greybeardednyc

How do you generate income - income enough to survive?

- rifd 1/23 after 13 yrs - 25 yrs exp

How do you generate enough income to survive?

Not everyone has friends or family capable of helping them… or doing so without it significantly impacting their family/friends ability to avoid falling into the same situation.

Additionally, temporarily is fine when you have prospects to lift you from having to resort to relying on the generosity of friends/family but for those that don’t, it’s difficult to ask for help (don’t want to burden those you “love”), and difficult to provide any (“want to help but can’t afford it”)

I definitely get the whole “web3” is useless argument for a lot of the cases it’s been proposed but like any new technology I think it may find valid use cases somewhere down the line.

One of the few uses for which I am interested is “web3” identity - being able to keep ownership of my identity/credentials. Using, for example, a wallet to sign a message proving I own an address, I can build apps that don’t require me to store any passwords (and not rely on a “trusted” 3rd party to do so either). My app can just store the wallet address (like a username).

To build on this, if that wallet has data associated with it (“assets” it holds) for example, an ENS name, my app can pull that data directly from the contract onchain - instead of showing a public key I can show the users chosen display name, avatar, etc

I’m an old school dev and I wrote off “crypto” for many of the same reasons a lot of you have stated but I have realized there are some interesting cases that could emerge from its usage. Zk (zero knowledge proofs) as a means of reducing the amount of PII data that needs to be exposed to random parties also seems to have some good use cases.

Alas “value” aka money being associated with the usage/tokens makes the landscape much harder to navigate and much more prone to exploitation.

As I read your post I recall having come to much of the same conclusions (also have a similar non traditional/institutional history - over 20yrs writing/building stuff).

I went as far as to enroll in an interview prep course to try and “freshen” up for an attempt to move from my current role/comp to a faang.

The trainer was an ex google guy who had done a ton of interviews over the years so I took the opportunity to ask him… why?

Why is the knowledge of how to implement an esoteric algorithm that I would almost never have a need to use for the job/role relevant. Why is memorization of these implementations so critical? I get why it’s useful to understand the high level ideas/approaches but why do we need to be able to recite their implementations like the gospel?

After much prodding he admitted that it ultimately boils down to the companies using these practices trying to find an “unbiased” means of measuring a candidate. People tend to be terrible judges of character so having some standard questions and expected solutions gives the company at least some hope of providing a way to interview and hire at scale and reduce bias (slightly).

I get it now, there are (were?) so many applicants and so many interviewers that they had no time (or confidence) to try and get to know the applicants and their specific skills or what values they could add. They basically decided to punt and choose people who take the time to learn the gospel - these folks would either end up being good developers/engineers or more commonly getting put on review and fired - but they showed they had the capable to learn whatever might be needed.

I get it, I do, ultimately decided that I’m too old for the politics of the process (and that’s kinda by design) and I’d be better served ghosting comps that require this sort of thing going forward.

- just a grey bearded dev

I’m guessing this is just a way for Elon to double down on his signaling of “cost cutting” to help hold the stock price right?

Id suspect there are lots of managers involved in things other than managing devs at Twitter but love to see the commentary from the HN twitter engs here

Oh and as a quick follow up, it’s probably best not to give up any equity at all (aka not raise funds - borrow if really needed but otherwise bootstrap) if you can.

If you really believe there is a revenue generating business there the worst thing you could do is give equity away at a value far below what you believe it’s worth

I’m probably missing something here but usually a “business” looks to fundraising because it has some goal/need which requires money it does not currently have.

Usually this goal/need has some eventual outcome of generating revenue (whether directly or indirectly) and in doing so, paying its investors back.

Are you asking how to “raise funds” for some specific purpose or because you’ve built “an app” that uses “hot” tech to see how many thirsty “investors” you can get to send you money?

I’m not necessarily saying you can’t “raise funds” just for the sake of doing so (without any clear use for the funds and without any revenue) but unless you have experience/reputation for building valuable businesses/ip, connections to cc’s/capital who trust you’ll make good on their investments, id be kinda surprised if you get any checks.

That said, do lmk if you score - I’ve got a retired mining rig turned gpu farm for SD running with custom (locally trained/tuned) models as well as all of the 4chan/Reddit/etc ones as I’m sure many HNers have :)

Best of luck