The Pop-Up Employer: Build a Team, Do the Job, Say Goodbye | Hacker News Reader

The Pop-Up Employer: Build a Team, Do the Job, Say Goodbye

nytimes.com

206 pointsdpflan201 comments

The pop-up employer and the disposable employee. The future of work. What's wrong with this picture?

Hollywood does it that way. They're heavily unionized, which gives the workers some bargaining power. Construction used to be heavily unionized, which made per-project employment not too oppressive.

To see how unions can work in software areas, see The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, which represents most of the people who make animated and CGI content in Hollywood. They have a standard contract and minimum rates for different jobs.[1] Most projects pay more than the posted minimum; that's negotiable. The lowest rate for any job under the union contract is currently $31.50/hour, for an "inbetweener" in the first 6 months of work.

There are also provisions which keep employees from being jerked around. A basic feature of Hollywood contracts is that there may be situations that require extra work, even extreme hours, and all that costs the employer. Time and a half after 40 hours or 5 days. Double time after 14 hours, including meal breaks. Any day where work is required must be paid for at least 4 hours. (This is why film scheduling and budgeting is a real discipline while software scheduling is a joke.)

[1] https://animationguild.org/the-guild-contract-one-year-in/

Another thing that makes the Hollywood model work is that people who work enough get benefits like health insurance directly from their union. That's significantly different than, say, the UAW where the employer typically pays for an insurance package that the union negotiates.

The Animation Guild makes the point that their pension plan has outlived all but two Hollywood animation studios.

> What's wrong with this picture?

Nothing, as long as you work on short-term projects.

It might be boring working full-time on the same codebase for 5 years, but you get really good at it.

I've been working at my project for ~6 years. It's true that it doesn't have the everything-is-possible excitement of starting a new project. On the other hand, growing and maintaining a codebase over a long period is also interesting.

Stronger social safety nets are the answer. If people aren't afraid of being without food, shelter, and healthcare, then we can have a more flexible labor force.

But if you're (not you of course John, I mean the folks pushing this flexible work model) doing this just so you can skirt labor law and keep the profits for you and your shareholders, GTFO.

Stronger social safety nets are the answer.

They would be, except for the fact that our modern media makes it a cottage industry to gain eyeballs/power/money by using viral outrage to degrade the social fabric and public discourse. Because of this, democracies will lack a voting populace cohesive and informed enough to handle such a society. As de Toqueville predicted over two centuries ago, democracy will end by everyone voting themselves pay raises until the economy is wrecked, then we'll start to blame and kill each other over it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

> As de Toqueville predicted over two centuries ago, democracy will end by everyone voting themselves pay raises until the economy is wrecked, then we'll start to blame and kill each other over it.

You made some good points about the modern using viral outrage to degrade public discourse and parts of our social fabric and how it affects how informed and cohesive the voting populace participates.

However, then you took what I thought was a very disconnected turn that betrays your first premise. Let me ask you, how does a fractured and misinformed populace vote themselves pay raises?

It seems to me special interest groups have done an incredible job of making sure people are divided on just about every important issue and then hijacking the legislative process for each of those issues. If you look at health care industry, you will notice they give to both sides of the aisle and have played a big role in shaping both the ACA and the repeals of the ACA.

While the changes in policies in health care policy will have a big impact on us (either in increased costs, or reduction in coverage), the health care providers and insurance companies will benefit from both the ACA and any law that repeals the ACA because unlike us, they are not divided in their objectives.

I see the world as a number of possible futures, and I don't dismiss de Tocqueville's prediction, but I don't think that's reflected in the current landscape. I think people are entirely too manipulated to be smart enough to vote themselves a pay raise, and I think special interests have done an exceptional job of influence government policy to maximize their interests.

I too suspect we might crush the economy with a tremendous amount of debt, but I think it will be the special interest groups that will figure out how to bleed us dry before people vote themselves a pay raise.

It could also be a mix of both scenarios.

Let me ask you, how does a fractured and misinformed populace vote themselves pay raises?

Let's set aside the question of how we'd get something like Basic Income in the first place. Let's assume it exists. If something like that exists already, then people could well be united in wanting to increase their income. In that case, the utterly fractured discourse would guarantee that rational voices explaining why this is a bad idea would be completely drowned out, leaving the issue to be decided by people's short sighted self interest.

I think people are entirely too manipulated to be smart enough to vote themselves a pay raise

I think people are entirely too manipulated to think clearly about voting themselves a pay raise.

It could also be a mix of both scenarios.

It will be a mix of both scenarios, and a fractured public unable to discuss anything rationally will enable the pathological government decision making.

I always think so, but this appears not to be true. Social safety nets are much stronger in Europe but people in the US take a lot more risk.

> but people in the US take a lot more risk.

Can you provide a citation? Because the people I see taking risk are those who already are well off or who have family and/or family wealth to fall back on.

That may well be true, although it seems like an over-generalization. But there are plenty of people in Europe with rich families as well, and yet from my own experience (living in the UK and Spain) it feels like folks are generally more risk-adverse there, even when they have the economic means to take a chance. I do think there are cultural norms that drive this to at least as great a degree as individuals' circumstances.

Perhaps they're risk adverse because their upside potential isn't as large as in the US? Why waste your life trying to shoot the moon if life is pretty good as-is?

One of the greatest regrets people have on their death bed is working too much, and not spending enough time with loved ones. [1]

[1] http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/04/27/the-top-5-reg...

Perhaps it's simply that they are older countries. If you are the descendant of a family who lost a fortune going through this or that upheaval (from revolutions to economic crashes), rather than someone whose grandparents came to an empty country owning only a suitcase, you will not value dynamism and risk in the same way.

Stronger social safety nets have historically been built by unions

Yeah. Even if you don't believe in unions, unions are necessary to force the hand of government. Bismarck instituted a welfare state in Germany to undercut the popularity of socialism and the left. You need unions to get to a stronger safety net, even if the powers-that-be are establishing it in opposition to them.

> Hollywood does it that way. They're heavily unionized, which gives the workers some bargaining power. Construction used to be heavily unionized, which made per-project employment not too oppressive.

Both examples rely on geographic proximity of the employer. In case of "True Story, a card game and mobile app in which players trade stories from their daily lives", it seems that most hired guns could be dispersed around the world.

Both examples rely on geographic proximity of the employer.

Do they? Quickly unscientific, but the US appears to house only about 1/5 of the major animation studios[1]. I don't know what amount of Hollywood business that translates to, but it doesn't appear that even the majority of work (incl. TV and advertising) comes from local outfits.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animation_studios

So would work ordered from Animafilm (Romania) be subject to The Animation Guild rules and pay? How does it work?

The problem is that union organizing requires geographic proximity. You just don't get "Solidarity Forever" from the work-at-home crowd.

That might be a temporary situation: currently, most homeworkers are such because they were already contractually strong enough to command such a big adjustment in work conditions, so of course they are not the ones who'd want or need unions.

As these arrangements become more and more mainstream, I'd argue that it might actually become easier to organise homeworkers: when you don't have to fear the physical presence of your managers or their anger, relationships become somewhat more academical and dispassionate.

How would they ever agree on an acceptable minimum rate? Somebody working from SF will have a dramatically different view on living wages than someone from Bucharest or Mumbai.

One non-American anecdote: Finnish software engineers are "heavily" unionized. However, the minimum wages the union has negotiated are really low, $52643 per year for the most senior roles (less senior roles have even lower minimum wages). Of course, unions work differently in different countries, and Finland is one of the most unionized countries in the world.

I personally hate the fact that I'm subjected to the agreement negotiated by the union even when I'm not a member of a union. They negotiate for things that I don't need/agree with, yet don't negotiate for things that I would like. In effect, I'm "paying" for benefits that I don't need, yet this agreement makes it more difficult to argue for benefits that I actually want in my contract.

>They negotiate for things that I don't need/agree with, yet don't negotiate for things that I would like.

It's about what the majority wants, not each individual.

Yes - that's the major problem with group negotiation, and the complaint here. I'm unclear on whether this is meant as a defense or a criticism of a union system?

A defense.

It's not like a system like a union that represents many people could cater to any particular person's whims.

At the same time, if it didn't represent many people, it wouldn't have any negotiating power.

At the more limited case -- representing only one person and its desires -- a union would just have that individual's own negotiating power. But of course if the individual employee already had the power to make employers respect his desires, then he/she wouldn't need a union.

> But of course if the individual employee already had the power to make employers respect his desires, then he/she wouldn't need a union.

This is why I wasn't sure it was a defense. We're talking about software here, and the US experience is that without a union you can have not only a good job, but enormous control over your outcomes. You can trade between money, stock, benefits, and time off by changing employers, or even within a single employer.

I agree with your initial breakdown: unions cannot offer every configuration an individual might want, but they can't be effective without representing lots of people. But that implies they're only worthwhile when the alternative is that without a union, most people end up unhappy. Adding collective bargaining to a field where individual bargaining works well seems harmful.

> It's about what the majority wants

You are going to have to show some evidence for that. Really the only guarantee is that the union will negotiate for what the most influential union member wants, not even necessarily the majority.

That's still up to the majority -- that is, up to the members to ensure that it doesn't happen. If they're not diligent and vigilant then that can happen.

But not if they are actually on the watch.

Democracy (in a country or a union or whatever) is a participatory sport, it's not about voting every 4 years and watching from the sidelines for the rest and/or voting scoundrels again and again.

Maybe for one particular issue. But on the whole it does not represent the majority. It represents the average. Its a subtle distinction but one that I think has significant consequences.

Do you think you'd have more of what you want if bargaining with your employer as an individual?

Yes. There is of course still a negotiation of benefits on top of the standard contract, I'm not paid minimum wage. If I could remove some benefits I don't need from my own, personal contract this would give me leverage to get something else in return. A slightly higher wage if nothing else.

Possibly although in my experience in the US the flexibility to change benefits is limited. I have choice in things like health plans but that's mostly about how much I want to pay on top of an employer contribution. Most of the disability, life insurance, etc. benefits aren't negotiable afaik (and are probably much better deals from the company anyway).

It depends on the employer. If you're under 35, and in decent health, you're likely better off getting disability and life insurance on your own. Your premiums will be lower than from a group plan, which usually takes some average demographics to determine the group premiums. If your employer is paying the premiums, you're better off if you can decline the benefit, get yourself a lower premium plan, and pocket the difference.

Conversely, if you're older, or have health issues, those group plans can be a steal of a deal.

That may be true although, to the broader point, I've never seen those sorts of benefits be optional (albeit across a fairly small sample size). Employers get a good deal precisely because there's going to be a lot of adverse selection with these sorts of things. Healthy single 20-somethings get a pretty good deal on their own but most of them won't even bother.

That's because of federal tax laws regarding benefits, sadly.

Yes, unions works kinda like price fixing but across the entire country. The thing is that the union tells everyone what your expected salary is given certain experience, so this salary will always be the starting point in any negotiation. If you are a strong candidate you might get a few percent more and vice versa for weak candidates. This is how it worked where I came from at least.

Yes. Unions protect workers in commodity markets. Software development is _not_ a commodity. Anyone with valuable skills should be able to negotiate a better deal with potential employers than the industry average that the union represents.

Then why can't you negotiate a better deal separately from the union?

If it's truly not a commodity market, then a firm could gain a competitive advantage by refusing to negotiate with the union and hiring non-union employees.

You must not be familiar with how unions work, which is understandable. A union employer can ONLY hire union employees to do the class of job the union provides. The employer does not have the option to hire non-union workers for those roles as long as the union contract is in effect. This enforced depending on the jurisdiction either in contracts or by government regulations.

No, that's a closed shop, which has been illegal in the US since 1947. The usual arrangement in the US is a "union shop", where new non-union employees can be hired, but must join the union. In "right to work" states (mostly the ones that used to have slavery), union shops are prohibited.

> non-union employees can be hired, but must join the union

That amounts to the same thing.

> "union shop", where new non-union employees can be hired, but must join the union

This retains the problem that you have to join the union, and therefore are immediately subject to the union's negotiated rules on seniority, pay scale, benefits, etc. It's better than a closed shop, but doesn't solve the problem at hand here.

Even so, the 2nd point still holds -- if the union discourages good employees and employees truly are not commodity, then the non-union shop should put the union shop out of business.

This varies significantly depending on where you are. In Norway, for example, there are 3 main IT unions (and some specialty ones - I think there's one main union for IT workers in finance, for example). Depending on the employer, one or more of the unions may engage in collective bargaining for things like pay structures, yearly raises, and such.

My employer doesn't do yearly bargaining with the union - in part, probably, because employees haven't demanded it. The last time the unions had major discussions was when our employer wanted us to sign new contracts, and the unions negotiated to make sure we weren't going to be prevented from doing things outside of work. Generally speaking, the only reason union members bring in the union these days is if they're being terminated, and the union helps make sure it was done properly and works to get the worker the best package possible.

Why not become a member and organise for negotiations on those things that you would like?

I don't think it's worthwhile.. the union governs over 42 000 employees, they will hardly take my own preferences into account.

They'll take them into account more than if you're not a member.

That's... not necessarily true?

A large union represents more people than the number of benefit configurations it can offer. So some number of people won't get access to the arrangement they want - if what you want is particularly uncommon, joining the union won't necessarily produce any change at all in your direction.

This feels a little like "you can't complain about the government because you got to help elect it". It's still possible to give your input to a system and get no progress at all.

One person's really low wages are another person's dream wages.

Senior programmers in my neck of woods make about 1/3 of that really low Finnish wage while cost of living is about 2/3 to that of Helsinki.

Not saying that unions are some perfect solution, just that grass is always greener elsewhere.

So get involved. A union works for it's members.

SE wages are just really low in europe in general, it's not just a union thing (maybe excepting switzerland)

Though we shouldn't compare wages in the SF bay area and NYC to anywhere else. SE wages in the bigger european countries aren't significantly worse than in the non-hype areas of the US. In fact a SE in Germany will on average have more purchasing power left over after taxes and basic cost of living expenditures than on in the US. (again, looking outside SF bay and NYC)

Though one thing we see in Europe is that highly qualified young people aren't nearly as ready to move to the economically strong areas, where their skills are in high demand. Instead they remain unemployed or underemployed in their home country. Which also has the added bad effect of depressing wages for their peers.

I'm Finnish too. $52.6k USD / year translates to 4k EUR / month, which is not a low wage in Finland by any definition. (Remember that the employer pays about 25% on top of that in mandatory pensions and social security, so if you're going to compare to other countries, the true cost to the employer is about $65k USD.)

Also, nothing stops you from negotiating a higher wage. If you think you're worth more, ask for it. I don't really understand what you're complaining about.

Which is about 4x less than what you could get working remotely for a US-based firm. It's less than my starting salary out of college, for a senior position.

Maybe I am not up to date with the latest salary trends but 200k for a remote job seems pretty hard to achieve. If you can pull that off, I'd say "Go for it!".

As an all-in, benefits included number? Yes that's fully achievable.

Which employers pay that much for remote work?

A lot of them? In the US as a rule of thumb you take whatever salary you're paid and 1.7/8-2.x it and that's what you're actually being paid when you take into account benefits in addition to salary. Even in the Great Lakes region you're looking st like $60-$70,000 starting salary + a great healthcare plan, 401k, bonuses, and in some instances even a pension still. Hell, even public institutions pay well in this regard.

If you're making $240K working remotely, you're doing considerably better than all but one person I know. Perhaps that'd be a little bit of an outlier?

I have to echo the other comment because I am too curious: If one can make $260k instead of $65k within this system, then what is stopping him?

Lack of networking contacts with the kind of companies that pay such money, probably. It's not like you just push a button and get a bigger paycheck. You have to hustle to find and land the job.

So you can see why the average college graduate in Finland isn't going to land a $200k/year remote job any time soon -- how would they have those networks?

There are of course outliers: people who have active open source careers, etc. But for the vast majority of engineers, the prospect of a $200k remote job while staying in Finland is about as likely as becoming a professional Starcraft player.

What you call outliers I call people who did the necessary leg work.

But it's not necessary in any sense of the word. You can have a very nice, balanced life in Finland as a software engineer making 4k EUR / month for a local company with steady working hours and not a lot of stress. Thanks to state-provided health and daycare services, 4k/month is a very solid wage.

Or, you can try to become a $200k / year remote superstar, but what you call "leg work" is very far from the daily interactions of a Finnish college graduate. It's like deciding to become a Hollywood actor when you're just a good-looking girl in a small European town.

I think you also underestimate the importance of language and co-workers. If you stay in Finland and work for a local company, most of your daily work can be carried out in native Finnish with people who live close by. Remotely working for a US company can be quite lonely (I know, I do it).

ok, so you've identified that the US isn't Finnland. Very inquisitive.

Also, what place in the US, at those pay levels, is hiring a new grad for remote work?

Word! I know a lot of places paying a lot less than that lol.

Shoot, when I graduated from college a few years ago I knew people taking up jobs at $70k/year. In programming. XD In California, in the Bay Area even!

I dunno where people are getting these $200k/year jobs but I'd totally take one...

You may have misread or I wasn't clear. My first job out of college was $72k. I'm now in a position to earn 3-4x that, remotely if I choose. (Less than 10 years into my career.)

Do you actually make that much money now? Or could you if you wanted to, but don't?

Well I think many of us with these skills choose to try to start our own full-fledged business, because it's great for work experience and consulting is a fine fall-back.

Similarly, consulting at those rates can be a smart way to bootstrap a startup as long as a balance can be found between the two.

And some consultants just work at that rate for a while and then take 6 months off. So there are a few ways to "could, but don't". I'm turning down work left and right.

It does take self-motivation and research to talk to the right people until there's a steady source of leads. But that's typical for any consulting.

And specifically that San Fransico isn't Finland.

I don't think the average developer in most of the US is getting $240k

A gross income of $240k is just an hourly rate of $120/hr. That's "meh" consulting/contracting rates. The mid/senior folks I know - and I can think of at least a half dozen - don't even get out of bed for less than $200/hr. They generally work a client FTE for 3/6/12 months, make them wildly happy, move on, rinse, and repeat

120 might be meh, but it's a pretty satisfying amount even with self-employment tax and health care costs. What are the specific tech roles that pay 200/hr? Are these people that were CTOs or extremely senior managers prior?

High-impact devops consulting. "Migrate me from expensive on-premise hosting to a private cloud running Openstack, because I have regulatory requirements that prevent me from going public cloud. This will save me $1.5M/yr in hosting costs". Great, that'll be a half-mil right to the engineer's pocket, TYVM, we'll be ready to launch in 8 months.

"We have zero CI/CD expertise in-house, build us a pipeline that does all the things vis a vis testing, deploy, etc". OK, that'll be $90k, we'll have it done in 2 weeks, plus another week for training your team on its use and upkeep.

"Our CTO is actually the tech person, and he's tired of provisioning VPCs and VMs by hand. His time is better spent doing more business-ey things" Poof, here's your CM deploy that lets your CTO either update a single YAML file and press 'go' to spin up all the things, or allows him to hire a junior/mid-level to twist all the knobs and pull all the levers. $300k please, it'll be ready to go in six weeks.

so on, and so forth.

This guy gets it.

I have built systems like that or had jobs where stuff like that was part of it (CI/CD applies to most jobs actually). There is no way I could charge money anything like that. You are in a bubble full of money. 95% of even US businesses will not spend money like that for most projects. That's a small market of only the largest cash-rich businesses if you want those rates.

Some huge portion of businesses are trying to do those things. Most are small or medium sized businesses and they just can't spend that kind of money in a short time frame.

I mean, CI/CD is actually the new standard, so everyone is trying to get there. Same with deploying VMs -- the new standard is to do it automatically. That stuff falls under DevOps, which again, is the standard now for people that know what they are doing, and it can't really be separated from the other aspects of development anyway. There are millions of developers working on better integrating DevOps into their organizations who are not making $200,000 or more per year. That's just not a realistic wage for most areas of the world.

But if you have access to those clients good for you. Just don't pretend everyone can get that.

It's such a small market that there's multiple businesses who focus on it?

www.stelligent.com

www.reactiveops.com

www.fuzzy-logic.org

none of these businesses are hurting - in fact, they're growing. $300k, in the scope of an individual, is a staggering amount of money to most. To a (healthy) business, it's more along the lines of a small/medium capital investment. A lot of the pitch is "You can home-grow this over the course of X years, making occasional mis-steps and paying your expensive engineering salary along the way, with every hour they spend developing this automation thing being an hour they're not spending developing your core product. Alternatively, you can pay Y and have it done in weeks/months while your FTE staff focuses on your core product the entire time. You get to reap the return (on time, on money, on agony, whatever) much faster, you have experts setting it up right the first time, and it's delivered turn-key, with training, to your FTE staff so they can start using it immediately"

There's a reason most engineering talent is under-paid, and it has much to do with the individuals not understanding the business mindset, the actual value of the services they provide to the business, and frankly being snowed by 'big personality, business-oriented' hiring managers. $200k for a talented mid-level engineer with a history of producing should be the 'good start' number, not the 'pie in the sky' one, not just in SV but from sea to shining sea.

I have done works for companies just to see another group do similar work for the same companies and charge absolutely no less than 5 times as much.

Problem is when you start at x the companies will never pay you 3x or 5x again. You just started too low.

However, they will gladly drop you and pay someone else 5x and justify it and not even remember you were ever here and not even feel the pang of the new amount they are paying.

Side note: NEVER EVER EVER let the companies you are working with know you are a freelancer. For all they know you are WE. Let them assume the size of your team.

3.8k EUR / month is low, since taxes and prices are high in Finland.

The true cost to the employer is almost always higher than what is paid to the employee.

"I don't really understand what you're complaining about."

This is explained in my second paragraph.

the difference: finns don't WANT to pay their employees nothing and have them work infinite hours per week

Sounds horrendous. I know nothing about unions but can't you do anything about it? Create an anti-union group? Or is that just another union...

> anti-union group

That sounds a lot like just another union to me.

> This is why film scheduling and budgeting is a real discipline while software scheduling is a joke

No, that's not at all why software scheduling is notoriously hard.

A fair few of those provisions are (or, well, were... thanks to the Coalition gutting them over the last few years) mandated in Australian law for most industries (with different values for each industry). I think those sorts of provisions should be extended to everyone!

Even many long-running TV shows lay off a large fraction of their staff over the summer and hire them again in the fall. They receive unemployment payments all summer. Shows can run for decades this way.

It's very cheeky since I'm pretty sure the taxpayer doesn't really want to subsidize three-month vacations for people who make decent money.

Unemployment benefits are largely funded by employers, not taxpayers.

So the employer is the taxpayer. Still sketchy since all employers pay payroll taxes but most don't have the cash accrue to their employees all summer.

Unemployment is not supposed to be part of your compensation strategy.

This is why basic income is so important, so people will stop getting stressed out by new innovations.

Similar story for theater. A team is built from scratch for each show. Repertory theaters have a permanent core staff, but still engage specialists per production. Between Equity, IATSE, and USA, most everyone at the highest levels has union representation. There are strict boundaries on how a working day can be scheduled and who can be asked to do what. Members get health insurance through their unions.

A side effect is that most new and cutting-edge theater is done by 20-somethings in poverty conditions (or on trust funds) hoping to finally make it into the union and onto higher-production-value projects. Only large-scale commercial shows, or very prestigious nonprofit shows, use union labor.

A great wage for entry-level union workers does not equal a great wage for entry-level practitioners, it means that entry-level work is done outside the union, and only an elite few will make it to union work.

I came here to write a similar comment about the South African film and commercial industry. My SO works at one of the more well known production companies that does a lot of US pharma adverts and the first thing I thought was, "Oh but this has been going on for ever in their industry" when I started reading the article.

They are a small company of 10 people. Each time they successfully win a job, they send out a call to their freelancers, who in turn respond with a yes/no, and build this temporary team for that specific job. Quite honestly it seems to work really well, but that might be due to the nature of the business and the product/service [1].

Their office is actually two floors. One floor is completely empty, and they have a lot of open desks in the main office. So when they running a few jobs in parallel it fills up with all their temporary freelancers. In winter (now) the one floor is completely empty.

[1] That seems to be the only thing that works really well. The rest looks like a inefficient cluster fuck.

Here is the issue: software is not a product, it is a service.

It has to be modified, supported, updated, debugged, improved, and so on.

I don't think a "flash" organization can produce a "serious" product. And by serious I don't mean one that is complicated or large -- it can do that -- by serious I mean one that is intended to be used for more than a few months.

But modification, support, debugging, improvements and so on take less than 1 full-time person.

It depends on the product.

I suppose we should now talk in ratios of FTE:PTE, and where we in the lifecycle and so on.

Note that bringing in part-time help, contractors and consultants is not new. The article seems to be making a point about the degree to which it is used.

I know companies in the video game space that do this. They either are hired to write something or produce something in house. They staff up, write the title, ship it, do one or two patches, then essentially disband the team while they look for the next project.

Sounds like the right use case.

The lifecycle of a game is similar to that of a movie, or book etc.

The lifecycle of most games, but far from all. Subscription based games (mainly WoW and other MMORPGs), F2P cosmetic games (e.g. MOBAs and Valve games) and DLC-heavy games (e.g. Paradox games) are all more similar to SaaS than movies or books.

And don't forget the way Lucas kept upgrading Star Wars years after release. Some things are never done.

I suspect that these games are developed by employees rather than temporary contractors.

Video games are show business, though, and follow the same gig-oriented pattern.

Sure, but it's still just software.

The domain knowledge involved with developing games is... "developing games."

The domain knowledge involved with developing an industry-specific tool or product is not always applicable outside that single context.

Way more manhours go into art, level creation etc. than writing software.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of maintenance (perhaps even the majority of maintenance) for games is done by a different team to the one that wrote it originally; especially any patch releases that come out many months after the original release.

The majority of this sort of thing is usually platform ports, these have a long history of being outsourced. Bug fixing will tend to involve at least a subset of the original team as shipping code in a game can be err... interesting by the end. Otherwise it's mostly bringing in specialists to write specific things that will then be maintained by the original team.

With the rise of games as a service it's also becoming more common to outsource the development of the game and develop the platform layer in house. Or visa versa depending on the expertise of the studio.

Platform ports was the main line of business for the company I was talking about. It was very much a feast or famine situation.

Unfortunately without the protections that most show business workers enjoy.

Yeah, and it's total hell, I worked in that industry.

Imagine having to uproot your entire life and move at the end of the project because there aren't local jobs or that pay(which is 30-70% lower than standard SE roles) means you can't afford stay around in a high CoL. Many people I knew in the game industry lived month to month(present company included).

If there's any SE industry that could do from unionization it's gamedev.

I mean, you took the job. You know what you were getting. I have never done anything like that, I would turn it down.

The recent shift towards DLC has changed this, though. The advent of day-one DLC and frequent releases of additional DLC have done a lot for job stability in the video game industry

Here's an infographic that explains it: https://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/5370/2147534...

Here's an interesting article about this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-a-75-billion-business-is-ge...

(I believe posted here on HN a little bit ago)

_Bad_ software is a "service". Good software works for 15 years before you need to do anything.

I used to think so, but not anymore.

Consider: you write perfect code, and you write the perfect web and mobile app.

1. Does it have a server?

2. What happens when everyone upgrades their browser?

3. What if everyone upgrades their iOS?

It is not your fault that it may not work in 2 years, let alone 15.

In my book Craigslist is good software. Looks the same as it did 10 years ago, does the job, works in the shittiest browsers imaginable.

Is there any chance in the world that Craigslist has not been continuously updated and maintained behind the scenes, regardless of the stability of the UI look and feel?

I agree with the points you made:

1. It is good software

2. It looks the same as it did 10 years ago

Although I don't know for sure, I suspect it has been updated, modified, debugged and so on quite actively over the last 10 years.

their business practices and model has changed some over the past 15+ years as well - some posts are charged for, more opportunities to report spam, etc. if it was 100% the same system it was 15 years ago, it wouldn't survive.

A pretty basic example, but one which illustrates your earlier point pretty well.

Even if we assume that it were a perfect piece of software 10 years ago, craigslist, at some point within the past few years, updated its CSS to include @media rules to display properly on mobile browsers. This update needed to be made in order to support an entire class of devices that didn't exist 10 years ago.

Are you trying to suggest that Craigslist hasn't been updated in that 10 years? The UI might not have, but I guarantee you that various changes in business direction and in regulation have required Craigslist to make changes to the software running their servers.

It takes a large technical team to pull this off:

https://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring

Craigslist has surely had to keep up with browser updates, new browsers, new mobile devices, etc. There's no way the Craigslist codebase of today is the same as 10 years ago.

It depends. For software that interacts with services, most certainly.

Otherwise, consider emulators - games or applications written for platforms long gone can continue to run today, because that software was written (mostly) to some sort of standard.

My only experience with emulators is trying to run Commodore 64 games, and in my experience they end in heart break usually when you beat one level and are about to go to the next one.

Sounds like C64 emulation isn't particularly robust or mature. For the opposite extreme of things, look at something like DOSBox or ZSNES.

Which games, and which emulator(s)? I've done a fair bit of C64 emulation; setup is sometimes a pain, but I've never had any technical problems once the game loads.

It can produce a serious product.

Startup gets in touch with one-or-two programmers. They do a POC. Startup gets the funds. Funds must be utilized. Those one-two-programmers now create a FlashOrg1. In just two months its a huge 30 people team (including non-programmers). They deliver the product fast. FlashOrg1 is costly. Startup brings Org2 into picture. Org2 politicizes and hinders output from FlashOrg1. After a few months CFOs decide to cut ties with FlashOrg1. So this flash org was created and destroyed in a matter of 8 months. But the product continued

Have worked for one. It is fun to work with and stressful too. And such orgs are definitely not for employees - but for independent consultants/freelancers.

It's obviously a product, but it has to be modified and updated all the time because:

a) the industry on the whole doesn't care about quality, so we ship crap that needs to be fixed later.

b) selling a subscription seems to be more profitable than getting paid once, so companies tend to force customers into subscriptions.

Building a product from scratch is very different from maintaining a product.

It stands to reason that those that make the product don't need to be the same guys who maintain and extend it.

Do you really need a software architect after the major architecture has been built? Do you need a senior automation engineer when everything has been automated? Its really a waste of the company's money and the workers' time to have highly experienced and perhaps specialized doing maintenance work - it also leads to unnecessary projects in order to keep those people interested and engaged.

Stuff like this reminds me that politics is inescapable. Why? Because living in the US, my health care is tied to my employer, so no matter how desirable this kind of work might look to me, I'm not going to do it, because while I can tolerate instability in work (developers are lucky to be able to get a job very easily) I will not tolerate instability in my family's health coverage.

For a few years there it really looked like the US was going to go in the right direction, but alas. And this ought to be a totally off-topic rant, but when you tie employment with other statuses like the US does, you can't ignore it.

If the pay is lucrative enough, you could just buy your own health insurance. You probably already are notionally adding the cost of private health insurance into your understanding of your salary, just to have a more accurate representation of your benefits package.

You can, but from my understanding the math is not equivalent - employer-subsidised healthcare is cheaper even when you factor everything in, because they benefit from group-buying discounts.

So yes, if lucrative enough. But that's quite the qualifier, especially when you won't have a reliable income.

Sounds like a case for unions or some other professional association where workers can band together into common insurance pools.

The ability to negotiate healthcare benefits as a group is indeed a popular justification for unions in fields not historically associated with union labor. Freelancers Union is an example, in addition to others mentioned up-thread. https://www.freelancersunion.org/benefits/

Circling back to the inescapability of politics.

> You can, but from my understanding the math is not equivalent - employer-subsidised healthcare is cheaper even when you factor everything in, because they benefit from group-buying discounts.

Well, that's partially correct. True for General Electric, but companies with 500-1,000 employees don't really have a pull. Remember that insurance is also bought by state, so only employers heavily concentrated in one state get those.

The biggie on the employer side is tax deductibility. US taxpayers generously subsidize the cost of employer-purchased health plans but not the cost of individual-purchased health plans.

As an individual you can tweak the situation in your favor (figure out if your doctor or dentist belongs to an HMO, join an HMO instead of PPO/EPO plan, buy a bronze plan when you're young and single, upgrade to gold or platinum when you're older or have kids), but the massive corporate subsidy still means that someone working for a corporation and receiving exact same benefit would be paying less.

Individual coverage is crappier than group coverage, especially if many of the ACA reforms get rolled back as the GOP wants to do. Pre-existing conditions, yearly and lifetime caps, etc.

You can never buy a policy as cheap or good as a mid or large group policy. You always pay more for shitty benefits, although Obamacare made it better.

Also, many big employers self insure and cut out the risk premiums. My current (large) employer offers an old school PPO with high copay but generous coverage including infertility, prosthetic and devices, etc for a total cost less than an Obamacare gold plan.

> Because living in the US, my health care is tied to my employer

This is rather an argument against the fact that health care is tied to the employer (which I agree it should not) and not against the pop-up employer.

I think that was their point; with healthcare tied to the employer, going to a pop-up employer is way riskier since it means you'll not only be gambling on your economic stability once the project is done, but the ability for you to get healthcare.

> I think that was their point; with healthcare tied to the employer, going to a pop-up employer is way riskier since it means you'll not only be gambling on your economic stability once the project is done, but the ability for you to get healthcare.

Which is exactly, as a pointed out, an argument against the fact that health care is tied to the employer, but not against the pop-up employer per se.

Yes, but it's a technicality. For all intents and purposes it is an argument against pop-up employers if that form of employment means having worse health care coverage, or none at all (I'm not based in the US, so not entirely sure how it works). Ensuring the same health care coverage invalidates the argument, but that's not today's reality as I understood it.

1. Buy a computer with internet access

2. Subscribe to America Online

3. Navigate to www.healthcare.gov

4. Sign up for a health plan, paying likely more than your employer pays for you, but likely much less than the self employment premium

* Even the current republican plan wouldn't really change this, and even if so, it wouldn't change for like 4 more years.

* There are pricing and plan challenges every year are real, due to the incentive system being insane (and sick people being expensive.) Depending on where you live, it may be tough to predict what plans will be available next year.

So what you're saying is that my healthcare plan will be more expensive and is guaranteed for a year at most, and maybe less if Republicans get their way?

Yeah, I'm not doing that.

This sounds similar to the "tour of duty" concept of employment that Reid Hoffman wrote about (https://hbr.org/2013/06/tours-of-duty-the-new-employer-emplo...).

It seems like a good idea and, if done right, could be a win-win for employers and employees.

Unfortunately, very few companies can even make their annual performance evaluations work using baloney "SMART" goals, 360-reviews and whatever other bullshit HR dogma they're attempting.

Pop-up teams (or tours of duty) require a really fine ability to measure the value of individuals and understand their strengths and weaknesses. I just don't see how that kind nuance is remotely possible in most workplaces. The chances are more than very high that pop-ups are just going to end up being heavily loaded with asshole-driven project managers and hapless line workers who get jerked around until they quit.

At the moment, however, that's less workable due to the way that benefits and health insurance are tied to employment.

TBH this is pretty much how most freelance work is these days. However tying the end of a contract to the delivery deadline is usually hard to achieve.

My last contract was an initial 2 months that eventually lasted 7 months but I agreed in the last month to leave the moment the work was complete.

If it wasn't for the 18 UI improvements the product manager came up with in the last two weeks, I would have had a nice break between contracts. :/

What I have noticed that there seems to be a skeleton dev/architect skill set within these organisations with a focus on sales/marketing. In effect us freelancers facilitate fast delivery of a product, but do leave the resident dev to hold the fort while we head off onto pastures new.

This structure has existed forever in government contracts.

Northrop Grumman owns a shipyard and wins a contract. They build most of the ship. Raytheon supplies a missile system or three. BAE does some systems integration. A laundry list of companies you've never heard of do everything in between.

At scale it's more efficient to be over/under staffed at times rather than perpetually hiring.

Within the larger contractors headcount is semi-constant and they shuffle bodies from project to project as appropriate.

The smaller companies you've never heard of (e.g. a machine shop that NG subbed out the run of several thousand of a part to) will hire people or bring in temps for the contract .

> However tying the end of a contract to the delivery deadline is usually hard to achieve.

That's by design. Why end a project when you can drag it out for another month and secure another month of those sweet day rates for your big team, skimming off the top?

It really depends on how the contract is designed. Many government contracts have a "point of total assumption" wherein the contractor "eats" costs that go beyond some agreed threshold. In other words, if the project slips, they start losing money.

Not if you're contract people are competent.

Hold milestone payments hostage,require signoff on milestone acceptance, and be well disciplined on scope. Then stuff gets done on time.

Flat rate projects go south when the buyer writes a sloppy contract, fails to deliver things they are responsible for or "shares" responsibility. When the vendor fucks up, there's a clear consequence (no $$). When that happens the project management usually gets fired.

This reminds me of a certain cyberpunk staple where a team is assembled by an AI for a task(omitted to not spoil). I wonder if we'll get to the point where this team assembly is mostly automated or if there are things that it will remain cheaper/ more effective to keep humans making the hiring decisions? They say they are using AI, but it was unclear if they are using AI to train on human-picked teams now or if they already have a model that is working.

i feel like an ai capable of assembling a team of humans for tackling a task will have better things to do than assembling teams of humans for tackling tasks

Not to spoil too much but the task was definitely a part of the reason why it didn't have better things to do. Neuromancer, by William Gibson definitely a classic

"Not to spoil too much", you say - and proceed to identify the novel of which GP's comment spoils the entire plot.

Granted, more than thirty years after publication I'm not sure spoilers are still worth worrying about. But, you know, internal consistency is a thing, too...

Damnit, I'm actually reading that novel (for the first time) right now.

SPOILER QUESTION

So the thing mentioned above is not something you know from the get go?

No but you find it maybe around halfway through the novel. It is definitely not like the main twist or anything.

In the real-world, planning algorithms are AI so this isn't really so unreasonable.

Supply the AI planner with a set of tasks (objectives) and let it plan out what needs to be done. Provide it with a set of actuators (this could be people, software, physical systems) which are capable of, given some input, accomplishing the tasks needed for the final objective(s). Give the same planner or a separate one the authority to act within various constraints (time objectives, financial and other resource constraints).

EDIT: Honestly, I could see a lot of intermediary jobs being replaced or largely displaced by such a planner. As an example, the USAF has a role called "Item Manager". Their job is to track materiel (primarily) needed for various systems and customers, and make sure that they're available when they need to be, get serviced when they need to be, are replaced when they need to be.

A (very abstract) example might be a particular ground vehicle, let's say trucks. They have maintenance schedules, they have spare parts that are needed, and replacements need to be available should one irreparably breakdown. So an IM may be responsible for every truck of that kind for 100 customers (various squadrons around the world) each with maybe 10-20 trucks on average.

A lot of their work is already semi-automated, but with sufficient care the full scheduling of maintenance, receipt of damage reports, maintaining a supply of spare parts and trucks, can be fully automated. With a human perhaps only involved to assess the damage reports submitted from the field, and to periodically sanity check the numbers, and to actually authorize spending requests. The AI planner can be given all the information needed (including budget, shipping logistics, storage availability) to do a lot of the planning itself.

These types of "AI" would also benefit from some old fashioned rules-based systems too, so that they could be audited for legal compliance (for example, it is desirable that they provably do not discriminate against protected classes in the US)

Really? Humans are unparalleled when it comes to doing things in the physical world. An AI interested in doing things in the physical world could do much worse than to assemble a team of humans and give them a reason to want to accomplish the things it wants done.

unparalleled? the vast majority of physical work is done by machines. humans are the gods in the gaps

You're wrong about who does most of the work. But even if you weren't - who builds the machines?

other machines. much more efficiently too. programming those machines is gap work

I've heard about some hedge fund trying to work on something along these lines. I don't know enough about the program to discuss its technical merit, but it's broad goal is to systematize management, and build really detailed profiles of employee strengths and weaknesses in all kinds of disciplines, specifically for the purpose of team formation and management.

Bridgewater Associates[1]? From what I could gather, they have a very unique company culture to the point of being cultish.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-worlds-largest-hedge-fund-i...

I could see AI selecting a set of candidates, but I don't think the people running the show would be willing to delegate the actual hiring of them to an AI.

Maybe with human review, but that's how you get the one-click team they talk about in the article to scale, no?

That is one of my favorite books!

I just finished the whole trilogy, really an amazing piece of work.

AI capable of assembling a truly great team would be probably on a higher level than all the candidates it gets to evaluate ;-)

I don't think this follows at all, I think it could more easily be interpreted as a narrow AI problem than a general intelligence problem, where you respond to signals and hire/ fire much the same way high frequency trading works. Those bots make complex decisions based on all the signals they can pipe in, but no one thinks that they can build themselves robotic bodies to go out and develop houses for sale if they detect real estate is going to go up :)

I have seen this with other types of organizations like when bands go on tour (such as Radiohead) they created an organization to manage their tour in addition to their album release. I have also seen this in Anime where a company is formed to produce anime. On the other hand a bunch of movies have production companies that are tied with the Director and that company is not transient.

This is predicted by contract theory: in a perfect free market (we are still far, but we keep getting closer), and a perfect contract market (we are still very far, but we keep getting closer), there are no companies at all. Just ad hoc contracts.

Firm theory says that all companies exist to reduce the friction of negotiating all these things over and over again.

With transparent, market driven pricing, you don't have to negotiate.

Doesn't that assume that contracting resources are all the same?

Not necessarily. You just need a trustworthy reputation system to go with everything else. Some things will cost more, some less, more reputation costs more, too. Relevant, in demand experience costs more.

What exactly do you think a market is?

Oh, goodie. I get to compete against people who are gaming the system to enhance their artificial reputation in the name of a market.

Do I get to trade recommendations with 30 people on "Agile Methodologies?" We can turn LinkedIn into a MMORPG! Great!

You're already competing against those people. You're just doing it in an environment that puts you at a disadvantage.

That's so incorrect I cannot resist replying.

What do you think a market is, if not negotiations about prices?

The simplest markets are commodity markets: there are a large number of sellers, a large number of buyers, a large quantity of goods which are all substitutable for each other -- who cares whether you buy this bushel of winter wheat vs that other one? -- and everyone has perfect communication with each other.

Like perfectly spherical cows, this doesn't happen exactly in the real world, but is close enough to some scenarios to be useful.

Here are factors which affect the price in the market and therefore require negotiation:

- flood - drought - unexpected hot weather - unexpected cold weather - diseases - war - transportation costs - fertilizer costs - labor costs - legal manipulation - accidents - irrationality

(I left out governments, taxes, and all sorts of illegal things that won't count as "transparent", but exist anyway.)

And that's just to buy grain, a commodity so basic that the Babylonians invented accounting and writing to deal with it.

Yes, you need to negotiate. Sometimes you can just say: "the price you quoted is sufficiently low that I can accept it immediately", but that's merely the fastest negotiation.

Firm theory reflects the empirical reality that markets aren't perfectly free and efficient.

A consequence of firm theory is that more standardized arrangements lead to less friction in negotiations, and smaller companies. Conversely the more that arrangements are in flux, the more that you need an integrated company to enable the refactoring of roles.

This reminds me to re-read Coase's "The Nature of the Firm." 80 years old and still brilliant.

> Firm theory says that all companies exist to reduce the friction of negotiating all these things over and over again.

But the negotiation costs are coming down. There's now a number of somewhat standardised roles in your typical web startup (design, dev, PM, etc) and there's enough common language that expectations are close enough to being met.

There's also virtually no running costs at the MVP stage. You can rent servers, and you can avoid renting an office. So you don't have the negotiating problem of who swallows the losses, because the losses are just your individual opportunity costs.

This is of course for your typical unspecific "let's make an app" idea. If you need real capital, the firm is still a good place to start.

This is assuming that roles are static and unchanging and technologies don't morph. Which they do. The idea that negotiation costs are coming down constantly is fallacious and unrelated to a reality where tech keeps changing.

Isn't even tech, a notoriously mobile and free-wheeling industry, not perfectly contractable? See the intense interview processes. It's not simply preventing low-quality workers from being hired- if it was a perfect contract situation, then employers can simply terminate them as necessary.

One of my fantasy ideas was a pop-up company that did destination projects.

Like, have the project in Hawaii or Aspen or some other destination. Provide travel, accommodation, event planning, meals, etc. Imagine renting a huge mansion somewhere, or an entire compound of cabins by a lake. Go out on group activities, have "expert presentations". Put together like a "mission impossible" group of exceptional experts and build something. People commit for 1-3 months, all inclusive food, salary, etc.

This would really only work for people without commitments i.e. mostly single and young. The idea sounds great though. Come to think of it, sounds like college ;).

I agree there are drawbacks. I could imagine a certain allowance for spouses, children, etc.

I got the idea from couchsurfing.com development. I heard anecdotes that they were trading couch time at their offices for dev time. I thought you can do much better than that.

It also fit into an article I read on millenials being more motivated by "experiences" than salary. If you want to attract the best talent you should promise them some incredible experience - and destination employment seems to me to beat the Google campus type experience.

To be honest, given my current circumstances I would jump at the opportunity for the right experience. I mostly choose where to work/live based on experience.

>This would really only work for people without commitments i.e. mostly single and young.

Or older and divorced with no kids (or no custody). That situation isn't too unusual these days.

>The idea sounds great though.

Yeah, sounds great to me. When you're newly divorced, something like this to give you a complete change of scenery would be very welcome.

In the oilfield, workers generally have rotational schedules.

Something like 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off.

The 2 weeks on is intense. 84+ hour work weeks, and still hitting the bar and partying every night. When you're on site, all laundry/meals/etc. are taken care of for you. Toolpushers (project managers) have budgets to cover booze (off-site), entertainment, and so on.

The 2 weeks off is to go back home, spend time with family, go fishing, and whatever else you to have to do to relax and be refreshed for your next 2 weeks on.

The workers usually get double occupancy rooms. One person works the day shift, the other works the night shift, both working on the same thing. During transition periods, they update each other with statuses of what's going on.

As far as I can tell, this is the most ideal way of pushing limits on how to maximize output without burning everyone out completely.

If someone had that kind of business model setup, I'd sign on in a heartbeat.

Sounds like something you can only sustain when you're young and healthy.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-18/fifo-work-can-lead-to-...

https://www.australianmining.com.au/news/fifo-lifestyle-poin...

Tree planting was another inspiration for the idea and it has similar 6 week on, 2week off schedules based around camps. I have friends who talk about it like it was the most gruelling difficult work of their lives. Yet they look back on it and talk with a nostalgia like it was some of the best times of the life.

There are lots of examples of these types of work environments but none with the "coddled tech worker" sort of vibe.

Yeah I've been thinking about this for a very long time. I think something like this would work really well with the lean start up type approach at least until you hit product market fit. Every good pitch should have an estimate for the cost of the flash corporation and the expected non vanity metrics they should achieve at the end of the initial phase.

This is how Film and Television has always worked. Often times with even more people and extremely complex relationships and functions.

Nope. It has only worked that way since the breakdown of the studio system in the early 1950s.

But the key to making it efficient is well-defined and well-understood roles.

Well, since the studio model broke down and gave way to the guild model, maybe ... but the studio model was solid until it wasn't. Baseball franchises (for example) own the players until they are allowed out of their contract to become free agents (like after Marilyn Monroe's contractual obligations to the studio back in the day).

This is how I ran my web agency back in 2007, to some decent success. "Hollywood" model, of a small network of trusted contractors, we'd find a client and come together to work on the project.

Hardest part was ensuring the contracts in place were fair and strong, but once that was done it was mostly smooth sailing.

The best writing on the subject of temporary businesses is by Ted Goranson, especially his short monogram "Whale of a tale", now out of print (I've suggested to him that he simply upload it to Amazon and self publish it, but he has not yet done so).

Of businesses that exist for a specific job he calls them Agile Virtual Enterprises. He traces the history of the AVEs to the whaling ships of the 1600s. He points out that the laws created then continue to shape modern AVEs, and countries that did not do whaling in the 1600s generally don't have AVEs now. He focuses on industries such as film to look at how AVEs evolved during the 20th century and how that culture helped influence modern startup life.

I would consider myself a pop-up employee. Looking back at my professional career, I've pretty much switched companies every year (4 companies in the past 5 years since graduation). This has been tremendous for my growth (financially, emotionally, and intellectually).

The financial upside is obvious. In addition to stock options, RSU's, the sign-on bonus adds up nicely. The additional 20-50k to my (already pretty high) yearly salary helped me buy my first 2 homes faster than I had planned for.

Giving myself a timeframe with a company helped me prioritize what is important. If I had a track record of not producing much during my time at a company, I would probably have a hard time finding a job again (and I don't want that). So I learned how to work with people collaboratively to get things done. For example, if I wanted to implement a new framework or system, I learned to work with my teammates to convince them to try it out with me. Then when I bring this up to my manager it is easy to switch because everybody is already doing it. (Sidenote: I learned to avoid taking the spotlight. I learned to encourage my teammate to bring up new solutions that we've been working on so they get the credit).

By working with a few companies, I got to see (and compare) how different companies set up their technology stack. I thought about the stack I was accustomed to and tried to see why the company went with choices they went with. These different experiences helped me grow as an engineer.

Also, I didn't have to put up with anyone's bullshit. I simply did what I believe was right (sometimes cautiously against what my managers say). My coworkers were my greatest ally (and litmus test). If I can't convince them to do whats right, then I was probably wrong. With a whole team convinced, it makes the manager's life easier.

Now, 4 companies later, I live off my rental income, help my mom with gardening, and teach people how to code (and more importantly, how to think).

Here are some concerns that you might have if you consider doing the same:

1. Do employers get worried that you switch jobs frequently? Depends. If you can show on your resume that you were able to produce great results, it won't matter. Here's a line I typically use: "I love my job, but I came across (your company) and I love the way you are (company's vision)."

2. Was it hard to quit a company? Yes. Having a goal to help my teammates get promoted and help them get visibility makes things easier. Friendship doesn't end with the job. You can still hangout with your manager and your coworkers!

Tips: Don't apply for jobs, ask your friends to refer you. Don't have friends? Walk into a bar closest to your dream company and make one. This way, you can respond to "why do you want to leave your current job" with "I love my current job. But my friend told me that ... (insert great things about company) ..."

This sounds awesome/perfect

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