What Your Software Engineering Job Buys You
tldr; know what your job really gets you...remote contracting is good for work life balance and income arbitrage, big tech (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple) is good for having babies, skill building, and playing made up games -- aka fiefdom expansion; small tech is good for agency, work alignment, and provides upside but will kill your personal life. Indiepreneur is only good once you have distribution, and is over hyped because indiepreneurs make money by talking about how good their life is as a result of being an indiepreneur.
A decade and half into a 'career', I've run the gambit. Working at a failed startup, a successful startup that Microsoft purchased for north of $100M (note: I had a very small slice of equity), 2 years at Microsoft, 4 years not working (painting, surfing, riding motorcycles), and 3 years doing remote contracting at fortune 500 companies.
This is what I've learned about what these jobs afford a person in terms of work, life, lifestyle.
Remote Contracting:
- work life balance
- no boring meetings, or in boring meetings can read a book
- job stacking
- no career progression
- no mentorship
- hard to building lasting connections
- limited agency, no upside (in terms of equity), and usually poor alignment because companies that hire remote contractors have weak cultures and uninspiring missions
Big Tech:
- skill building
- monopolies provide job security
- have babies, stack money in a 401k, and do as little as possible OR only focus on doing the things that lead to career progression. Side bar: I've worked with people that only talk in meetings right after their boss talks. This may be effective for getting promoted but if visibility is the determining factor for promotions then something has gone wrong.
- monopoly companies are disengaged from market forces and everyone ends up playing made up games. Ex: Twitter pre Elon acquisition. -- I was chatting with friends about Google layoffs a few years ago. And they said it was because of the market downturn tied to the increasing cost of money. And I said, Google is a monopoly with billions of cash stacked up. They're not being forced to lay off people because of market constraints. They're laying off people because it's more acceptable to do in a poor market.
Small Tech:
- alignment and agency
- personal life gets nuked
Indiepreneur:
- you can do whatever you want
- you'll end up caught in a memetic trap and copy something that already works and face massive competition and not make much money
- Note: This may change with the advent of AI-powered app creation that lowers the cost of building software down to zero. So that distribution matters a lot more. Or AI-powered app creation by one person is better than a 10-20 person team 5 years ago and doesn't have any agency / alignment problems.
So, with this map if you're early in your career try and get to a monopoly. Have them shoulder the cost of your mistakes and learnings. If you're later in your career and have savings, you can afford to take more risk as an Indiepreneur or Small Tech worker. And if you're trying to max on lifestyle get to either a monopoly or stack remote contracting gigs.
Software engineers are paid to write code in theory. But they also are useful as symbols of power within an org and a software engineer that does nothing except not quit is worth quite a lot to a director of a 120-person org. Because without you, they'd be running a 119-person org.
In closing, I'm working a remote job and considering moving out of California to a place where the land is cheap, access to public land for running is good, and the state tax rate is much lower (AZ, Texas, Illinois?). The advent of Starlink shifts where I can live from only places with high-speed internet to anywhere with good access to the sky. I was surprised to learn that the median income in Mayer, AZ is $33k/year and not surprised the homes their cost 1/10 what they do in California.
The basic calculus that I'm looking at is something like distance to airport, distance to running trails, quality of air, crime rate, availability of groceries and good food, access to Amazon prime, good weather, proximity to family and friends, and proximity to the ocean.
Thanks for reading, all mistakes and misspellings are my own.