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Comment by leokun | Hacker News Reader

$70,000 is a nice haul, but over six months it averages to a little more than $10,000 a month which at least in the bay area pays for about 1.5 developers. I hope their growth curve is still more vertical than flat.

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Hmmm. $11,666 per month for 1.5 developers is roughly $100,000 per developer per year. You must be talking about junior developers, because salaries around here for experienced developers aren't that low. They can't be--not when senior/experienced developers can get $100,000 working just about anywhere else in the country for less than 50% of the cost of living as in the bay area.

I was being generous, also I know in at least Arizona senior developers are not paid anything near 6 figures. About 50K at best.

Arizona salaries are lower than the Bay Area but not that low, at least in my experience (from living there 2007-2010). Mid-to-senior Java J2EE or .NET programming positions are offering $80K to $100K. There are lots of VB.NET or ASP.NET types of programming jobs for around $30/hour W2 contracting or $50-$60K full time, sometimes more.

Move.

1) He's wrong. My first job in Arizona I got paid more than that, 15 years ago. 2) It's so, so much cheaper to live in Phoenix than in one of the tech centers. And a different lifestyle. Some people want a big house and a boringly steady job.

I'm not wrong, look at jobs at the University of Arizona (Tucson) for experienced C/C++ programmers. $45K a year.

Universities are not going to pay as well as the private sector, or even many government or non-profit organizations, for the same work. Using that as an example doesn't help your argument.

I don't live in Arizona anymore, I live in the bay area.

It definitely will. He's onto something - categories of education which can convert to immediate employment are going to be the biggest winners in the online education space.

I had this idea in Jan 2012 and even did the ground work. - Essentially devbootcamp type thing and I didn't pursue it because I'm really bad at teaching people - I get very annoyed very fast :) ...

$70k is revenue, not profit.

yea. At 40% margin (from elsewhere in the thread), that's $28,000 profit, for an annual profit so far of just over $50,000. If we assume that all the salaries except his own are coming out of that gross before profits so that $50,000 is for him alone, then it's a decent income for a college kid - although I'm not sure if that's a fair assumption, and given he says he has no idea how to bookkeep, I don't know if, say, all the student fees were paid upfront for the courses next month, but he hasn't taken out the instructor fees for next month because they haven't been paid yet. So it's very hard to judge whether he's actually got a solidly profitable business going - but to be fair, he does say "It’s not much, but it’s a start" so it's not like he's yelling "I HIT IT RICH GUYS".

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