u/DrVixen

I am still seeing 1000 -1500 USD for mid senior roles. 2000 USD for senior roles. Ma tghayaro from two years ago. What is going on? Ma befham hal balad. Dubai prices, zero safety, cost of living increasing rapidly.

I also noticed a disgusting trend where they lie about the real scope of the role. They frame it as a junior or mid senior role with a defined scope and the moment you start working suddenly they want to extract as much as possible from you and start increasing your scope like a senior without adjusting your pay. Literal slavery.

How exactly are you supposed to live and build a future here with these salaries?

My ex-boss built a 5 million dollar mansion but refuses to pay his employees properly. Many more like him.

Badna pls nbalesh bahdale. Minimum starting salaries should be 2000 USD. Fi masare. But they just want to hoard it to themselves and underpay hardworking Lebanese people as much as possible.

Edit: kamen ma befham el obsession of Lebanese CEOs and forcing everyone to come to the office.

Let people work fully remote. And no you should not pay them less just because they want to work fully remote.

The traffic sucks and not everyone can afford or wants to live in Beirut. Especially with these awful salaries. It would do us more good than harm w btefda el tor2at.

Ktir ego driven management w micromanagement w lots of incompetent leadership.

The cage just looks nicer when you’re the one who built it.

That’s kind of how I feel about entrepreneurship now.

I used to think starting a business was the escape from the 9 to 5 rat race.

No boss. No fixed hours. No office politics. No asking for permission. Just freedom, ownership, and the chance to build something of your own.

But the more I’ve seen it up close, the more I think entrepreneurship can become another kind of prison.

I’m not saying this as someone who only watched from the outside either.

I got into an incubator, raised funding, and was genuinely excited about the company at first. I gave it three years of my life.

During that time, I rejected great offers and opportunities because I was committed to the startup. I kept telling myself it would be worth it, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re building something.

But I eventually left because I was miserable. It wasn’t what I expected, and it wasn’t what I had signed up for.

And the ironic part is that the moment I left, my career started moving faster than it ever had before.

That was one of the hardest realizations: the thing I thought would set me free was actually holding me back.

With a normal job, if the role changes too much, or the culture becomes toxic, or you realize the industry isn’t for you, you can usually change jobs.

A startup is different. It can become a long-term commitment before you fully understand what you’re committing to. Startups pivot a lot, and mine certainly did. The company started moving in a direction I no longer believed in, and the dynamic became more about control and ego than building something healthy.

At that point, I realized I wasn’t free. I was trapped in something I had helped build.

With a 9 to 5, the constraints are obvious. You answer to a manager, trade time for money, and work inside someone else’s system.

With entrepreneurship, the constraints are less obvious, but they’re still there.

You’re “free,” but you can never fully switch off. You don’t have one boss anymore. You have clients, customers, employees, cofounders, suppliers, algorithms, market conditions, and your own bank account all pulling you in different directions.

Another thing I don’t think people think about enough: you need to know what you actually want before starting a business.

Because starting your own company does not mean you get to spend all day doing the thing you love.

A designer doesn’t just design. A writer doesn’t just write. A builder doesn’t just build.

You also have to deal with sales, networking, managing people, finances, operations, leadership, legal, admin, difficult conversations, and a lot of boring business stuff no one puts in the inspirational founder posts.

There is also a lot of schmoozing. A lot of relationship management. A lot of proving yourself to people you may not even like.

So if what you really love is the craft itself, but you hate everything around running a business, entrepreneurship might not actually give you more freedom. It might pull you further away from the part you enjoyed in the first place.

That said, starting a business teaches you a lot. Even if you don’t continue with it, you learn things about people, money, risk, pressure, decision-making, and yourself that are hard to learn any other way.

But I think it’s important to be honest about what you’re signing up for.

And if you raise money, freedom gets even more complicated.

Investors may not manage you day to day, but they can still influence the direction of the company, growth expectations, timelines, pressure to scale, and sometimes even the decisions you’re allowed to make.

So yes, you might technically be the founder. But you’re still answering to someone else’s expectations.

Then there’s the internal side people rarely talk about. Startups can get messy. Cofounders fall out. Investors can take sides. Boards can remove founders from the companies they started. Once money and power enter the picture, the dream can become very political very quickly.

So the thing you built to make you free can slowly become the thing that controls you.

I’m not saying jobs are better. I’m not saying people shouldn’t start businesses either.

I just think entrepreneurship has been overly romanticized online.

A lot of people sell it as the only path to freedom, when in reality it can become just as restrictive as employment. Sometimes even more.

I used to buy into that story too. I thought starting a business was the highest-status path. The “real” way to become free.

Then I realized it can be the same rat race, just with more risk and a better narrative.

At some point, I had to ask myself what I actually wanted.

And the answer was freedom.

Not the internet version of freedom. Not “raise money, scale fast, exit big.” Just actual freedom.

A quieter life. More control over my time. Work I don’t hate. Enough money to take care of myself and my family. Time to travel, build community, have real experiences, and take care of my health.

Once I stopped chasing the version of success that gets pushed online, I became a lot happier. Ironically, I also started making more money than I ever did.

I don’t own a business right now. Maybe one day I will. But I’m not rushing it anymore.

One of the biggest things entrepreneurship taught me is that it is not automatically freedom.

Sometimes it’s just another cage.

Curious if anyone else feels this way. Did starting a business actually make you feel freer, or did it just create a different type of pressure?

I am a self taught marketer, 6 years of work experience in the field and currently Head of Marketing at a fintech company. This is my first time in a leadership position of this caliber and in this industry.

I can’t seem to find a mentor to help me in my journey and I could honestly use one.