Hunter Walk

Narrow and very misleading way of looking at engineering and careers for sure because it assumes a false binary choice.

A choice between doing what you love and making a big payout by doing something else. This assumption is wrong.

On one level, there is truth to what is stated--- but it correlates more to big company paths, people who have a conservative view on their ability to leave an impact on the world, and people who are narrowly focused on programming for programming's sake.

It's not about "switching" to management (this thinking is big company), it's about taking your technical skills and making things happen. If that means you have to be a startup founder or a leader (CTO, CEO, VP engineering, whatever) who ends up not coding much anymore to make that happen, so be it. The point is if you love programming, do it, get amazing at it, solve real problems... and you'll have limitless potential in the future.

Being a programmer/engineer gives you the ability to find and build real solutions to problems in the world. If you're good, being able to build things = creating a startup or partnering with others to take on big things.

Regardless of statistics on the rate of success of startup endeavors, this potential and this opportunity make being a programmer completely worthwhile and rich with potential. You do not need to be a manager to have financial success. What you need is equity, equity that appreciates massively in a successful company. Financial outcome is a…

S/he should get the right people and pay them what they're worth. Trying to under-pay people results in sub-par people or good people leaving. 80% of nothing is a lot less valuable than 60% of something successful. Great people are absolutely vital at an early stage.

I'm not making things up here, either. Every successful entrepreneur I know agrees with that sentiment, as does the prevailing philosophy of investors[1][2], thought leaders[3], and serial entrepreneurs[4].

I have never once seen anyone successful say to hoard your equity, especially if you're bootstrapped and cash-flow positive. Greed is a great way to kill morale.

1. http://hunterwalk.com/2014/11/26/one-founder-told-me-he-wanted-to-overpay-his-employees-so-we-invested/

2. http://blog.samaltman.com/employee-retention

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109

4. http://jamesaltucher.quora.com/The-Ultimate-Cheat-Sheet-For-Starting-And-Running-A-Business

No matter what kind of business you’re in, it’s wise to diversify your sources of revenue. YT’s ad-focused monetization model disservices a variety of creators for a variety of reasons, many of which are mentioned in this NYTimes article.

Fan patronage in the likes of what Vidme (disclaimer: I’m a co-founder) and Patreon are offering help creators diversify their revenue streams and make content for their fans, rather than to please advertisers.

Google and Facebook aren’t well incentivized to offer this kind of model on platform because they can make considerably more money allocating resources towards optimizing ad revenue. Hunter Walk, an ex YT employee turned investor, writes about this in this blog post: https://hunterwalk.com/2017/03/26/why-were-paying-for-content-these-days/

there's a long literature of:

- why even VCs diversify bets

- why working on side things helps your main thing

- how Nobel prizewinners are 3x more likely than the average scientist to have creative hobbies

- https://hunterwalk.medium.com/why-a-paid-newsletter-wont-be-enough-money-for-most-writers-and-that-s-fine-the-multi-sku-f41daa074cdb

and so on. i didnt say that having 4 things is spreading yourself thin. its just a really unscientific thing to assert without proof that having only 1 thing is "the key to success". so i push back on it.