Yes because it’s harder to land a stable job, it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.
Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
> it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.
I only have to convince one place - Google Ads. Plus bring in the "eyeballs" with my free app, but I have accomplished that more than once.
> Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Just one company in my case (actually several, but 90+% of the money comes from Google)
> Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
I have to be competitive enough to make a few thousand a month, and with my programming (and database design, and UX, and SRE etc.) skills, I have achieved that.
> And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
In the US you do.
> the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is less than $50 USD.
>Success rate: According to Zippia, only 0.5% of mobile apps are successful, with 9,999 out of 10,000 apps failing. Fyresite estimates that 99.5% of consumer apps and 87% of business apps fail.
Now imagine what would happen if more people took that advice?
For context, a new grad working in a major city in the US not on the west coast - even an ordinary CRUD enterprise framework developer - can make $70k- $80K a year.
What exactly is a “few thousand a month”? That’s a good side hustle. But even that’s not enough to support yourself
i just launched a website a month ago to sell sweet potatoes online and i ran a bunch of google ads. now i have a b2b revenue stream selling sweet potatoes to medical diagnostic test manufacturers.
please, with the original snark style from your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42632061, tell me more about how it is a waste of my time to find businesses to do business with my brand new business and instead just find a stable job?
hard to debate these things with people who are born and bred into “slave for someone else” mentality and think like $350k is great salary one should be happy with slaving away at some cubicle in the Bay or at home 12 hours per day… :)
America is great at making sure most people think this way…
I wake up in the morning, role out of bed, walk over to my home office, shut down my computer after 8 hours and get on with my life.
I don’t have to worry about finding customers, I have unlimited paid PTO and I plan to take 30 days this year not including 10 paid holidays.
My wife and I travel a lot and we did the digital nomad thing for a year.
If the company decides they don’t want to employ me anymore, I find another job like I have done 10 times in my career including last year and the year before. Both times it took three weeks.
I don’t live in the Bay Area , I live in a nice condo with access to 5 pools, a private to the condo association fishing lake and two gyms, bars and restaurants all within walking distance in state tax free Florida.
i have all this (though i only work 4-6 hours a day when selling my time to other people), and i also have side income selling sweet potatoes and it didn't take much of my precious free time away. currently, it's earning me a similar hourly rate as my development rate (senior developer/lead developer/architecting infrastructure, etc). you are correct that it doesn't replace my income, but that was never the point. that income will help me weather any job loss etc, but more importantly, against your advice, i can potentially grow the business to a point that it replaces my income. and if you really want to be like, "that will never pay your bills," then that is 100% false if i put all of that income into stocks and the money grows to a point twenty years from now that i can use that money to pay my bills. and i'm also able to find a job quickly if i need to, just like you. which i guess, based on your experience, one can be extremely shortsighted person and still find a job quickly.
I have a years worth of expenses in in an HYSA outside of my retirement accounts that will help me “weather a job loss” and a set of skills that I’m 100% sure that someone will give me a job or contract before my money runs out. I work full time for a consulting company now - and I’ve worked in cloud consulting for almost five years including three and half working at AWS.
I have been working professionally for 28 years across 10 jobs. I assure you I’m not “short sighted”.
i'm happy for you and glad you figured out a way to navigate this rough finanical world. but we live in a different world now. i'm 33 and that strategy just will not be as reliable in the future. it's a losing strategy imo, at least for what i want out of life. what works for me might not work for you. telling other people that their approach is wrong is very shortsighted.
I mentored an intern when I was at AWS and worked with a few other new grads and continued to mentor the returning intern after they graduated.
After three or four years in the industry, if they suck up everything they can and take advantage of every opportunity, they will be set.
The same is true to a much lesser extent on the enterprise dev. I tell people on that side just not to be a “ticket taker” and volunteer to have larger more impactful products - “don’t be the bullet. Be the gun”
i've been mentored by dudes in their 50s who think they are providing a good to the world by mentoring young people (aka dad energy), then later received real mentorship from folks my age and a decade older than me. most likely they took what you said with a grain of salt and realized that you are out of touch.
It’s “dad energy” that you are doing. I’m telling people to “grind leetcode and work for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) and to learn how to pass system design and behavioral interviews and pointing them to resources.
Whose advice is going to lead to better outcomes? Doing drop shipping from Ali baba and selling sweet potatoes on line or mine?
While I haven’t had to pass a coding interview at BigTech, I have had to pass system design and behavioral interviews at one and I have conducted a couple at BigTech.
I’m telling them to work to demonstrate skills with working at increasing “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”.
i wasn't suggesting that you were out of touch with technology, i was talking about career/life strategies. i believe that what worked for your generation isn't as sure a thing for my generation, and building various small revenue streams is a better approach. this is how i see it from my point of view as a younger person observing the world around me and where i fit in. a lot of people tell me that your way is right for me, but i disagree. a corporate 9-5 makes me want to kms, not exaggerating. i think we have fundamentally different worldviews and that's ok.
> My latest project I’m leading is a Kubernetes + Generative AI project.
we are no different. i'm leading a project to deploy an etl pipeline on azure kubernetes right now.
> was talking about career/life strategies. i believe that what worked for your generation isn't as sure a thing for my generation
My generation for the most part never will work for a FAANG or get equivalent compensation because we aren’t going to grind leetcode and do what it takes.
I would never have gotten into one if it weren’t for the very thin needle I threaded and I definitely wasn’t going to sell my big house in the burbs to move to Seattle to be an SDE (what the recruiter originally suggested).
There are plenty of people who post here who are under 30 and will make more than I will ever make. I’m not bitter. Like I said at 50, I can afford to purposefully prioritize lifestyle over chasing money and eschew opportunities to make more.
My Generation didn’t have the chance of graduating from college and getting a job making an (inflation adjusted) almost quarter million working for BigTech or the equivalent company back then. Many in my generation came in during the dot com boom and it took years for us to recover and some never did (I didn’t suffer any ill effects from the crash).
From looking at LinkedIn, none of them are or have ever worked for a company paying as much as my former coworkers at BigTech are making 3-4 years out of college.
The generation graduating post 2010-2012 has way more opportunities to make a lot of money.
gen x in tech are some of the wealthiest people in the world. y'all are the new kings.
i graduated high school during the great financial crisis. i remember being near done with college at the university of mississippi when i visited birmingham, alabama and walked through the occupy encampments. i didn't make enough money to contribute to retirement savings til 2019 when i was in my late 20s. your generation has experienced unprecedented stock market gains over your peak earning years. i'm not hopeful that these gains will continue through my peak earning years therefore i prioritize finding creative ways to generate income before it's too late after being complacent with my fat ass tech paycheck sitting at my standup desk and drinking my kombucha with the wool over my eyes while the ai writes my code.
And you were on the opposite side of the bimodal distribution of comp within the industry from 2012-2019.
The top end of enterprise dev salaries for seniors is around that of entry level salaries at BigTech and adjacent companies.
That’s not meant to be an insult. I was on that side until I was 46 and now at 50 I’m back on the very top end of enterprise dev. But it’s still somewhere between entry level and mid level at BigTech and closer to entry level.
The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.
If you graduated in 2008, yes it was a shit show. But that means by 2012, BigTech comp and enterprise dev comp started really diverging. The stock market has been gangbusters since 2012. But it stagnated most of the 200x’s.
If you had jumped on the BigTech wave in 2012 you would have been set.
By that time, relocating wasn’t an option for me because I was 38, just gotten married and had two (step)kids.
i didn't start working in the industry until 2019.
> The advice I’m giving is to stop wasting time on a side hustle and do whatever it takes to get on the BigTech side of compensation if you want to maximize your income.
this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now. nonetheless, we are not talking about maximizing income here, we're talking about surviving in a changing world with a tougher job market for devs. let me remind you of the grandparent orginal comment that started this all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42631755 that person is right.
> i didn't start working in the industry until 2019.
Yeah for an entry level developer getting in the industry right before Covid hit had to suck.
> this was good advice 5 years ago, even 2-3 years ago, if your goal is to maximize income. but it's out of date now.
The entire market sucks now. But BigTech is still hiring as well as the enterprise dev side. You might as well shoot for the moon and settle if you must.
i believe that what worked for your generation isn't as sure a thing for my generation, and building various small revenue streams is a better approach.
100% this.
this is how i see it from my point of view as a younger person observing the world around me and where i fit in
that sounds fucking amazing!!!!! I think the main “disagreement” we have is that I truly believe there are too many people thinking that FAANG-driven career is fullfilling and something that should be taught to new kids that are coming into our industry. I am now and will spend the rest of my career pleading with them to choose a more fullfilling and rewarding career
If I were 22 in 2025 instead of being 22 in 1996, I would definitely do what I needed to do to exchange as much money as possible for my labor instead of toiling away at an enterprise dev job making $70K a year when instead I could be graduating college making $170K to $200k+.
I did do my bid in a FAANG working remotely between the ages of 46-49 and I saw first hand the doors it opens and the experience that college grads had that they couldn’t get anywhere else,
Hell, it open doors for me. There is no way I could have found jobs as quickly as I did both last year and the year before without it.
Also even at 46-49 I learned a lot that has helped me since I left.
On another note: after my youngest graduated, my wife and I sold everything we owned and after traveling for a year, we settled down in our vacation home (a unit in a condotel we own).
We rent it out when we decide to travel for an extended period of time. The “hotel” part of the condotel takes care of everything.
Are you making at least $80K a year? Again that’s what an entry level CRUD developer can make. They would be much better off preparing for interviews than selling sweet potatoes on line
Actually I am. When I get off of work, I don’t think about work. I am either exercising, hanging out with my family or friends, traveling (I work remotely and I could very well be working during the day and doing something at night in a different city).
This discussion was about creating a business instead of working for someone else.
I bet you that you could make more money by spending your time doing interview prep and changing jobs than you could selling potatoes on the side.
btw spending time marketing yourself is much more effective than interview prep in my experience. i got every single one of my jobs because i know how to sell myself. all the jobs i've gotten did not include an algorithmic interview. i can only think of one algorithmic interview i've done in my career, and it was early in my career and helpful to learn my knowledge gaps as a mostly self-taught developer. i did not spend any time doing "interview prep" after that, but simply learned the CS fundamentals that i was bad at. that has helped me so far. not 1337 code or whatever the fuck.
but that doesn't matter. i work 4-6 hours a day selling my time at a high hourly rate. this gives me more free time to do all the things i want to do. i chill hard as fuck. walk 90 minutes a day, sell sweet potatoes on the internet, grow my food, write books, and work on my saas app.
i recommend doing this if you are like me. don't work a 9-5, unless you use it to help get you to this point.
Check my other comments on this submission - I got into BigTech without doing any coding too - AWS ProServe.
But I am self aware enough to know that isn’t a repeatable process that most people can do anymore than “selling potatoes online”.
I don’t have to “market myself”. My job at AWS fell into my lap more or less then after leaving, with that on my resume and LinkedIn profile along with my other experience, people reach out to me. I don’t spend time trying to be a “thought leader” online.
actually selling sweet potatoes. if you would listen!
> I don’t spend time trying to be a “thought leader” online.
i have 139 followers on twitter. i don't tweet about tech. "marketing" is simply one html document on the public internet that clearly communicates to technical and non-technical people what you can do for them. not what skills you have.
1. Sales = learn to knock on a 100 doors to get one sale.
2. Marketing = learn to communicate your value prop to specific companeis and hiring managers.
3. Delviery = learn to deliver products/projects end to end with all the management that goes in between.
If you know all 3 you'll never be in a position where you don't have income.
It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now ... don't just do a 8 hour job and go home and watch tv.
Keep trying to sell your services to others ... at least 2-3 hours after work to other companies/startups/other industries. Its a big world - smeone needs your services - your survival depends on finding those people nad packaging your skilsl so that they buy.
time-management and sleep deprivation, should write a book with that title
0600 - 0900 Your project
0900 - 1600 Corporate job
1700 - 2100 Family & free time (you need to learn how to make the most of it so that you can recharge as well)
2100 - 2300 The low-CPU low demanding part of managing a business paired with some interesting background content goes here
Yeah it’s pretty simple. Just teach your kids to walk and the importance of no sleep interruptions, then they can get themselves to kindergarten and make their own food. /s
Considering the schedule has you stopping one task and one time and starting another exactly seven hours later, that’s not seven hours of sleep. Most people don’t stop a task and immediately fall asleep, or wake up and can start working. That gap means less than seven hours of sleep. And for many people seven hours isn’t enough. Sleep deprivation means not having enough quality sleep, it’s not a single number which can be applied to everyone all the time equally.
It's a rough schedule. It's not work to the minute of 11:00pm then start unwinding. You might be pretty unwound by 10:30 and then answer a couple of emails before making a hot drink at 10:45 and calling it a night. It seems a bit silly to overly argue how that can't possibly describe a full night's sleep, when it clearly can.
It's not like saying that. 7 hours is very similar to 8 hours, and lots of people don't even sleep 8 hours (I don't).
What's the point of wasting time with a very poor analogy? It's actually like saying if 2200 calories is a normal day of food, 1925 calories is not like starvation.
Some people will criticize but I follow a similar time management schedule.
It was only when I've built my first startup that many of those skills had to be learned and to be quite frank, I only wish to have started earlier rather than being throw into for making enough money.
Nowadays that schedule is accurate and I'm a family person with two young kids in the house. I just don't wake so early but that is mostly because I keep working on my personal projects until midnight~1 AM.
The good thing is that I'm no longer so attached with my employer company. Mismanagement, demotion or those issues don't affect me so personally because my professional value is no longer just defined by the company where I work. My work outside company hours is valued by many others, albeit not profit-driven it serves as a good backup whenever falling into unemployment situations.
My “backup” is not working 40 hours a week, then working on a side project and sacrificing time with my family and friends, not having time to exercise and travel and just relax.
My backup is an always up to date resume with an up to date skill set, and a longer career document, a years worth of expenses in a HYSA in addition to retirement savings, low fixed expenses, and a decent network.
I figure in a year someone , somewhere will give me a job or contract. While my wife hasn’t had to work since 2020 at 44 when I was 46, she has kept her CDL so if push comes to shove, she can get a job with the school system as a bus driver for the benefits while I build up an independent consulting clientele.
You probably don't have kids. Or if you do, that's really low amount of time and overall pretty horrible long term life quality setup, I guess then wife picks up most of family chores. Maybe your career is stellar, added value as a parent and (not only) emotional anchor for your kids... not so much.
Where is commute? Corporate jobs in IT are not 8 hours sharp and ciao, there is also lunch break to count in. Also 23-6 means 7 hours of sleep, too little for many. And so on.
Having a wife who is working takes some of the financial pressure off.
My children were four and eight when I started my business and it wasn't a problem at all. In fact I would say it made many things easier because I had a more flexible schedule.
Yes is just that easy. You don’t actually have to have anything to sell. If that’s all it takes, why do only 1 in 10 startups succeed and that isn’t even counting all of the people who are struggling in obscurity.
> It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now
That 4 years number sounds like an ass pull. What’s your source? Everyone is different and some of those skills come naturally to some people, so I sincerely doubt that number is even close to universal.
Honestly, your whole suggestion seems straight out of one of those generic self-help scams that ignore the realities of life and always blame the user: “You gotta do the thing. If you’re not successful it’s because you didn’t want it enough, not because we’re dispelling the same dated advice to everyone”.
Note I don’t think that’s what you’re doing, you’re not selling anything. I’m just saying I question the helpfulness and quality of the advice.
Anyway, the real advice is not to always preemptively work a second job. It's use your high engineering salary for as long as you have it to save, save, save and invest, invest, invest. This is how you shield yourself.
Because statistically it’s going to fail and even if you do make some side income, it’s not going to substitute even for an entry level enterprise dev job.
Also, the time one poster was spending “selling potatoes online” (literally not trying to be funny), he would be better off, spending that time doing interview prep and job hopping making more money.
You can take these numbers for YC investments and draw your own conclusion.
> Also, the time one poster was spending “selling potatoes online” (literally not trying to be funny), he would be better off, spending that time doing interview prep and job hopping making more money.
this made me lol. you are being a dickhead so i will ignore that and defend myself in good faith.
i actually job hopped this year so i can make more money while spending less time selling my work to other people. it's going well for me, so good that i had enough free time to launch an ecommerce website selling sweet potatoes. this project was an experiment to see if there was a market for direct to consumer food and also a project to learn about shopify and google ads (for other business ideas which you frown upon so you might not see the value in this). it was also an attempt to work closer with farmers because farming and food is an interest of mine, and i'm from where they grow a lot of sweet potatoes.
so that time was spent learning and doing something interesting to me intellectually, which is never a waste of time. 20 hours of my free time (which, to remind you, i have extra free time to do this because of my overall career strategy where i earn a high hourly rate so i can work less hours each week) resulted in learning new skills. with 10 more hours of my time i've learned about food safety, organic regulations, shipping, managing physical inventory and cash, as well as learning about our food distribution system (which is totally fucked since there is a market for direct to consumer sweet potatoes). not to mention, the time spent has earned me over $100/hour.
can you please remind me, snarkily, again, why this was a waste of my time?
All that other time watching TV and commenting on YC can be used to learn to run a business.
Also the skills you'll learn by starting a very tiny biz - marketing, sales, resilience, communication, people-skills and delivery - will help you sell yourself at present and future job opportunities.
Also not everyone is in tech or wants to be in tech. /smh
This will not work if the status quo actually changes to a degree that a significant portion of developers have to do this. It'd very quickly saturate the people willing to give you a chance.
This was a good advice 10-2 yrs ago, but going forward? We'll have to see, but my gut says this will become just as likely to succeed as becoming a successful influencer... By which I mean that a few will occasionally make it/succeed, but it'll only be such a low fraction of the people trying for it that it rounds to 0.0%. and the ones succeeding will generally have been able to leverage an opportunity that most trying the same never had.
(Not to discourage people from trying - without an attempt you won't even have the chance to grasp such an opportunity. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of an observer)
> If you code, you should be building a business on the side.
This is incredibly far from being the universal claim you say it is. 99% of software developers work for someone else, not at their own business, and most are perfectly happy.
By all means, building a business is great for many reasons, sometimes including financial reasons, and you should do it if you want to. But not wanting to is not an "excuse" and you shouldn't feel pressured to do so.
I think OP is saying that it's more of an insurance policy than something to make you happy. If you asked any software dev 5 years ago what their career security looked like, I'm sure most would tell you that they feel extremely confident. A lot has changed in 5 years. Being good at one thing and expecting that to support you for the rest of your life is a risky strategy in the fast-changing world we live in. Tech people felt immune from that, but the facade is starting to crack.
100%. people wanna blame companies for laying people off, doing leetcode, having ATS systems that don't parse resumes correctly.
if people realized - aimed at software engineers - that the same company you're applying for - someone went through the pain of creating the initial product, marketing it, selling it. I'm sure you can do the same - maybe not at the same level but at 80%.
unlike in zero-sum games - real life you can have multiple winners - 80% will get you there.
I do wonder about that. If you had it in you to start a business then I doubt you would have been sitting around waiting for the next downturn to do it.
Especially if you are early in your career and its becoming harder to land a stable job.
you need to learn how to market your skills, get clients and deliver.
No more excuses to sit in a job and do nothing. This is going to be critical to survive.
Eventually I think companies are going to be much smaller entities than they once were which means your have to really buid your own biz.