Ask HN: How do you earn your money?

Having done many different things I'm currently quite happy "building things to make others wealthy whilst (I) earn (bit more than) £30,000 a year". The reason I like it is because I'm surrounded by managers and other people who's job it is to run interference for me and make sure I can really focus as much as possible on what I find interesting and not be distracted by the necessities of trying to run a profitable company. All I have to do all day is hack and solve problems.

A qualified developer with basic social skills and hygiene habits should have no fear of a full time job's lack of control. Yes, we go through minor hiccups in the hiring market every decade or so, but even in those, all of my friends who were actually good had no issues if they wanted to move jobs.

Get good at development, if that's your thing. It will help you whether you do a startup or work for someone else. (It's also a lot more fun, IMO.)

I'm 19 and living in Sydney, Australia.

I ignored High School and taught myself javascript and web standards instead from about the age of 12. During this time I also did 8 years of ballet, contemporary and jazz dancing. I also played the guitar and double bass semi-professionally and I sang in a Cathedral Choir ( even sang for the pope a couple of times even though I am 0% religious ). I also travelled across most of Europe and Asia ( it helps that I speak fluent Ukrainian and Russian ). I did a bit of freelance when I was about 16 for a couple of places. This experience was probably the most valuable part of my career to date. Learning how to pitch work to someone that doesn't know you, learning how to manage your own time correctly and learning how to talk the client speak are things that restrict many developers later on ( i've found ).

I started work a week before my HighSchool final exams were over as a full-time junior front-end Developer for a small agency that was quite far from where I lived at the time. I think it was particularly good for me since they had a wonderful culture and though my title was 'junior front-end' I was actually the only developer there that knew anything about front-end and I was able to plunge into the deep-end with every project, and really own the front-end. I also learnt to work closely with designers and really care for that relationship there. Another thing that is so often missing.

Interestingly enough, that agency ended up firing everyone and doing something new about 7 months after I started which sucked ( I was absolutely gutted at the time ). Luckily, I had built a pretty good portfolio there of work where I could point at the front-end and say 'that was all me'. I ended up applying for about 5 different places that I particularly liked.

The first place I interviewed at was actually wonderful. Great culture, reasonable expectations and a great work ethic and care for perfection ( this was my ultimate need ). Funnily enough, they liked me just as much; so much so in fact that they hired me in the interview to start the next day as a contractor until they got all of the documents in order to make me full time.

3 months in, I changed a bit as a person. Still very much a developer in mentality, I felt closed off from the decision making process and a lot like I was just a 'resource' rather than a person with ideas. The agency was in a 'transitional' period and the corporate side struggled with integrating properly with the newly acquired 'dev' side. Anyway, after 3 months I decided I needed to change something. I stopped being a developer and began working there as a 'Creative' ( this is still my position there ). This was actually pretty great since I have a great passion for marketing as I do for development. In this role I my main duty is as a 'concept' resource in regards to big integrated campaigns. I spend most of my time researching and writing up ways that the dev side can be best applied to the corp. side or drawing up concept art for products or ideas.. It's a pretty fun gig. Aside from this I do a bunch of random sub-contractor work for different people. This allows me to continue flexing my dev side which I feel is just as important as everything else.

It's hard to say i've been that successful yet, because I still have so much I feel I need to do; but it's definitely liberating earning a good $80k AUD at 19 after everyone told me that I wouldn't be able to do anything with my life unless I went to uni.

I am also working on a product in my other spare time ( if it even exists ) that I know actually has a market. Trying to figure out if I want to drop everything and pursue it or possibly even license it and raise some funding and employ someone to build it for me. Tough decisions.

Down the road, I will build an Agency that bridges the gap between digital innovation and the needs of Ad/Marketing Agencies ( I have a huge underlying passion for this ).

The nice thing about just being an employee is you get a lot more free time to enjoy life. Yes, there is life outside of software for some of us!

Also, way less risk.

I work for big companies, and the chance of getting laid off is about 0%, while the chance of an annual raise and performance bonus is 100%.

Not saying it's the best way to go, but it works for me.

I work as a salaried employee. This is largely because I'm neither good at marketing & networking nor have a tremendous desire to be, as well as having lived for a long time in a place with no meaningful tech industry.

I would like to operate my own side business, but to date those projects have demanded more time than I have available.

In the long term, I'd like to obtain a PhD and consult in areas related to that, working remotely.

I also want to remark that, given careful choice of employers & their IP agreements, there's nothing stopping you from pursuing your dreams at home. Your salary might be paid for someone else's dream to come true, but it's also funding your life and dreams.

Every now and then a startup hits the jackpot - say, every one out of a few hundred. As a non-founder, you probably won't become wealthy this way. Even founders get messed over a good deal. This is well documented and understood. So if your dream is to become wealthy, being an employee developer is not the way to go. You will need to gain significant equity. If your dream is to build amazing product, you probably need to look for a midsize company who does that sort of thing but isn't large enough to have seized up into cash cow milking.

At the end of the day (i.e., when you look back on it in ten years), very few businesses are amazing, innovative, and tremendous: they exist to provide services & goods to help other people's lives get along all right & maybe improve their lives a bit.

final ninja-edit:

This is not a bad thing, to do good work for reasonable pay. There is great dignity in doing so, regardless of whether you make someone else rich or yourself rich, or simply holding a steady state in the world. Being able to provide for yourself & yours, giving back more than you take, is an honorable thing not to be despised.