[hnjm0101]

Curious why people here hate 9 - 5 so much. I can understand starting a business if you have an idea you're passionate about and you're confident you can make you more money than you can make working for someone else. But most software development jobs actually allow you to have a lot of autonomy (flexible hours, work remotely, etc), a place to socialize with people who are likely going to have a lot in common with you and good pay with a nice safety net. Venturing out on your own and starting your own business has none of these things.. at least in the beginning, you are likely going to work more, for less money, by yourself. I understand why the small subset of business owners start their business for the reason I mentioned above, but I get the impression a lot of people working 9 - 5 are just assuming the grass is greener on the other side...

[FilterSweep]

Well here's why......

The benefits you listed, "flexible hours, work remotely, etc"

Are, indeed, nice, but they are actually far more rare than you'd expect. Many places still require 100% "facetime" despite being able to commit & deploy code and take calls remotely, and some that don't require "100%" still will hem and haw over days that you are not in the office.

Not everyone is sitting in an (over)funded startup with foosball tables, a fridge full of beers, young & eclectic coworkers, and happy hours with the coworkers every other day - where as long as you complete your projects by/around deadline, you're happily well-employed.

And most are not in an area that complains over a "dearth of tech talent" and have the liberty to hop from job to job without actively searching, taking the time to interview several rounds, and locking in the second job before leaving the first.

Labor Supply and Labor Demand have upmost influence on these factors, and with thousands of intelligent people finishing coding bootcamps every day, Supply is far outpacing Demand.

The other key (and probably the biggest) benefit you're missing is legitimately coding for yourself with your own. You want to develop a "Slither.IO" type game by yourself with PhoenixOnElixir as an un(der)employed coder? Go for it. Because most of us aren't getting jobs at Blizzard or Riot. You want to build a fitness app in a city with only financial/legal/logistic coding jobs? Go for it! It's an unparalleled learning experience.

[hnjm0101]

Thanks for your response. I guess I've been coding long enough now that I just view it as work and not fun (although I do enjoy other aspects of my job). I do remember when I enjoyed coding just for fun so I can see the appeal of your argument there.

I'm surprised to hear that supply is outpacing demand where you are. Where I am (in Toronto), we always have a hard time hiring good people and it seems to be getting more difficult.

[FilterSweep]

Thank you too. I agree that as I get more jaded, I consider it more "work" than fun in C#, but at home when I get my webscraping/scripting jobs in Python or even my front end styling working, I still get the thrill of achieving. From what I've heard, even more jaded devs than myself enjoy it when the work they produce is going to their own/their future employee's own benefit than when they are working for someone else, underpaid.

Question for you: Is hiring good people refer to hiring good people, or hiring people who pass your exams and interviews?

I'm still recently out of college, but when I first joined a company, our interview questions were more along the lines of Palindrome/FizzBuzz and being able to write good, simple SQL queries. We found out relatively quickly if you were competent for the job, and if not, you were gone.

Now, even MVC/CRUD Apps are asking interviewees to complete Google coding interview questions such as "Implement a Binary Search Tree" - which most of us even just a few years out, have not done for quite a while.

[hnjm0101]

Yeah I would never ask anything crazy like "implement a binary search tree" in an interview. Our hiring is more like, look at someones resume, and if their skills generally fit what we're hiring for and they actually know the things on their resume and they don't seem extremely lazy/arrogant/(whatever personality flaw that is hard to work with), then hire. A lot of the time we bring them in to the interview and they don't actually know the things they say they did on their resume. For example, if you claim to be experienced in object oriented programming but have no clue what i'm talking about when I say words like inheritance or polymorphism, you do not actually know object oriented programming. You should also know how to do it in one of the languages you say you know on your resume (I don't care if it is the language we're hiring for, syntax can be learned quickly enough).

[Bakary]

I am not familiar with the industry at all, but my understanding was that there weren't enough programmers to fill the demand. So it turns out to be the exact opposite?

[soulnothing]

I don't have an issue with 9 to 5 if the time is used wisely. You're paying me a salary per year. Is that salary to get a product out of me, or to fill a seat? My issue is the time waste. It's been exacerbated recently because of having too move and my daily commute going up from 20 minutes to 5 -> 5.5 hours. I work on the transit as much as I can.

My current contract I was hired to create a new software team, but research wasn't fully scoped out. So the project isn't feasible, and scrapped. I'm now primarily idling, and sitting here just collecting a pay check. I'm looking but the travel time is making it difficult to apply properly.

My last contract I worked 80 hour weeks for five months until I burned out. I loved it. I had a team I loved, a good challenge, remote work etc. I quit that and tried boot strapping a business but my savings were obliterated by an unforseen expense.

So why the hate for 9 to 5? A majority of the jobs I've worked there is so much time waste. Time I can be doing something else, I have a plehtora of hobbies and no time to indulge them. My current contract has no work for me. Two contracts ago I was set to do a python web service slated for a year to a year and half. I finished it in a month. I'm not a rock star or 10x, just it was not scoped out or understood how easy it was to implement. If you're going to have me sit in a chair for 9 - 5, make use of me. Please for the love of all that's holy make use of me. I will work my tail off, and do over time, but let me do in on my terms. Give me something challenging, and let me learn. Now not all 9 - 5s are like this. But I've had more difficulty finding an interesting 9 - 5 versus starting my own venture. Also it seems alot of the roles I've worked projects are no where near properly scoped.

[hnjm0101]

Ugh, that commute sounds rough. Good luck with the job search.

[Zelmor]

Work on your own business during those hours. They are paying you to sit there, so sit there and create.

[vi1rus]

Since I am the one that made this post, I will answer you.

- If I work at my 9-5 8 or 12 hours a day it makes no difference in the money I bring home. You can say that theoretically I will get promoted but there are limits.

- I do not control my fate. Case in point today AFTER I made this post the company I work for laid off 16 people, it's a company of 180 so close to 10%

- I don't want to have an expensive house / car. I just want to financial be able to support myself and my family

- Freedom. Freedom to not work for a day and not have to explain myself. Freedom to travel somewhere and not have to worry about it. I realize the contrary to this, perhaps having my own business is not really freedom. I will still have clients, or people that need things from me.

[hnjm0101]

Thanks for the response. So in my view, all of these points can be resolved by simply having more money in the bank and it is much easier to earn a decent income by working 9 - 5 as a software developer right now (at least where I live) than it is to start your own business. Having a decent amount of savings/disposable income allows you to:

- Feel less pressure to work longer hours. Worst case scenario, you work 8 hours a day, your boss fires you because they seem to think you should be working more and you find a new job within a few months

- Allows you to take some time off work unpaid if you wish and travel wherever you want

Of course this all relies on your take home pay being greater than your expenses, but this should be possible if you have no aspirations to own a fancy home/car (I don't really either). If you want a lot of money at the expense of taking on higher risk and likely working more hours with more stress and you think you can achieve this with your idea, then I think starting your own business makes sense.

[sehutson]

I quit my day job back in 2008 and it's probably the best thing I've ever done. The first year or so sucked in terms of work hours and financial security. I had to drop all my day job income to scale up the non-job income and my income and credit both took a hit in the short-run. Today, however, life is amazing.

1. Security - Over the years, I've built up a nicely diversified stream of income. Sure, some of them slow down or disappear from time to time, but the odds of me losing even 50% of my income overnight are so low that if it happened, it would likely correspond with some kind of catastrophic societal collapse. On the other hand, I've watched several good friends (and my dad) lose their jobs with no notice this year - and often, no severance. If you're like most single people, losing your job = losing 90% or more of your income.

2. Task flexibility - If I start to hate a part of what I'm doing, or if there's a segment of that income stream I don't like doing, I don't necessarily have to keep doing it. I might decide it's unpleasant but worthwhile, or I might decide to move in another direction or outsource the task. There's no boss to say I have to stick with it or personally complete it.

3. The "work in your pajamas" factor - I usually don't, but it's not uncommon for me to work in a golf outfit, yoga pants, or a bikini/swimsuit coverup depending on what I intend to do that day. Depending on the dress code of your day job, you might also save a lot on work clothing.

4. No artificial caps on income - Instead of relying on a boss or HR department to give you raises (often limited by what everyone else there is getting, or some annual percentage cap), I can work harder/smarter and increase it indefinitely. This has worked out very well.

5. No coworkers - Some people would call this a drawback, but I love it. I'm an introvert, and I get more than enough social interaction by joining clubs or taking classes (and I've met a very diverse and interesting group of people in doing so).

6. You can do things when it's most efficient - I do my shopping on weekdays, I drive mostly outside of rush hour, and I tend to vacation mostly in the off-season and shoulder seasons. In doing so, I save an incredible amount of time and money.

7. Greater control over your priorities - Let's say something happens and if you don't take action RIGHT NOW, your company will probably lose money, a client, an opportunity, whatever. If you have a boss, that boss is going to want you to deal with it immediately. If you work for yourself, you can decide whether it's really that important, or if you'd rather enjoy your evening/vacation/etc. and let things fall where they may (and most things aren't as urgent as they seem, so it often works out anyway).

8. Flexibility in terms of hours worked - Yes, some jobs really do offer this, but they're few and far between - and in many cases, a job billed as "flexible" just means the boss wants to be able to use you at any hour of the day. Similarly, most jobs do want you accountable and at a desk SOMEWHERE for at least 40 hours/week and some portion of the business day. Working for myself, I can get my work done in a few hours and then go do something else. Yes, there was a time in the beginning when I worked insane hours, and yes, I've had occasional bouts where procrastination allowed 3 hours of work to swallow an entire day - but on the whole I work much, much less than almost everyone I know (while earning more). Sometimes I feel guilty about it.

9. So much free time - Working 40-60 hours/week, commuting, and getting ready for work takes up a lot of time (slightly more if you're female and you have to dress up). I sometimes go back home to the Midwest for weeks or months at a time and my grandma and I do tons of stuff together because my free time approaches that of a retired person. It's not automatic with self-employment, but it's certainly more possible than if you have a day job.

I'm sure there are other pros I'm not thinking of at the moment, but I get bad feelings just thinking of what it was like to have a day job. It's not for everyone, but for me it's a night and day difference in terms of quality of life.

[hnjm0101]

Thanks for your response. I think everyone can agree that your situation sounds much better than working a 9 - 5 job :). I'm a bit more interested in the year or so that sucked, though. My main concern is for the few people I know who are thinking of quitting their day jobs to start a business, but whom I feel are not going in to it with their eyes open (in their view, everything about starting a business is better than working 9 - 5, whereas in my view you're giving up quite a bit in the short term in hopes to gain in the long term).