Originally posted on my blog.
—When I complain to my friends about a recent spat of not being productive, they often remind me of the 10 hours I spend forgetting to eat properly while hunting down a bug. When introducing myself, I am always clear that, most of the time, I am either busy, or trying to be busy. Everything to me is work, everything that makes me proud of myself is work, everything in my future will, hopefully, be more work. The entire concept of retiring to me is madness. I never want to stop working.This is often mistaken as an unhealthy obsession with work, which is not entirely true. I am not torturing myself every day for 10 hours just so I can prove myself, I'm doing exactly what I want to do. I'm 21 years old, I can drink and smoke (but never do), I can drive (but I take the bus anyway), I go to college (but rarely attend classes), and in general am not a little boy anymore. Most people my age are finishing college and inevitably taking low paying jobs while they search for another low paying internship at a company so they can eventually get a high paying job that actually uses what they learned in college after they're too old to care.If I really wanted, I could be at Facebook or Microsoft right now. I even had a high school internship at Microsoft, and probably could have gotten a college one too. I could have spent my time learning all the languages the companies want you to learn, and become incredibly well-versed in everything that everyone else already knows. I could have taught myself proper documentation and proper standards and proper guidelines and kept up my goody two-shoes act for the rest of my fucking life and get congratulated for being such a well-behaved and successful clone.Fuck that.I am 21 years old, and I'm going to spend it doing what I like doing, working on the projects I want to work on, and figuring out a way to make a living out of it even if I have to live out of my parents house for another 6 months. I am not going to get a job doing what other people tell me is important. While I am often very critical of myself as a person, realistically speaking, my only regrets are the moments I spent not working, or wasting time on things that weren't important. It doesn't matter that I've been working on a project most people dismiss as a childish fantasy since I was 18. It doesn't matter that I have no income and no normal job and no programming skills that would get me hired at a modern tech company because everyone hates C++.I'm not working on something a CEO thinks is important, I'm working on something I think is important. I'm going to start a company so I can continue to work on what I think is important, and every single employee I will ever hire will work on something they think is important. This doesn't necessarily mean its fun - finding a rogue typecast is anything but fun - but rather its something that you are willing to ride the highs and lows through because it is intrinsically important to you, as a person. You should not wait until your 35 with a family and a wife to worry about. Do it now. Do whatever is necessary to make it possible for you start working on whatever you think is important and then do it so hard you can make a living out of it.Don't waste the best 10 years of your life working on someone else's dream.
Actually it's interesting to note that one reason I want to start my own company is to try and foil that line of thinking. I want to work with people as a team in that employees aren't just codemonkeys being paid to work on something, they are part of a group that shares the same goal. In this regard, it becomes not only a search for talent, but also a search for purpose. You hire someone so you can pay them to work on what they wanted to work on in the first place, because they'll do a damn good job of it. When you gather a team together for a project, an employee should choose to work on it, not be assigned to it.
That isn't to say there won't be compromise, because a team is all about compromising between individual opinions to create a coherent final product, but there is a difference between working on something as part of a team and being told to do something.Hmm, good luck with that. To be honest, while I can imagine you being an indie developer, I have no idea how starting your own company would work out for you (unless you cooperate with some other company at first). But that may totally be because I hail from a country who scares enterpreneurs off with a sheer amount of bureaucracy required.
And don't we all have dreams about how we would operate if we had successful companies? If I hired people for my nonexistent one, for example, I would put up the job offers on Gumtree, asking people of all backgrounds to send in their resumes and cover letters, then disregard them anddrive into wallsjudge them based on an informal conversation in a coffee shop.People bitch about unemployment and blame that on people choosing useless career paths. I blame that on companies reluctant to realise that there are the thousands of people who would do an awesome job but don't get the opportunity because of the ridiculous way the job market operates.You know a great way to find employees?
Search for something related to the open job position on Youtube and click the "Show all from Today" button.:PGood luck with that, you're not the first nor the last person to think that way, however the world stands where it stands for a reason.
You know what, I agree with this. I agree with going your own path and doing something productive that you wish to do, instead of working on someone else's project simply to make money. I've been trying to live that way all along, trying to make something productive of myself before I'm socially obligated to leave my parents' house, so I can start off right away on my own dreams, instead of waiting until a life of hard work on someone else's ideas leaves me either jaded or derivative. Hence the vast amount of failed half-completed serious projects I keep talking about (although lately I've stopped telling you guys because I'd imagine it'd just be a nuisance at this point).
If and when you do have a successful company running in a while, if I agree with what you plan to do, I'll gladly talk about working with you.On another note, I think the reason I've seemed so immature as of late is because I tend to say more intelligent things on Facebook instead, where they inevitably rot in a corner, unread by thinking eyes. That, and I used to see the Minecraft more as a vent than as a social network in and of itself. So yeah, expect more words to do with programming/game design/hard work and less words to do with foul parts of one's anatomy. "less" does not mean "none" however.Note that it is possible to work in such a way you're both working on someone else's dream and your own at the same time. It's what I do in some way. By working on someone else's dream I invest in reaching my own. Furthermore, you get to know great people.
Its nice to see that I'm not the only one who is shooting for Awesomeness.