Ask HN: How do you earn your money?

I'm a developer at dojo4 in Boulder, Colorado (dojo4.com/team) and am really happy. I do a few hours a week on a side project (manualviableproduct.com) but mainly for my own enjoyment.

I have a bachelor's in cs and a bachelor's in information assurance however so it wasn't a hard pitch to be a developer. I worked at a couple of more corporate style companies before being really happy at dojo4.

They care enough about the craft of developing that they push me to be a better programmer and give a big middle finger to anyone who wants us to forget our values for any amount of money. I love it. Our clients love us. I'm proud of the quality of the work we do.

And we drink lots of beer & scotch, eat lots of cookies and free lunches, and get massages every month. :p

> Risk aversion should not be an issue in your twenties.

That's a difficult expectation to meet when you're $50,000 in student debt though.

I've only ever done salaried work, and only had one job, which I've had for 10 years. I'm a builder. I want to work on big things that solve complex problems for a large userbase and grow and evolve that solution over the long term. The place were I work the web product was a few ten thousand lines when I joined as the junior member of a three man team, now it's over half a million lines (and growing quickly) and I'm the senior member of a 25 man team. Staying in one place was surprisingly educational, because I was the one who dealt with the consequences of all my own technological decisions, and thankfully my employer left me mostly free to make those decisions. Probably financially it wasn't the smartest move never to switch jobs, but it did give me the opportunity to actually build things across a timespan of years without getting distracted by having to actually run a business. I'm not a manager, I'm not a sales person, I'm not that good with people, and I'm not someone who can stand to do a lot of paperwork. I need other people to do that part of the business so that I can focus on the actual building of software.

I think that you are spot on in your analysis. If you work as an employee at a startup and the company isn't a "rocket ship" that is going to go public or be acquired and make all of the early employees wealthy, you are pretty much just helping someone else achieve their dreams. It could still be beneficial for you career-wise as startups give you a lot of leeway to learn new skills and use cool technologies, but the other side is that they can sometimes try to take over your life. They also try to get a discount on salaries by offering stock, which is usually pretty worthless in the final analysis.

I personally freelance full time. Once you establish yourself and get a reputation as someone who can get things done it can be a great career; if you stay pretty busy (last year I was working for probably 9 months, 6 of it onsite someplace and the rest spread out between a few different gigs) you can earn significantly more than at most "real" jobs and have lots of free time to work on your own projects or just go on vacation. I'd definitely recommend moving to someplace with a lot of work to do, such as San Francisco. There is a lot of demand for tech talent here that you can leverage to get the career you want.

Ask yourself:

Can I go weeks or months without paid work? (risk tolerance as others have mentioned)

Do I want to learn about sales & marketing (the learning never stops btw)? Am I comfortable with self marketing?

Can I hustle and cold call if necessary?

And as another poster mentioned, am I willing to do A/B testing and optimize funnels? Build a social presence?

Do I enjoy the challenge of working on varying types of projects for different companies? Or would I rather stick to a few things?

In my experience you don't need to be good at all of these things to run your own show, just good enough. But I value flexibility and also really enjoy working with and learning from companies in different industries as I'm a generalist, so I chose the consultant path after a few years in corporate. I hope you find what works for you, and don't stress out too much about it, it's easier to switch paths these days! The important thing is to try.