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Comment by Mc91 | Hacker News Reader

> it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.

I only have to convince one place - Google Ads. Plus bring in the "eyeballs" with my free app, but I have accomplished that more than once.

> Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.

Just one company in my case (actually several, but 90+% of the money comes from Google)

> Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding. I have to be competitive enough to make a few thousand a month, and with my programming (and database design, and UX, and SRE etc.) skills, I have achieved that.

> And you need to make enough to pay for health care. In the US you do.

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https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/12/most-subscription-mobile-a...

> the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is less than $50 USD.

https://medium.com/beyond-agile-leadership/the-difference-be....

>Success rate: According to Zippia, only 0.5% of mobile apps are successful, with 9,999 out of 10,000 apps failing. Fyresite estimates that 99.5% of consumer apps and 87% of business apps fail.

Now imagine what would happen if more people took that advice?

For context, a new grad working in a major city in the US not on the west coast - even an ordinary CRUD enterprise framework developer - can make $70k- $80K a year.

What exactly is a “few thousand a month”? That’s a good side hustle. But even that’s not enough to support yourself

i just launched a website a month ago to sell sweet potatoes online and i ran a bunch of google ads. now i have a b2b revenue stream selling sweet potatoes to medical diagnostic test manufacturers.

please, with the original snark style from your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42632061, tell me more about how it is a waste of my time to find businesses to do business with my brand new business and instead just find a stable job?

hard to debate these things with people who are born and bred into “slave for someone else” mentality and think like $350k is great salary one should be happy with slaving away at some cubicle in the Bay or at home 12 hours per day… :)

America is great at making sure most people think this way…

I wake up in the morning, role out of bed, walk over to my home office, shut down my computer after 8 hours and get on with my life.

I don’t have to worry about finding customers, I have unlimited paid PTO and I plan to take 30 days this year not including 10 paid holidays.

My wife and I travel a lot and we did the digital nomad thing for a year.

If the company decides they don’t want to employ me anymore, I find another job like I have done 10 times in my career including last year and the year before. Both times it took three weeks.

I don’t live in the Bay Area , I live in a nice condo with access to 5 pools, a private to the condo association fishing lake and two gyms, bars and restaurants all within walking distance in state tax free Florida.

that sounds fucking amazing!!!!! I think the main “disagreement” we have is that I truly believe there are too many people thinking that FAANG-driven career is fullfilling and something that should be taught to new kids that are coming into our industry. I am now and will spend the rest of my career pleading with them to choose a more fullfilling and rewarding career

I’m also 50.

If I were 22 in 2025 instead of being 22 in 1996, I would definitely do what I needed to do to exchange as much money as possible for my labor instead of toiling away at an enterprise dev job making $70K a year when instead I could be graduating college making $170K to $200k+.

I did do my bid in a FAANG working remotely between the ages of 46-49 and I saw first hand the doors it opens and the experience that college grads had that they couldn’t get anywhere else,

Hell, it open doors for me. There is no way I could have found jobs as quickly as I did both last year and the year before without it.

Also even at 46-49 I learned a lot that has helped me since I left.

On another note: after my youngest graduated, my wife and I sold everything we owned and after traveling for a year, we settled down in our vacation home (a unit in a condotel we own).

We rent it out when we decide to travel for an extended period of time. The “hotel” part of the condotel takes care of everything.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp

i have all this (though i only work 4-6 hours a day when selling my time to other people), and i also have side income selling sweet potatoes and it didn't take much of my precious free time away. currently, it's earning me a similar hourly rate as my development rate (senior developer/lead developer/architecting infrastructure, etc). you are correct that it doesn't replace my income, but that was never the point. that income will help me weather any job loss etc, but more importantly, against your advice, i can potentially grow the business to a point that it replaces my income. and if you really want to be like, "that will never pay your bills," then that is 100% false if i put all of that income into stocks and the money grows to a point twenty years from now that i can use that money to pay my bills. and i'm also able to find a job quickly if i need to, just like you. which i guess, based on your experience, one can be extremely shortsighted person and still find a job quickly.

I have a years worth of expenses in in an HYSA outside of my retirement accounts that will help me “weather a job loss” and a set of skills that I’m 100% sure that someone will give me a job or contract before my money runs out. I work full time for a consulting company now - and I’ve worked in cloud consulting for almost five years including three and half working at AWS.

I have been working professionally for 28 years across 10 jobs. I assure you I’m not “short sighted”.

i'm happy for you and glad you figured out a way to navigate this rough finanical world. but we live in a different world now. i'm 33 and that strategy just will not be as reliable in the future. it's a losing strategy imo, at least for what i want out of life. what works for me might not work for you. telling other people that their approach is wrong is very shortsighted.

I mentored an intern when I was at AWS and worked with a few other new grads and continued to mentor the returning intern after they graduated.

After three or four years in the industry, if they suck up everything they can and take advantage of every opportunity, they will be set.

The same is true to a much lesser extent on the enterprise dev. I tell people on that side just not to be a “ticket taker” and volunteer to have larger more impactful products - “don’t be the bullet. Be the gun”

i've been mentored by dudes in their 50s who think they are providing a good to the world by mentoring young people (aka dad energy), then later received real mentorship from folks my age and a decade older than me. most likely they took what you said with a grain of salt and realized that you are out of touch.

It’s “dad energy” that you are doing. I’m telling people to “grind leetcode and work for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) and to learn how to pass system design and behavioral interviews and pointing them to resources.

Whose advice is going to lead to better outcomes? Doing drop shipping from Ali baba and selling sweet potatoes on line or mine?

While I haven’t had to pass a coding interview at BigTech, I have had to pass system design and behavioral interviews at one and I have conducted a couple at BigTech.

I’m telling them to work to demonstrate skills with working at increasing “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

I know first hand the leveling guidelines at one of the BigTech companies and 2nd hand about another. From working at one less than 2 years ago.

My latest project I’m leading is a Kubernetes + Generative AI project.

Do you really think I’m someone who doesn’t have a pulse on the modern tech landscape?

i wasn't suggesting that you were out of touch with technology, i was talking about career/life strategies. i believe that what worked for your generation isn't as sure a thing for my generation, and building various small revenue streams is a better approach. this is how i see it from my point of view as a younger person observing the world around me and where i fit in. a lot of people tell me that your way is right for me, but i disagree. a corporate 9-5 makes me want to kms, not exaggerating. i think we have fundamentally different worldviews and that's ok.

> My latest project I’m leading is a Kubernetes + Generative AI project.

we are no different. i'm leading a project to deploy an etl pipeline on azure kubernetes right now.

i believe that what worked for your generation isn't as sure a thing for my generation, and building various small revenue streams is a better approach.

100% this.

this is how i see it from my point of view as a younger person observing the world around me and where i fit in

GODSPEED mate - you are on the right track

> was talking about career/life strategies. i believe that what worked for your generation isn't as sure a thing for my generation

My generation for the most part never will work for a FAANG or get equivalent compensation because we aren’t going to grind leetcode and do what it takes.

I would never have gotten into one if it weren’t for the very thin needle I threaded and I definitely wasn’t going to sell my big house in the burbs to move to Seattle to be an SDE (what the recruiter originally suggested).

There are plenty of people who post here who are under 30 and will make more than I will ever make. I’m not bitter. Like I said at 50, I can afford to purposefully prioritize lifestyle over chasing money and eschew opportunities to make more.

My Generation didn’t have the chance of graduating from college and getting a job making an (inflation adjusted) almost quarter million working for BigTech or the equivalent company back then. Many in my generation came in during the dot com boom and it took years for us to recover and some never did (I didn’t suffer any ill effects from the crash).

From looking at LinkedIn, none of them are or have ever worked for a company paying as much as my former coworkers at BigTech are making 3-4 years out of college.

The generation graduating post 2010-2012 has way more opportunities to make a lot of money.

gen x in tech are some of the wealthiest people in the world. y'all are the new kings.

i graduated high school during the great financial crisis. i remember being near done with college at the university of mississippi when i visited birmingham, alabama and walked through the occupy encampments. i didn't make enough money to contribute to retirement savings til 2019 when i was in my late 20s. your generation has experienced unprecedented stock market gains over your peak earning years. i'm not hopeful that these gains will continue through my peak earning years therefore i prioritize finding creative ways to generate income before it's too late after being complacent with my fat ass tech paycheck sitting at my standup desk and drinking my kombucha with the wool over my eyes while the ai writes my code.

And you were on the opposite side of the bimodal distribution of comp within the industry from 2012-2019.

The top end of enterprise dev salaries for seniors is around that of entry level salaries at BigTech and adjacent companies.

That’s not meant to be an insult. I was on that side until I was 46 and now at 50 I’m back on the very top end of enterprise dev. But it’s still somewhere between entry level and mid level at BigTech and closer to entry level.

The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.

If you graduated in 2008, yes it was a shit show. But that means by 2012, BigTech comp and enterprise dev comp started really diverging. The stock market has been gangbusters since 2012. But it stagnated most of the 200x’s.

If you had jumped on the BigTech wave in 2012 you would have been set.

By that time, relocating wasn’t an option for me because I was 38, just gotten married and had two (step)kids.

i didn't start working in the industry until 2019.

> The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.

this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now. nonetheless, we are not talking about maximizing income here, we're talking about surviving in a changing world with a tougher job market for devs. let me remind you of the grandparent orginal comment that started this all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42631755 that person is right.

> i didn't start working in the industry until 2019.

Yeah for an entry level developer getting in the industry right before Covid hit had to suck.

> this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now.

The entire market sucks now. But BigTech is still hiring as well as the enterprise dev side. You might as well shoot for the moon and settle if you must.

Are you making at least $80K a year? Again that’s what an entry level CRUD developer can make. They would be much better off preparing for interviews than selling sweet potatoes on line

lol are you really sitting here telling me that it is bad that i have side income? that is hilariously stupid

Actually I am. When I get off of work, I don’t think about work. I am either exercising, hanging out with my family or friends, traveling (I work remotely and I could very well be working during the day and doing something at night in a different city).

This discussion was about creating a business instead of working for someone else.

I bet you that you could make more money by spending your time doing interview prep and changing jobs than you could selling potatoes on the side.

you obviously have not heard a word i said.

btw spending time marketing yourself is much more effective than interview prep in my experience. i got every single one of my jobs because i know how to sell myself. all the jobs i've gotten did not include an algorithmic interview. i can only think of one algorithmic interview i've done in my career, and it was early in my career and helpful to learn my knowledge gaps as a mostly self-taught developer. i did not spend any time doing "interview prep" after that, but simply learned the CS fundamentals that i was bad at. that has helped me so far. not 1337 code or whatever the fuck.

but that doesn't matter. i work 4-6 hours a day selling my time at a high hourly rate. this gives me more free time to do all the things i want to do. i chill hard as fuck. walk 90 minutes a day, sell sweet potatoes on the internet, grow my food, write books, and work on my saas app.

i recommend doing this if you are like me. don't work a 9-5, unless you use it to help get you to this point.

Check my other comments on this submission - I got into BigTech without doing any coding too - AWS ProServe.

But I am self aware enough to know that isn’t a repeatable process that most people can do anymore than “selling potatoes online”.

I don’t have to “market myself”. My job at AWS fell into my lap more or less then after leaving, with that on my resume and LinkedIn profile along with my other experience, people reach out to me. I don’t spend time trying to be a “thought leader” online.

> do anymore than “selling potatoes online”.

actually selling sweet potatoes. if you would listen!

> I don’t spend time trying to be a “thought leader” online.

i have 139 followers on twitter. i don't tweet about tech. "marketing" is simply one html document on the public internet that clearly communicates to technical and non-technical people what you can do for them. not what skills you have.

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