
Ask HN: Side income while still highly invested in full time job? - jmarchello
I’m a software engineer with a job that I really enjoy with a company I want to succeed. At the same time I’d like to start earning some side income. I also have a young family so I need to be careful with my time commitments. Any suggestions?
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FBISurveillance
It's hard to assess your situation but I would rather look for a better job
(or better-paying job). If you still want to try it keep in mind that:

* You need to be extremely careful with IP and legal: are you going to use your work machine for a side project? Are you going to do any side work from your current company offices? Is there conflict of interest? All those things need to be carefully planned.

* You're going to get distracted, so your performance on both jobs will be lower.

* If your management is going to figure it out, you'll lose trust. If I'd figure that one of my employees does contracting on the side, I wouldn't be happy. If you really need more money for a serious reason, I'd prefer people to chat with me about that during 1:1. We've had an employee couple years ago who had a brain tumor and we covered his medical expenses on the company, with no obligations, which was more than his annual salary. He recovered successfully since.

* Having two jobs will impact on your quality of life and your family. Maybe not instantly but at some point it will. Be careful not to burn out.

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starbugs
While I agree to most of what you said, the attitude of paying based on what
someone needs doesn't seem to be a fair basis for negotiation to me. The case
you mentioned is surely an extreme that deserves an exception to be made and I
highly appreciate that you helped your employee in this situation, but this
shouldn't be the general way to assess what someone is worth to you as an
employer.

Also someone working on the side (within limits) may actually benefit you as
an employer. It's a way to gain experience that you otherwise couldn't get
your hands on. I agree that things need to be made transparent and agreed on
before, but I'd rather not recommend a general negative attitude towards this.

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FBISurveillance
I'm assuming the case when one gets paid fairly, regardless of their location.
In my previous comments on one of GitLab posts I expressed my disagreement
with the way their salary calculator works: it calculates salary based on
location and I'm against that.

When discussing those things first thing to keep in mind are legal
complications for both parties, and being open about this lets everyone deal
with risks properly.

~~~
scarface74
“Fair” in a capitalist economy is based on supply and demand. If you want to
get a developer locally to Silicon Valley, you’re going to have to pay more
based on the pool of qualified individuals. If your pool is “the entire United
States” or the “entire English speaking population”, as employer, you can pay
less. As an employee, you’re competing with a much larger pool.

Why would s company pay more than they have to?

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scarface74
Suggestions? Don’t do it.

Your family comes first. Why would you work full time at a company _and_ do
side work at the expense of your family?

Do you have equity in the company? If not, your employment with the company is
solely a business arrangement. You give them X number of hours per week and
they give you Y dollars.

If you can make the Y larger without changing the X, why wouldn’t you? Why
would you sacrifice time with your family for a company? Do you really think
if times got hard and they could lay you off and survive they wouldn’t?

Unless you have a decent ownership stake at a company, never confuse a company
that you work for with _your_ company.

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saluki
Check any agreements you have with your company they may contain wording that
anything you create is their IP or other restrictions.

If that checks out I would look in to building income with products and
eventually a SaaS app.

Listen to the archives here:

[https://StartupsForTheRestOfus.com/archives/](https://StartupsForTheRestOfus.com/archives/)

Rob and Mike cover starting a business on the side and lots of topics that
will be of interest to you.

This is inspiring too: @DHH Startup School Talk 2008
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY)

Keep your focus on your family and on your day job.

There are hours here and there when your family is asleep or busy that you can
put that time in to building products. If you enjoy this type of work you can
build your own products instead of watching TV two hours a night. Follow Rob's
stair step approach. Like DHH says it's still hard, but it's definitely
doable.

Good luck.

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p0d
I generally don't do long answers but I've done what you are suggesting so
stick with me.

I worked in a school and created a saas product as a sideline. This was very
manageable in the world of school. I joined an IT company 8 years ago and
brought my saas product with me. My product requires very little support so
the new company were happy to let me do my full time work and let me look
after product. The company even thought they may get involved with my product
but it differed too much from their vision. 8 years on I now work 3 days a
week for the company and 2 days a week on my on own saas product and I'm very
happy. The company have been very supportive.

Some people here are saying don't do it, think of your kids. I started my
sideline as I wasn't making enough to save any money and wanted to put some
money aside for my kids. My kids and I (who are now adults) are very close. Do
what you think is best.

I think it's important to be honest. If you go down this route make something
that requires as little interaction with your users as possible. It was always
important for me not to be the guy sneaking out to take calls.

I reckon a good starting place would be setting aside an evening or something
and sticking to a fixed amount of time. I've been down the road of a full time
job and sideline taking up my whole week. I won't go back there again. I don't
work on Saturdays. I don't really work on Sundays either but I'm very involved
in my church which is another type of commitment.

Have a good think about why you want to do this? Having my own thing which I
made and try to grow fires me up. Know what your reasons are so you don't end
up disappointed.

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hackermailman
www.moonlightwork.com is an agency specific for what you're looking for, or
toptal and list yourself as weekends or nights/mornings only.

They also hire interview phone screeners all the time, and whenever I've
talked to one of these guys they sounded like they were either driving in a
car or in a coffee shop lineup so seems like it's something you could easily
juggle on the side. They're always looking for experienced developers to do
phone interviews. These positions are usually on github jobs and other remote
job boards [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#job-
board...](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#job-boards)

As for time get up early and finish by 11am if it's a flexible enough side gig

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rthomas6
I started doing /r/flipping as a side hustle. It works, but it scales with how
much time you're willing to spend on it. But that's also a benefit of it-- no
hours, no deadlines, nobody to answer to. And failure is painless. Obviously
it makes less money than contracting on the side would, but I couldn't find a
way to do contracting without signing up for large chunks of time in advance.

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matt_the_bass
I have a slightly different take on this. I know that the OP said “start
earning some side income”. However, I think there can be value from a side
project other than income. It can be a great hobby the allows one to explore
other creative avenues.

As a manager (and founder), I encourage my team to have outside projects.
However, they should not be done on the company’s dime. I also encourage them
to use most of the cool tools we have.

For me, I’m currently building solid wood word clocks. A coworker made a bunch
of educational web tools for teachers (spouse is a teacher). One sw dev was
learning electronics and borrowed some nice soldering equipment and an o
scope.

Some of us make a little money doing these things to make it fun and cover our
hobby’s expenses. The point is these are more of a hobby (that might earn some
money) than a job. By encouraging this with my employees, they get a breath of
fresh air and some alternative perspectives.

FYI, the minimum stint for engineers at my company has been about 5 years. Our
most valuable engineers have been with me for more than 15 years.

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sloaken
Your family is your side job. The thing your kid wants most from you is your
time.

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starbugs
Are you aiming at passive or active side income?

I find active work on the side to be much more manageable than passive. E.g.
you could start doing contract or consulting work on the side. Keep your
employer in the loop. It's important that they know about your side activities
or otherwise you might get into trouble.

Passive side income is much harder to do if you don't have experience with
this kind of work. Especially if you have a family and cannot commit to
investing a lot of time. You need to get really good at self management and
make sure you don't commit months worth of your time into something that later
turns out to not earn you any money. Start as small as possible. Don't make
the mistake of thinking that a product consists of code only. From my
experience at least two thirds of product success is outside of engineering
(design, marketing, sales, finance, management).

Good luck!

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SamReidHughes
Man, it is sooo hard for me to put mental energy anywhere besides what I'm
working on full time.

My advice is to first ask if you're in shape. Maybe you could work out
instead.

I recommend having a fixed weekly (or monthly) time budget on this. It's
perfectly reasonable for you to have a hobby like making money.

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sfifs
> I also have a young family so I need to be careful with my time commitments

Find a better paying job if needed. Taking time out of family time when kids
are young is something you will definitely regret later - as do some of my
friends who took up high paying management consulting gigs when their kids
were young and missed the whole childhood of their kids.

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shyn3
How are your investments doing? Your salary can help put away a ton of money
you can grow using vanguard funds.

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phakding
Day trading, Landlording, freelancing : some of the things I do.

But if you have young family, you might want to invest your time in the family
and build a solid foundation. That could help you spend more time away from
them being ambitious in the future.

~~~
yalph
Off topic but are you from nepal?

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phakding
:) No, I am not. I trekked to Mt Everest base camp last year and I stayed
there the first night after starting at Lukla.

Are you from Nepal?

~~~
yalph
I am not either but I love the country and its people. I have trekked before
around the Annapurnas.

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bdcravens
Codementor.io. You can generally work as little or as much as you want (bulk
of work is helping others via videoconferencing). Oftentimes mentoring calls
you do can turn into more long-term side work, if that's what you want.

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tmaly
Check out indiehackers.com it is a great community for those building
profitable side projects.

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guessthejuice
> I also have a young family so I need to be careful with my time commitments.
> Any suggestions?

Spend time with your family? Time is the only thing you can't buy. How are you
going to start a side business and earn income if you aren't willing to trade
time with your family? There's only 24 hours in a day.

If you are a software engineer who is so poorly paid you need to look for side
income, maybe look for another job? Unemployment is at all-time lows and
companies are desperate for tech talent.

I can understand baristas looking for side income, why would a software
engineer need one?

~~~
h4b4n3r0
^ This is the right answer. Find another, better paying day job. That
shouldn’t be super hard if you’re in the US. Do not steal time from your
family, you will 100% regret it eventually, guaranteed.

