Time and risk

In other words, to get $100, you have two options: find a job and work or buy a lottery ticket. The latter requires less time and is very likely to fail (fast, high risk), whereas the former is much more likely to get you to $100 by the end of the month (slow, low risk).

Most people I know would prefer to just have the $100, instead of having to work for it, and yes, some people do enjoy the work for work’s sake, but you have to pay for food. I think most people that want money don’t really consider the time and risk equation fully. Yes you want money, but what’s the best way to go about getting it? Here the two options again (slightly modified):

1. Get employed: slow, low risk
2. Start a business: fast, high risk

You see, getting rich via salary is slow and low risk, while getting rich by starting a business is fast but high risk… Or are they?

If you work in any intellectually intensive field (science, tech, engineering, maths), how do you feel about your career right now? Is your career totally safe, and thus low risk? Would you bet that your position will be useful for the next 20 years? Even if a position looks rock-solid, the business itself might break.

On the other hand, what about starting a business? Sure, some businesses are as risky and hard as they’ve ever been. Capital intensive projects, hard-tech, groundbreaking therapies — these still require years and billions. However, there’s a certain breed of businesses that have become much easier to start: software businesses. Shipping apps that people love (Slack, WhatsApp, TikTok, games…) is easier now than ever before.

These software businesses aren’t just magically more successful right now. Instead, because of AI coding tools, they’re much faster to validate. Building an MVP that took 3 months in 2020 now takes 2 weeks with AI tools. That fact alone reduces the risk significantly — you need a lot less to test a business idea now compared to 5 years ago.

So, with AI priced in, and considering the field of software development, here’s how I see the two options:

1. Get employed: slow, moderate risk
2. Start a business: really fast, high risk (but low cost per attempt)

Suddenly, even if you are a typical risk-averse, content-with-life developer, getting employed seems like a worse off deal. The point of getting a stable job is stability. If the stability itself is getting eroded, what’s the point of having a job? Put another way, are businesses paying a premium for vulnerable developers? Money-wise it makes sense, because the risk-taker should be rewarded. Unfortunately, none of the people I know got a raise “due to the increasing risk of AI automation”.

There are some genuine reasons to avoid building a business. One of them is knowing your risk tolerance well and seeing that business is not worth it. A less good reason might be not having a friend to build it with. But the absolute worst reason is not having an idea on what to build. This last one is the worst, because you have so many ways of fixing that! You can follow guides or dream about (software) things you’d like to exist, or just look at the inefficiencies in your own job¹.

Time and risk are two ingredients of getting rich. The once-stable developer jobs are getting riskier, while the risky software businesses with the right idea are becoming easier. It is time to rethink if the time and risk of a ‘stable’ dev job is worth its salary.

Thank you to Ani Talakhadze, Ben Meisner, and Marco Borgato for reading drafts of this