Ask HN: How do you earn your money?

I bet you didn't expect that.

1) does the company provide a product or service that makes a world a better place? (e.g. Nest, Tesla would qualify)

2) are my potential colleagues great people that I will enjoy spending time with and learning from? (it's miserable to work for miserable people)

3) will the company pay me a market wage such that I can provide for myself and my family

Ideally I'd settle for some junior dev type of position with reasonable(read: low/acceptable) salary, but without college degree and living in Europe, but not EU (thus no work permits for those), there's small chance of that happening - I've tried and eventually gave up on that...

Oh and today I got sued by govt for failing to send in (literally) an empty paper for my previous company and I'll (most likely) have to pay an equivalent of one month american-level-salary fine. So I've got that going on in my life too, which isn't really the best situation you want to be in if you earn your money like I do...

I don't even know why I'm writing this, I don't have any tips or suggestions for you, and even if I had you can see from the above that I'm probably not the best person to give out advice. And I understand what you're saying but... things could be worse.

You at least have options: build dreams for yourself, or for others. There's nothing stopping you (as far as I can tell) from working on both your projects and/or for someone else.

As for your feeling about your situation, I think there is a pretty clear pyramid scheme whereby older people get younger people to build their pyramids for them. The idea is that people with a lot of experience lead, and provide their workers an opportunity to gain experience. I think that's partly true, but it's equally true that there are elements of human nature, ageism, and taking advantage. Perhaps it's just positioning - whether it's the older leveraging the younger, the more vigorous leveraging the more passive, or risk-takers leveraging the risk-averse, no matter how you rationalize it, in the end you will find a small number of people in a position where they're either making huge amounts of money or expecting to, and a large number of people just making whatever the ordinary wage is for their job.

and I also hate getting delayed results, when I code at my day job, I see results immediately, although it's gradual, it's still a direct feedback to my actions, I put code, I get working software, I do a code review, I get immediate feedback and quickly implement it.

So unless you are ready to do the business side of things (or know someone who is good at it and likes to do it) then doing someone else's dream is probably a good choice. As long as they pay you what you deserve. (how do you know what you deserve? take the highest salary you find for your role in indeed.com or glassdoor / payscale, and ask for it in your current / next job). There is no other way to know.

But if you are OK with delayed gratification, have a LOT of patience, are willing to speak with customers, do sales, experiment, do follow up calls, accept failure again and again and still try to make it work by changing one aspect (AKA pivot). If you are willing to lose some money to gain money later (e.g. pay for some failed ads just to know the click through rate and validate an idea), and if you are OK working your a off with potentially zero gain for a long time, then you should probably start your own business (even if you don't have an idea, find someone who does, or take an existing idea and do it better)

Even doing freelancing can work, all you need is someone (can be you) who can bring customers, and someone (can be you) who can keep those customers happy in a good hourly rate without too many non billable hours.

My advice to my younger self - try it while you can, it's harder for me now with a family to stop it all and start my own thing.

You always can do the side project thing, but don't expect it to become your main income source without either a lot of work or a lot of luck. I had a few side projects some of them made money, but it was a lot of work to maintain.

Look at the successful startups out there, yes there is a lot of execution and technical talent that drives their success, but I say this is not the main reason they are where they are, it falls down to ability to get users to come and ability to get users to stay.

I see those companies fall into one of 2 types - either they have a very high growth curve (the "Viral" / network effect startups) which are statistically very hard to re-create (getting users is REALLY, REALLY, HARD, a single Show HN in the front page + a techcrunch review + good SEO is not enough. You also need people to keep returning to your product, and tell more people about it) these include free products like Facebook, or market places like AirBNB - they need lot's of users to make it work

The other type is startups that sell something (product / service, one time or subscription), in this case you can have revenue from day 1, so I would recommend this route, but it is known to have a very slow ramp up [0]

As popular to say, YMMV... but this is my personal view on this.

[0] http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...