Be Your Own Boss

Most people have mixed feelings on terms like startup, be your own boss, or business venture.

On one hand starting a business may promise an obscene amount of money (look at Google and early share holders of Microsoft), but on the other hand when one is actually involved in it, these activities usually mean one and only one thing: no life.

Salaried job used to be more stable with less swings: if a business makes money, employees won't get much profit-sharing, but if a business is not doing well, employees (usually) will still get fixed incomes.

However this assumption is losing ground in recent years. Salaried jobs are more ephemeral than ever. I can say in high-tech field like software engineering, no-one can be sure where they are, or/and what they do in the next three years. At least I can't.

Anybody remember Sun stations running Solaris? These were the de-facto engineering stations in a lot of universities and corporate offices roughly 10 years back when PCs were relatively weak and useless. The advancement of PCs, coupled with the introduction of free *Nixes (i.e. Linux, and those BSD variants), has changed the landscape to the extend these workstations which costed almost 4 to 10 times more than a comparable PC, became real white elephants.

Say if you really spent your entire life to study Solaris, what do you feel? I am not saying knowledge on Solaris is extinct, or useless. In fact, there are quite a number of those inside the corporate backbone. And those places are where your next job is. Eventually, when your company decides to purge old machines, you may be part of the stuff that got cleared out from the corporate office.... mean? yes, but this is how this world works.

In the computer trade, the workers need to go through the learn-apply-forget-relearn cycles much more frequently than people in other fields. Put it in other ways, computing and IT are among the top in terms of 'knowledge volatility' (oh yeah, i coined that term).

Now back to the 'Be your own boss' topic. As I mentioned, computing keeps on changing, and IT knowledge has a relatively short half-life than other sectors. I am thinking be my own boss, or at least, get a second income will be very desirable.

For now I still decide to capitalize my computing skill-sets. Hence I am not going to consider things like becoming a hawker to sell fried noodle, selling insurance, or doing multi-level marketing.

My dear reader, do you ever plan to become your own boss, and if you do, what do you want to do, and why?

Please vote at the side-bar as well. :)