Hey, what’s up, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I get a lot of questions about career and resume and entrepreneurship.
I thought I’d answer this question which I thought is pretty unique.
I’m not going to read the email here.
I’m just going to summarize here but this email is from Phillip and he says—essentially
he’s will being an entrepreneur hurt me.
What he wants to know is basically if he goes out and he becomes an entrepreneur for some
period of time and he develops his own company and then he goes and puts that on his resume,
is that actually going to hurt him.
Is someone not going to want to hire him because they see that he was an entrepreneur or even
if he’s doing it on the side will they not want to hire someone who’s an entrepreneur?
This is sort of a complicated question and I can’t give you a yes or no absolute answer
on this but I can give you some kind of perspective on—I want you to think about 2 things here.
One, I want you to think about what kind of company do you want to work for.
Two, I want you to think about the kind of company that you’d want to work for, what
would they think about entrepreneurship or more specifically what kind of values, what
kind of things would they value in an employee.
There’s going to be a lot of companies out there probably that would look on entrepreneurship
and look on someone who has outside interest and is doing things outside the job as a threat
because they want to hire a developer and they want the developer to be theirs.
They don’t want to share them.
They don’t want them to leave or do anything like that and so that’s going to be a scare.
They’re going to look at your resume and they’re going to say, “Whoa!
Hold on.
You started your own company for this time?”
They’re going to question that.
They’re going to say, “Was that really your own company or could you just not get
a job?”
or they’re going to say, “Hmm, it seems like you must have failed in business and
now you’re coming back here and you want to get a job.
What happens when things are good again?
Obviously you’re going to try and leave and start your own company because that’s
what you want to do, right?”
I’m telling you this to scare you because that’s the worst case that you’re going
to face.
There’s going to be plenty of companies that are going to think like that but here’s
where that first question comes in.
Do you want to work for those companies?
Do you want to work in those environments?
I’ll tell you there’s also going to be companies that are going to value entrepreneurship
that are going to say, “This is interesting.
We don’t want to just hire someone.
If you want to just come to this job and live here for the rest of your life and work at
this job, we don’t want you.
We want people who are growing and expanding.
If we can only hang on to you for a year or 2 years that’s fine because we know that
you are going to produce 5 to 10 times the effort of someone who’s a lifer, who’s
looking for a job that they can just go to and never worry about getting fired.”
There’s going to be plenty of companies like that.
I would challenge you to think about whether or not those are more of the companies that
you want to work for.
Yes, some of those companies might be rare and there are going to be companies that are
going to be in between that are not going to have any idea.
I mean you can dress up your entrepreneurship however you want.
I mean you can tell your resume, right?
I’m not saying lie, but I’m saying that you can tell her to highlight the entrepreneurship
or not.
For those companies, let’s talk about why some companies would want to have an entrepreneur.
The thing is if you are an entrepreneur, if you are building your own business then within
the company there’s this idea—I did this interview with Matt Kremer and he sort of
named the topic he called it intrapreneurship, the study of being an entrepreneur inside
a company which is a pretty cool concept because if you are an entrepreneur at heart and you
come and work for someone and you’re an intrapreneur that means that you’re building
up this empire, you’re building up this company within the company.
You’re sort of autonomous.
I think a lot of companies would want to hire someone that’s autonomous that can run their
own unit that can build and grow things on their own.
One of the best aspects of an employee, of any employee is the ability to be able to
do things without being told, being able to anticipate the need and to go and do that
thing.
Again, I can’t give you an absolute should you do this or not.
Everything has a risk and everything has a trade off but I would say that there are definitely
going to be companies that are going to appreciate entrepreneurship and value that and that’s
the companies I’d be looking for.
I wouldn’t be worrying.
I wouldn’t be basing my decision on whether or not to start a business on whether or not
I think a company will hire me.
I think there’s plenty of reasons to believe that the companies that you want to work for
would hire you, but at the same time just realize that it is a tradeoff.
There are going to be certain jobs that you’re never going to be able to get.
Would you really want those jobs?
I would say no, but it’s a decision that you’ll have to make.
Anyway, good question.
Thanks for the email.
If you have a question for me, email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com.
If you’re interested in entrepreneurship and going from developer to entrepreneur I
am putting together a course.
It’s not released yet but you can sign up to get on the early notification of when I
put this out on basically going from developer to entrepreneur, all the tricks and trade
details that I use as I build my business, as I went from developer to entrepreneur.
I’m going to share those all with you.
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Talk to you next time.
Take care.