Maybe you don't live in the right country. I've been an employer as well as an employee. And being an employee is super super relaxing compared to being an employer. You don't have to worry about 1000 things at the same time, many things aren't your responsibility. You don't have to worry about variable income and ways to protect against that. You don't have to worry about getting sick — in this country I have to pay you for a max of 2 years if you have a long-term illness. And it's nearly impossible to fire you: if you misbehave or underperform then I have to go through a mandatory performance improvement plan for at least 6 months before I can even ask permission from the state to fire you.
When I look at large companies that employ people, e.g. banks or insurance companies, I see employees that are much more relaxed than I was when I was a small company employer. The stability such large company jobs give you is amazing. At these companies I also see a fair number of freelancers but inevitably they are much more stressed than the regular employees due to having to deal with multiple clients and no illness income insurance by default.
So I can't recognize the "being compelled to do something on behalf of a boss", at all. As a boss, I was compelled to do all sorts of things in order to keep the company running and in order to be able to pay all my employees. Employees can go home at 5 while I worked the weekends.
You misunderstand. I have no interest in being an employer (been there, done that, got the useless equity). I'm an employee now because it's the easiest way to reach my goal. Once I reach it, I can finally stop building things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and instead focus 100% on improving humanity's chances (as opposed to the 20% I manage now).
Improving our chances of surviving as a species into future millennia and beyond by giving the human race every edge I can within my wheelhouse while I'm still breathing.
I've had to hold down a full time job, so I've only managed small things like crash reporting, emulation, metalanguage syntax, and a generalized data format. But I have more ambitious projects to greatly improve the energy-efficiency, openness, and robustness of our communications systems, which I plan to leverage into some of my real-world projects going forward (once nice feature is that it will become harder for autocratic regimes to "shut down the internet").
Sorry to be inquisitive, I'm genuinely curious to understand. What drives you to improve chances of humanity to survive? What if it survives but the societal format will be totalitarian? What if the existence will be meaningless ... something along the lines of "brave new world"?
What's your motivation and expectations? Do you have a moral principle or belief you can describe that forms the basis of your desire?
What's the origin of your beliefs - a lot of people here cite works of science fiction.
Where do you see humanity in the best case scenario? What's the best possible end game?
What's the end game for you - would this be some kind of immortality project? i.e. your name will stay around or so.
Sorry again if this comes of a bit off. I admire the resolve and understand the time spent working on meaningless stuff. Just genuinely curious about the belief system (myself I'mat the same point but I think of going other way, more small scale stuff).
>And being an employee is super super relaxing compared to being an employer.
If you're starting a business or just run something that barely gets profit yes. Else, after you have a cool few million in the bank, it's only stressful if you want it to be stressful and you're that type.
>Employees can go home at 5 while I worked the weekends.
For billions of people around the world (including hundreds of million in the first world), employees are expected to suck it up and work late nights, do whatever BS the employeer asks them to, work to the bone for minimum wage, and so on, if they even want to put food on the table. And they don't end up with any equity, even if they did all the hard work, and the employer is just some trust fund baby with family connections who just had some hazy "ideas"...
You make it sound like it's trivial. "After you have a million" could be 10-15 years of weekend-work-and-no-holidays later.
> For billions of people around the world, employees are expected to suck it up and work late nights
Then call for your government to introduce better labor laws. You can't just blame all this on "the bosses" as a big homogenous groups. Here in the Netherlands, bosses in fact cannot expect employees to "just suck it up and work late nights": employees have to agree and get compensated. And if they don't agree, they cannot be fired for disagreeing.
> Well, for billions of employees it never is, even after 30+ years of hard labor.
This is not a good comparison. You are right that the answer is "never". But the other side of the coin is that, as a Dutch full-time employee, you enjoy incredible stability, something which employers don't have.
The employer might get rich after 10 years of hard work. Or the employer may (much more likely) go bankrupt.
As an employee you are not required to work more than the contracted 40h/week. Yes you will never get rich, but you also don't really have the risk of going bankrupt next month. You are not required to do more than 9-5. You don't have to work overly hard.
Heck even if you lose your job and you can't find a new one, the state will give you a minimum income. You aren't rich but it's also nearly impossible for you to end up in poverty.
If you want to have a shot at getting rich, then start your own company and take the risks of going bankrupt at any moment until you make it. Instead of complaining that you can't get rich while also enjoying stability.
This is also the position of the Dutch tax authority. I once once tried giving employees equity (while also giving salary). The tax authority was like: you can't give them equity for free, they have to buy it from you. I asked why, because I never bought my own stocks. They said: because they're carrying none of the risk, so it's not a fair business transaction if they get it for free; they must pay for it and also pay taxes over the transaction.
>This is not a good comparison. You are right that the answer is "never". But the other side of the coin is that, as a Dutch full-time employee, you enjoy incredible stability, something which employers don't have.
Perhaps, but if only the employer-employee relationship only happened in the Netherlands [1], and not in 120+ other countries. Because in most places "incredible stability" is less than a pipe dream.
([1] And in relatively recent Netherlands, because historically workers there didn't have it as good, and with new neoliberal laws passed and prior rights eroded, workers increasingly they don't have it as good as more "socialist" decades past).
When I look at large companies that employ people, e.g. banks or insurance companies, I see employees that are much more relaxed than I was when I was a small company employer. The stability such large company jobs give you is amazing. At these companies I also see a fair number of freelancers but inevitably they are much more stressed than the regular employees due to having to deal with multiple clients and no illness income insurance by default.
So I can't recognize the "being compelled to do something on behalf of a boss", at all. As a boss, I was compelled to do all sorts of things in order to keep the company running and in order to be able to pay all my employees. Employees can go home at 5 while I worked the weekends.