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Comment by dejv | Hacker News Reader

I am doing maintenance programming for living (in Delphi 5), which usually consist of long list of small problems and changes: I am usually trying to do one or two things a day, generate new binaries and send it to customer so he have something new to play with. I am usually working on my own things till, say 5 or 6 and then do my daily work for my customer.

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Besides having the not-so-mainstream needed habilities, how do you manage to find that kind of (niche?) work?

I don't know, really. I do Delphi programming for 15 years now and it was quite mainstream back then, even now I occasionally do work for new clients (iOS, Rails, Machine Learning) and every 7 years or so I found another client whom I really like to work with and I just try to keep around. So I might find my client number 3 eventually and it is not going to be Delphi anymore. I usually work with like 2 new people each year.

Basically I do like to work with established, non-tech company that is around for long time, both companies are family owned with 50+ years in operation. I do respond to ads sometimes, got some referrals, bump to some odd guy at wine tasting and stuff like that.

Thanks for sharing your experience! :D

I had never think about this: "established, non-tech company that is around for long time"

Probably makes for a very good working enviroment, they may have a lot of technology to add to their business, and also they may value your work a lot more than a tech companies.

True, "established, non text company" sounds good.

I loved Delphi 7. Nowadays I do web dev, but it was just so fast to create a full-featured app with Delphi. Lazarus isn't there yet, unfortunately.

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