**Experiences Working in a Corporation**

One of the downsides of working in a corporation is that you can be strong-armed to accept BS that wouldn't fly elsewhere. In a corporate setting, it's less likely that they will decrease your pay or hours. However, on some freelance contracts, clients can be more aggressive in trying to get you to accept lower pay and fewer hours. My response to such situations is usually to tell the client that I won't accept less than what I'm worth and that if they want me to work for them, they should pay me what they pay others or else I'll go look for other opportunities. This approach has worked for me in the past, but it's not a guarantee that everyone will respond positively.

When working in a corporation, it's essential to stand up for yourself and assert your worth. If you're worth more than what you're being paid, don't be afraid to push back on that. On the other hand, if you've screwed up or aren't meeting expectations, then accepting lower pay might be a viable option. However, this should never be the default approach. Always prioritize getting a paycheck and building a war chest of experience and contacts before moving on to freelancing.

**The Difference Between Freelancing and Consulting**

Freelancing and consulting are two distinct career paths that often get conflated. Freelancing typically involves doing the labor yourself, such as coding, testing, and implementing solutions. In contrast, consulting involves strategizing, understanding business needs, designing solutions, and managing projects. While freelancers may delegate tasks to other programmers or engineers, consultants often work with a team of experts to implement solutions.

As someone who started out in a corporation, my personal philosophy is to build experience and contacts before moving into freelancing. Once you've established yourself as a solid engineer, you can transition into a freelance career, where you'll be working directly with clients on a project-by-project basis. From there, it's possible to move into consulting roles, which often command higher pay due to the value you bring to clients by providing solutions rather than just selling software.

Consulting is an excellent way to play arbitrage in the market, leveraging your skills and experience to provide high-value solutions that solve real problems. By charging more for your services, you can earn a higher income than you would as a freelancer. This approach requires a different mindset and skillset, but it can be highly rewarding.

**Starting Your Own Business: The Pros and Cons**

If you're considering starting your own business, whether through freelancing or consulting, there are pros and cons to weigh. One of the main benefits is that you'll have more control over your work and be able to choose projects that align with your values and interests. However, this also means taking on more risk and responsibility for managing your business.

As someone who has worked in both corporations and as a freelancer, I can attest that starting your own business is not for the faint of heart. It requires long hours, hard work, and a willingness to learn and adapt quickly. However, with the right approach and mindset, it can be incredibly rewarding.

**The Importance of Salary**

When working on freelance or consulting projects, it's essential to prioritize getting a salary rather than just taking equity as payment. Equity is not always a reliable source of income, as businesses are more likely to fail than succeed. As an employee, you need cold hard cash coming in to support yourself and your family.

If a company offers you equity as part of your compensation package, it's essential to take it but also understand that it may not be worth much if the business fails. In contrast, getting a salary provides a steady income stream that is more reliable. While equity can be a valuable benefit, it should never be taken as a replacement for a paycheck.

**Learning from Others**

As you navigate your career and consider different paths like freelancing or consulting, it's essential to learn from others who have experienced similar challenges and successes. By sharing their stories and experiences, others can offer valuable insights and advice that can help guide your decision-making process.

By reading the comments section of a video discussing these topics, you may find other people share similar stories or experiences which could be very helpful in making informed decisions about career paths.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat is up everybody in today's video I'm going to answer a question I've gotten a few times on this channel and that is should I work a corporate job or should i do freelancing let's find out so a surprise surprise there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question so let's break it down into a few different factors so I've done both now full disclosure here I have never done machine learning for a corporation I've done machine learning in a consulting freelancing capacity for various small businesses and startups but never in a corporate environment I have however been a process engineer at Intel which in some sense used data science to make decisions that drove our module forward to reduce defects and to improve the process over time so I can speak to a corporate environment in the general sense and you can make your own extrapolations based on what you would expect in a machine learning type position and if any of you in the audience have direct experience working for corporations doing machine learning please if I say something incorrect correct me down below let the audience know the truth again I'm not pretending to have done something I have not so corporations are their own Beast so the first thing I want to speak upon is something about culture so when you work for a corporation you are really coming into a totally different culture it will have its own vernacular its own lingo when I started at Intel it took me about a month to actually literally to understand what people were saying because they spoke in terms of abbreviations and acronyms and it took a long time to understand what all of them meant and to be able to piece them together into some type of intelligent sentence so don't be alarmed if you start a corporate job and you are kind of inundated with lingo and don't really understand what people are saying in addition to the the cult the lingo there is also how people interact with each other what are the expectations from management how you are expected to take initiative the corporate values these types of things so my job was process engineering as I said and what that meant literally was using data to design experiments to conduct those experiments and then analyze the data to make intelligent decisions about improving the process now I turned out I worked in one of the worst modules in the factory for defects I was a dry edge back-end engineer and this is an incredibly dirty part of the process literally dirty meaning it we used plasmas to inch various types of polymers this caused flaking off on the wafers those flakes would result in blocked edges which of course results in a defect on your chip dead die and of course lost the bottom line so there was an enormous amount of pressure on us to make process tweaks to try to reduce the occurrence of those defects to maximize the profit of Intel as our part of the process we were the only factory working on it it was the legacy 32 and 45 nanometer at the time when Intel was on 22 nanometers is a few years ago so there's an enormous amount of pressure part of that job part of that process of making improvements actually the largest part of that process was dealing with other humans so on the process engineers were kind of near the bottom of the totem pole the poor process engineering technicians were below us and they caught a lot of flack those poor guys and gals they worked super hard but they were the lowest on the totem pole we were one rung above them above us were the integrators now the integrators had a kind of bird's-eye view of the process they would look at operations on either side of the dry edge and see how what we did affected the stuff behind us and how what happened before us affected the stuff that went on at our module so they had some clue as to how the proposed changes we were trying to implement would affect other parts of the process in theory now part of their group was to cycle people in and out so as part of that cycling in and out you would occasionally get people that didn't you know they were new so they didn't know you were part of the process so you had to spend time training them educating them bringing them up to speed on your part of the process now that wouldn't be half panic so those people were gatekeepers for the changes you wanted to make you couldn't do anything without getting there by off so not only did you have to educate them you had to persuade them as well and these are all sharp people you're not going to lie to them and hoodwink them and you know and nor would you want to because the consequences would be quite great if you did but you had to educate them and as well as to persuade them that the change you wanted to make wouldn't totally destroy the process and the culture of Intel was supposedly about risk-taking but the reality was quite the opposite people are generally risk-averse and those in integration were especially so-so even if you wanted to make some change it seemed innocuous they wanted a full full mock-up of everything they wanted to know how it affected every part of the process because they had to cover their own rear ends to make sure they didn't sign up on something that was going to break part of the process and indeed this actually happened one of our senior engineers the guide have been there many many years highly experienced wanted to do a very seemingly simple change in how we loaded the wafers in the machine totally innocuous one would think they signed off on it and the end result was a massive a massive excursion there was a huge issue I can't go into too many details but it resulted in me being put on a task force along with another engineer from my module as well as other people around the factory to try to figure out what went wrong we figured it out pretty quickly but then couldn't quite understand what went wrong with that proposed change because it was something so simple we couldn't quite nail down the physics of it but in the corporate world you're not there to understand physics you're there to solve problems so that was the culture of Intel to kind of give lip service to risk-taking but then very very quickly back off that risk you know there was no attempt to say hey how can we mitigate this damage and maybe get the benefit of the changes guy implemented because it was a significant benefit it wasn't like he did it just out of the blue hoping you know it would you know it was calculated it it would have generated an enormous payoff had it worked unfortunately not everything works out so culture you're gonna have to deal with other people they're gonna have their own little mini culture within their own group you're gonna need a huge set of soft skills to survive in a corporation you need to be able to persuade people to educate them persuasion more than anything you know you may not have to educate new people you certainly have to persuade people if your data scientist or machine learning engineer that what you want to do is the right thing that you're drawing the right conclusions from the data that you did not implicitly but bias into your day that would influence your decision-making process there's gonna be a whole host of things you have to convince people that you have looked into then that your decisions are sound so what else about culture so many organizations have what are called performance reviews so I am whenever you work for corporation you your performance will be reviewed at least on an annual basis that's how it was it until when I worked there and now they have switched to doing it I believe for three or four times a year I know Netflix does it four times a year I had a buddy very very very smart guy known for many years he's a talented developer he got axe from Netflix on one of the quarterly reviews I guess you know whatever he didn't make the grade and it's probably going to be the case at most organizations I think there are a couple maybe Microsoft doesn't I think I read something about them doing away with it a while back but you can expect a performance review and so that performance review is not going to be a process in which your colleagues are going to help you out so your colleagues are in competition with you at least it Intel is a zero-sum game they had a set amount of money they could divvy out for raises as well as stocks they could divvy out to keep people around and every stock that I got was one less somebody else got so it was a zero-sum game and there was no real cooperation at least around that part of the job for helping each other out so expect a performance review and to navigate that successfully you want to keep something like a log a journal screenshots demos anything you can to document what you have done because particularly if you have it yearly it's gonna be difficult to remember what you did nine months ago and it generated enough documentation to show it had an impact so that's the most important thing is to document whatever everything you do if you help other people if you're spending time helping other engineers document that as well because that you know that goes into team building that goes into showing leadership mentorship corporations like that managers typically like that because it makes them look better and makes their job easier so keep track of everything that you do including helping other people document it as best you can including demos video anything you can do within the confines of the corporation some companies don't like you taking video stuff you know they may have issues with screenshots or whatever but just stay within the confines the rules but document everything it is that you do or that performance review so what are the upsides of working for a corporation so the biggest upside is a steady consistent paycheck that is really the biggest draw to working in a corporation in my mind anyway I let me just say that I have no allegiance to a corporation and neither should you a corporation is not a person it's not your mother your brother your sister your uncle your father it's not related to you it's just a conglomeration of people working towards a common goal and as soon as you are in the way of that common goal you will be steamrolled and that's just the way it is so don't have loyalty to the corporation beyond what is required by the ethics of the job you know don't do something shady and screw over your employer certainly but don't you know don't go out of your way to sacrifice for a corporation that isn't gonna reward you with sufficient Renu Maury ssin you know there if you're going to work twice as much but only get paid 3% more than you need to recalculate your you know your earnings right there you're gonna have to think of a new way to make money maybe switch to a different job so steady paycheck is the biggest draw for corporation brand cachet is another having worked at Intel you know there's a certain amount of cash hey at least there used to be until they lost the process lead there's a certain amount of cachet that goes with that certainly working for Facebook Amazon Netflix Hulu any of those mega corporations has its own you know certain kind of swagger to it and that's cool you know it's it's it is part of the culture where hey you know we are Google we are whatever you know we impact the world we're major players we're part of something greater and that is part of the kool-aid you know you should don't chug the kool-aid you can sip it don't chug it don't go all in on that because I don't think you should plan on making a corporation your end game but it is a step in the process to achieving wealth in life so aside from the steady paycheck and brand cachet there's the experience you get you're gonna get to work on significant problems and have some real impact in the world that is always nice you know if you value that kind of thing if you don't then you know it's neutral at best I suppose but if you value that kind of thing then working for corporation is probably going to satisfy that need for you so what are some of the downsides well the downside is aren't kind of numerous one is that in many cases it is a zero-sum games you're constantly in competition with your coworkers so don't get too chummy with them always be on the lookout to understand that you know different corporations all have varying degrees of this but everybody's looking out for themselves right we're all self-interested and you shouldn't be too altruistic to a fault you know help people if you can make sure to document it but never allow someone to walk all over you because at the end of the day they're out for them you should be out for you and that's just how it is so another downside is a lack of autonomy at least in most places you are working to solve a particular problem for the corporation so if you are a an exceptionally curious type person you want to work on other things you don't want to work on a single project you know for extended periods of time then that will be a downside I don't know what the turnover rate on projects is for machine learning and corporations but I suspect is of order you know months to years so if it bores you to tears working on one thing for years at a time then or you know maybe many many months at a time then that will certainly be a downside for you another downside is that you will be expected to work more for less by which I mean working overtime is generally going to be expected because the person next to you is gonna do it and so you're gonna be expected to do it too now this is a balancing act where I don't advocate surrendering your life to a corporation at all my personal philosophy is that a corporate job is a means to an end and you should act ethically and do the best possible job you can while you're there but your end goal isn't to be the CEO of the company it isn't to make manager it is to build a war chest and move out on your own and do other more exciting things that you want to do and make your own impact on the world so never work more for less if you're gonna end up doubling up then you need to on somebody else's work for an extended period of time as someone goes out on vacation you're covering for him that's kind of expected they would do the same for you just part of the job but if you are full-time covering two roles then you need to be jockeying for getting more compensation for that and don't be afraid to push for it because nobody's gonna advocate for you everybody's out for themselves right and that's that's a fact whether he whether you realize it or not they're not gonna argue for you have to argue for yourself and they're not gonna get you know your manager is gonna get upset if you say hey you know I'm doing XYZ I have brought a BC value to the company it's impacted the bottom line this way it saved money it's you know a stellar new product for us or whatever they're not gonna think that you're being greedy or you know unethical by asking for more money for accomplishing more never ask for more money because you need it right nobody gives a crap what you need it's really irrelevant only ask for more money that is commensurate with the value you have provided to the company so corporate life in a nutshell is gonna be working long hours getting paid a steady paycheck a decent amount with a company culture that where a lot of people are gonna have guzzled the kool-aid they're gonna be you know all all in full on board with the culture and you're gonna have varying needs for soft skills to to persuade people to you know navigate the corporate environment but all in all I think it's a great place to start I think that if you are just out of college you definitely definitely try to land the most most prestigious job you can that pays the most money because that's gonna pay dividends you know throughout your career you know once you get that first job nobody cares about your degree so you that first job is really really important and so it behooves you to once you graduate get a job for the best company you can making as much money as you possibly can so freelancing so now I have some direct experience here so freelancing is a bit of a mixed bag so what are the upsides are freelancing there were quite a few the biggest freelance the biggest upside of freelancing is that you are kind of your own manager you're not your own boss the client is the boss but you are your own manager and many clients are hands-off particularly for something like machine learning where unless you're slotting in with a dev shop or an existing team they're not gonna know a whole lot about it so they're gonna be really relying on you to do the right thing so you don't get micromanaged which is a which is an upside but it's also an enormous amount of responsibility right you can't screw up otherwise you know you've wasted the clients money you wasted their time and that's gonna look bad so there is a lot of pressure a lot of pressure to perform to do well and to guide the client making the right decision another up sign is that if you don't like a client you can fire them you know it's really painful to leave a corporation particularly ones that give you stocks to stay on board because those stocks will typically invest over a period of years and if you leave you don't get them so there's a cost to leaving but the cost of firing a bad client is you know whatever you've got to go find another client and you should have a war chest saved up so that you can facilitate that if you need to because you will run into bad clients you know there's good clients as bad clients you know there's good developers bad developers right there's a distribution of people so it's something you should plan for but it is quite simple and straightforward to fire a bad client and if you're using something like up work they may try to hold a bad review over you I wouldn't allow them to do that I would just say whatever leave whatever review you want because you can always leave a response to it and you can always speak to that on your next gig say hey you know the client was unreasonable I have you know this chat chat logs to prove it if you really want to see you know whatever a client isn't gonna look at one bad review and say this developer sucks or I'm not gonna hire them you know they understand that some people are reasonable some people aren't another upside is that you get to work on many different projects so you should really specialize and one thing you should kind of know you know if you do like computer vision or natural language processing you should really specialize in one vertical but you will get to work on a variety of projects with a variety of different teams and companies and that's pretty cool you know you don't know you don't really stagnate on one thing you get to move from project to project solving problems new problems getting to see how different businesses work that's kind of the the another benefit is that you get to see how different teams businesses industries verticals work so you get a fresh perspective pretty much with every new job other upsides are that you have to develop your soft skills now this may seem like a downside for some because you don't like to sell but really everything you do in life is a sale you know if you're trying to get a girl to go out on a date with you that's a sale you're trying to sell yourself over the next guy that's trying to do the same thing right trying to say you know I'm a man of value hire me for the job a man of value go out you know on a date with me so sales is critically important it's a soft skill that we all really need to work on and freelancing really gives you the chance to work on sales on nearly perpetual basis because you're always hunting for new gigs which brings me to one of my first downsides of freelancing you really are hunting for new gigs quite frequently particularly if you're firing clients and if you find yourself firing a bunch of clients maybe the clients aren't the problem maybe it's you but I digress you're always going to be on the hunt for new clients because the project is going to end at some point you know it and so you're gonna want to have something lined up for the end of that project so you have continuity of income the the flipside of that in a pro of freelancing is that with each new job you can negotiate a pay raise right you can say and if they push back I've had people push back they say well you charge this other person you know X dollars why you charging as you know 1.2 X the answer is well I'm much better at my job now I've already done something similar I can get this done more quickly more thoroughly I can write better documentation you know if you think I'm expensive wait till you hire the person that does it cheaply then you'll find out how cheap I actually was you know so each job is an opportunity to negotiate a pay raise which is really great for your bottom line I've seen freelancers I've worked with freelancers that have made well over a quarter million dollars on up work I've seen others that have made a million plus over the course of like a decade that's probably pretty rare at least on up work but you can make big money as a freelancer but it is a bit of a slog so that's another downside is that you you will be sending out many proposals you will be interviewing for many gigs and not getting all of them so you got to learn to face rejection that isn't a huge deal rejection is you know whatever who cares it just means there's more chances to learn more opportunities to find other gigs but it is something to take into account you have difficulty dealing with it get used to it right you have to deal with that if you're interviewing - when I was looking for jobs right after graduate school I sent out something like 50 or 60 different resumes and proposals and I only heard back from three or four of them most of them went into a black hole particularly with IBM you never hear back you don't know what happened to it nothing ever comes of it so rejection is just a fact of life it's particularly prevalent with freelancing so learn learn to live with it learn to embrace it and you know quite far another downside and this is something I encountered on my last gig is you can be strong-armed to accept BS that wouldn't fly in a corporation so in a corporation they're not gonna usually aren't gonna decrease your pay they're not gonna decrease your hours whereas on some freelance contracts the client can be like hey you know I'm running out of money here I've been totally mismanagement project so you're gonna have to take less money and work less hours that's happened to me my response is usually well that's your problem you can either pay me what you pay me or I'll go work somewhere else no big deal and you know you should never never accept that but people will try it never accept less than you're worth but people will try it so it's just something to be aware of don't stand for it I always be assertive always stand up for yourself and unless you've screwed up if unless you're not worth the money they're paying you then in that case take the lower pay but if you're worth it then definitely definitely push back on that so one other option here is consulting so consulting is actually separate from freelancing freelancing the connotation of that is that you're actually doing the labor you're doing the coding the testing the implementing the consulting role means you are strategizing trying to understand the needs of the business and designing solutions and then you may do some of the coding but you've probably delegating or working with other programmers other engineers that are implementing the solutions as you go along and you're managing the client managing the contract managing the project now that's kind of in my opinion one of the the second-tier what you should attempt to achieve right my personal philosophy is if you start out on a corporation build a war chest build experience build contacts get become a very solid engineer move on to freelancing do really well there and then gradually move into a consulting type role to where you are charging more money because you're providing more value because you are not focused on selling software you're focused on selling solutions to problems and then that's really all businesses care about is hey we have some problem it's costing X dollars if we can buy a solution that is less than X dollars and you know solve the problem hey we're going to do that and so consulting is your opportunity to really play arbitrage to say there is some value to this problem they're trying to solve my skills have this value here let's try to kind of skim that area and get some of that profit for ourselves and you can make more money than you can in freelancing because you are not tying your money directly to the hours you work you're tying your pay to the solution of a problem and that goes into the process of selling a great book to look at for learning how to sell high ticket stuff it's called spin selling it's an acronym for situation problem implication and need these are for different types of questions you can ask in the sales process and need based questions are the most strongly correlated with high ticket sales I should I should have an Amazon affiliate link for that but I don't anyway go buy if you're thinking about consulting or freelancing it's a great book I'll teach you how to sell effectively at the high ticket range one other option is startups I didn't talk too much about that because you know it's really gonna be similar to the corporation the difference is gonna be less be our bureaucracy there's gonna be a faster pace you don't have as many checks and balances or gatekeepers but the expectations are gonna be the same have to work really hard long hours the one one thing I will say is that you should never under any circumstances work for equity solely you should always always get a paycheck you should always get a salary and then if the company wants to offer equity on top of that that's fine but you should never work solely for equity you're because you you don't know right ninety nine percent ninety-five percent or so the businesses are gonna fail and in which case equity is worth precisely zero you know you can't you can't eat on i/o use so you need cold hard cash coming in so never never take equity in lieu of the paycheck always take it paycheck and if they offer equity hey that's awesome because it may may make you a millionaire who knows but definitely never under any circumstances work just for equity so I hope that is helpful those were my experiences working for a corporation and as a freelancer please share your own experiences down below you know I've only worked you know a finite number of gigs you've you know the collective group of us have worked far more so we can all help each other by sharing our stories please do do so down below if you found it helpful make sure to subscribe hit the bell icon share this and I look forward to seeing you all in the next videowhat is up everybody in today's video I'm going to answer a question I've gotten a few times on this channel and that is should I work a corporate job or should i do freelancing let's find out so a surprise surprise there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question so let's break it down into a few different factors so I've done both now full disclosure here I have never done machine learning for a corporation I've done machine learning in a consulting freelancing capacity for various small businesses and startups but never in a corporate environment I have however been a process engineer at Intel which in some sense used data science to make decisions that drove our module forward to reduce defects and to improve the process over time so I can speak to a corporate environment in the general sense and you can make your own extrapolations based on what you would expect in a machine learning type position and if any of you in the audience have direct experience working for corporations doing machine learning please if I say something incorrect correct me down below let the audience know the truth again I'm not pretending to have done something I have not so corporations are their own Beast so the first thing I want to speak upon is something about culture so when you work for a corporation you are really coming into a totally different culture it will have its own vernacular its own lingo when I started at Intel it took me about a month to actually literally to understand what people were saying because they spoke in terms of abbreviations and acronyms and it took a long time to understand what all of them meant and to be able to piece them together into some type of intelligent sentence so don't be alarmed if you start a corporate job and you are kind of inundated with lingo and don't really understand what people are saying in addition to the the cult the lingo there is also how people interact with each other what are the expectations from management how you are expected to take initiative the corporate values these types of things so my job was process engineering as I said and what that meant literally was using data to design experiments to conduct those experiments and then analyze the data to make intelligent decisions about improving the process now I turned out I worked in one of the worst modules in the factory for defects I was a dry edge back-end engineer and this is an incredibly dirty part of the process literally dirty meaning it we used plasmas to inch various types of polymers this caused flaking off on the wafers those flakes would result in blocked edges which of course results in a defect on your chip dead die and of course lost the bottom line so there was an enormous amount of pressure on us to make process tweaks to try to reduce the occurrence of those defects to maximize the profit of Intel as our part of the process we were the only factory working on it it was the legacy 32 and 45 nanometer at the time when Intel was on 22 nanometers is a few years ago so there's an enormous amount of pressure part of that job part of that process of making improvements actually the largest part of that process was dealing with other humans so on the process engineers were kind of near the bottom of the totem pole the poor process engineering technicians were below us and they caught a lot of flack those poor guys and gals they worked super hard but they were the lowest on the totem pole we were one rung above them above us were the integrators now the integrators had a kind of bird's-eye view of the process they would look at operations on either side of the dry edge and see how what we did affected the stuff behind us and how what happened before us affected the stuff that went on at our module so they had some clue as to how the proposed changes we were trying to implement would affect other parts of the process in theory now part of their group was to cycle people in and out so as part of that cycling in and out you would occasionally get people that didn't you know they were new so they didn't know you were part of the process so you had to spend time training them educating them bringing them up to speed on your part of the process now that wouldn't be half panic so those people were gatekeepers for the changes you wanted to make you couldn't do anything without getting there by off so not only did you have to educate them you had to persuade them as well and these are all sharp people you're not going to lie to them and hoodwink them and you know and nor would you want to because the consequences would be quite great if you did but you had to educate them and as well as to persuade them that the change you wanted to make wouldn't totally destroy the process and the culture of Intel was supposedly about risk-taking but the reality was quite the opposite people are generally risk-averse and those in integration were especially so-so even if you wanted to make some change it seemed innocuous they wanted a full full mock-up of everything they wanted to know how it affected every part of the process because they had to cover their own rear ends to make sure they didn't sign up on something that was going to break part of the process and indeed this actually happened one of our senior engineers the guide have been there many many years highly experienced wanted to do a very seemingly simple change in how we loaded the wafers in the machine totally innocuous one would think they signed off on it and the end result was a massive a massive excursion there was a huge issue I can't go into too many details but it resulted in me being put on a task force along with another engineer from my module as well as other people around the factory to try to figure out what went wrong we figured it out pretty quickly but then couldn't quite understand what went wrong with that proposed change because it was something so simple we couldn't quite nail down the physics of it but in the corporate world you're not there to understand physics you're there to solve problems so that was the culture of Intel to kind of give lip service to risk-taking but then very very quickly back off that risk you know there was no attempt to say hey how can we mitigate this damage and maybe get the benefit of the changes guy implemented because it was a significant benefit it wasn't like he did it just out of the blue hoping you know it would you know it was calculated it it would have generated an enormous payoff had it worked unfortunately not everything works out so culture you're gonna have to deal with other people they're gonna have their own little mini culture within their own group you're gonna need a huge set of soft skills to survive in a corporation you need to be able to persuade people to educate them persuasion more than anything you know you may not have to educate new people you certainly have to persuade people if your data scientist or machine learning engineer that what you want to do is the right thing that you're drawing the right conclusions from the data that you did not implicitly but bias into your day that would influence your decision-making process there's gonna be a whole host of things you have to convince people that you have looked into then that your decisions are sound so what else about culture so many organizations have what are called performance reviews so I am whenever you work for corporation you your performance will be reviewed at least on an annual basis that's how it was it until when I worked there and now they have switched to doing it I believe for three or four times a year I know Netflix does it four times a year I had a buddy very very very smart guy known for many years he's a talented developer he got axe from Netflix on one of the quarterly reviews I guess you know whatever he didn't make the grade and it's probably going to be the case at most organizations I think there are a couple maybe Microsoft doesn't I think I read something about them doing away with it a while back but you can expect a performance review and so that performance review is not going to be a process in which your colleagues are going to help you out so your colleagues are in competition with you at least it Intel is a zero-sum game they had a set amount of money they could divvy out for raises as well as stocks they could divvy out to keep people around and every stock that I got was one less somebody else got so it was a zero-sum game and there was no real cooperation at least around that part of the job for helping each other out so expect a performance review and to navigate that successfully you want to keep something like a log a journal screenshots demos anything you can to document what you have done because particularly if you have it yearly it's gonna be difficult to remember what you did nine months ago and it generated enough documentation to show it had an impact so that's the most important thing is to document whatever everything you do if you help other people if you're spending time helping other engineers document that as well because that you know that goes into team building that goes into showing leadership mentorship corporations like that managers typically like that because it makes them look better and makes their job easier so keep track of everything that you do including helping other people document it as best you can including demos video anything you can do within the confines of the corporation some companies don't like you taking video stuff you know they may have issues with screenshots or whatever but just stay within the confines the rules but document everything it is that you do or that performance review so what are the upsides of working for a corporation so the biggest upside is a steady consistent paycheck that is really the biggest draw to working in a corporation in my mind anyway I let me just say that I have no allegiance to a corporation and neither should you a corporation is not a person it's not your mother your brother your sister your uncle your father it's not related to you it's just a conglomeration of people working towards a common goal and as soon as you are in the way of that common goal you will be steamrolled and that's just the way it is so don't have loyalty to the corporation beyond what is required by the ethics of the job you know don't do something shady and screw over your employer certainly but don't you know don't go out of your way to sacrifice for a corporation that isn't gonna reward you with sufficient Renu Maury ssin you know there if you're going to work twice as much but only get paid 3% more than you need to recalculate your you know your earnings right there you're gonna have to think of a new way to make money maybe switch to a different job so steady paycheck is the biggest draw for corporation brand cachet is another having worked at Intel you know there's a certain amount of cash hey at least there used to be until they lost the process lead there's a certain amount of cachet that goes with that certainly working for Facebook Amazon Netflix Hulu any of those mega corporations has its own you know certain kind of swagger to it and that's cool you know it's it's it is part of the culture where hey you know we are Google we are whatever you know we impact the world we're major players we're part of something greater and that is part of the kool-aid you know you should don't chug the kool-aid you can sip it don't chug it don't go all in on that because I don't think you should plan on making a corporation your end game but it is a step in the process to achieving wealth in life so aside from the steady paycheck and brand cachet there's the experience you get you're gonna get to work on significant problems and have some real impact in the world that is always nice you know if you value that kind of thing if you don't then you know it's neutral at best I suppose but if you value that kind of thing then working for corporation is probably going to satisfy that need for you so what are some of the downsides well the downside is aren't kind of numerous one is that in many cases it is a zero-sum games you're constantly in competition with your coworkers so don't get too chummy with them always be on the lookout to understand that you know different corporations all have varying degrees of this but everybody's looking out for themselves right we're all self-interested and you shouldn't be too altruistic to a fault you know help people if you can make sure to document it but never allow someone to walk all over you because at the end of the day they're out for them you should be out for you and that's just how it is so another downside is a lack of autonomy at least in most places you are working to solve a particular problem for the corporation so if you are a an exceptionally curious type person you want to work on other things you don't want to work on a single project you know for extended periods of time then that will be a downside I don't know what the turnover rate on projects is for machine learning and corporations but I suspect is of order you know months to years so if it bores you to tears working on one thing for years at a time then or you know maybe many many months at a time then that will certainly be a downside for you another downside is that you will be expected to work more for less by which I mean working overtime is generally going to be expected because the person next to you is gonna do it and so you're gonna be expected to do it too now this is a balancing act where I don't advocate surrendering your life to a corporation at all my personal philosophy is that a corporate job is a means to an end and you should act ethically and do the best possible job you can while you're there but your end goal isn't to be the CEO of the company it isn't to make manager it is to build a war chest and move out on your own and do other more exciting things that you want to do and make your own impact on the world so never work more for less if you're gonna end up doubling up then you need to on somebody else's work for an extended period of time as someone goes out on vacation you're covering for him that's kind of expected they would do the same for you just part of the job but if you are full-time covering two roles then you need to be jockeying for getting more compensation for that and don't be afraid to push for it because nobody's gonna advocate for you everybody's out for themselves right and that's that's a fact whether he whether you realize it or not they're not gonna argue for you have to argue for yourself and they're not gonna get you know your manager is gonna get upset if you say hey you know I'm doing XYZ I have brought a BC value to the company it's impacted the bottom line this way it saved money it's you know a stellar new product for us or whatever they're not gonna think that you're being greedy or you know unethical by asking for more money for accomplishing more never ask for more money because you need it right nobody gives a crap what you need it's really irrelevant only ask for more money that is commensurate with the value you have provided to the company so corporate life in a nutshell is gonna be working long hours getting paid a steady paycheck a decent amount with a company culture that where a lot of people are gonna have guzzled the kool-aid they're gonna be you know all all in full on board with the culture and you're gonna have varying needs for soft skills to to persuade people to you know navigate the corporate environment but all in all I think it's a great place to start I think that if you are just out of college you definitely definitely try to land the most most prestigious job you can that pays the most money because that's gonna pay dividends you know throughout your career you know once you get that first job nobody cares about your degree so you that first job is really really important and so it behooves you to once you graduate get a job for the best company you can making as much money as you possibly can so freelancing so now I have some direct experience here so freelancing is a bit of a mixed bag so what are the upsides are freelancing there were quite a few the biggest freelance the biggest upside of freelancing is that you are kind of your own manager you're not your own boss the client is the boss but you are your own manager and many clients are hands-off particularly for something like machine learning where unless you're slotting in with a dev shop or an existing team they're not gonna know a whole lot about it so they're gonna be really relying on you to do the right thing so you don't get micromanaged which is a which is an upside but it's also an enormous amount of responsibility right you can't screw up otherwise you know you've wasted the clients money you wasted their time and that's gonna look bad so there is a lot of pressure a lot of pressure to perform to do well and to guide the client making the right decision another up sign is that if you don't like a client you can fire them you know it's really painful to leave a corporation particularly ones that give you stocks to stay on board because those stocks will typically invest over a period of years and if you leave you don't get them so there's a cost to leaving but the cost of firing a bad client is you know whatever you've got to go find another client and you should have a war chest saved up so that you can facilitate that if you need to because you will run into bad clients you know there's good clients as bad clients you know there's good developers bad developers right there's a distribution of people so it's something you should plan for but it is quite simple and straightforward to fire a bad client and if you're using something like up work they may try to hold a bad review over you I wouldn't allow them to do that I would just say whatever leave whatever review you want because you can always leave a response to it and you can always speak to that on your next gig say hey you know the client was unreasonable I have you know this chat chat logs to prove it if you really want to see you know whatever a client isn't gonna look at one bad review and say this developer sucks or I'm not gonna hire them you know they understand that some people are reasonable some people aren't another upside is that you get to work on many different projects so you should really specialize and one thing you should kind of know you know if you do like computer vision or natural language processing you should really specialize in one vertical but you will get to work on a variety of projects with a variety of different teams and companies and that's pretty cool you know you don't know you don't really stagnate on one thing you get to move from project to project solving problems new problems getting to see how different businesses work that's kind of the the another benefit is that you get to see how different teams businesses industries verticals work so you get a fresh perspective pretty much with every new job other upsides are that you have to develop your soft skills now this may seem like a downside for some because you don't like to sell but really everything you do in life is a sale you know if you're trying to get a girl to go out on a date with you that's a sale you're trying to sell yourself over the next guy that's trying to do the same thing right trying to say you know I'm a man of value hire me for the job a man of value go out you know on a date with me so sales is critically important it's a soft skill that we all really need to work on and freelancing really gives you the chance to work on sales on nearly perpetual basis because you're always hunting for new gigs which brings me to one of my first downsides of freelancing you really are hunting for new gigs quite frequently particularly if you're firing clients and if you find yourself firing a bunch of clients maybe the clients aren't the problem maybe it's you but I digress you're always going to be on the hunt for new clients because the project is going to end at some point you know it and so you're gonna want to have something lined up for the end of that project so you have continuity of income the the flipside of that in a pro of freelancing is that with each new job you can negotiate a pay raise right you can say and if they push back I've had people push back they say well you charge this other person you know X dollars why you charging as you know 1.2 X the answer is well I'm much better at my job now I've already done something similar I can get this done more quickly more thoroughly I can write better documentation you know if you think I'm expensive wait till you hire the person that does it cheaply then you'll find out how cheap I actually was you know so each job is an opportunity to negotiate a pay raise which is really great for your bottom line I've seen freelancers I've worked with freelancers that have made well over a quarter million dollars on up work I've seen others that have made a million plus over the course of like a decade that's probably pretty rare at least on up work but you can make big money as a freelancer but it is a bit of a slog so that's another downside is that you you will be sending out many proposals you will be interviewing for many gigs and not getting all of them so you got to learn to face rejection that isn't a huge deal rejection is you know whatever who cares it just means there's more chances to learn more opportunities to find other gigs but it is something to take into account you have difficulty dealing with it get used to it right you have to deal with that if you're interviewing - when I was looking for jobs right after graduate school I sent out something like 50 or 60 different resumes and proposals and I only heard back from three or four of them most of them went into a black hole particularly with IBM you never hear back you don't know what happened to it nothing ever comes of it so rejection is just a fact of life it's particularly prevalent with freelancing so learn learn to live with it learn to embrace it and you know quite far another downside and this is something I encountered on my last gig is you can be strong-armed to accept BS that wouldn't fly in a corporation so in a corporation they're not gonna usually aren't gonna decrease your pay they're not gonna decrease your hours whereas on some freelance contracts the client can be like hey you know I'm running out of money here I've been totally mismanagement project so you're gonna have to take less money and work less hours that's happened to me my response is usually well that's your problem you can either pay me what you pay me or I'll go work somewhere else no big deal and you know you should never never accept that but people will try it never accept less than you're worth but people will try it so it's just something to be aware of don't stand for it I always be assertive always stand up for yourself and unless you've screwed up if unless you're not worth the money they're paying you then in that case take the lower pay but if you're worth it then definitely definitely push back on that so one other option here is consulting so consulting is actually separate from freelancing freelancing the connotation of that is that you're actually doing the labor you're doing the coding the testing the implementing the consulting role means you are strategizing trying to understand the needs of the business and designing solutions and then you may do some of the coding but you've probably delegating or working with other programmers other engineers that are implementing the solutions as you go along and you're managing the client managing the contract managing the project now that's kind of in my opinion one of the the second-tier what you should attempt to achieve right my personal philosophy is if you start out on a corporation build a war chest build experience build contacts get become a very solid engineer move on to freelancing do really well there and then gradually move into a consulting type role to where you are charging more money because you're providing more value because you are not focused on selling software you're focused on selling solutions to problems and then that's really all businesses care about is hey we have some problem it's costing X dollars if we can buy a solution that is less than X dollars and you know solve the problem hey we're going to do that and so consulting is your opportunity to really play arbitrage to say there is some value to this problem they're trying to solve my skills have this value here let's try to kind of skim that area and get some of that profit for ourselves and you can make more money than you can in freelancing because you are not tying your money directly to the hours you work you're tying your pay to the solution of a problem and that goes into the process of selling a great book to look at for learning how to sell high ticket stuff it's called spin selling it's an acronym for situation problem implication and need these are for different types of questions you can ask in the sales process and need based questions are the most strongly correlated with high ticket sales I should I should have an Amazon affiliate link for that but I don't anyway go buy if you're thinking about consulting or freelancing it's a great book I'll teach you how to sell effectively at the high ticket range one other option is startups I didn't talk too much about that because you know it's really gonna be similar to the corporation the difference is gonna be less be our bureaucracy there's gonna be a faster pace you don't have as many checks and balances or gatekeepers but the expectations are gonna be the same have to work really hard long hours the one one thing I will say is that you should never under any circumstances work for equity solely you should always always get a paycheck you should always get a salary and then if the company wants to offer equity on top of that that's fine but you should never work solely for equity you're because you you don't know right ninety nine percent ninety-five percent or so the businesses are gonna fail and in which case equity is worth precisely zero you know you can't you can't eat on i/o use so you need cold hard cash coming in so never never take equity in lieu of the paycheck always take it paycheck and if they offer equity hey that's awesome because it may may make you a millionaire who knows but definitely never under any circumstances work just for equity so I hope that is helpful those were my experiences working for a corporation and as a freelancer please share your own experiences down below you know I've only worked you know a finite number of gigs you've you know the collective group of us have worked far more so we can all help each other by sharing our stories please do do so down below if you found it helpful make sure to subscribe hit the bell icon share this and I look forward to seeing you all in the next video\n"