
Ask HN: How do you earn your money? - Dale1
I&#x27;m currently a student and wonder how developers tend to earn their money? Do you work for someone as an employee or have you got your own company? Or is it a mixture of both throughout your careers?<p>I do work part time as a developer in a start up and can&#x27;t help feeling i&#x27;m building a dream for someone else. Not that the experience isn&#x27;t really good, (It definitely is and I learn more in work than in uni!) but i can&#x27;t help feeling that the current university paradigm of work hard, good grades, get a job seems to be bit of a misnomer unless you&#x27;re happy building things to make others wealthy whilst you earn £30,000 a year?<p>Unless i&#x27;m missing something important, I am young and naive after all!<p>This is a subjective question. I just want to get a few thoughts especially from you old timers who want to tell a youngster some home truths! :)
======
jawns
"...can't help feeling i'm building a dream for someone else."

The reason so many people are content with being employees, rather than
striking it out on their own, has to do (at least in part) with their risk
tolerance.

If you want a stable, steady income, and you don't want to put a lot of your
own money at risk, then you might find that being an employee is the way to
go. Yes, other people (investors in the company) are making money off of your
labor, but that's because they're willing to risk their investment.

That's not to say that it's impossible for employees to build a dream for
themselves, rather than someone else. In companies that are organized as
worker cooperatives, the employees (rather than outside investors) own the
company. You might want to look around and see if any places around you are
organized this way ... or look into starting your own co-op.

Edit, to actually answer your question: I have a day job as a software
developer, which gives me a steady paycheck and good benefits. I'm also an
author of two books (see my profile for the titles), and that's produced a
very nice supplementary income.

~~~
nathan_f77
That's awesome to learn about worker co-ops. I was thinking about starting a
software development or SAAS company where every person is a worker/owner, so
it's good to know they already exist.

Here's what I'd love to do if I ever started my own company:

I start the company with 1 or 2 other software developers and designers. We
would each own an equal number of shares. Any new team members would have to
go through a relatively intense interview process, but when they joined, they
would receive an equal number of shares, which means that our shares would be
evenly diluted. And the next time we bring someone new on board, the decision
would need to be unanimous.

Since we'd be giving away such a huge number of shares, they would vest over
something like 7 years. But we would be giving them actual shares, instead of
stock options that you have to exercise with your own cash. Also, keep in mind
that that person would probably own more of the company after their first
year, than most early employees own after 3. So yes, if we bring on someone
new and our company was doing really well, we might be giving away millions of
dollars in stock, and paying them massive bonuses in their first month. But
why not? If we could pull it off, I think that would be an incredible way to
structure a company.

And we'd start all of this without outside investment. Mailchimp and GitHub
are two awesome examples of bootstrapped startups. But if it ever made sense
for us to raise $100 million, then we'd go ahead and do that, knowing that
every single person's shares would be diluted equally.

As soon as we start making enough money, we'd be able to pay everyone an equal
base salary. We'd all agree on a budget for equipment, office space, hosting,
altruism, and cash reserves, but the rest of the profits would be paid out as
monthly bonuses.

We'd also dedicate a very large portion of our time and assets to altruistic
causes from the very beginning. Eventually, our company would become a non-
profit of sorts, where each of us re-invest our millions, and work on fixing
everything that's wrong in the world.

I think that finding like-minded people will be pretty damn hard, but even if
it's just ten of us, I think this would be an amazing way to build a company.
I don't think this would be able to scale past 50 or 100, but who knows.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant :)

~~~
einhverfr
If you are serious about this idea, contact me. (Chris at efficito dot com). I
would love to help start such a business.

~~~
panduwana
What country?

~~~
einhverfr
I am in Indonesia at present but if nothing else can help with ideas and
experience.

The businesses I own are currently all on a coop model. I think subject matter
is likely to be a larger limitation though than location.

------
mattront
I've been in software development for 20 years now. Started to work as a
student at a top consulting firm in my country, at the expense of dropping out
of CS studies - real work (and earning good money) was so much more
interesting than studying.

After that I switched a couple of regular jobs and enjoyed every single one of
them: working on real-world problems (electronic banking, multimedia
production) together with bunch of talented and all-around nice people.

My carrier was interrupted by unexpectedly getting stuck in remote mountains
of east Tibet for almost two years. After returning home I felt professionally
disoriented and took on a couple of terrible freelance gigs, working for a
year like crazy and earning about 2 EUR per hour (in EU) because of feature
creep on a fixed amount project.

Then I got to my senses and started a consulting firm doing mostly web
development. Since childhood I dreamt of having a company of my own. When I
got it, it was far from glamorous - trading time for money that barely paid
for my rapidly growing expenses (marriage, mortgage, kid).

Software development is one of the rare professions where you can relatively
easily create something that has a value on its own - scalable and not
directly dependent on how much time you put into it.

Selling products instead of my time was my goal throughout this time. Now,
seven years later, we (I run the company with my wife) are finally getting
there [1] [2].

I made a lot of mistakes in these 20 years, but in general, if I could go
back, I would not do it much differently. Mistakes are an important stepping
stones on the path.

So, what I'm trying to say is this: you're young, do the things that excite
you. There is nothing wrong in working for and with others. At any time, you
can decide to try creating something on your own. At this stage in life you
can probably take on more risk than later when/if you get a family. But no
point in over-calculating things. As long as you breath and your heart beats
you have the freedom to steer your life in any direction you choose.

[1] [http://pinegrow.com](http://pinegrow.com) [2]
[http://getbooklers.com](http://getbooklers.com)

~~~
ashray
I find your story incredibly inspiring! What happened in Tibet ? Also, the
fact that you and your wife run your business(es) together is something we
have in common. Am going to drop you an email!

~~~
mattront
Would love to hear from you!

------
danieldk
After finishing my Master's degree, I had a couple of options (company offers,
a startup idea plus co-founder, a four-year research position). I chose the
research position, which cumulated in a PhD thesis. Afterwards, I worked for a
company for six months in NLP and machine learning. Now I am in a research
position again in a different university.

The pay check may not be as good as working in some companies, but working in
academia provides a lot of freedom to try ideas, do it your favorite
programming language, go to conferences, and visit far-away countries.

Academia is certainly not a good option for everyone, but it's certainly
something you could consider.

That said, I don't exclude the possibility of going to industry again later.

~~~
euphemize
Thanks for adding an academic perspective on what is mostly an industry-
centric discussion :) I struggled myself with choosing work at a startup VS
going for a PhD after my Masters, ended up taking the job. I love it but still
think about going back to school every once in a while. I miss the whole
experimental side of academia, having loose goals and being able to fail
miserably without risking somebody else's investment.

~~~
crozewski
I decided to build a career in academia after working as a technician for a
college that afforded me the freedom to experiment with approaches to my work.
Now I am an IT manager at a small state University. My boss allows me the
latitude to approach projects with creative perspectives. This fall I also
plan to begin teaching, and I am continuing my work towards a Master's degree.
Lastly, I find the structure of academia to be such that my off time is
clearly defined (at least in comparison to working for a company in private
industry), and I am able to also pursue entrepreneurial ventures.

------
nikolak
I compete with people who are willing to work for $1/hr, on freelance sites
like oDesk - occasionally someone picks me so I earn few bucks to get by. If I
try to charge more people usually accept workers who charge the same amount as
me but are from more western countries.

Ideally I'd settle for some junior dev type of position with reasonable(read:
low/acceptable) salary, but without college degree and living in Europe, but
not EU (thus no work permits for those), there's small chance of that
happening - I've tried and eventually gave up on that...

Oh and today I got sued by govt for failing to send in (literally) an empty
paper for my previous company and I'll (most likely) have to pay an equivalent
of one month american-level-salary fine. So I've got that going on in my life
too, which isn't really the best situation you want to be in if you earn your
money like I do...

I don't even know why I'm writing this, I don't have any tips or suggestions
for you, and even if I had you can see from the above that I'm probably not
the best person to give out advice. And I understand what you're saying but...
things could be worse.

You at least have options: build dreams for yourself, or for others. There's
nothing stopping you (as far as I can tell) from working on both your projects
and/or for someone else.

~~~
ludwigz
can I ask you where you're from? There's plenty of work for good coders, you
seem very delusional. Try to send some resume

~~~
nikolak
Sorry, delusional about which part?

In my experience, people are more likely to hire US/UK based workers for
higher paying jobs than for example Indians or people from countries. Does
that happen _always_? No, of course not. I've had clients from a bunch of
different countries. Hell, maybe I'm completely wrong - but that's how it
seems to me. Maybe it's just me. I'm not excellent programmer, nor do I claim
to be, maybe that's it.

As far as the part about finding work in EU goes, the biggest hurdle (that
I've been told) is getting paperwork for someone without college degree.

Maybe I'm delusional, maybe I'm a shitty coder, maybe I just had bad
experiences, maybe you're right. I don't know.

Oh and I'm from Bosna/Serbia - don't even get me started about getting a job
that pays acceptably in those countries....

~~~
tluyben2
I would hire, for good money, a person from any country who has the right
skills to work remotely. Unfortunately it usually falls flat on skills or
greed. I work with a guy from Bosnia since two months and it has been good for
both!

~~~
zaporozhets
I work in an awesome environment where we have half a web dev team in the
office and half in France and Poland. We actually prefer it that way.

------
anonymous1980
I grew up in a small town in Russia during 80s and early 90s. I found my first
job as a developer building accounting software in Pascal when I was 15. I
remember spending my first paycheck (about $100) buying winter boots. It
wasn't enough, my mom ended up pitching in. :)

As soon as I graduated, I moved to a larger city to work for a company doing
offshore development in C++. I was paid $4 / hr, managing to put in about 250
hours a month. I only ended up working there for 6 months before I moved on to
the next stage.

I moved to the US in 2000 to work for Microsoft in Redmond. Microsoft was
good, but it quickly became obvious that there was no way to make real money,
even though I doubled my paycheck in 4 years I spent there. I started at $66K
/ yr, ended up around $130K when I left at the end of 2004 to go and work for
Google.

Except that I didn't go to Google. :) I interviewed, got an offer and used it
to get an offer from a smaller company where I felt I could do more. I wanted
to be a big fish in a small pond and Google already felt to me like a big
pond. Their offer was for $150K and ~10,000 shares with strike price of ~$170.
Smaller company offered $200K base, $50K bonus and 2% of the company. In 2004
that was a lot of money.

The smaller company didn't do as well as I expected. I only made about $3M
from stock versus $5-10M I could have made from Google. But I met some good
people there. But 2009 I was a VP and making close to $450K / yr. I left in
2009 to work on a startup with a couple friends. We sold it at the end of 2010
for $15M and almost immediately started another one.

Right now I work as a CTO for that other startup. We had $40M in revenue last
year and on track to be at $90-$100M this year.

~~~
yankoff
Were you still on H1B when joining small companies?

~~~
anonymous1980
Yes. I transferred H1B and restarted green card process. Despite that I got my
GC before some people who remained at Microsoft. Maybe it's because I re-
applied in California instead of staying in Washington.

------
yodha77
Long time HN reader but never been a contributor (never felt smart enough to
contribute). When I was growing up the best job that I have thought possible
was to be a Typist (My parents has told me to learn typing). So, when I ended
up in US through graduate school, I have thought I made it. But, again, I was
pretty clue less after the school was complete. I have thought I should follow
money (even though I was passionate about AI and did my graduate school in it)
and joined e-commerce consulting firm in 2000. got laid off twice and ended up
for a small company where I thought I was doing AI stuff. Slacked off for 9
years.. ended up making about 100K when I quit (worked myself through
management: engineer -> Director of engineering). then, I have joined a
development manager at a public company and has been working there for 3 1/2
for about 150K salary (40K stock every year). I thought I will be doing
searching and machine learning. But, I have gotten deceived again(my team was
cut in half)I have tried making side projects.. picked complex ones like image
searching. but, couldn't sell it. I have thought may be I should something my
own (I am 37 now.. leaving in a rural US town with 2 kids). So, I have
resigned my job (from largest enterprise software company in world) and trying
out entrepreneurship.. want to build great AI application. Even though, I can
survive at least 3 years, I am going to try this out for 6 months. If it
doesn't work, I am going to back to work.

------
incision
I wouldn't call myself a developer, more of a generalist.

I started my first real job in technology in the mid-late 90s and spent
roughly the first half of my career maintaining systems that were built by
other people.

Eventually, I jumped up a level and stared accelerating from there. Planning,
writing proposals and doing the technical implementation for projects of
increasing size and complexity. With each major undertaking done I was looking
for the next as I had no interest in getting drawn back into maintenance mode.

I started toying with the idea of working for myself, being a truly
independent consultant and ended up doing some side projects while maintaining
a full time job. The money was great, nearly double my full-time job hourly
rate, but it wasn't nearly consistent enough and I was in the process of
starting a family.

With all the responsibilities of a family looming I had more or less mentally
resigned myself to moving into a rock-steady management role and calling it a
career.

That plan didn't work out for what at the time were incredibly frustrating
reasons, but it turned out for the best. I took a job as an independent
contractor for a lot more money doing a mix of interesting projects and
braindead operations.

That's where I am today, I've realized that I'm unlikely to ever be satisfied
working for other people or working on the same things for more than perhaps
year at a time.

At the same time, I've realized that I don't need to draw satisfaction from my
day job. By coming to grips with being parent and learning to manage my time
and goals I'm able to collect a good, steady income to live while doing a full
load of courses and dabbling in side projects to satisfy myself.

That's probably the most important part. _Once I was earning enough money to
have everything my family needs plus many of the things we want I found myself
wanting less and realized at least within the same order of magnitude more
money isn 't what I want._

As best I can tell, what I want is autonomy and variety.

Figuring out what it is that you actually want would a great start.

Personally, I mean to continue my education while building up enough
consistency on the side to transition that to be primary income. If something
better comes along in the meantime - great.

------
robobro
I receive donations for my writing, coding, and art. I do some tutoring, too,
which pays alright. I'm not a conventional developer, but I'm more than happy
with the freedom I have and I feel I can really appreciate the things I have a
lot more because of my self-imposed poverty.

~~~
nuetrino
Could you go into a bit more detail on how you do this?

~~~
robobro
I have a PayPal link on my site requesting donations, and for whatever reason,
a lot of people donate money. That's all there really is to it. It's linked
from my twitter page, so maybe generous people who enjoy reading my posts
there stumble across it.

------
Nursie
>> work hard, good grades, get a job seems to be bit of a misnomer unless
you're happy building things to make others wealthy whilst you earn £30,000 a
year?

The UK is terrible for salaried developers. The industry here (like everywhere
I guess) continues to moan about a lack of technical talent, but it's no
surprise given how low the compensation is. The US and Australia both value
tech talent far more. And the money hasn't really moved up much since I was a
graduate 14 years ago. That said - that pitiful £30K? Just for context, that
still puts you well above the national average income.

That said, 90% of people will never be anything other than an employee and
never really aspire to it either. Steady income, minimal perceived risks* to
employment etc etc. It's only really in the startup world you're close enough
to feel like you're working for someone else's dream though, and plenty of
tech folk advance through the ranks of the big corporates like IBM and do
pretty well for themselves.

Ask yourself what you want out of your life and career. Do you want a secure
income and a long-term commitment to a project? Take the 90% route, work for
other people.

Do you want more control over when you work, more money and to take on new
challenges every few months, but without the security (or ties) of a job? You
might enjoy contracting (I do). I made a few times multiple of your starting
figure there and had 4 months off in the last year.

Do you want to risk it all to build your dream? Go for it, if you have a dream
and the drive to do so. You'll sink all your time into it and you might get
nowhere. But you might get everywhere.

So there it is, what do you want out of life, and are you good enough at what
you do (and confident enough) to reach out and grab it?

*I say perceived risk because in reality most perm jobs are no better protected than us contractors.

~~~
hcho
The UK is actually on par with US, if you accept to work in a "at will"
arrangement. Let's say London is about the levels of New York in terms of
compensation.

~~~
Nursie
Contract work is not quite the same as the at-will arrangement, nor is it the
majority of available work in London. That said, you're right and that's the
reason I do it. It's the only way I've found to match the salary I had in
Australia.

~~~
jscn
I'd love to know a little more about what you were doing and where in
Australia.

------
capex
Would you like a comfortable first class seat in a jet airliner, or perhaps
fly your own little 2 seater?

There are advantages in flying the 2 seater. You might get sponsored by one of
those large companies, and if you convince someone to fly with you, there is a
chance that you'll soon be buying a 4 seater. And on and on.

The jet airliner doesn't offer all those possibilities, but it does give you a
very predictable flight.

~~~
rphlx
However, other passengers on the jet will form little cliques & play Game of
Thrones with each other, with the losers getting thrown out of the plane. If
you fail to join the right clique, sooner or later, you'll be skydiving.

Sometimes the pilots will go crazy, screw up, or get highjacked, and you'll
die by landing 30ft short of the runway, running out of fuel over the southern
indian ocean, etc.

Even on a perfect flight, your talent and hard work will likely have had
minimal influence.

I will take the Cessna 152 please.

------
ashray
I'd say I'm a mix of entrepreneur and developer for hire. But I haven't done
contract work for a while now.

I've also worked fulltime in a programming role for about a year and a half in
the past at a fast growing startup. I learned a LOT in my first few months
there (including getting reasonably good at Python and Django) and really
absorbed so much good stuff from my peers and bosses and even people who
worked in other departments. But as time went by and the company grew (went
from 20 to about 100 employees in that year..) I started learning less and
less. So I quit.

One thing though, I never needed to work there (for money). I already earned
enough from my own projects to sustain a reasonable lifestyle. (rented
apartment, car, etc.) I just did it to learn more.

I have a few successful projects under my belt that pay for life reasonably
well. This really varies from person to person. Some people are happy with
$3000/month and some aren't happy with $50,000/month.

In my opinion you should work somewhere for a bit because you will absorb a
lot of stuff with the right attitude. You should always keep your mind focused
on the end goal of being your own boss if that's what you want from life. And
when that awesome idea finally comes to you, the one that you have a burning
desire to watch come alive, take the leap!

If you eventually can support yourself well with your own projects/freelance
work then you will have the kind of freedom and flexibility that most people
can only dream about.

I spent the last two years traveling and working (a little..) at the same
time! Spent time in about 20 countries :)

Regarding university and the whole rat race thing. You're spot on! My personal
opinion is (and has always been) that the rat race is definitely glorious in
its own way (if you are at the top..). But why compete with a million other
people who are trying to do the exact same thing better than each other ? It's
really really hard to stand out. And hey, you may still manage to make it into
the top 5% if you work really hard and are really smart. But why run the race
everyone runs ? Find your own race and you'll likely enjoy it and probably win
at it too!

~~~
NicoJuicy
Actually, i'm trying to get the same thing as you have.

Currently developping some webapplications and when they earn enough income
i'd like to spent some time travelling / working.

------
camara
There are two quite different motives for building a company.

One is the financial comparison between building a company and working at one.
This is a straightforward risk-reward tradeoff. When you think about it you
will consider things like stability and the impact of stability on other
things you want to achieve in life, like family; you will also consider things
like how to make starting a venture as safe as possible and gaming what you
build based on likely exit; you will think about freedom, meaning freedom to
do other things.

The other kind of motive is the desire to build an empire, to run something
that is yours and to leave a mark on the world. People who are motivated this
way don't think along the lines of risk v. reward or stability being
sacrificed or freedom being earned; they don't even think about the reward
from exit, except incidentally, as a way of building the big thing they really
want to build or as a way of keeping score. People like this just don't think
life is worth living (for them, not for other people) the other way; their
overriding goal is to build a great organization doing great things.

It's important, I think, to understand which of these motives is active when
you're thinking about starting a company --- or joining a startup at an early
stage. If you are a type 2 person, you won't be happy until you're building
that kind of organization for yourself.

------
spullara
I've tried it all. My LinkedIn resume goes back to my first job after school
(doesn't cover some during school):
[http://www.linkedin.com/in/spullara](http://www.linkedin.com/in/spullara)

Still code every day, but my main job is as an investor. Best moves I made
were risky moves, like moving from Chicago to San Francisco to join a very
early stage startup. I was lucky and that startup grew from a handful of
people to over a 100 and was sold to a larger company. You can also watch how
it unfolded here: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/02/sam-
pullara/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/02/sam-pullara/)

I get the question from engineers all the time how I ended on the path I have
been on. I think there are 2 things you can do 1) try to be a great engineer
and 2) involve yourself in the strategy of the company. The latter requires an
opening, mine was in helping perform the technical due diligence for
acquisitions.

If I was doing it again, I would intern at some of the big companies (Google,
Twitter, Facebook, IBM, Oracle) and then try and get a job at a Series A
funded startup run by people with experience. Good luck!

------
Joeri
I've only ever done salaried work, and only had one job, which I've had for 10
years. I'm a builder. I want to work on big things that solve complex problems
for a large userbase and grow and evolve that solution over the long term. The
place were I work the web product was a few ten thousand lines when I joined
as the junior member of a three man team, now it's over half a million lines
(and growing quickly) and I'm the senior member of a 25 man team. Staying in
one place was surprisingly educational, because I was the one who dealt with
the consequences of all my own technological decisions, and thankfully my
employer left me mostly free to make those decisions. Probably financially it
wasn't the smartest move never to switch jobs, but it did give me the
opportunity to actually build things across a timespan of years without
getting distracted by having to actually run a business. I'm not a manager,
I'm not a sales person, I'm not that good with people, and I'm not someone who
can stand to do a lot of paperwork. I need other people to do that part of the
business so that I can focus on the actual building of software.

------
graemem3
Don't be so down on taking a job with a fixed salary. It's not a choice of one
or the other. Personally I see my current and previous job as a stepping stone
to doing my own thing in the future. Actually being an early employee with a
start up has made me seriously consider if going it alone is something i want
to do. I have gained so much experience in the past 2-3 years since university
and have grown up a lot.

Taking the job is fine, but it's important to find one that allows you to step
outside your role when appropriate, and be involved in any area of the company
which interests you. Basically any start up or small company (10ish people).
You gain so much knowledge having an insight into the other areas of the
business.

I almost started a company when I left university and i believe we could of
made some money from it. Comparing what I knew then to what I know now, my
approach to starting that company would be much different. Also the experience
and contacts I have would give it a much better chance of being successful.

------
hrktb
Before hitting 25 being an employee or not should be a matter of
opportunities. Working in a startup before, I felt I gained a lot of
experience on a lot of fronts. After switching to 100+ then 5000+ employees
companies, the tasks where less diverse, but one could instead focus deeper on
more complex problems.

So, being an employee or not shouldn't matter if you do something interesting.

Now when you get in the mid 20ies, you might want a job that banks accept as
credible, renting a house doesn't involve convincing that you're not a fraud,
and the parents of your girlfriend aren't suspicious of your profession.

If you're a super successful founder that's no big deal, if your startup is
surviving or you're a freelance consultant that might be more difficult while
not impossible, but if you have a stable job as an employee no one will even
ask questions. Depending on what you want (i.e. kids and a house in your late
20ies), that might be an important point.

------
larrys
"I'm currently a student "

"I do work part time as a developer in a start up and can't help feeling i'm
building a dream for someone else."

"Not that the experience isn't really good, (It definitely is and I learn more
in work than in uni!)"

"Unless i'm missing something important, I am young and naive after all!"

You are. At the risk of the ire of others on HN I have to say that this is a
totally millennial attitude of - gasp - entitlement. Tempered by the fact no
doubt that you realize "I am young and naive after all!"

I think you have to back away at this "I want it all now" thinking that you
have.

You are gaining valuable experience and I'd like to know why you feel that you
deserve better than that at this point? To me that's scary. I'm glad you asked
the question but want to know why you feel you deserve, at this early stage in
your career, to jump to the head of the line.

------
medell
Ask yourself:

Can I go weeks or months without paid work? (risk tolerance as others have
mentioned)

Do I want to learn about sales & marketing (the learning never stops btw)? Am
I comfortable with self marketing?

Can I hustle and cold call if necessary?

And as another poster mentioned, am I willing to do A/B testing and optimize
funnels? Build a social presence?

Do I enjoy the challenge of working on varying types of projects for different
companies? Or would I rather stick to a few things?

In my experience you don't need to be good at all of these things to run your
own show, just good enough. But I value flexibility and also really enjoy
working with and learning from companies in different industries as I'm a
generalist, so I chose the consultant path after a few years in corporate. I
hope you find what works for you, and don't stress out too much about it, it's
easier to switch paths these days! The important thing is to try.

------
scotthtaylor
Building blocks.

You are going to learn processes, insights and experience failures when
working for someone (and help with building their dream). This is learning on
someone else's dollar. It's mutually beneficial and £30k is certainly not
something to sniff at.

Very few people walk out of university, raise money and launch the next
Facebook.

It's all about de-risking. Make yourself investable over the next few years.
Branch out and learn other areas of the business (marketing/sales/etc).

Plan what you want to do and make sure you have calculated steps to reach
them.

You'll also probably want to be tinkering with stuff on the side. These could
potentially get you some money, but more realistically will provide you with
invaluable learning.

------
quaffapint
All depends upon where you want to end up in life. For me I was getting
married and knew I'd be having kids. So job stability was very important. Also
got my graduate college degree, which at the time opened the doors to
corporate dev jobs. Maybe it's not so necessary in smaller/startup places now,
I don't know. So, I'm jsut a cog at a big corporation. It's not glamorous, but
it pays the bills for my family.

On the side is when I do stuff I (kind of) want to do - I still need to make
money to pay more bills (kids are expensive :-)), but at least it's a little
different than my day-to-day 9to5 stuff.

------
bindley
I'm kind of in the same boat. I took a year off college to focus on learning
web development.

A year later, I'm working for a startup, but I am also making double I was at
my old job. It was really a paradigm shift in my mind.

I looked at college as my entrance to a career, and later learned that wasn't
the case. People value unique skills, not cookie cutter graduates.

You're asking some deep life questions, that extend outside programming. a
book: The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin really helped me when I was at a
place you're in right now. Helped me understand how really successful people
do it. hope that helps :)

~~~
antonius
_People value unique skills, not cookie cutter graduates._

I'm hoping to be able to work in Seattle next year at either Microsoft or
Amazon and the main requirement they look at is whether the applicant has a
degree in Computer Science or related field. Only after do they begin to look
at personal projects/past accomplishments etc.

Not trying to say a university degree is for everyone, but for people like me
looking to get into a top technology company, it's a requirement.

~~~
girasquid
Not always though. I didn't get a degree but have had recruiters from both
companies reach out to me based on work experience. Based on the conversations
we had, it didn't sound like my lack of a degree was a big deal.

If you have the unique skills they're looking for, the top technology
companies are willing to budge on the degree requirement.

~~~
bindley
Definitely, it's a shift all intelligent companies are making. Google has been
relatively vocal about hiring quality people regardless of degree or quality
of school i.e. ivy league.

------
readme
I'm on active duty in the Army.

I bet you didn't expect that.

------
benrhughes
I went from CS at Uni into a full time dev job for a government agency. Since
then I've worked for a mature micro ISV and now an environmental not for
profit.

I have a paid android app and an OSS windows app that gets donations. The
vast, vast majority of my income comes from my day job though.

Building someone else's dream can be great. Sometimes you get to work on
things that are more important or just broader scoped than what you can do on
your own. Also, a regular, decent paycheck has it's benefits.

------
jprince
I make about half my income from my job, where I get paid relatively little
for my skillset but have heavy equity that will vest in a few years, and then
I do about 15 hours of work a week as a consultant.

I hire out subcontractors to increase my throughput, and I make the other half
of my income from this. In total, I make more dollars from the 10-15 hours a
week I spent consulting than from the 40 I spend in my job, but I've done the
math and when you include the equity vesting in a few years, in terms of per-
hour rates, the full time job and the consulting share nearly identical rates.
One just has a longer payment period.

When I started I was afraid to freelance because I didn't feel that safety net
of my job beneath me, but I finally got my first job working 300$ for 20 hours
of work. It was ridiculously underpaid. But I got my foot in the door and now
I make quite a tidy sum from it, while getting a lot of enjoyment and
satisfaction in it.

Also, I'd always recommend having a side gig going on because it frees you. I
don't need to work full time - I don't use a single dollar from my full time
job anymore. It goes straight into savings. That kind of thing can free you,
and make you more likely to be eligible for raises at work because they know
you're only here because you want to be.

------
arym
Building a dream for someone _who doesn 't ask for it, but who deserves_:

I live in a less-developed country, where university students aren't well-
treated neither by staff & faculty (underestimated and humiliated), nor by
government (54 USD/Mo scholarship for ~40%, no housing, no dining, no basic
students services), nor by companies coming just for low-paid hard-coders and
unpaid interns.

I endured studying in these circumstances, and finally graduated with a MSc &
Eng. in Computer Science.

Now, I decide to make something valuable in honour of the student community; a
service that students deserve; which take in consideration student dignity;
and which help to restore student confidence and hope.

I'm looking for a startup or a small business idea, which can generate some
money just for me and 2 other friends (our team), just to survive! But most
importantly offer the first awesome and affordable quality service for
students. Even a small service, because for our student community less is
always more!

I can make web apps, and have access to some student infos (name, university,
classOf). I also have access to cloud services via a restricted credit card!
And I can have mobility to national universities.

Do you have some ideas and/or advice to share?

I've posted my story here as a comment first because I think it make sense,
secondly I don't know how do I make it visible! I'm a greenhorn HNer; let's be
tolerant :)

Thanks Dale1

Sorry for my English mistakes!

------
restlessmike
I think that you are spot on in your analysis. If you work as an employee at a
startup and the company isn't a "rocket ship" that is going to go public or be
acquired and make all of the early employees wealthy, you are pretty much just
helping someone else achieve their dreams. It could still be beneficial for
you career-wise as startups give you a lot of leeway to learn new skills and
use cool technologies, but the other side is that they can sometimes try to
take over your life. They also try to get a discount on salaries by offering
stock, which is usually pretty worthless in the final analysis.

I personally freelance full time. Once you establish yourself and get a
reputation as someone who can get things done it can be a great career; if you
stay pretty busy (last year I was working for probably 9 months, 6 of it
onsite someplace and the rest spread out between a few different gigs) you can
earn significantly more than at most "real" jobs and have lots of free time to
work on your own projects or just go on vacation. I'd definitely recommend
moving to someplace with a lot of work to do, such as San Francisco. There is
a lot of demand for tech talent here that you can leverage to get the career
you want.

------
BryanB55
I think something that a lot of developers forget is that building a product
is only half the battle, if that. You also need to sell it and make sure
you're building something people actually want.

So theres a lot more to running a company than just building a product . You
also need to sell it, support it, manage people and run the actual company.
Just because you're a good developer doesn't mean you're a good entrepreneur.
Sure you could learn along the way but you'll also be taking on more financial
risk, be responsible for a lot more things and likely not have as steady of an
income.

The reward may be much higher but so is the risk and responsibility. That
doesn't mean you shouldn't set out on your own and learn to be an
entrepreneur, it's just the reason why the financials line up the way they do.

It's also worth noting that there is a 3rd option. If you happen to get in on
an early startup that is later successful and goes public or gets acquired, it
can also be very financially rewarding for you. I remember reading somewhere
that in the valley it is common to hear "he was an early employee at Google"
which is well known to translate to "he's now very wealthy".

------
PythonicAlpha
============= GO, SEARCH FOR YOUR ISLAND =============

I know your thoughts very well. I myself have worked for 18 years or so as
employee building the dream of someone else -- or better to say: building the
wealth of someone else.

I think, a lot is said already, so I want to restrict myself to my personal
opinion: If you have this feeling you describe, you should definitively search
for your island! And don't give up until you found it.

I am searching now for ten to fifteen years I think and have not found it yet.
But I hope, my current project (an online medieval strategy game) will bring
me thus far. I dumped until now at least three projects that resulted in a
situation that I had to say I can not do it with my resources or in one case
the project proved itself to be not profitable. Currently I also dumped my
employer to be fully able to find the island I am looking for.

Today, I think, the biggest problem is to find one or more good partners. If
you have one, good for you! It makes things easier. But it is so difficult to
find one and I have not, since some are just not reliable enough and with
others I was not able to find a common target.

The problem is, that if you are in a group you have to give up parts of your
own dreaming to find a common dream.

------
alinajaf
I'm not much of an old timer, but here goes...

I make my money primarily by building software for small businesses and
startups. I charge about £2500 a week for this, and am booked about 50-75% of
the time. This is supplemented by the occasional workshop where I teach
developers about web application security through the lens of RoR
applications, which net me about £5k a pop depending on how well they sell. I
have one employee who I'm training up to take on some client work for me so
that I can focus on drumming up new business and building products that will
provide a sustainable income that isn't linked to the amount of time we put
in.

> _I do work part time as a developer in a start up and can 't help feeling
> i'm building a dream for someone else._

Some people are bitten by this bug and some aren't. I know perfectly good
career developers who are content to turn up, do a good days work and get a
regular pay check at the end of every month. If you ever do start your own
business and go out on your own, you too will long for the days when you could
do the same and have guaranteed monthly cashflow.

> _but i can 't help feeling that the current university paradigm of work
> hard, good grades, get a job seems to be bit of a misnomer unless you're
> happy building things to make others wealthy whilst you earn £30,000 a
> year?_

In this market, after a few years you'll be doubling to tripling that salary.
I know a guy who's been on the job two years and cleared £65K. That's not at a
city IB, just a plain old startup. It was only a matter of time before London
developer salaries caught up with what you might get in the states.

------
saraid216
Instead of answering your question, I'm going to offer some generic life
advice:

Figure out what you want. Even if it's just in the short term, but ideas of
what you want in the long term are best. Use that to decide what you do month
to month and year to year. I've noticed that most happy developers are only
mildly interested in what their company does: they enjoy their work because it
presents challenges and lets them work with people they respect. For these
people, it's less about the salary than it is about the opportunity. The
salary is important more for keeping your position in the market than to make
you rich.

Do you have your own dream? If so, then it might be worth looking into
entrepreneurship. Starting a business is less about being able to code your
MVP than it is about learning what's available in the current market and being
able to sell. Is your dream crazy? Is it crazy in terms of ambition, or crazy
in terms of feasibility? The former is fine; the latter should make you step
back and reconsider.

Your dream doesn't have to involve some engineering department at a
corporation, either. You can be a developer in other settings. They're less
obvious, but if you dig into your other interests, you might be able to find
opportunities where your programming skill can contribute something huge.

If you don't have such a dream, you still have to make a living. Is it so
terrible to contribute to someone else's dream in that case? You'll want to
learn how to drive a hard bargain so that you can get the most from them out
of the contract. Building someone else's dream starts looking fairly peachy
when you're pulling in enough to not have to worry about money anymore.

------
cristea
I'm currently a student, so with the great benefits of student loans in my
country I am able to afford an OK standard of living.

I am currently working in my startup with some friends. I believe firmly that
what I do is everyone's dream, though the need to have a stready income is
greater for most.

I also have a part time job at the university, so I do have some sources of
income. My startup provides no income, and takes a lot of time.

You can be happy both working at a company, and you can feel ownership to
something you have made for that company, even though it might be labeled
without your name. It all comes down to what you really want.

In any case I would say the time to try something for yourselves would be
before you have ties somewhere, being a wife/kids, a car etc.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to live a good period of time with no
money, and are prepared to work literally every hour of your day for a long,
long time, I would go for it. If not the need to survive will become greater.

When creating something, unless you utterly hate the concept of the very thing
you are making, I would say you gain a sense of ownership towards it. If you
made the Paper app for Facebook you would certainly be proud of yourself.

------
JoelleAyala
1)Get a job where you can learn as much as possible, where you're not even
close to being one of the smartest people in the room, and that gives you the
freedom to experiment and learn. Find a boss that knows this won't be your
last stop, but is willing to put some time and training into you anyway. -
There's a lot more of these types of bosses than you think. 2) Start up a
business on the side. Even if you are just trading time for money - IE a niche
software dev company rather than a cool new app - it's still worth it for the
intrinsic value. Starting a business forces you to deal with clients,
overhead, time management, contractors, and lots of other aspects of work. You
can also give yourself any title you want. I suggest stay away from "CEO" or
"CoFounder" because it will make you look like just another wantrepreneur. Try
"Director of ...." It's really important to give yourself an awesome title
that people will believe and give you credibility for. 3) Know that your
business WILL fail. It's going to happen. Don't avoid it, embrace it.
Obviously don't willingly fail, try to keep it going as long as possible, but
just know in the back of your mind that you will fail. 4) Know you have
experience with a company, a group of people that you can use as references,
as well as a former fancy title and experience running a business and managing
people. You just skipped 10 years of climbing the corporate ladder. The next
time you apply for jobs, or as a high level director in a startup, you'll be
younger and just as qualified than your contemporaries.

Try it out - let me know how it goes...it worked for me, and a lot of other
successful people.

 __Note, I 'm not a developer, I'm a marketer __ _

------
daledavies
I work as an e-learning systems developer for large FE college in the UK, it
is very stable and rewarding job that allows me to innovate. It is a public
sector job and as such the wages aren't as good as working in the private
sector but I do have good working hours and a very generous holiday
entitlement, because of this I get plenty of time to pursue personal projects.

I'm currently trying to set myself up as a freelancer and consultant to
supplement my wages and maybe if it takes off I can make the transition from
full time employed to full time self-employed.

Because my full time job allows me to innovate I've developed my skills an
enormous amount while working there, I now get asked to give talks in industry
events about the work that I have been doing which gives me a massive
confidence boost. I actually worry that moving away from my full time job
would stop me from being able to develop my skills and experience at the rate
I have been doing.

So I guess that if you have a job that makes you feel like you're lining
someone else's pockets with little reward for yourself then you're working for
the wrong company!

------
namenotrequired
> can't help feeling i'm building a dream for someone else

This is one reason why I try to limit myself to working with companies that
are on a mission that I believe in.

A side effect is that it also seems to be easier to find a job there because
these companies love hiring people who are passionate about the same thing as
them. Cold emailing is fine if you can show good reasons why, and even more so
when you come bearing gifts.

------
hellbanTHIS
I wanted a part time job to pay the bills while I'm finishing up a couple
sites so I took one washing dishes at a pizza joint. All I can say is writing
code in the morning and then doing the most mindless, repetive work while
being forced to listen to "sunny FM" is not something I recommend. I think if
I hear one more Billy Joel song my brain is going to go into emergency
shutdown mode.

------
zackmorris
Currently contracting through oDesk. I tend to average about 25 billable hours
per week, with the remainder of my time split between learning about
technology trends and working on long term personal projects. This led to a
six month stint last year as a contractor at a local business that is
exploring startup approaches like Agile/Scrum, which was an overwhelmingly
positive experience. I was also lucky enough to be a contractor at hp for a
year in 2005 but didn’t recognize the potential of making it a career at the
time.

Before that I had many years of negative experiences working as a furniture
mover, a web developer, a Macintosh technician, and your local neighborhood
computer guy. I survived for a year after the housing bust on $6,000 I made
flipping PowerPC iMacs that were suffering from the bulging capacitor issue
that’s been plaguing electronics. I scratched out income any way I could to
support a floundering shareware business, hoping that the “if you build it,
they will come” philosophy would pan out, but unfortunately it never did.

If I was a student again and had it to do all over.. hmmm what a question. I
think that even today I consider £30,000 a year to be a good income, although
a contractor can certainly make more than that at the going hourly rate if
they reach full employment. It might help to take a step back and look at
software development like any other kind of development. For example in real
estate, there is earned and unearned income, and each type has its advantages.

There will always be money in the first type, because people always need
things done. Historically contractors have generally been paid more than full
time employees, because they are responsible for their own equipment,
training, insurance, retirement, etc. Software development requires a great
deal of education. If you add up all of the hours, not just in school but on
personal time, it’s comparable to a being an architect or civil engineer.
Except instead of leveraging the efforts of subcontractors, we employ code. So
there is a potential there to make considerably more money. There is no
ceiling on income for software contractors.

The second type works more like speculation. Yes, a client might make a
million dollars from the code you develop. But the odds are extremely high (I
would put them around 50/50, maybe even up to 90%) that he or she will break
even or possibly lose money. The contractor gets paid first, after that it’s
anyone’s guess. I had every advantage (a degree, a brief period of no bills
living with my father after I graduated college, even a dot bomb to open up
opportunities over the competition) but I was unable to find any traction with
the products I was creating. The tech industry has rose colored glasses. For
every overnight success, there are hundreds, even thousands of failures.
Successful speculators in software are like the ones in real estate. Generally
they just don’t touch the code. They’ve either put in their time and earned
their wings, or they have a personal calling inside themselves to outsource
the details and focus on the big picture. And perhaps most importantly, they
have access to capital. I have come to peace with the fact that I would rather
be in the trenches than flying a desk.

But say it’s the year 2000 again, I’m fresh out of college and Facebook hasn’t
been invented yet, and I want to be in the second camp. It’s not going to
happen selling shareware games, or scratching out a living doing odd jobs, or
pulling all nighters with other hackers. As far as I can tell (and the
simplicity of this took me a decade to grok), the secret is growth. I know it
sounds mundane, but if you look at any successful company, they are always
growing. So fresh out of school, I would have done my contract at hp first, to
just see how established companies do things. Everything is about
interoperability, passing data back and forth to different teams, being able
to explain your work to others. It’s vanilla, and boring, but allows for
scale. Then I would have taken my savings for the year (I would have only
spent about a quarter to half of my earnings) and used that to bootstrap
myself over the next year, meeting local developers and the clients they work
for. I would have found myself designing websites, probably learning about the
gotchas of scaling databases, but today it’s all about apps and SAAS and
scaling interfaces and interoperating with mobile devices. I would have
quickly found that there is high demand for such work. High enough that I
couldn’t respond to all of the job invites coming my way, and would have to
make a choice either to become a team of developers or cater to more selective
clients. At some point I would have crossed a threshold where my priorities
switched from survival to planning. To me, that means having six months of
income or more saved so you can work on your own without answering to anyone.
And more importantly, having a trade that allows you to build your savings
again in case of failure (which is likely). Then I would have had a history of
a few successfully completed projects under my belt, and could think about
hiring myself and others.

Then I would either write a solution for a company and sell it at $10,000 a
pop, or look at the niche they are ignoring and write the app that fills it.
Knowing how I am, I’d go for the second option. It’s almost always something
that people want really badly, that they’re willing to pay for, that they just
can’t get easily (preferably software related so it can scale). In my fantasy,
this would be a wifi box that gives you free internet by way of distributed
hashing (hey, I can dream, that’s why I got my degree in computer
engineering), and I’d just build them out of my garage and sell them locally
for a few hundred dollars each until we hit scale. Maybe another option is a
$99 app that runs on your cell phone, something that crosses wifi mode and
tethering to create a mesh network. The prospect of canceling one’s internet
and cable bills is almost too sweet to think about rationally. Then everyone
in the country would want one, and we’d have more work than we could handle,
and we’d sell to Elon Musk or Richard Branson or whoever for a billion
dollars. I probably have, I don’t know, a few dozen, maybe a hundred ideas
like this that I would like to do, but never had the savings to attempt such
things, until recently. Most of them are not nearly this audacious.

But just out of college, my highest priority was “just finishing this game
I’ve been working on for years” and I missed out on a ton of opportunities. So
I think that kind of nagging, soul crushing worry is something to be very wary
of, because it’s hindered the careers of countless developers. I should have
focused on a concrete product, with say a three month development time, that I
could sell for real dollars, that people would tell their friends about. The
shareware and app markets are saturated, so for a fraction of the effort, I
could have created new niches. I should have listened more closely when my
family had trouble setting up their email and written a $5 solution for them,
that solved the decision tree of username, password, pop/smtp, ssl, etc once
and for all, and sidestepped the necessity of hosted tools like gmail. I
remember being surprised that Apple implemented it in their Mail.app years
later. Such low lying fruit could have been so lucrative in the early 2000s.
It would have sidestepped app stores and marketing by going viral. Crossing
that magical curve from $100 a month to $1,000 and then $10,000 would have put
me well on my way to making a meaningful contribution. Instead I floundered,
and let the internet lottery distract me from networking, bootstrapping and
compound growth.

P.S. It’s worth noting that I’ve only had a six month cushion twice in my
life, and didn’t keep my eye on the ball. I let others talk me out of it.
Those times were after long term contracts, but my current goal is to get
there independently. Sorry this got so long.

~~~
russell
Hey Zach, advice to you from an industry elder. From your comments, I would
put you in your late 30s, young enough to be scrappy but experienced enough to
be on a founding team.

The only reason for doing is to gain industry domain experience. (Software
doesnt count.) The domain can suggest startup possibilities. Consulting income
is a trap, unless you make massive savings.

Dont look back at what might have been. I worked on a VisiCalc equivalent on a
7094 in the 60s. One of the members of the founding team of Sorcim worked for
me (remember SuperCalc?). Dont say I didn have my chances to be rich and
famous.

Dont look sideways. If it is being done now, someone has beaten you to it. And
someone else is working on the second generation.

Dont scratch your own itch. Software itches dont make money. Too many smart
people doing the same thing.

Do cultivate relationships.

Do look for other people,s problems. As you noted , if it bugs the common man
or the elderly, it is probably an annoyance for everyone else.

~~~
zackmorris
Hah you got me, I'm 36. I also agree that consulting can be a trap, but for
the reason that it's not scalable. A consulting firm is only worth about as
much as its employees, so there's no real exit strategy. I guess I'm kind of
lucky that I don't live in a big city so can afford to dabble in it. But it
does sting sometimes to not receive residual income for past work.

Cool to hear about your earlier escapades. My business partner and I were just
getting a foothold in Mac OS 9 shareware games when Apple switched to OS X and
antiquated the code we had worked so hard on for 5 years. I took it really
personally and suffered several years of depression. Things didn't turn around
for me until I stopped using my own code. Now I don't maintain an "engine", I
just scavenge commonly used code and find that it shields me from the whims of
proprietary APIs.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I also look back on what might have been,
and sometimes wished I had been born 5 years earlier, when things were
“booming”. But it’s an easy trap to fall into, because at least for the time
being, programmers’ leverage is increasing faster than competition can fill
the niches. Kids today, what with their supercomputers and megabit internet
connections and being able to stand on the shoulders of giants’ open source
projects! Get off my lawn! In my day we didn’t even have the internet! We had
BBS’s, and floppy disks that stopped being readable, and books.. paper books!
Imagine such a thing! And girls didn’t even use computers! Neither did
teachers! Can you imagine?

I too have often wished the geeks and hackers of the world were better at
networking. Generations of potential have been lost to reinventing the wheel.
It’s kind of ironic that we’re so able to communicate in this distributed
fashion and solve problems but have so few interpersonal and professional
relationships.

~~~
mietek
FWIW, I enjoyed your game. I especially liked the way the day and night cycle
shifted the colour palette. Made a lasting impression.

~~~
zackmorris
Thanks, that is nice to hear. Lots of custom 16 bit blitters made that happen.
I made one that blended between (I think) 16 bit patterns to interpolate
between two images, plus some RGB blending if I remember right. PowerPC had
some wonderful functions for all of that but in the switch to Intel, computers
were fast enough that I used a regular loop since it was waiting around for
ram anyway. We got pretty far on an OpenGL port but ran into issues with
needing to draw the scene in a handful of passes instead of piece by piece. My
partner had the vision for artwork and special FX and I just made it happen on
the back end.

------
cinquemb
Dropped out of college a little more than two years ago, moved to nyc, started
freelancing and got tired of trying to source clients for their social
networks, so started company (bootstrapped) that mines/crowd-sources data
online about people. We should hit low 6 figures in revenue by end of the
summer (in the middle of scaling our ops now, started generating revenue this
mid jan). I'm 22 and my friend is 27.

Through my journey (many ups and downs), I've started to respect a lot more
when some people say to not trade your time for money (or debt) and all the
pressures society (and the different people that may be in ones environment
who may) try to place upon you as an individual, because in exchange you can
have the freedom to take risks and pursue whatever you want to do. I had that
mindset when I was younger, but I was briefly co opted by the rat race which
set me off my ways. Life is too fleeting for me to want to waste time
doing/worrying about things that don't work for me.

------
glanotte
"can't help feeling i'm building a dream for someone else."

Background - employed software developer for 15 years.

I really don't see a problem with building other people's dreams. In fact, I
enjoy it and have been rewarded for it well over the last 15 years. I have had
the opportunity to work with and learn from some amazing developers and to
build some very cool products. At the moment, I don't have an entrepreneurial
dream and I may never have one. I am content to make a living doing what I
love to do - which is simply to write software.

I don't think the issue is risk aversion or not following your dream. I just
think that different people have different dreams and desires. At the risk of
sounding like a Disney firework show - follow your dream. If you have a dream
of owning your own business, you can make a plan to do that. That might
involve striking out on your own early or later in life. I think you just have
to ask yourself what you want.

------
pnathan
I work as a salaried employee. This is largely because I'm neither good at
marketing & networking nor have a tremendous desire to be, as well as having
lived for a long time in a place with no meaningful tech industry.

I would like to operate my own side business, but to date those projects have
demanded more time than I have available.

In the long term, I'd like to obtain a PhD and consult in areas related to
that, working remotely.

I also want to remark that, given careful choice of employers & their IP
agreements, there's nothing stopping you from pursuing your dreams at home.
Your salary might be paid for someone else's dream to come true, but it's also
funding your life and dreams.

Every now and then a startup hits the jackpot - say, every one out of a few
hundred. As a non-founder, you probably won't become wealthy this way. Even
founders get messed over a good deal. This is well documented and understood.
So if your dream is to become wealthy, being an employee developer is not the
way to go. You will need to gain significant equity. If your dream is to build
amazing product, you probably need to look for a midsize company who does that
sort of thing but isn't large enough to have seized up into cash cow milking.

At the end of the day (i.e., when you look back on it in ten years), very few
businesses are amazing, innovative, and tremendous: they exist to provide
services & goods to help other people's lives get along all right & maybe
improve their lives a bit.

final ninja-edit:

This is not a bad thing, to do good work for reasonable pay. There is great
dignity in doing so, regardless of whether you make someone else rich or
yourself rich, or simply holding a steady state in the world. Being able to
provide for yourself & yours, giving back more than you take, is an honorable
thing not to be despised.

------
mmcdan
I am so happy this thread exists. Reading a bunch of raw, honest, and
insightful stories about the journey through an industry fueled by reality-
distortion is like a breath of fresh air. This feeling must be what people
mean when they talk about the "old HN". Glad to see its spirit still lays
beneath the surface.

------
jabbathehut
Worked hard for 10 years in various web development shops, started a company
with two of the smartest people I met during that time, sold it, worked
through golden handcuffs, and had a nice exit. Now I live off of interest from
fixed income investments and am currently looking to pivot my career from web
development into computer graphics/games/VR since I think a revolution is
coming. I love programming and don't need to work but really want to build
cool stuff. In broad strokes I'm where I set out to be when I graduated in
college -- I didn't know the tactics but I knew the strategy. I'm in my early
thirties.

This is probably the most important book you'll read at your age:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Millionaire-Fastlane-Wealth-
Lifeti...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Millionaire-Fastlane-Wealth-
Lifetime/dp/0984358102)

~~~
macguyver
jabbathehut, you've just described my situation as well. Worked hard for 8
years at various VC/self-funded startups as founding hire, went solo in
between startups, and don't need to work either - although for me, it is more
of a combination of passive income and frugal living - I like to work and
solve problems. I recently lived in South America for six months and realized
after the novelty wore off that I really wanted to make cool things that will
change the world in a big way. In fact, I ended up spending most of my time
working on this while living there, so I came back to the US to move things
faster.

May I ask where you're based out of? The computer animation/games/video
revolution is definitely coming and I see very valuable applications of the
technology outside of the gaming space. The immediate opportunity/problem I'm
working on solving is in a growing global niche market. The idea came from a
problem I had in this space. Users (including myself) are paying lots of money
but there's nonexistent innovation and almost every user I spoke with is in
interested in trying this. I'm fairly location independent, and I'd love to
meet up/chat to talk more; if you're interested, please feel free to email me
at yuzshan [At] gmail [d0t] com

PS I'm also in my early thirties. Great book by the way.

------
Steveism
"...can't help feeling i'm building a dream for someone else."

I can relate to that feeling and it's something I revisit occasionally.
Though, being a founder or joining a startup and taking equity has it's own
set of anxieties. I think the right approach is to just focus on what you're
building and if it's right for you. If you believe in the projects you're
working on it's a lot easier to find happiness in your work. Some tough
decisions need to be made along the way regarding money but it is possible to
find a balance between compensation and doing what you love. You just need to
be relentless in reaching the goals you set for your career.

I personally split time between a regular 40 hour a week job as an in-house
web developer and freelancing. I just try to find new projects that interest
me so that I don't get bored.

------
miles_matthias
I'm a developer at dojo4 in Boulder, Colorado (dojo4.com/team) and am really
happy. I do a few hours a week on a side project (manualviableproduct.com) but
mainly for my own enjoyment.

I have a bachelor's in cs and a bachelor's in information assurance however so
it wasn't a hard pitch to be a developer. I worked at a couple of more
corporate style companies before being really happy at dojo4.

They care enough about the craft of developing that they push me to be a
better programmer and give a big middle finger to anyone who wants us to
forget our values for any amount of money. I love it. Our clients love us. I'm
proud of the quality of the work we do.

And we drink lots of beer & scotch, eat lots of cookies and free lunches, and
get massages every month. :p

------
einhverfr
I am self-employed and have been for about 10 years.

To some extent as a programmer there are times when you will (and should) help
other people build their dreams. None of us can build what we want to on our
own. Doing so for money brings you connections if you do it well, which help
you down the road. Additionally if your dream doesn't help others achieve
their dreams, you will never be able to make money at it. This is true both in
terms of formal employment and major contract work.

None of that means you shouldn't work on your own projects as well if you
want, and try to make money at that. Owning your own work, in the sense of not
reporting to a singular boss (sure, customers are bosses, but they aren't
singular) is very rewarding.

------
kpapke
I've been developing professionally for about 4 years now and I've tried a
10,000+ company, a 40 person company, a 2 person startup, and now back to a
large corporation (with plans to continue the startup).

It's ok to make mistakes, keep learning skills (even if you don't make a lot
of money), know your worth, and never give up your dream. You can't do a
startup if you have lots of time but have no money to survive, and you can't
do a startup if you're making someone else's dream and you have no time of
your own. So find the right balance and do what makes sense.

------
late2part
Complete luck. Timing to start out in the right industry, followed by vigorous
effort, learning, and experimentation. I also built many relationships early
on in my career that I've mostly kept alive throughout the last decades. I've
changed careers twice when the old skills/industry lowered the value of those
skills. Keep learning - read Richard Hamming's _You and Your Research_ [1].
Keep friends and work hard. [1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw)

------
wingerlang
My main source of income is very up-and-down. I develop software for
jailbroken iOS devices. Once I release something there is a little bump in my
income. The iOS7 release and subsequent software-updates gave me a little bump
also. It's my absolute passion and I am super happy to be able to do this for
a living at this moment.

It won't last forever though. I have a freelance "employer" also but the
projects are small and far inbetween.

A big help in this is that I am currently living in S.E. Asia, otherwise this
would never (!) work.

------
someotheridiot
I've worked almost 15 years in various IT roles, building up my skills
(technical and otherwise). In my spare time (when I had it), I would also
dabble in side projects. Some made money, most didn't. Eventually a side
project started taking off and is now providing a nice bonus. I still work
full time for someone else, but I aim to have the flexibility to choose what I
want to do now and not just work for the money.

This stuff takes time and a lot of effort. You can't just build an app and
sell it for $19B overnight.

------
nixgeek
If you're intending to have a reasonably-sized stable of clients then there
are significant tax and liability advantages to doing things through your own
Limited Company, but that really is a nomadic existence, you can't just work
for one client without risking falling foul of IR35.

What do you care about most? Doing something fun, feeling that your efforts
are worthwhile to humanity, making money? Everything is a balance of risk and
reward, and everyone's motivations tend to be slightly different.

------
squarebum
It's a good question. I love to read people's responds here and kudos to all
who have shared their experience. Answering to your question, I work as an
employee. I enjoy working in a company because there are trainings, financial
support to get IT certification and the salary is not bad. Also the company's
dream which is to make IT more secure is pretty much similar to my dream. So
if you end up working as an employee, better be in a company that has the same
dream as yours.

------
binaryorganic
Almost all of my money comes from client services. I didn't finish college,
but often wish I had, if only because it took me just as long to sort out how
to self-learn.

~~~
nsomaru
care to share insights you gained about self-learning?

------
duochrome
You are right. Developer is just labor. Not too much different than a server
in an resturant.

So how did a server become an resturant owner? You need to think about that.

------
eswat
Two weeks ago my money came from the startup I worked for.

But I have now switched to freelancing, with said startup being my only client
at the moment. I might look for more clients later, but I’m hoping to make
money through Gittip and releasing my own products instead. Like you, I want
to be in charge of my own destiny, even if that means not doing what has
conventionally worked for others.

------
eranation
My personal experience is this: writing software is easy, building a business
is hard. I love writing code, I hate doing A/B testing / funnels, SEO blog
posts, drip marketing, calculating LTV/UAC and all that, I'm not good at it +
I don't like it.

and I also hate getting delayed results, when I code at my day job, I see
results immediately, although it's gradual, it's still a direct feedback to my
actions, I put code, I get working software, I do a code review, I get
immediate feedback and quickly implement it.

So unless you are ready to do the business side of things (or know someone who
is good at it and likes to do it) then doing someone else's dream is probably
a good choice. As long as they pay you what you deserve. (how do you know what
you deserve? take the highest salary you find for your role in indeed.com or
glassdoor / payscale, and ask for it in your current / next job). There is no
other way to know.

But if you are OK with delayed gratification, have a LOT of patience, are
willing to speak with customers, do sales, experiment, do follow up calls,
accept failure again and again and still try to make it work by changing one
aspect (AKA pivot). If you are willing to lose some money to gain money later
(e.g. pay for some failed ads just to know the click through rate and validate
an idea), and if you are OK working your a off with potentially zero gain for
a long time, then you should probably start your own business (even if you
don't have an idea, find someone who does, or take an existing idea and do it
better)

Even doing freelancing can work, all you need is someone (can be you) who can
bring customers, and someone (can be you) who can keep those customers happy
in a good hourly rate without too many non billable hours.

My advice to my younger self - try it while you can, it's harder for me now
with a family to stop it all and start my own thing.

You always can do the side project thing, but don't expect it to become your
main income source without either a lot of work or a lot of luck. I had a few
side projects some of them made money, but it was a lot of work to maintain.

Look at the successful startups out there, yes there is a lot of execution and
technical talent that drives their success, but I say this is not the main
reason they are where they are, it falls down to ability to get users to come
and ability to get users to stay.

I see those companies fall into one of 2 types - either they have a very high
growth curve (the "Viral" / network effect startups) which are statistically
very hard to re-create (getting users is REALLY, REALLY, HARD, a single Show
HN in the front page + a techcrunch review + good SEO is not enough. You also
need people to keep returning to your product, and tell more people about it)
these include free products like Facebook, or market places like AirBNB - they
need lot's of users to make it work

The other type is startups that sell something (product / service, one time or
subscription), in this case you can have revenue from day 1, so I would
recommend this route, but it is known to have a very slow ramp up [0]

As popular to say, YMMV... but this is my personal view on this.

[0] [http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-
constant-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-
contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/)

~~~
1morewebdev
> The other type is startups that sell something (product / service, one time
> or subscription), in this case you can have revenue from day 1, so I would
> recommend this route,

This is good advice. A few years delayed, but slow, steady, stable growth or
your mental self as well as your brand and of your team is a pretty good
platform to launch something bigger.

------
wuster
I choose who I work for by these attributes:

1) does the company provide a product or service that makes a world a better
place? (e.g. Nest, Tesla would qualify)

2) are my potential colleagues great people that I will enjoy spending time
with and learning from? (it's miserable to work for miserable people)

3) will the company pay me a market wage such that I can provide for myself
and my family

------
Namrog84
Still working on masters. Current income is from being a TA, I help teach and
grade undergrad computer classes. I still have time to work on my own projects
and have a salaried job lined up at one of the main big tech companies out
west. Though I want to branch off and do independent work and start company in
a few years.

------
codr
The nice thing about just being an employee is you get a lot more free time to
enjoy life. Yes, there is life outside of software for some of us!

Also, way less risk.

I work for big companies, and the chance of getting laid off is about 0%,
while the chance of an annual raise and performance bonus is 100%.

Not saying it's the best way to go, but it works for me.

------
Dale1
Just a quick comment to say thanks for replying. Lots of useful ideas and a
few things i'll be looking into.

Keep em coming! :)

------
simonreed
I work as a software developer in an investment bank. In finance you can earn
much more than £30,000 per year.

~~~
hackerboos
Not easy to get those jobs and not easy if you don't want to live in London.

~~~
simonreed
Yes, I'm afraid both of your points are true.

------
stefek99
Excuse me? Are you a student working part-time earning £30,000 a year?

(I would say that's pretty much)

Correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
stefek99
I read most of the comments, except of 2-3 vey long essays (short attention
span).

On my way to work (living wage) I'll be listening to: \- Millionaire Fastlane
\- Icarus Deception

I miss my freedom so much. Working because I have to pay off the car that is
getting me to work. #insane

------
andersthue
I started out working for a couple of years as a supporter while programming
for fun at home, this way i learned a lot about computers (think os/2, dos,
win 3.11) while building up my programming skills.

Been self employed for 16 years now.

------
orware
Hi Dale,

I ended up starting out at UC Berkeley and during that first year of school I
got my first real introduction to programming and computer science. However, I
was also running a failing dial-up Internet service business (a cousin of mine
had gotten my parents to purchase it so I could run it and earn some
money/learn a bit about business, which was cool during high school) and was
trying to maintain a long-distance relationship (which ultimately failed) and
working part-time in the dormitory computer lab.

Because of the relationship, and the stress of dealing with the business
failing (and closing after my first semester in school) I ended up not doing
too well my second semester and ultimately decided to come back home.

At the time, back in 2006, things were still in boom mode and there were lots
of cool new developments coming up back in my small town so I saw this as an
opportunity to do something to make my community a little bit better.

I didn't necessarily want to continue with school (looking back, that was a
pretty dumb thought) so I'm glad I followed my sister's advice and enrolled
for an online degree program and worked my butt off over the next year and a
half (with my AP credit and the credit from my classes I did pass at Berkeley,
along with CLEP Exams I took along the way to get out of certain requirements,
I was able to finish my Bachelors, and have that all too important piece of
paper, before I was 21).

During that time I was in school I had started up a new business hoping to do
a bunch of web development for local business and start making an income I
could live off of. After that didn't really materialize I figured it'd be a
good idea to start pursuing a "real job" where I could earn a regular salary I
could depend on.

So months before I officially graduated I had started my job search in my
local area. I blame most of this on luck, but I applied for a number of IT
jobs, which I got "Thank you for applying" letters and a few web development
jobs, but kept on getting rejection letters. I also ended up applying for a
webmaster job at the local college in April 2007, but even though I kept on
checking in each month, there wasn't any movement on actually hiring anyone
for months.

So in late 2007 or so I ended up releasing a site which I hoped would "change
things" and raise a bunch of money for education by encouraging folks to
purchase their online products through a non-profit which would be setup
specifically to collect and then distribute affiliate fees earned by all of
the local individuals that made their purchase through this site (as an
example, you might click on the Amazon link on this site and then be taken
onto the main Amazon site after that to do your regular shopping, but since
you went through that non-profit's site it would bring back a bit of that
purchase to the community and I was hoping that money could go to paying for
field trips for schools and other stuff that normally gets the ax because of
budget cuts nowadays). I learned a few years later, but I guess that work is
what eventually made the college move forward with looking at all of the
applicants for that webmaster job and I impressed them enough in the interview
that I was offered that position in early February 2008. That day I got that
call that I was going to be hired is probably one of the happiest I can
remember (it's a good feeling to know that your hard work and talents are
appreciated).

Those good feelings were tempered dramatically when the Friday before I was
supposed to start working, my younger sister passed away in a car accident
driving to her high school. Going through such a difficult time right when you
begin working somewhere really showed me how much people care about each other
down here and I really appreciated all of the support I received at my new
workplace during those early days.

Over time, I've learned so much and each week and month most often has
something new to work through that you didn't know about before. I'm
essentially self-taught in most everything related to programming I've
accomplished since that first year at Berkeley, but it was a great foundation.
However, if there's one thing I have learned over these years is that there is
so much I don't know and which I would love to learn. The hard part is finding
teachers, particularly where I live because we have no connection to startups
that could teach us the wide variety of skills I'm always hearing about here
on HN. I'm starting to get to the point where I'm just going to start learning
some of this stuff on my own, but it's hard to justify sometimes when your day
job doesn't necessarily need you to learn those things (it's always an
additional driver to know that this thing that I'm trying to learn is going to
be directly applicable to work).

I have a small software business I work on some weekends, but it's super small
($200-$300 which about $150 in overhead). One of my goals this year is to try
and increase that amount (it's been basically the same each month since I
started it back in August 2010), not because I want it to replace my day job
(if the business takes off that'd be wonderful of course, but I think I would
still want to keep my day job and use that extra money to help my family or my
community in some way).

I think the main thing you're talking about though is that you yearn for
something a bit more, and I can't say that I don't have those same wishes too.
I'd love to work for a startup or a big company, but not necessarily because I
think they'd be better than my current workplace, which is really great, but
mainly because the types of problems would be different, there'd be more
people I could learn from, and those sorts of things (additional learning
opportunities).

As jawns mentioned, it has to do with your risk tolerance, and working for a
good organization can be very good for you particularly when you're just
starting out. Gaining that experience is crucial to allowing you to continue
getting positions at other organizations if you're not happy with your current
one. If creating/joining a startup sounds attractive to you, just try and make
sure you think through all of the possibilities (I'm an optimist so I always
think things will turn out great for my businesses, but after those past
failures it does help make you a bit wiser...or at least more understanding of
your own limitations as a business person, haha).

All the best and good luck for you in your career!

~~~
efdee
Thanks for writing this, and sorry for your loss.

------
mschuster91
I work nightshifts in a gambling hall and by daytime I'm coding for two
startups I have with a friend. Only problem is the constant lack of money...

------
Techasura
I'm employed and i'm a freelancer both. Tough handling both, but i just can't
sit idle for even an hr, i have to do something.

------
throwaway13qf85
I do research for a hedge fund, which pulls in $150k-$1m per year depending on
how well the fund does. I program in my spare time.

------
Mankhool
Working for any entity that you do not own can be perceived as making someone
else (owners, shareholders, investors) rich.

------
zaporozhets
I'm 19 and living in Sydney, Australia.

I ignored High School and taught myself javascript and web standards instead
from about the age of 12. During this time I also did 8 years of ballet,
contemporary and jazz dancing. I also played the guitar and double bass semi-
professionally and I sang in a Cathedral Choir ( even sang for the pope a
couple of times even though I am 0% religious ). I also travelled across most
of Europe and Asia ( it helps that I speak fluent Ukrainian and Russian ). I
did a bit of freelance when I was about 16 for a couple of places. This
experience was probably the most valuable part of my career to date. Learning
how to pitch work to someone that doesn't know you, learning how to manage
your own time correctly and learning how to talk the client speak are things
that restrict many developers later on ( i've found ).

I started work a week before my HighSchool final exams were over as a full-
time junior front-end Developer for a small agency that was quite far from
where I lived at the time. I think it was particularly good for me since they
had a wonderful culture and though my title was 'junior front-end' I was
actually the only developer there that knew anything about front-end and I was
able to plunge into the deep-end with every project, and really own the front-
end. I also learnt to work closely with designers and really care for that
relationship there. Another thing that is so often missing.

Interestingly enough, that agency ended up firing everyone and doing something
new about 7 months after I started which sucked ( I was absolutely gutted at
the time ). Luckily, I had built a pretty good portfolio there of work where I
could point at the front-end and say 'that was all me'. I ended up applying
for about 5 different places that I particularly liked.

The first place I interviewed at was actually wonderful. Great culture,
reasonable expectations and a great work ethic and care for perfection ( this
was my ultimate need ). Funnily enough, they liked me just as much; so much so
in fact that they hired me in the interview to start the next day as a
contractor until they got all of the documents in order to make me full time.

3 months in, I changed a bit as a person. Still very much a developer in
mentality, I felt closed off from the decision making process and a lot like I
was just a 'resource' rather than a person with ideas. The agency was in a
'transitional' period and the corporate side struggled with integrating
properly with the newly acquired 'dev' side. Anyway, after 3 months I decided
I needed to change something. I stopped being a developer and began working
there as a 'Creative' ( this is still my position there ). This was actually
pretty great since I have a great passion for marketing as I do for
development. In this role I my main duty is as a 'concept' resource in regards
to big integrated campaigns. I spend most of my time researching and writing
up ways that the dev side can be best applied to the corp. side or drawing up
concept art for products or ideas.. It's a pretty fun gig. Aside from this I
do a bunch of random sub-contractor work for different people. This allows me
to continue flexing my dev side which I feel is just as important as
everything else.

It's hard to say i've been that successful yet, because I still have so much I
feel I need to do; but it's definitely liberating earning a good $80k AUD at
19 after everyone told me that I wouldn't be able to do anything with my life
unless I went to uni.

I am also working on a product in my other spare time ( if it even exists )
that I know actually has a market. Trying to figure out if I want to drop
everything and pursue it or possibly even license it and raise some funding
and employ someone to build it for me. Tough decisions.

Down the road, I will build an Agency that bridges the gap between digital
innovation and the needs of Ad/Marketing Agencies ( I have a huge underlying
passion for this ).

------
blufox
Testing Software

------
leoplct
Freelance

------
benched
Looking back over my career, it seems to me that I mostly warm chairs and surf
the web while in the offices of software companies. Occasionally they ask me
to code something, and I do it. I'd say that accounts for less than 10% of the
time I've spent in the office. This is across 4 companies and 15 years. I did
the most work at the one that was a startup.

As for your feeling about your situation, I think there is a pretty clear
pyramid scheme whereby older people get younger people to build their pyramids
for them. The idea is that people with a lot of experience lead, and provide
their workers an opportunity to gain experience. I think that's partly true,
but it's equally true that there are elements of human nature, ageism, and
taking advantage. Perhaps it's just positioning - whether it's the older
leveraging the younger, the more vigorous leveraging the more passive, or
risk-takers leveraging the risk-averse, no matter how you rationalize it, in
the end you will find a small number of people in a position where they're
either making huge amounts of money or expecting to, and a large number of
people just making whatever the ordinary wage is for their job.

~~~
russell
It is not surprising that older risk takers lead the younger and risk adverse.
I dont think that per se is ageism. They have accumulated the capital and
connections to make a startup work. YC counters that somewhat. It's not
necessarily for someone new to hone their skill and maybe be part of the
founding team next time around.

That said, this industry is rampant with ageism. Once you get beyond 40, it
takes longer and longer to find a new job. The presumption is that, if you are
older, your skills development stagnated somewhere around the turn of the
century.

------
jagawhowho
Entrepreneurs have no cap on their income but don't always make more than an
employee. Try both and see what you like.

------
CriticalSection
I worked in IT, with no BSCS. I took some college classes at nights and
weekends while working.

When 2008 rolled around, I knew things were shaky at my company, but many
companies I looked at had "Required: BSCS" or even when not, HR would grill me
on college when I applied. I began saving a lot. I decided if I could find an
equivalent or better job I'd leave, otherwise I'd take my chances - I had many
months warning about the company and economy shakiness. Finally at the end of
2008 I got severance (it was a big company) and unemployment. I went back to
school full time.

While at school, I learned how to program better and better. I learned Java. I
took $100 of my money, sent $25 to Google and bought 6 months of web/email
hosting with the other $75. I began publishing Android apps. After six months,
one of my apps finally began doing well, and it has paid for itself ever
since.

As far as my revenue, it has averaged $600 a week for the past few weeks. My
business expenses are negligible - about $35 a week, $25 of which is my cell
phone bill which is not fully a business expense. My non-recurring costs are
when I pay for artwork or translations or ads.

My fall 2013 semester was academically tough (with my AI class only being one
of the hard classes) so I did very little new work on my apps, just some minor
maintenance, checking Nagios etc. Sometimes I can do work during the semester,
sometimes I can't. I wind up doing a lot of new work during winter breaks, and
during those summers in which I did not take classes (some summers I do take
classes - but there is a short break around those as well).

The general ideas floating around here on HN are good. Paul Graham's essays,
the Lean Startup ideas of Eric Ries and all of that.

One major difference for me is I am not looking to build a billion dollar
company that is initially desirable to invest in for angels and VCs. I am
doing a bootstrapped, lifestyle thing for now. I'm happy with $600 a week,
although I hope to push that up to $700 or $800, and then eventually to $2000
a week. Once I get to $2000 a week, I'll probably shift what I'm doing, and
may take on a more long-term, ambitious project more in tune with what is
discussed here. For what I'm currently doing, pg's "Ramen Profitable" essay is
good. "Startup = Growth" is good as well. As well as other essays, posts, and
blogs by others doing bootstrapped startups.

You talk about working part-time. I started off taking four classes a
semester, including a hard class in each semester. Before doing my own apps,
one semester I took a consulting gig, and stripped down to two classes - one
hard, one easy. It was not stripped down enough - I wound up having to drop
the hard class, and the company said I was taking too long.

I also took a summer consulting gig and had no time at all to work on my apps.
It's hard to juggle too many things. One semester I could only get two easy
classes registered, so I got a lot of app work done during the semester.

One problem with working for others is during go-go times like 1998-1999 there
is a lot of work, but come 2001 or 2009, work dries up, especially if you have
no college diploma. I'm happy I've built up $30k in side income. If it keeps
building up, it might become all of my income.

On the other hand, as others have said, you learn things working at companies,
technical and otherwise, meet people etc. Some companies are just overflowing
with cash.

~~~
nekopa
Hey, I would like to get in touch with you, as I am about to take a year off
to try building an app based lifestyle business. My email is in my profile.

Just looking for some hints and tips, will probably setup an 'Ask HN' closer
to the start- I have about three months of commitments left before I go full
time on app building.

