» Samhain’s Inflection Point
I can’t say much because I’m under some pretty heavy NDAs but today my business faced an important decision: What is my time worth?
On Friday I terminated a development agreement because it didn’t work for me strategically. Today I got a counter-offer which is a lot more juicy.
It’s still not a good move strategically, but the idea might now have tactical merit — it’s become a money-for-time deal which will put food in my mouth in exchange for in-chair coding time.
Employment, however, is slavery, and I’m far from hopeless enough to sell out so readily. The better alternative is putting that time into my own product, assuming both products are equally viable (I actually think mine’s better).
This is where the philosophical rubber meets the road. The thought of a regular paycheque is hard to turn down, narcotic even acknowledging that I’m selling myself into bondage. I could also take the money and do both projects, but you all know how hard it is doing things after work…
An aside about a Thai entrepreneur from this article:
If you can’t do things after work (and I know I can’t), you’re born to be a slave. You must be able to put food on the table while pursuing your own goals. Only the children of the rich can choose to opt out of the real world while they work on their own projects.
Jared
23 Mar 09 at 10:47 pm
Warning, false dichotomy slave-think: “put food on the table” and “pursuing your own goals” are not mutex!
But point taken: Man cannot live on words alone. I’m in negotiations to accept the money with a couple of conditions: First, the money buys units of product, not time, because my company sells product, not time. That implies payment should be related to deliverables, not hours.
Keeping a time sheet is a ludicrously modernist exercise easy to dismantle accidentally: “But… What if I’m thinking about a client on the bus? What if I dream the answer?” Time sheets have no answer to these questions — “I guess I’ll bill it to transportation?”
I get to avoid the indignity of filling my life with lying timesheets, but there’s a risk that I contract to deliver something I don’t fully understand and it takes longer than I expect, decreasing my hourly wage. That, however, is slave-think: Risk is to be borne, not shirked. Lost revenue due to poor estimation is to be booked as a research expense into better business systems, not as a loss!
But isn’t this just rearranging identical objects on an inclining plane? I mean, whether you’re selling product or time you’re still beholden to another person, so that’s slavery, right?
Selling time is slavery because your boss buys the right to coerce you (maybe that’s why we had to pass sexual harassment laws).
Selling product is not slavery because the client has no coercive power. To them the production process is opaque. Orders go in one end of your company, bang around for a while, and then a product comes out. What you do inside the black box is nondeterministic — pure free will, to the extent that exists.
Jack
24 Mar 09 at 2:38 am
In classical Roman society, freemen, even the lowliest, were paid based on a per product, per service basis. To accept a stipend or be “paid by the hour” was considered insulting and degrading because slaves would customarily receive a small stipend based on their length of “service”.
This just proves that Roman society was superior. I’m waiting for the pater familias concept to come back.
Don
24 Mar 09 at 9:18 am
PKD proves out again: The Empire never ended.
Jack
24 Mar 09 at 2:56 pm
[...] banking system makes us all capitalist oppressors of each other“, or, “employment is slavery“, I kinda just assume you all share my background in finance and economics (or that [...]
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