Dr Jekyl & Mr Hyde - Balancing the 2 lives ...

Having a day job as well as working on a side project is difficult for many different reasons. The obvious one is there is less time to spend outside and enjoy the sun, the beach, the night life and basically do the things you like outside the technology world. There are also alot of disturbances that can occur during the day job that can affect your ability to concentrate once your at home and working on your own code base. It could be that there is pending work to catchup on back in the office which means you need to get in earlier, or you just had a disagreement with the lead architect because a silly decision was made putting you in a foul state of mind, there could even be self inflicting problems were you made a mistake at the office because of sleep deprivation from the coding session the night before. This leads to the fact that you have to spend time in the office tomorrow fixing the mistake before it evolves into a major issue.

Along side the above issues, one of the biggest things that you notice when working a day job in a big4 consulting company and starting up a technology company at the same time is that the way of thinking ingrained in a technology entreprenur and the culture that runs big4 consulting companies are completely different. Other then the fact they both deal with technology there are no similarties worth mentioning.

• Large companies throw around big money whilst the technology entreprenur tries to save money and be as resourceful as possible, employing different methods to achieve the desired outcome, for almost no additional cost
• Large companies involve masses of people managed by highly paid project managers to do a task that a single competant person could accomplish.
• Large companies are resistant to change and hate when a *different* suggestion slightly outside the box is made. Startups would crash and burn if thinking outside the box was outlawed
• Many employees of large companies have a single view on success and that is moving up the corporate ladder. Seeing other methods of *making it* seem outlandish. Tech- entreprenur are excited about technology and building great systems. Brown nosing, kissing ass or smooching just to get an extra 5K next year or get a promotion that means less technical work and more BS'ing around just isnt as interesting
• And the list goes on ....

Basically what it takes to be able to work on a startup and also have a day job is to train the mind to be tolerant. Most of the time i find stress and frustration occuring when im at my day job trying to solve a problem but only given the *corporate* tools. This means ruling out open source tools because it is unacceptable even though it is proven technology and does the exact desired task (PGP vs GPG or IE vs Firefox/chrome) . There are many competing ideaologies and to ensure that there is harmoney they need to be kept well apart.

Other then the competing ideaologies, i also find it difficult when a solution to a problem i have (for my startup) pops up in my head during office hours. If im busy doing day job work .. logging into my home network and making the fix would eat up my time and/or cause conflict of interest and future legal issues should i get caught typing into the wrong putty console....

There are many different thing that make working a day job and also starting a startup difficult, i know that soon i may also need to quit the day job should the startup require that attention . Im looking forward to it but until such time that i can see a stable source of income keeping the day job is a must, not for me but mainly for the people who depend on me (parents, sister etc). Its a challenge and there are many mind games you need to play to ensure that the motivation is kept alive and so far they have worked for the last 8-11 months.

There are ways to keep the motivation there for months on end through the early stages of the startup, its different for everyone... the main thing is you understand these points and focus on those to keep you moving in the right direction ... even if the day job makes it that little bit harder ...