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Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?

#71

Post by narcraft »

gtsop wrote: post #33
dusted wrote: post #23

I guess you already know, and you're asking exactly because you know.. But programming does not create value, it creates programs, which may create value.. Programming is a skill sure, but it does not create value, it creates programs. Programs may create value, so, the valuable skill is not really being able to create a program, but being able to find some problem, whose solution creates value. Programming may be re…

> Programming is a skill sure, but it does not create value, it creates programs. Economic value is created when a human being spends man-hours to produce an artifact that other people need and thus are willing to pay for. Programming is a form of working, as is designing, researching, building, plumbing etc. The artifact of programming (ie the program) is the value you create by working. Programs do not by themselve…

Since you said "economic value" specifically, I'd have to say that the man-hours are only one of the factors that could determine value. Strictly speaking, economic value is determined by supply and demand. Man-hours are a cost and help determine the shape and position of the supply curve of a given good or service, but the demand side is almost completely independent of how much effort it takes to produce something. Instead the demand curve will be shaped the culmination of individuals' marginal utilities (the perceived value of the next additional unit of a thing) for the good or service in question. On a more philosophical note, value is entirely subjective, but the equilibrium price model is compatible with value's subjectivity and gives us a powerful paradigm for understanding why some things are more "valuable" than others

Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?

#73

Post by cryptica »

It's quite unusual to find agency work which rewards good programming. Most agency work involves adding unnecessary complexity and bugs to keep the client coming back for fixes... Then after some time the client becomes dependent on the agency... At that point you can take longer and longer to implement features to bill more and more hours. It rewards bad code. Most software agencies sell labour hours, not quality software; so they optimize for maximizing lock-in (via poorly written code and/or contracts which allow them to retain ownership over the code); this later allows them to maximize billable hours.

I've worked for companies as a software engineer where the CEO insisted on using a third-party agency to host and develop part of their software... When it would have been trivial to develop everything in-house and to host it ourselves on Amazon EC2... I told them it was a bad idea but most of these CEO types are too dumb to understand... I since learned to keep my mouth shut and let them make their mistakes. It's not my business. My goal since then is also to maximize my billable hours.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?

#75

Post by Retric »

karpierz wrote: post #53
malthuswaswrong wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A penny saved is a penny earned. Many programmers are employed to automate tasks and reduce labor requirements. That adds value to the organization. You are splitting hairs by saying "the program" vs "the programming". You are a wizard that casts spells to make people's jobs easier. What exactly that means depends on the management. Once a job becomes easier they can either pay fewer employees to do the job or they c…

The parent's point is that you don't make money by casting arbitrary spells, you make money by solving problems for people. You happen to solve them by casting spells, but they're not paying you for the spell, they're paying to make the problem go away.

Except division of labor means people are paying people for the actual casting vs any other task. Therefore if you can cast the spells of 4 people that adds actual value directly.

Plenty of other things add more value, but replacing 4 or more people at 200k a pop is already significant money.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?

#78

Post by dgreensp »

Have you heard of a guy named Paul Graham?

Obviously the advice “start a start-up” has some caveats, but this is Hacker News, I mean this whole site/community started with the idea that “hackers” should just start start-ups, for similar reasons to this.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?

#79

Post by blunte »

I was thinking today about programming as I'm onboarding at a new client right now and coming up to speed with their product/codebase.

Programming is so little about typing code, at least if done right. It is really about making decisions: product/api design choices, system architecture choices, code organization and patterns, etc.

The actual typing of code can be done by anyone who can follow clean examples and operate development tools. This arguably should get automated away someday.

IMO, the best way to monetize good development skills is to float between product and tech lead -- not actually writing much code.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?

#80

Post by rexstjohn »

Similar experience

The good news is there is nearly unlimited demand for programming work. However, you have to filter it very carefully, learn how to market yourself and become very selective and specific about what you want to do.

Pick a very specific niche which is specifically designed to be highly profitable, low custom work and doesn’t involve whole cloth creative agency work (trust me; you don’t want it).

Strongly recommend finding a simple, repeatable system or workflow that allows you to constantly come into contact (in a valuable, engaging way) with your target audience (people who are going to pay you to do stuff).

This can be a podcast, community, dinner series, workshop, roadshow, summit you organize. The objective is to make it valuable for you to be constantly reaching out and getting in touch about something OTHER than selling that person your services.

I also recommend designing or developing your own IP. Create your own stack or best practices, turn that into a brand and go promote it. Try to only get work applying that exact stack. You don't want a disconnected stream of random work with no narrative. You want to anchor your consulting work or business in some fixed constraints so it becomes repeatable.

Furthermore, you should be very specific about what work you want. You probably don't want to be doing end-to-end full stack "from zero" development. You would be better off applying some repeating system, taking over maintainance of running systems or selling your own IP.

Find a community or start one where your target market hangs out and make yourself useful, visible and valuable. Learn how to select clients and stack retainer revenues. Quality over quantity.

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