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by godzillabrennus 2198 days ago
Yeah, start your one thing. I’ve never worked a W2 job and I’ve been able to work on interesting problems my entire career.
2 comments

Curious, what type of interesting problems did you work on?
Inventing a novel approach to telephony timing issues when voip was new.

Working in countless industries.

Inventing asynchronous technology for an industry specific use case.

Using amalgamation of existing technologies to resolve industry specific issues.

Loads of others.

If you are young and healthy without crushing debt. Don’t go looking for a job. Go find an adventure.

> If you are young and healthy without crushing debt. Don’t go looking for a job. Go find an adventure.

I am looking exactly for adventure. I was in a consulting company where I was solving such problems. Now I am in a large product company where the bureaucracy is becoming unbearable. It is also more about where you are presently to get opportunities. I am in a country where the scope is limited.

What kind of expectations did these companies have when they interviewed you? Did they expect you to have experience in the domain or samples of previous work etc?

What's W2?
There are two worker classifications in the US which refer to the tax forms they get:

"W2": An employee. A regular job.

"1099": Independent contractor, freelancer.

To expand on this, the differences come down to taxation. There are taxes in the use called FICA that are half-paid for by the employer for W2 workers and not covered for 1099 employees. Also 1099 workers are able to deduct business-related expenses from their income ta.
The most important distinction is clients large and small will try to rip off 1099 workers. The state labor office will not help 1099 workers. They must hire lawyers sometimes to get payment.
W2 is the form on which wages are reported to the IRS (American tax collectors) by an employer.
basically means working as a contractor in the US