Ask HN: Should I climb the software engineering Ladder or build a side hustle?

Your question is too vague to understand. So, instead I will invent an appropriate question for you to ask and then answer that question.

How do I know I am achieving higher performance compared to my peers or capabilities they cannot perform?

Once you have enough experience you don't have to guess at this. You will know how to measure your own performance with numbers. For example you will know the last 50 times you completed a given task it took about x number of hours to complete. You can then look at your peers to determine if you are slower or faster and you know how long it will take you to perform the same action into the future.

You will also see that your peers are stupid and blindly fail in the same ways over and over or you won't ever see this because you are that peer failing in the same way over and over. Once you solve for that and fully automate away that specific stupidity you will know you have attained some capability vastly superior to your peers.

If you cannot do either of those then you are absolutely not ready to go out on your own.

Its a form of Dunning Kruger.

First of all, how do you know you are good? If you are guessing (or imagining) you aren't good. This implies you need something to measure. Secondly, how do you know what to measure? If you don't know what to measure you have no idea whether you are good. You could be good, but you have no ability to determine this. Third, if you do know what to measure you need to know how to measure it. If you don't know how to conduct those measures this is where reality begins to set in, because you know enough to determine your competency but not enough to qualify it. Finally, if you know how to conduct such measures you have to determine their validity and that just takes experience, such a various forms of competing measures.

If a person can make these measured determinations with a few as 2 years experience then they are likely excellent. Excellence isn't at question though. Its the ability to appropriately determine excellence that matters.

Dunning Kruger is typically the opposite of gatekeeping. Its where under qualified people believe they are better performers than other people determine them to be. That distortion of reality is often on full display in embarrassing fashion to those making the determination and third party observers. If gatekeeping were in effect under qualified people would not be provide these opportunities to embarrass themselves.

My current conclusion is that I should do side hustle. Because at work, opportunities don't simply come to me because I'm good. Opportunities don't come to me, because my manager lose an internal turf war to another manager, i.e. there are a lot of factors out of my control, even my technical skills are strong.

Secondly, if I put all my energies into the work, I will be tied too much to the technologies used by the work, and I will miss the opportunity to grow myself.