GeekNights Monday - Working from Home

I don’t agree with this mathematically. Thanks to computers doing a lot of work, we have companies that have relatively few employees that bring in tons of money. 20 people with a fuckton of luck could easily make a video game that gets very hot and sells a zillion copies and brings in enough cash to send 20 people to the beach. Think Angry Birds style.

Not in the modern world where the barrier to entry for any enterprise is enormous.

And for every one of those, there are 1000 that don’t make enough money to even pay their employees.

Who puts up the before-money?

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You don’t have to become enterprise overnight. Start small.

How do you get the money to start at all? And have health care?

Most things that start small die small.

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Don’t live in the US.

That’s not always the case. In niche markets sometimes someone has to step up and disrupt things and be willing to work years for no compensation for their dream. You can argue that “realizing the dream is reward enough” and maybe that’s true but ultimately if I put in five years to design and build and test and invest my money into to build something that I have a vision for when the prevailing market trends among the established brands don’t seem to make a case for it, I’m not suddenly giving the kid whos almost out of highschool that I want to bring on to help with the social media and shipping side, half of my rights and margins and entitlement to make decisions. If I hire two of them suddenly our profits could go to buying Xboxes and couches for the lobby vs hiring a CNC center and hiring a specialist to take over the machining ops… If that’s how these two decide to vote.

Now maybe it’s better for me to just “contract” those tasks out but, instead of bringing someone in. But those kids are on their own vs potentially working into long term, critical members of the team where I trust them not to just vote for dumb shit that doesn’t follow my vision.

Now, if I partner up with someone of approximately similar level of skill and involvement and they weren’t there at the beginning, that’s somewhat different. We can split it 50/50 and maybe we agree that I can bill the company for some compensation for back pay… And know that I’ll be successful with half. But that means I trust that partner and they trust me. If I’m the guy with a clear vision, they are coming in with the understanding that I have that goal and that’s what they are signing up for.

I totally get the benefit and encourage a factory to be a co-op. But I also fundamentally believe that some organizations need hierarchy and not everyone gets decision making rights. Many people should be trusted with just about zero decision making outside their specialty and maybe their input on compensation/benefits.

There’s like 1023981 answers to that question. Ask any entrepreneur how they started out. You’ll get a different answer each time. There’s reams of published material to answer your question. There’s entire schools of academia devoted to answering that question.

Hell, at the graduation I attended at Babson, literally 0 speakers would shut up about the value of entrepreneurship. An entire graduating class (accelerated masters grads too) in the art of having the answer to your question.

Your pessimism vs all that.

You make a lot of good points and I’m not saying every business needs to be a worker co-op. I know it doesn’t fix every problem. My only case on that front is I think they should be tried out more as I think they are, on balance, better than more traditional corporate structures. Not always, but more often than they aren’t.

You scratch the surface deep enough most entrepreneurs come in two flavors: “I was able to borrow start up Capital from family members.” or “I made so much money at my Day Job I have enough to start up my own business.”

There’s also “My Credit/Situation was good enough to score some smaill business loans.”

Dude, I’ve been working in global finance for most of my professional life. I interact with VCs, investors, traders, etc… daily.

Almost everyone who puts in that herculean “startup” effort ends up with nothing. Most of the people who succeed are already wealthy to begin with.

The world of 2018 is vastly different from the world of 2008.

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Yeah, I totally agree we need more of it.

A games company is probably the type of startup where I would go for a co-op. Find a pile of like-minded professionals and start a team… Makes perfect sense. If there’s a group of people who look at, say, e-bikes because a person decides to start a shop making e-bikes and finds 5-6 people who are into that, co-op is almost natural.

The guy who works for years in his garage and slowly expands, the only way I see for that to go onto a co-op direction is if that inventor sells the design to a group of partners that form a co-op Enterprise around making said invention.

So there’s ways to do it.

FWIW, I would never actually form a flat co-op. I’d definitely be the dictator.

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My reason for not working from home when I could was simply that my home is a place of joy. Work is not that and does not belong in my house.

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I’ve spoken about this before, but working from home is the best thing, work wise that has happened to me.

~More sleep/rest
~Less hassel with grooming (hair, makeup)
~Cheaper, clothes wise
~My car has barely had any miles on it
~I save money on gas
~I save money on eating out, lunch prep, coffee
~I have my cats to keep me company
~I can blast my music/podcasts as loud as I want
~I save using leave to go to early afternoon appointments
~I am home to receive packages.
~I get way more work done from home.
~I get way less work done when I go into the office once a week.

My threshold for dealing with normal work bullshit has grown as long as I don’t have to go into the office. Plus my work pays for my transit card.

Also another plus is that I love my job and love what I do for most part. My boss knows I’m an honest/hard worker and leaves me the fuck alone. Work at home is this best, for me at least

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I can feel that. Even when I do work from home, I want it to be in a separate context. If I had a house, I’d have a “working” room separate from all my other rooms. Make it easy to change my context.

That’s one of the main reasons why I don’t work from home, even though I could easily.

I like separating my work from the rest of my life, and too many people I know who telecommute and work from home end up working longer hours. When I go home, I am legally forbidden from bringing my work with me.

Additionally, I like coming into work because it forces me to be more social. If I worked from home, I’d probably turn into somewhat of a recluse.

I’m worried that if I worked from home I’d be too distracted by everything there (games, books, TV, etc) and end up working longer hours to compensate.

Because I’m legally forbidden from working from home, when the government closes, I get a Grown-Up Snow Day. Grown-Up Snow Days are the best.

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In theory, I guess you could also do that if you had a large enough apartment, depending on how much separation you needed. For example, you get one with an extra bedroom and use that as your “working room.” That’s what I did when I lived in an apartment.

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I have a computer room, but it’s used for:

  • My desk
  • Emily’s desk
  • VR
  • GeekNights production

If I had a bigger place, I’d have a room just for production, and a separate room for our general desks, gaming, etc…