Work for a FAANG or Freelance

[Chumbimba]

As I am honing in my software engineering skills I am considering two possibilities. 

1. Freelance and work for myself as a software engineer/ Start my own business within my field right out of the gate

2. Work for a big company. save up a bunch of money for capital, then start my business. 

I eventually want to get into Entrepreneurship, I just don't know how I am going to bootstrap it

Any advice? 

[Chumbimba]

i am 23 by the way if that matters. My ultimate goal is to escape wage slavery eventually 

[Rolo]

its important to take into consideration that the economy is messed up and getting into debt is a big risk. It all depends on how willing and confident you are about starting your own business. If you can use your creativity to do something that can adjust to the current times, then yeah go for it, if not, its ok to start your career working for someone else so you can get some experience working in this industry.     

[Yarco]

Working for a big company is more secure, but also more chance that you get stuck/comfortable. Once you have a steady income, will you be able to give it all up to pursue something risky?

[Setzer901]

Honestly no one can give you the 'right' answer. Life is chaotic and it all depends on you.

If you get a secure job, you may find yourself becoming complacent. If you do freelance you may rise upto the challenge and light a bonfire up your ass. Or you may sink into depression if things don't pan out(and become complacent again). 

Know yourself first. See what other people have to say, but ultimately you have to decide. 

[Hello from Russia]

I think it depends a lot on your personality and preferences. But If I was in a similar situation I'd choose the freelance option, which I did in my own life (I'm not an engineer but a designer, though). Maybe my rationale will help you in your contemplations

1. You control your hours of work and it is huge for self-development work and alignment with your working style
2. You develop more rounded this way and get all kinds of skills (entrepreneurship included) that will help you achieve your purpose later. Companies, on the other hand, often force you to specialize
3. In a short time you'll probably make less money but long term the possibilities are endless. Especially that you start to master entrepreneurship this early. Most entrepreneurs suck heavily at entrepreneurship as a skill, it is easily explainable because when people have the excess money, they often create some kind of a venture, but they don't really care about learning how to do business properly
4. You develop the right kind of connections this way with other entrepeneurs\highly creative people which can actually be useful. The peers you'll meet at companies will either be useless to you (in best case scenario) or they will drag you to all sorts of bad shit like partying, gossiping, wasting time at videogames/tv. 99% of workers do this stuff, even at faang. That is why they are workers and not something else. Also, they will rot your mind with a worker mindset, which can make you complacent and less prone to take some real independent actions in your life
5. You have way more control of your life and you actually develop something tangible for yourself. You're creating the capital for yourself (which is not only money). You're in full control of what it's going to be. Many creative people, for example, struggle because they can't control how their portfolio will look like when working for some firm. And in most scenarios, you won't even own the piece. I personally worked for some creative firm for a while and it did 0 to my portfolio, even though I was busy 8-9 hours/day working on their creative tasks. This isn't the case right now with my own practice. With every project I create I own every piece of it and I align my business with what type of projects that I want to do which is quite easy when you have control over it
6. That will force you to be more creative/have more responsibility. In your typical work, it is way too easy to go to the automatic "manual" mode and become a "monkey see - monkey do" monkey because you're told what to do my your managers.
7. On the other hand, even if the work is not manual, you're basically wasting your creativity making someone rich. Creativity is what creates for work. But in a company setting as an employee, all the margin is usually taken by the CEO's and you get scraps for it. Like, you could create some kind of creative solutions that makes a certain piece super effective and it will make the company an extra 5-10 million dollars. But you will probably get scraps from this amount

Edited October 17, 2020 by Hello from Russia

[FrankMcGuire]

On 09.10.2020 at 5:41 AM, Yarco said:

Working for a big company is more secure, but also more chance that you get stuck/comfortable. Once you have a steady income, will you be able to give it all up to pursue something risky?

Totally agree. Also you'll have a career opportunity