Reminds me of a Jimmy Carr joke: "I was in a taxi when the driver said 'I love my job! I'm my own boss and nobody tells me what to do!'. I said 'Great. Now take a left here!' "
When doing something a customer asks for, you are doing something for someone's benefit (usually...).
When doing something the boss asks for, well, you may never know whether it makes any sense to anybody at all if the company sufficiently detaches employees from the results of their work. There are places where you just feel like you are wasting time for nothing.
Besides that, you can always (but not too often ;)) tell some particularly annoying customer to leave and pick up another one.
My view has been that someone always works for someone else. Even the most powerful board members answer to shareholders and entrepreneurs answer to their customers - lest they go out of business.
Tell me about why you don't think you have to answer to your customers.
Customers are a constraint, to be sure, but so are the laws of physics. Customer preferences are just market conditions, and adopting to market conditions is closer to dealing with physical constraints in your product design than it is to being told what to do by your boss.
I mean, sure, in some sense you're "working for" your customers and "working for" a boss, but that's just using the same phrase to describe two fundamentally different relationships. Customers have no meaningful say in anything beyond buying your product or not; they can't dictate culture, they can't play politics, they can't drag you down with pointless meetings... etc.
Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent. Especially for consumer-oriented products, they're faceless. In a hierarchy, you have one immediate boss and a some bounded number of executives above them, all of whom operate more or less as a single entity. You can't just decide to ignore a segment of your management the way you can change focus to a different class of clients. And you have to deal with your boss one-on-one in a way that you can avoid for any individual customer.
And hey, customers don't misbehave in the same ways. They fundamentally can't micromanage or claim credit for your work. Any customer by themselves probably has relatively little direct power over you which means they have less latitude to be jerks and if they are, it's easier to deal with.
Obviously, this isn't true for all customers. If you're beholden to a small handful of large customers or you're consulting, the relationship is a lot more like having a boss. But for consumer-oriented products and any businesses that scale—basically anything you could reasonably describe as a product—having customers is completely different from having a boss.
I believe this is the most important difference, at least for me:
> Customers are many. They're distributed and decentralized and independent
This gives me freedom. Sure, it would be best if I just received a one billion dollar gift (I don't think small :P) but until then, having the freedom to choose what projects I'm willing to work on is amazing.
You could also formulate the issue in terms of "alienation," that is, the degree to which you feel a real relationship based on your own volition and desire... like, you aren't beholden to someone else's promises, you get to keep whatever profit you make, etc.
Your customer may dislike your work, but you have power to change your work,just time and energy. Your boss may dislike you, but you can't have the time and energy to change enough to please him. Difference between engineering something and politicizing something.
Even when running a business I don't think you necessarily have to answer to customers, and you are certainly not forced to answer to shareholders or board members if the company is not structured in such a way to necessitate that.
The only one or thing you absolutely have to answer to is the market, people can complain all they want about whatever they want, but so long as there are people who will open their wallet you really don't need to pay attention. This is completely different from typical boss-employee relationships, you're solving a problem in an autonomous fashion not following orders.
Really important distinction: if you fire a customer you've lost some of your income; if you fire your boss (i.e. you quit) you've lost all your income.
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
>"My view has been that someone always works for someone else."
Taking that thought exercise a step further--I've tried to think of professions where one truly is beholden to no other individuals.
The only thing that comes to mind is a securities trader. If you are trading, sure the markets change, but you can make money on the upside or downside, and you really don't have any "customers." Now in theory you can be part of a larger bank, and being a solo trader can be harder, but it is possible.
Are there any other careers where one truly is independent and accountable to ones self and nobody else?
Some artists get to a place where no fucks are given. If there's adequate money from royalties or an inheritance or donations or marriage - even if it's not much in absolute terms - then there's no external pressure to produce.
E.g. A composer called Conlon Nancarrow spent most of his life in Mexico, punching holes in player piano rolls to make music that was impossible for humans to play.
He was pretty much ignored until he was 65, by which time he'd been writing music with no audience for most of his life, making next to no money from anything.
His career finally took off in a big way when he got a MacArthur award at the age of 70.
Another would be professional poker player, an idea I toyed with for awhile. You have customers in the same way sharks have customers. Every other person at the table could hate your guts (though that's not optimal), but they'll still sit there and give you money, provided you're sufficiently skilled.
The two professions are pretty similar - they both involve a zero sum game you're playing against other people.
Its more about minute-to-minute autonomy than answering to a person/customer per se. With the customer you still retain control over your day to day ... if I feel like going to the dentist on Tuesday, and then going to watch a matinee after lunch because I felt like it, I'll do it, and the customer will never know about it ... can't do that at most fulltime jobs.
Working independently definitely does not save one from BS and playing by the rules. However, I think the main distinction is that it feels less "personal".
In a poorly-run hierarchy, having a manager means playing along for someone else more powerful, playing along with their personal politic, etc. That can be very distracting and exhausting, because for less-adequate managers it involves a lot of mental effort. And, importantly, it feels very person-centred rather than craft- or value-centred.
Contrast that with freelance work: yes, clients can be very difficult to deal with, and in fact may require more "high touch" interaction. However, at that stage it is just a social contract, customer service, explicitly outlined interaction. And the relationship is transactional from the outset, there is a clear value focus. Plus, one could theoretically fire their client and move on (although that is not always realistic).
As another comparison, let's look at a trades job in a highly unionized company: it can actually be quite liberating, because promotion and career track are again detached from specific personal impressions and set to a highly regulated and enforced schedule. People feel empowered, because it is a shield of sorts (albeit one that comes with costs as well).
So in poorly run companies, you're selling a style of personal interaction rather than your ability to create value. I'm guessing in poorly run companies the company must resort to over paying for talent, (otherwise they can switch to better managed companies easily) and that premium could be selling the compliance to be poorly managed.
While you have more autonomy in some ways, you have less autonomy in others. Instead of a boss, you have clients you need to satisfy if you want to remain in business. And not everyone can be picky when it comes to clients, especially in a competitive market.
