Risk & Reward
Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. If your new business is going to fail, it’ll fail within 2 years, most likely in less than 1. If you try something this year and fail, where will you be in a year? If you’re young and don’t have any dependents, I bet you’ll be just fine.
The common career path of an engineer is a treadmill where every few years a new carrot is dangled in front of you to keep you going. It often looks something like:
- College
- Jr. Engineer
- Sr. Engineer
- Decide to manage or stay as an IC. This is the fork in the road.
- etc…
Depending on where you decide to work, there might be a lot of carrots
I’ve heard people refer to this as a “rat race” instead of a treadmill. My issue with this is that a race implies that there is a finish line, which is not the case. There’s always going to be one more level, one more vesting period for RSUs, etc…
On the other hand, if you succeed in any way with a startup and decide to get on the treadmill, you’ll have easily jumped the people who were already running ont it. But even if you fail you’ll have jumped several levels. Think about it: Who would you hire? The guy who started a company and failed, or the guy who’s been memorizing Kubernetes documentation for a few years?
It’s never going to be the perfect time to do something great. There’s a billion reasons not to do something. Focus on the reasons why you should do it and take a leap.