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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

How I wish I could do this. Mortgage is paid off but everything is still so expensive, at 50 I can't plot a way through the next 30-40 years without starving.

I want to write software. But these days jobs don't want to pay me to write software. They want to pay me to write JIRA tickets. JIRA tickets about fixing other people's code. I keep trying again and again, but the industry has completely lost any magic for me.

Meanwhile I can pump out hundreds of lines a weekend on my own free software projects and actually feel like I'm getting things done.

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> Meanwhile I can pump out hundreds of lines a weekend on my own free software projects and actually feel like I'm getting things done.

I can relate. It's sort of "Hell is other people." I work very effectively on my own, but the scope is limited. Big things require teams.

I realize how fortunate I am, that I could afford to retire. I don't have as much money as I would, with another ten years under my belt, but I should be OK.

It absolutely stuns me, that young folks are getting paid more out of school, than I made, in my entire career, and have less to show for it.

When I left Google 3+ years ago I was at first delighted to find I still really loved writing code, because I felt like work had drained it out of me.

And then, yes, I found, wait, I actually need to work in a team because like you say there's a limit to how far you can get by yourself. To do big things you need more people.

So I gave up on my fantasy of solo working or somehow retiring, and returned to work.

Only to spend the last 3 years increasingly frustrated.

At least Google dumped insane quantities of money on me, so the frustration was worth it. Plus free food.

Now I'm just frustrated and not nearly as wealthy.

AI coding tools are rapidly changing what a single person can accomplish.

Where I ran up against the limits was not in coding tasks. Programming is "easy"

It's UX & UI design, documentation, product specification, promotion.

I'm unsurprisingly just not that good at these things, but also don't really like to do them. And missed having team members who specialized in them.

It’s my hope that AI tools will be a help, here.

They already help me to write marketing copy (a weakness of mine), and have been helpful in solving bugs and researching the correct approaches to design.

I’ve been doing “soup to nuts” apps for a long time, but it can be tedious, so my scope is limited. I’m hoping that AI will help me to expand it.

The bigger the companies/products/teams the less code you actually write.

Right now I have a project where a PM asked me to describe the logic of a certain thing to him and I couldn't do it. Literally I couldn't spell it out better than just reading the code.

I ended up translating the code into pseudo code and send it to him (would have made a flow chart if he wasn't very smart).

And it is not just because of "bad engineering" or bad org, no it was just features added to account for multiple series of edge cases that had to work properly or a few thousands of people would call our company to complain the system wasn't working.

Like the hard part wasn't the code, it was the flow chart. Changes to that flow chart could take weeks to implement/test/release.

Consider writing your own software. Maybe something that scratches an itch, related to one of your hobbies, or a need you've observed in the market.

I write my own software compulsively every weekend and holiday, often at the expense of housework and personal relationships.

It just has no path towards paying the bills or putting my teens through university.

http://github.com/rdaum/moor

My problem is the amount of money I would make in a year selling the software I make for my hobbies would likely be less than one paycheck at a normal job.

One certainly can if they want to. You just don't want to.

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