I might be totally wrong but I think making online courses might give you some passive income and learning opportunity at the same time. Of course it requires you to focus on one small/niche subject and becoming expert at it. Maybe someone with experience in making courses could chime in and tell if it's doable.
Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
261–270 of 350 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
#262I'm a doctor from a third word country and we make around ~$1.2k per month. Imagine training to become a doctor and being a doctor with no family life and making ~1.2k per month? If I can make around 2-3k per month I would quit being a doctor and do that job any day. And someone from a third world country I can totally relate and understand your situation. The politics and corruption has rotten the country to the cor…
This isn't related to OP questions but moreso to your situation. I work in a hospital and I was talking to an occupational health safety advisor (probably makes CAD $80k/yr). He told me he was an ED physician in his home country of Colombia for 25 years. He can't practice here in Canada without going through full training again. He would make $300k/yr or more if he was able to practice. I asked him what was different…
Not just USA, even it's difficult to practice as a doctor in UK and Australia.
I also don't understand the difference between two doctors coming from two countries. The underlying principles are the same and the science behind it is the same.
We also read the UK textbooks at universities. I feel it just sucks to be a doctor. I would not recommend anyone to take this route.
Back in the day before I got to know these things I used to tell my mom who is a lawyer that it would be difficult to be a lawyer in another country because the laws are different.
But I guess it's just same for doctors insanely difficult even though most of the things are the same
Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd share more, but too many people would figure out who it is. Feels like your example is very specific and would not generalize to the average programmer.
I know many people that did this. Not all of them are making $500k a year, but here is some more examples: - Multiple Rails contributors, one that turned core. Those folks are making well north of $200k a year. - Ember contributors or contributors to projects around ember-data or similar. Multiple people making north of $200k a year. - A guy that dove into contributing to Postgres. He wouldn't even share how much his…
Your story is carefully tuned for "No True Scotsman" in advance. What are you going to say when OP spends 3+ months of their limited runway and ends up in the same place? "I said a real project, you didn't contribute to a real project" or "I said be smart with your choices, you must not have been smart", or "I said be professional, you must have been rude" or "I said network with experienced people, you must not have done enough networking"? "Worksforme"?
> I don't really see why this is so controversial.
This is you strawmanning. "Commits to Numpy or Rust are going to look better than a todo list" never was the controversial part, that is not controversial. "Be world class and people will want to hire you" isn't controversial, even.
The controversial part is "win the lottery - anyone can do it if they just try". Picking an appropriate project is a gamble. Becoming friendly with the core developers is a gamble. Picking the right issues to work on that people might notice you is a gamble. Being good enough that they actually do, is a gamble. That it translates into a job offer, is a gamble. That some people can do it isn't surprising, that everyone can and should prioritise that, is controversial.
That you should give away months of full-time equivalent work to profit-making companies, in the hope that it results in a job paying high above national average household income in first world countries, instead of spending that time elsewhere, is a huge gamble.
Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
#264[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
#265If you know Python, your background is perfect for a role with my company Hummingbot (https://github.com/coinalpha/hummingbot), an open source project for crypto algorithmic trading.
We have devs from Nigeria, Malaysia and Phillippines on our core team, and we work with extended devs all over the world.
Even if it's not a fit, I can try to help you find gigs. Because most crypto companies are remote-first and maintain open source codebases, we tend to work better with remote devs in developing countries.
Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
#266This is my anecdote, I hope it serves you well. I'm a computer engineer with a respectable bachelor's degree from Turkey. Google has enough material to see what kind of 3rd world country Turkey is. I found myself in a similar situation 2 years ago. I had 5 years of experience at that time. Due to my father's decreasing health condition, remote had become by only option. I don't know if it was luck or simply how the s…
This is exactly how we hired most of our devs at Hummingbot. We used to hire expensive Silicon Valley engineers before realizing that the folks we found on Upwork were just as good , if not better.
Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is more "this general strategy works for most people; but not everyone is going to get a $500k job from it". It's a reliable strategy to get noticed and make a good impression. How much money you manage to make from that opportunity obviously depends on many more factors.
The problem is that people are conflating "one guy got lucky and got a $500k remote job" with "here is a repeatable process to generate a full-time income by working on open source on spec." Even getting a $50k remote job is not a guarantee, and telling people to work for free on open source is the Hacker News equivalent of telling a designer that you'll pay them if you like the logo they make you. Only this is much…
> Only this is much more insidious because you're telling them to work full-time, for free, for "3 or 4 months."
Specifically, donating that time to a project which a company uses to make money.
Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
3pt14159 isn't saying that noddly should try and make money doing open source. Noddly should gain the respect of an open source maintainer. These maintainers receive lots of requests for job openings and contract positions. Most of it is just recruiter spam, but some of it is real and the maintainer would be happy to forward them on to someone they respect, along with a recommendation. It's that recommendation that's…
I had very few job offers originate from FOSS (maybe 2 in 4 years?). I suspect there's a narrow field where people recruit using FOSS/GitHub and I'm not involved in it. JavaScript based projects seem to be doing much better from an outsider perspective. I got more out of having a decent looking LinkedIn account.
In my opinion... LinkedIn gets you in the door, your Github profile can get you hired. I'm not sure how many job intros happen via Github to be honest... just from my own experience, I get a ton of calls from LinkedIn... and on the interview side, some higher profile contributions to open-source can help a lot.
For where I work now, our code challenge includes putting the solution on github/gitlab mostly to ensure they at least know git, but as a secondary to their gh profile, which leads to their dev and contributions.
It's not a hard requirement to me. I've known a lot of people in banking and secdef development that cannot participate in open-source, so there are definitely all types.
Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
#269What I've seen that has worked in the past is this: Pick an open source project that is in a language that is respectable and commit to contributing to it for three or four months. Full time. Try to make sure that your written English is clear and professional in things like PRs. Try to keep your code as clean and as well tested and linted as possible. Once the core team gets to know you a bit you'll be able to reach…
This just seems impossible. Any nontrivial open source project with a decent amount of stars (i.e. something that will give OP visibility) is impenetrable for a noob. I don't know why people keep recommending this as a way to break into software dev. It will take a couple months just to setup a testing environment AND get familiarity with the codebase where you can actually start modifying it. Then you need to identi…
>> I don't know why people keep recommending this as a way to break into software dev
2 reasons IMHO: 1. It is a powerful albeit mostly imaginary image/story. A sort of American dream incarnated in SW. Everything is out there, open and within reach so anyone can do it and make it big. 2. A lot of the HN crowd are actually committers to high profile projects (this is the most popular hacker community after all) so they tend to judge by their own story or stories from their circle. I suspect though that the average dev is quite away from this paradigm.
Having tried a few times to just build kubernetes (by now I honestly believe that you need a server farm to do just that) I have to agree with the point you're making. The sheer magnitude and the speed that this behemoth is growing just makes me loose any incentive after a while. Not to mention that you have to actually antagonize with a lot of other noobs to get to these "good-first-issue" PR first. (Diclosure: I'm quite familiar with kube and an experienced dev).
And then there is the other thing. I'm afraid somewhere along the way we missed the point. OS is (was) about doing what you want with no strings attached. Something inside me is twitching in the thought that it has become a (difficult) way to get a nice job and that it is mostly controlled by big Co (which you are effectively begging to throw its eyes over you and your contributions). Dunno if I want to be part in this grind. I prefer doing my own stuff (and GPL them like the good old days).
My 0010 cents.
Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?
#270Some business-y ideas: 1) Build an affiliate site. Some of the older posts on /r/juststart [0] are helpful. 2) Organize information and sell it. See the stuff made by Pieter Levels [1] or BuiltWith [2]. I just put together LotsofOpps [3] (which is just bunch of information on online/offline ways to make money). There is lots of info out there that will be interesting to someone if you can find the right angle. 3) Unb…
https://www.builtrigs.com/post-your-rig/
fyi: gives me a 404 (404 - page not found)