A graphical comparison between employees, freelancers and makers.

by elzr • 17 years ago

43 17 17 years ago

deekayteez• 17 years ago

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.

muddylemon• 17 years ago

I think the point is to make unemployed people feel superior.

jerguismi3• 17 years ago

Being unemployed is not always fun, it's in society's interest to cheer us up a little bit :) So we at least keep trying to make something.

nopassrecover3• 17 years ago

Read his first comment. Boss is dutch for master or so I'm told so it is an accurate reflection of the lack of control/power (particularly in the U.S. I gather because of health concerns?) an employee has.

jbarciauskas• 17 years ago

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.

jerguismi3• 17 years ago

"Any maker is lucky to have a single product in his/her lifetime succeed."

Not nowadays any more, you can make several iPhone apps, web sites, etc. The products don't necessarily create millions, but they may be good investements.

For example, I make a crappy iPhone app in two days -> publish -> app makes $1000 -> good investment for me. For me, success=good investments of my time & money.

sant0sk1• 17 years ago

If making a crappy iPhone app is your definition of success, you and I define success quite differently.

GavinB• 17 years ago

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.

nopassrecover3• 17 years ago

But an employee tends to be paid for performing tasks through an abstraction layer. They may make products but the boss does not buy the product off of them, it buys their service.

wehriam2• 17 years ago

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.

nopassrecover3• 17 years ago

Depends, the first employee of a startup is probably in a different position to most employees.

omouse• 17 years ago

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

dangrover• 17 years ago

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

wehriam2• 17 years ago

While lacking poetry, your chart seems more intellectually honest.

herval• 17 years ago

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

there, fixed the chart for you...

10ren• 17 years ago

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).

A graphical comparison between employees, freelancers and makers.

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