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With a typical salary at a typical programmer job, you can make enough money in every year to take several years time off. But meanwhile, taking time off tends to cause isolation, depression, and other problems, since modern social interactions are based around work. Making enough money to retire upfront seems needlessly suboptimal, as it makes it more difficult to do things, if you choose to avoid jobs thereafter. If you choose to work at jobs afterward, then making the money upfront simply isn't necessary. Of course in Ancient Greece it would be optimal to not have a job, but in America it's a liability. I don't understand the get-rich-quick mentality for making startups. It's illogical. Making a startup to accomplish a meaningful goal is interesting, but money per se isn't. Making lots of money to "be free" reduces to non-meaningful goals, no-goals centered around the rejection of much of what is worthwhile in life. It's better for people to have real, tangible goals and pursue them, which nearly always leads to work, even if said people already have "enough money." If one needs time to contemplate, sure, take a few years off. But normally during such years, people who are healthy and challenging themselves will automatically start doing things interesting enough that they can convince someone to pay them for it. If you can't do this, then you've essentially proved the irrelevance of your work (or that you need to go into academia, if your work is too theoretical to earn money in the "normal" world.) A strong argument for making a startup is when you want to accomplish something so ambitious that no job would let you tackle that task, simply because jobs have smaller scope. Maybe there are other good arguments for startups, but people are very unclear when they throw a bunch of confusing messages about money out there, because increasing income doesn't make people much happier [1], and it's easy for people who live in their means to take years off from jobs, if that's the issue at hand. Even if you want to never work again, there's a greater probability of success in taking a high paying, dull job and working hard for several years, than working on a startup. But many ambitious people would have a lot less pride in doing this, despite the higher probability of success. Again this indicates that startups are really about pride of ownership, pride of tackling new ideas, changing the world, etc, than money. [1]. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S15/15/09S18/inde... |