Ask HN: How do you balance creativity, love for the craft, and money?
Considering with AI an experienced engineer can build anything much faster and we had a discussion around "single person unicorn". How are you balancing your love for the craft and creativity. I see copycats of copycats generating decent $ per month, sometimes I wonder I should I also do the same and leave my job to pursue the unicorn dream? As every 2 years there is layoff, AI taking over... not sure if this make sense or this is just me bored on a weekend.
>> single person unicorn
I've mused about this hypothetical as well. I think, it would only happen if someone has a really good idea, is really skilled in many areas and also (and this is the key) is dead set on it being a single person unicorn.
Why? Well, once money starts coming in there will always be areas where adding another human (or a hundred) can help. In other words there might not be much distance between a single person unicorn and a zero person one (in which the AI comes up with idea and does everything else too).
What you don’t see are the 9 startups that outright fail after struggling for a few years where everyone there is making pennies. It’s kind of tautological that you only see the few successes. No one brags about their dumb idea that made no money and had no customers after a year.
If you are worried about layoffs, what do you think is going to happen when your startup statistically fails? What are you going to do about income while trying to get the company off the ground?
fair enough!
maybe it is just I saw 3-4 startups which "humanise" AI response and they are doing decent $, maybe just because of marketing
Are they profitable? Are thier employees making decent money or getting paid in “hopium” - ie illiquid equity that will probably be worthless?
There is a difference between wanting to make money and wanting to have money.
If you understand the difference, it is often painfully obvious that most of us are in the last boat.
If you want something, you would typically be doing it already. Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch, but you might be more interested in asking questions than in giving answers. In that case, just try to enjoy life as long as it is smiling to you.
Some great points in there. Yeah, in the boat of "wanting to have money" while having a job, where two years there is a layoff or restructuring. Trying to find a balance as an engineer in mid 30s and optimising for everything as life passed by, With little bit of fomo here and there!
I’m 51 and have had 10 jobs over 30 years. Those jobs have been everything from startups, to boring stable small and medium “lifestyle companies”, to boring big enterprise, to $BigTech and now I work in customer facing cloud consulting as a staff consultant.
And I’ve never seen a market this shitty. Even after the dot com bust if you were a regular old enterprise dev - and at the time I had 4 years of experience as a Windows developer in Atlanta - it was easy to find a job. 2009-2011 was a shit show but it wasn’t that bad.
While I did find a job quickly after being Amazon’ed in 2023 and again last year, things have gutted worse since then.
My only strategy is to keep our fixed living expenses way down (less than half my income and I’m the only one working by choice), stay out of debt, keep a years saving in the bank, keep my resume updated and a longer form career document [1], keep my skillset in line with the market (I lead a lot of “AI” related non chatbot projects) and keep a strong network.
I feel a tinge of FOMO knowing that an intern I mentored while they were an intern an a year after coming back makes a little more than I make. They are 25 and a mid level SA at AWS - similar to what I do. I have to think about the story of the “Mexican Fisherman”.
https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
[1] A career document is a detailed list of all of your accomplishments in STAR format that you keep updated quarterly.
>creativity, love for the craft, and money
All respectable accomplishments, but some of the most accomplished may not be the most balanced :\
Money would be the one that could be taken away from you most easily, or even completely lost inadvertently through no fault of your own.