule M-F for the last 3 years has been: 7am wakeup, feed kids etc. 9am - 5:30 work fulltime. 5:30 - 10pm family time. 10pm - 1am Startup time!. Yes thats 5-6 hours of sleep! Trying to do a startup on the side with children has been very challenging for me. Maybe its the biz models I am trying to tackle. Maybe building simple iphone/ipads apps would have had a better ROI.