Plus free time. Plus motivation and energy which is probably in short supply when you've already done 8 hours in a supermarket / your second job / a full day of childcare / etc.
> a few hundred bucks. It's a pretty low bar.
For a lot of people in the US, a few hundred bucks is the difference between eating that month and going without. Or being able to pay the rent and not be evicted. Or being able to afford transport to/from their job.
Show me any group of founders and you can point to a few outliers but people who have had jobs like grocery store clerk by and large do not go on to make a business. The bar is lowered enough for upper middle class only, with few exceptions.
That doesn't mean they're poor. I've known many, many people with zero savings living paycheck to paycheck. They had new cars, nice houses, good furniture, expensive clothes, took vacations, and ate regularly at restaurants.
They simply spent it all.
According to google, the percentage of Americans in poverty is 9.2% for 2020, not 63%.
Finances are quite tight overall - for the upper middle class that might mean living in an expensive area. For the middle class that might mean holding onto house and childcare payments. Those are choices sometimes, and others not.
What is also very common is to want a different job but not have the skillset people need, and no way to sacrifice the time it’d take to gain that skillset. Also age, if you wanted to be a programmer at 40 you could go to school for 4 years only to find there’s almost nobody willing to hire you at that age. This leads to people basically being stuck, unable to change their situation and certainly not able to have the runway to try to build out a business without an old fashioned bank loan.
Software engineers have a completely different set of problems than people who don’t work in tech.
These were middle class people, paid much more than myself.
They had no money, but they had plenty of income. They just spent it all. And there were a lot of them. I can give you many, many real life examples.
As for unemployable ancient programmers, I'm one of them. I know about it.
The solution is hire yourself. Nobody can stop you from buying a computer and hanging out your shingle. Companies are much more likely to hire an older person as a consultant than as an employee.
Contribute to open source to build a reputation. Several companies regularly scan the D programming language forums looking for people to hire, and they'll often hire remotely.
Everybody has some opportunities that are closed off to them. But they do have avenues that are available to be exploited. Focus on those.
> Everybody has some opportunities that are closed off to them. But they do have avenues that are available to be exploited. Focus on those.
Are you sure about that, honestly? Or is it that it worked out for you, with your particular set of prerequisites and willpower? I too believe there are more opportunities for people than they realize, but much of my adult life has been doing all I can to mentor and help people find and hop onto opportunities. I've done this enough to see a lot more failures than successes. It makes me think that people, while they may think its "hard", still really underestimate how much further ahead they were of people who weren't doing as well as them. Mental health and childhood trauma being one of the biggest factors that people don't end up considering, but also just how deep the cycle and mindset of poverty gets ingrained into people.
Yes. People have free will. They can choose. They are not condemned to fate.
I started my first business while working for Boeing 50 hours a week (they had mandatory overtime for years).
Similarly, "all you need is a computer" is still very much an indicator of privilege on a global level. Good luck if you live in a favella in Brazil or slums in South Africa or India. It is easier than it was in the 70s, but by no means universally available.
Last week, here in the US, I bought a decent laptop for $40 from the pawn shop. It was marked down to $40 because the battery didn't work (it worked fine on the charger) and there was cosmetic damage to the underside.
The US is a country where nearly everyone has a computer in their pocket that is thousands of times more powerful than ones in the 1970's.
If I recall correctly, Woz hand-assembled his early Apple software. That implies he did not have access to a computer running an assembler. Hand assembling code on notebook paper is tedious, but is certainly possible.
By the late 70's, there was a Byte shop within walking distance with many different PCs one could buy, and a heluva lot did and started businesses. Apple and other PC makers' success did not come from selling computers to the 1%.
As for Jobs, he started Apple for a few hundred bucks. It's a pretty low bar.