My first ever linkbaited, numerical list blog posting. I feel so deliciously slutty.

Paul Graham looks at what large organizations do to people an makes and analogy with the animals he saw in the wild in Kenya.

Favourite bit:

Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they’re transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they’ve grown several inches taller. [4] Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I’d describe the way lions seem in the wild.



5 Not an Employee

A website dedicated to not being an employee

Favourite Bit:

The Sticker they made “Expeditus A Dominus”

4 Steve Pavlina Outlines 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

A fabulous riff on why jobs are not actually more secure than self-employment/having a business & why the joys of slavery quickly pale.

Favourite Bit:

“When you want to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master for more money? Does it feel good to be thrown some extra Scooby Snacks now and then?”

3 Your Life as Pornography by Ran Prieur

A totally totally brilliant spoof/story by Ran Prieur of the Joys(!) of employment and what motivates us to do it.

Favourite Bit

He thought of the woman, her hot irresistible waiting body. “Uh, please Master, I beg you to let me be your slave…”

“Slave? We have no slaves! These are enlightened times.”

He sighed with relief. Perhaps the ordeal would not be so bad.

“Then what shall I be, Master?”

“You shall be my team member!”

“Do what to your member?”

“Beg! Beg me for it!”

“Please, great Master, let me team your member.”

“Abase yourself! Convince me you are qualified!”

“Sir, I feel I am uniquely qualified to apply this position on your member. I am experienced in several very similar member positions, with other teams…”

Thoreau was, like Whitman, Kerouac and Kesey, that uniquely American flavour of sage. In Walden he wrote one of the great books about dropping out. This essay is a look at a more natural kind of life – one where we are guided by an inner compass rather than being prodded and pulled by outside events.

Favourite bits:

To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated…. The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business…. Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom.

Need I say any more?

Favourite bit:

You are not your fuckin Khakis.

The above are why my (equal!) partners and I at Fizzy do not hire people and we make an effort to work with partners who do not hire people either. Personal sovereignty baby… second only to love on the priority list.