
Ask HN: Last full time job a year ago, thoughts on how to get back on the horse? - amboters
My last full time job was a year ago.<p>I barely tolerate my jobs: I resent spending most of my week working on &quot;urgent&quot; tasks that don&#x27;t really matter other than making their requester more political capital so they can play their game of thrones, while my only upside is that I get to keep my job and do more of this.<p>For the last year, I have been tutoring people learning to program. This is rewarding but it&#x27;s only 15h a week and the hourly rate is low: 95% of my after tax income goes to living expenses, and I&#x27;m frugal.<p>I had a three month streak of interviewing this summer and it was so dreadful that I would rather read the dictionary than doing it again. I still check job ads once in a while but don&#x27;t feel very excited about dealing with yet another dysfunctional entity to make the shareholders more money at the expense of my sanity &amp; freedom.<p>I feel stuck, and I&#x27;d rather make as much money as I should as a developer than surviving: this would put me back on track to save for retiring earlier (I&#x27;d like to retire before 40 but only have 25% of the required capital to date.) I have considered self-employment, but I have no network and suck at sales. The only people offering contract work are agencies who are looking for warm bodies to fill seats.<p>I could do this 3 days a week, but sadly no-one ever looks for part time developers: it&#x27;s 8h x 5 days a week or die. I have noticed that when self-employed, I feel differently: there is still crap to put up with, but I feel more in control and don&#x27;t mind as much plus the hourly rate is much higher than an employee and I can get more than 2 weeks a year off.<p>I&#x27;m hoping to hear from people who have been in similar situations: how did you get out of it? How did you reconcile the soul-crushing work prospects with your need for autonomy? I live in Canada, so while it is similar to the US some things can be slightly different.
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DoreenMichele
_This is rewarding but it 's only 15h a week and the hourly rate is low_

So, come up with another 25 hours per week of some kind of paid work, whether
programming related or not.

You could also see about trying to make money via (for example) bug bounties
since you are scraping by and have free time.

I'm not a programmer, but I am currently cobbling together things that work
for me.

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new_guy
There's another alternative you might not have considered. Passive income.
Write simple scripts and sell them on a marketplace like CodeCanyon, twitter
clone, youtube clone etc the quality is so bad there (even 'quality checked'
ones) you'll quickly get to the top.

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snazz
Although you’ll certainly not make enough money to live off of, there’s always
content ads as another passive revenue stream. If you make high-quality
content (learn-to-code videos, for instance), and it gets popular, YouTube et
al. might be sending you monthly cuts of ad dollars.

