My primary goal is to maximize my income with the least amount of stress possible, and FAANG hits that spot just right.
I guess you can say I could maximize further by switching to finance or starting my own business, but the amount of extra stress is just not worth it at the moment, personally.
Doesn't sound like you get it. You ask why people have an aversion to starting their own business and people are giving you reasons that you don't want to accept.
I've done both. Working FAANG is way easier than running your own business. Orders of magnitude less stress. That's why some people can "rest and vest" at FAANG.
It is not about stress. You are asking to pick between a) do same job at a different company for 2-3x income, or b) learn to do something different for a chance of smaller/same/or bigger income than in the previous case. First option requires passing somewhat stressful interviews and then it is all familiar territory. Second option has more unknowns.
> First option requires passing somewhat stressful interviews and then it is all familiar territory. Second option has more unknowns.
The most you'll ever make at a job is based on one conversation you had months or even years ago. Your income will only ever increase at steps every 6 - 12 months and, in the best case, linearly and in the worst case never increasing beyond inflation.
With a business, yes your income may be stagnant or slower, but your income isn't capped, can change rapidly, and can change on a dime rather than waiting on the next review cycle or whatever.
If you have the stomach for it, a business will long-term always give better returns for your work than a job.
Your liability is. Worst case scenario is you don't get hired, or you get hired, and then get fired. That the worst that can happen. FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.
Let's watch how the Crowdstrike scenario unfolds in the coming months, when they'll probably get lawsuits up the ass for the damages they caused. Get your popcorn ready.
>And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.
Sure, but not everyone can get there, the same how not everyone can become a successful football player despite so many successful examples. There's too many variables. Usually, the right connections are your most valuable asset as one man company, and not everyone has them.
CrowdStrike is a publicly traded company; no one is coming after the founders or the CEO for money they have cashed out via stock sales, prior to the event. So it's not a great example.
A better example is simply having your business evaporate overnight while you have a building/offices to pay for, employees to pay, etc. Which happened to someone I know back in the early days of Windows NT: his servers and desktops that he built, worked under NT but then a service pack for NT 3.51 broke everything; overnight his contract with a large local hospital went away; that a few months later the next service pack fixed the issues, meant nothing to his former customers. He went from making the equivalent of $250K today to approximately zero.
Crowdstrike is essentially on the level of a FAANG, so I don't think this is remotely comparable to the type of business I mentioned.
The likelihood of a one-person SAAS getting sued into oblivion is pretty low, especially if you aren't providing something as fundamental as security services to banks and airlines.
If you are a tiny business, you just need an indemnity clause. If you have employees, you pay for E&O insurance.
Im not saying any of this is obvious, but if you are applying to work at a FAANG, I will assume you are both smart enough and ambitious enough to do a bit of research.
First, you don't really know whether that'll hold up in court until it happens.
Second, by the time you're done with the court case, you'll have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy. Not only is that stressful by itself, it's also a big distraction from running the business, and every day you are busy with the court case you'll wish you were spending time working your business. The smaller you are, the more impactful distractions are.
This ignores the fact that nothing is stopping someone from suing you personally today, small business owner or not.
There are two types of people who sue:
- rational actors who have acted in good faith, exhausted all avenues of recourse, and feel like the courts are their only hope for some sort of resolution.
- irrational actors who sue for weird personal reasons, can’t be reasoned with, refuse all attempts to come to a reasonable settlement, etc.
You definitely want the first type of person as a customer.
Again, nothing is stopping anyone from suing you personally right now.
Not everyone lives in a litigious society like the US. Here in Europe if you try to sue an employee for work related stuff you'll be dismissed pretty quickly on the grounds that you need to be suing the company instead.
It's totally understandable if you don't want to sell/market your business or you just don't want the unpredictability which is probably greater than with a larger company. But, oh no, I might be sued should almost certainly not be a major consideration relative to other factors.
> FAANG isn't gonna come after you for damages if you accidentally brick something in production or are just lazy and incompetent. As a business, your customers might.
So? Worst case, the business folds and you start it again.
This is like being worried about being fired, and people telling horror stories about so-and-so who got fired. They’re fine. You’ll be fine.
The whole point of an LLC is to prevent people from going after the corporation’s owner. They have to go after the corporation itself. It’s in the name: limited liability corporation. And sure, if you end up harming someone physically then they might have a case against you, but most of us don’t run into that problem.
And there are plenty of examples (search on HN for them) of people running one person internet businesses and making a healthy living.