oldboyFX

Thanks but contracting / doing projects with a friend is hardly "owning a successful business".

You wouldn't call $5/hour folks on upwork "business owners". We're basically doing the same thing, selling our time for money.

> There's this terrible myth that I want to kill; that software engineering is a well-paid field. That's a lie.

For me it's been very profitable.

> Here's something pharmacists, account managers, farmers can afford: 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom houses near where they work.

I can easily afford that. Most software engineers I know can afford that.

> We can't. We're asked to live in apartments in Jersey and commute 45 minutes to Manhattan every day.

I don't live in NYC. I work from home or from an office 5min away from my home.

> Or we work remotely and are expected to take a smaller wage

I work remotely and earn more than most engineers in SF. I save 300-400% more.

> where the company can't wait to get big enough so that it can force us all to move.

I've never experienced this.

Moving to SF/NY makes sense if you're an ambitious, hard-working extrovert who knows how to sell and take advantage of those networks.

For ambitious introverts like myself, remote consulting/contracting feels like the best option.

A childhood buddy of mine moved to SF last year and got a job at a big corp downtown. He manages to save around $3,000/month as a senior developer with a ~$200k salary. No children, living with a partner who works as a teacher, and they're both quite frugal.

I work as a remote contractor from a small European town and am able to consistently save way more than that. I was saving more than that even in the past while working as a sub-contractor through platforms like Toptal.

How big of a salary would one need in order to save > $100k/year in SF (Single, small rental apartment, no car, average middle-class lifestyle)?

CS algorithm stuff you're talking about has little to do with web development in practical terms. It's mostly mathematics.

You're comparing two very different fields.

Try finding long-term engagements or find a well-paid remote job and become an employee instead of a freelancer.

This is coming from my experience working with mostly non-technical founders who are trying to turn their idea into a working product and start getting traction in the market:

What makes for a world-class software engineer is the ability to consistently deliver business value.

Learn about your company's market & business strategy. Be reliable. Effectively communicate with the non-technical stakeholders and be the bridge between technology and business goals. Make sure they're aware of pros and cons of every development related decision. Get used to saying no and pushing back on some of their ideas. Don't write code to solve problems that can be solved by an excel spreadsheet.

Your main goal is to build a successful business, writing clean code and using cool tech comes in secondary.

SEEKING WORK | Central Europe | REMOTE with frequent visits if needed

A high-grade self-managing team of two specialized in mapping out, designing, and delivering complex custom-built web applications on time.

We work with both established companies and passionate entrepreneurs to help them polish their ideas, turn them into state-of-the-art working products, and bring those products into the market.

We have a lot of positive experiences working with non-technical founders and guiding them through all stages of the product lifecycle.

Reach out and let's discuss your current challenges and future plans to see whether we're a good fit.

Read more: https://codetree.co/

Get in touch: ivor@codetree.co

Sample passion project (2015): https://movieo.me/movies

Preferred tech: React.js, es6+, webpack, npm, Yarn, Ruby on Rails, Elixir, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elastic, AWS, Capistrano, Docker

We're a high-grade self-managing team of two specialized in mapping out, designing, and delivering complex custom-built web applications on time.

We have a lot of positive experiences working with non-technical founders and guiding them through all stages of the product lifecycle.

Read more on http://codetree.co | sample project (2015) — https://movieo.me/movies

---

Location: Central Europe

Remote: Yes, since the beginning of our careers

Willing to relocate: No, but we can visit early and often

Email: ivor@codetree.co

---

IVOR REIC | FRONT-END, UX DESIGN, CONVERSION

Tech: HTML/CSS, Javascript (ES6+), React, Vue, d3, Webpack, npm and more

---

VEDRAN MARCETIC | BACK-END, DEVOPS, SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION

Tech: Ruby on Rails, Elixir, PostgreSQL, Elastic, Docker, AWS and more

---

Read more on http://codetree.co

I live in a small central EU country and know many locals who earn $100k+/year contracting. $200+k/year is also possible if you know how to position yourself and have a history of delivering high-grade products.

If you feel unable to find clients try platforms like codementorX. It's a relatively simple way to start earning triple figures and building your technical/communication skills.

I understand that these are outliers as most techies in my country make $30k/year doing java/php cubicle type work, just like most people in the US probably make ~$60k, not $400k as HN would sometimes have you believe.

However, most people (in any profession) are relatively content and not very good at what they do. If you think you're better than that and have evidence that backs your claims — you can definitely earn a lot more.

Folks, keep in mind that the value of code reviews, tests, etc. varies wildly from project to project.

- What kind of product are you building?

- How large is the project?

- How many developers are working on it?

- How experienced are the developers?

- How is the project being managed?

- Are there any hard deadlines?

- What is the budget? Burn-rate? Runway?

- Is the product established or are you just building the MVP and trying to validate market demand?

A two-person development team building an MVP with ever-changing requirements won't have the same workflow as an established company with a large development team and a bunch of existing users.

> The better way to think about it is that code review simply isn't optional.

Of course it's optional. Tests are optional too. There are many projects and situations where trading code quality for development speed makes sense. Especially when you're building MVP's, experimenting, or trying to validate market demand.

It's also often not worth it on small to medium sized projects where only one person is working on the codebase (think 3-person project: designer, front-end dev, back-end dev).

Larger projects with multiple people working on the same codebase are a completely different story. In those cases code reviews are valuable and highly recommended but still optional. The only thing that isn't optional is delivering a working product.

Best practices == great, dogma == not great.

Could you elaborate on this a bit; do you have any interesting real life examples of this mentality?

> What do you do when you want to update state in other places in response to a change in a component?

In 90% of the cases one of the parent components. Sometimes redux when the component tree goes super deep, or for things such as currentUser.

> How about if you want to make your component's state persistent (particularly when the component is external to your project)

What do you mean? Give me an example.

> Also, what do you do to generate state dumps for error reporting?

I don't generate state dumps for error reporting.

People use Redux way too often and think of features like time travel as nice-to-haves, when in reality they're the main reason why you'd want to use Redux in the first place.

Using Redux just to simply set and get data on every page is an overkill.

For the majority of applications making API calls directly from the component and storing data in the comp state is the way to go.

This is coming from someone who used redux excessively in the past.

This is pretty interesting but it's not immediately obvious whether it's an improvement over the current system.

Looks like one of those things you have to use for a couple of days before coming to a conclusion.

> Focus on delivering business value and creating the best END-USER experience.

I agree 100%. For most projects clean code comes secondary.

Moreover, what is clean and what is sloppy is extremely subjective. If the code doesn't produce too many bugs and is understandable enough for others to modify, great. That's all you need.

From my experience, the correlation between writing clean code and delivering business value isn't a thing. I would even go so far to say that people who really care about writing clean code often tend to ignore business goals. Additionally, I've worked with a few clean code/TDD enthusiasts whose output very often contained bugs.

NOTE: This is my personal and VERY anecdotal experience from working on mostly small to medium sized projects (up to 100k LOC).

Could you give us some context? What kind of project is it? How important is it? Are there any hard deadlines?

I will say that most web/iOS/android/similar developers rarely have to do anything more than simple division, multiplication, modulo etc when it comes to math.

Yes, many developers are good at math but I'd say that's mostly correlation, not causation.

NOTE: This is my personal, anecdotal experience.

A Croatian company built two fully electric hypercars with 1 motor per wheel and a torque vectoring system:

Rimac Concept One (the old model):

- Acceleration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT7KKxoAvvk

- Presentation at Stanford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FsrgJ66wUw

Rimac Concept Two (the new model, they plan to build ~150 of them):

- Geneva motors show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvjvYzzBh-k

- Company website: http://www.rimac-automobili.com/en/

I would say that many developers often sweat about minute technical details but completely ignore business goals. I'm involved in the local dev community and after meetups we often go for drinks. You almost never hear people talking about their company's successes, growth, strategy etc. It's all about the new hot tech they've recently had a chance to use. This mentality is reflected in the way they carry themselves and make development related decisions.

> In every single time, management outsourced and took the bid from the lowest priced company.

What was the initial bid of the Indian company that ended up costing $6 million dollars?

Stories like these make my blood boil. And to be fair it's not just Indian companies. There are plenty of EU/US based dev teams that consistently fail to deliver and the company still keeps paying them.

I wonder if management just can't deal with sunken costs or if someone is trying to steal money from their own company by making under-the-table deals with the development team.

I've had a couple of clients that dealt with "cheap" teams and wasted years of their life trying to get a product up and running. Taking them on felt like rescuing abused puppies from a shelter. Their eyes would light up every time they witnessed a working feature, no matter how simple it was.

It is simpler than we anticipated as well. I will say that many of our past clients had something in common — a recent ugly experience with one or more other development teams.

So far we have a history of delivering on what we promised (knock on wood), and we make sure to communicate that there is a very high chance that we will be the last team they will have to hire to solve their problem.

There's one more thing... A couple of years ago we created a passion project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8547351) that experienced quite a lot of traffic. I'm not sure how much influence (if any) this had on our ability to find clients, but a few of them did tell us how cool it was.

For the past couple of years our average engagement was full-time and 8+ months long, so we only needed to look for new customers once or maybe twice a year.

We took some time to create our consultancy website and make sure we're communicating our value and principles at least somewhat effectively.

It also helps having satisfied past clients who will speak well of you when someone calls them up.

We don't really do any speaking, blogging, traveling to conferences to network, or anything like that. I just advertise on a couple of websites like HN who wants to be hired, for hire subreddit, angel list, startupers.com, etc to let people know we're on the market looking for a new project. We usually find someone who is a good fit within a couple of weeks.

We are also involved in the local tech community and in the past we would get some projects through word-of-mouth, but those were at lower rates near the beginning of our careers.

You could also try platforms like codementorX and moonlightwork until you manage to connect with someone yourself.

There's another important point to make:

Im generalizing a bit here but if you write code it's relatively easy to find full-time long-term engagements. On the other hand if you're a strategic consultant you're going to spend most of your time blogging, networking, searching for leads, and selling.

$20k/week rate is nice but if you only bill 1 week per month you're still making the same annual income as a $5k/week software contractor.

The only difference is that you spend most of your time selling while the contractor spends most of their time engineering.

Like someone else in this thread said — pick your poison.

Author makes a valid point, but what about folks who actually like writing code (among other things)?

Here's what worked for me as a remote consultant who lives in a small central european country:

My partner and I currently position ourselves as "A high-grade self-managing team of two, specialized in mapping out, designing, and delivering complex custom-built web applications on time".

I suppose we might fall under the authors category of predictably positioned "opinionated developers".

Our ideal customer is a non-technical entrepreneur who needs someone to help them polish their idea, turn that idea into a high-grade working product, bring that product into the market, and start making traction and revenue.

I noticed that many entrepreneurs, especially non-technical folk, have a very difficult time building their first product — especially if it's a relatively complex piece of software. Most contractors are focused on using cool tech or writing clean code instead of helping people build successful businesses.

Our selling points are pretty basic: Learn about your client's business, be reliable, communicate effectively, deliver a great product on time. If needed also help with additional hires, validating PM-fit, marketing.

It's nothing revolutionary, but the fact that there are so many uninvolved developers on the market makes it very easy for us to find long-term engagements. The clients are happy and we're able to charge San Francisco-like rates. Just last year I put $1XX,XXX into my savings account.

We're in our late 20's so there's a long road ahead of us. Who knows, perhaps we'll get bored with programming in a couple of years.

But people should know that you CAN make very good money while still writing code most of the day.

Care to give us some context?

Also, take the doomsayers in this thread with a grain of salt. Some developers have bad experiences in their career and start thinking that all non-technical folks are just soul-sucking vampires, while often in reality they themselves are the source of the problems.

I would say that your main function is to effectively communicate with the co-founders and be the bridge between technology and business goals. Make sure they're aware of pros and cons of every development related decision. Get used to saying no and pushing back on some of their ideas. Your main goal is building a successful business, writing clean code and using cool tech comes in secondary.

SEEKING WORK | Central Europe | REMOTE with frequent visits

A high-grade self-managing team of two specialized in mapping out, designing, and delivering complex custom-built web applications on time.

We work with both established companies and passionate entrepreneurs to help them polish their ideas, turn them into state-of-the-art working products, and bring those products into the market.

We have a lot of positive experiences working with non-technical founders and guiding them through all stages of the product lifecycle.

Reach out and let's discuss your current challenges and future plans to see whether we're a good fit.

Read more: https://codetree.co/

Get in touch: ivor@codetree.co

Sample passion project (2015): https://movieo.me/movies

Preferred tech: React.js, es6+, webpack, npm, Yarn, Ruby on Rails, Elixir, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elastic, AWS, Capistrano, Docker

We're a high-grade self-managing team of two specialized in mapping out, designing, and delivering complex custom-built web applications on time.

We have a lot of positive experiences working with non-technical founders and guiding them through all stages of the product lifecycle.

Read more on http://codetree.co | sample passion project (2015) — https://movieo.me/movies

---

Location: Central Europe

Remote: Yes, since the beginning of our careers

Willing to relocate: No, but we visit early and often

Email: ivor@codetree.co

---

IVOR REIC | FRONT-END, UX DESIGN, CONVERSION

Tech: HTML/CSS, Javascript (ES6+), React, Vue, d3, Webpack, npm and more

https://www.linkedin.com/in/reicivor/

---

VEDRAN MARCETIC | BACK-END, DEVOPS, SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION

Tech: Ruby on Rails, Elixir, PostgreSQL, Elastic, Docker, AWS and more

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vedran-mar%C4%8Deti%C4%87-472363...

Folks at Shoutem poured years of effort into building this platform and it definately shows. The product is really solid and I recommend taking a better look at it if you're planning to build a mobile app.

I absolutely adore this. Watch out for the trolls though — they're coming.