from Hacker News

A graphical comparison between employees, freelancers and makers.

by elzr on 11/12/09, 9:43 PM with 17 comments

• by jbarciauskas on 11/12/09, 10:21 PM

  Any maker is lucky to have a single product in his/her lifetime succeed. Most freelancers only work on a single project at a time, and the success of those projects is mostly in the hand of the client who is responsible for the specs, marketing, integration, etc. Employees of good companies have the opportunity to work in an environment where a process has been put into place of creating, marketing, selling and distributing multiple successful products and input from all levels is integrated and contributes to the future success of the products.

  Put another way: the median contribution of an employee at a great company is much higher than the median contribution of a maker or freelancer. The average contribution is up for discussion, but it is skewed towards the very few outlandishly successful.

• by deekayteez on 11/12/09, 10:00 PM

  If you are a successful "maker", you will occasionally need employees to help you grow. I wonder if its wise to refer to this class of people as "servants" which has a denigrating tone to it.

• by dangrover on 11/13/09, 12:44 AM

  I made a rough diagram like this a while back kind of tongue-in-cheek: http://files.dangrover.com/hierarchy_of_work.png

  I think if I were to make a blog post or something out of it, I'd have to change a few things

• by GavinB on 11/12/09, 10:56 PM

  An employer is an abstraction layer that removes concerns outside one's area of expertise--someone in product development doesn't need to worry about getting press coverage or calculating payroll. Like any abstraction layer, it has costs and benefits. It can be appropriate or inappropriate, depending on your needs.

  Employees, freelancers, and "makers" can all work on product, and can all deal with customers. Don't try to tell me that a carpenter employed by a company doesn't "make" product.

  Also, this graph's comparisons don't work. A start-up "makes" products, but an employee doesn't "make" a job. It's nonsensical.

• by wehriam on 11/12/09, 11:35 PM

  The graphic lacks little beyond greater-than symbols in it's condemnation of "servants". The connotations behind the language used, the number of lines linking concepts, and the horizontal orientation in relation to the word "work" illustrate a particular worldview. So makers are better than servants - I wouldn't tell my startup's first employee that!

  Eli is implying that those who provide products independently and directly to consumers are superior to those working in a structured environment. It explains his choice of profession, but little else.

• by 10ren on 11/13/09, 2:47 AM

  The servant-mercenary-artisan terms aren't really necessary.

  A good maker is also servant - to a vision, a muse, a genius or an ideal; or to the pragmatic makers who are also sellers: to a market need, to customers.

  The diagram for an employee is also a little misleading, as today, most employees will have a series of employers over time, just as a freelancer mostly have a series of projects over time (though they can have them simultaneously).

• by herval on 11/13/09, 2:27 AM

  freelancer - servant of a dozen different bosses (without the benefits of being an employee)

  there, fixed the chart for you...

• by omouse on 11/12/09, 11:54 PM

  So which of the people in this have capital and which ones are the wage-laborers?