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)
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.