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Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

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Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#311
post #170
post #160

I'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…

As a doctor in a third-world country, do you have any needs that could be solved by a simple web app? I'd be happy to build it if it could be of use to you and you can sell it to local medical practices.

Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t

Interesting! Did you work there? Do they have an internal package manager of some kind? (in a meek voice) ...do they use MacPorts?

Not OP, but Googler here. We use an internal Linux distro for all our development. It's very similar to Ubuntu (so the default package manager is apt). People who have a Macbook use it as a thin client to ssh into their Linux desktops. So OS X package manager isn't really needed or used.

Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called Ghost Writing. If it's 90% or more or less, I have no idea, but it's quite common. From blog articles to books.

I’m familiar with ghost writing, but its mere existence does not support the claim that 90% of C-suite blog posts are ghost written.

I was ghost writing blogs for almost a decade. Almost everything I wrote was published under c suite names. 90% is my random guess. If the actual exact number is important to you then discount the 90%. I hsvent actually done a study.

Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#314

Your best bet is going to be freelancing/software dev contracting. There are many platforms other than Upwork and Fiverr. If you're on LinkedIn, post it to your network that you're looking for some consulting work. Talk about what you can build - focus on outcomes (how you can help clients deliver stuff). Join Slack communities focused around your skills. Find any community you can join and keep an eye out for work.…

what freelance platforms do you recommend?

Toptal and Gigster come to mind first. But I keep seeing ads on FB for more and more of these "remote developer" platforms.

Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#315
post #311
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a doctor in a third-world country, do you have any needs that could be solved by a simple web app? I'd be happy to build it if it could be of use to you and you can sell it to local medical practices.

This is an idea that I think of everyday but I can't find an answer because of these reasons

Most doctors have a very poor IT knowledge. Most of them know only to use Facebook

Most patients are elderly people, or people with extrame poverty. They either don't have the knowledge facilities or the money to pay for such a services.

Most of the work in hospital are still done by painful paper work. But making hospitals computerize has failed.

Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually what I did, but with web application and services. I tried app development in the one of my first few projects but finally gave up for web apps because it allows faster trial and error ( mainly I can push changes in UI and UX faster to a wider audience ). My take away is that stay away from "hot" topics ( news, game app ) unless you have a solid background because you need a really polish product to…

What metrics do you use for web applications and services? I mean with mobile app, you have downloads and ratings. But for web apps, you have no such thing.

I'm not a web developer but I am aware of Alexa ranking. That can be used to see how popular some website is worldwide or in a particular country.

Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#317

What 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 is correct. One has done it. He needed 4 months to join Gitlab from the day when he started contributing to Gitlab. https://medium.com/@shinya_55783/how-i-joined-gitlab-and-wen... I heard from my friends that because of pandemic, Gitlab is focusing on outbound recruiting. So I don't know whether the way still works or not in Gitlab. But I concur that contributing to opensource is one of the best way to get a hig…

Is that the Gitlab that famously only pays proportional to your cost of living?

Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#318

What 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…

> I've seen people make $500k a year doing this. That even crazy in California onsite level and you've seen that in remote? I liked the part about positioning in your comment, it does matter a lot.

It’s textbook survivor bias. Who is going the reveal their anecdote? The person who knows someone with a story. And 500k is a hell of a story. My bet is spending 3 months doing free OSS work on average has a lower EV than applying to a shitload of jobs, levelling up on interview challenges and technique et cetera.

Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#319
post #101

You say you don't want to use Fiverr because "fiverr is a race to bottom" . But your goal is to make $1,500/month. If you work just 25 hours/week, that translates to $15/hour. If $1.5k is truly your goal, then Fiverr is the perfect platform for you. Platforms like Fiverr and upwork get a lot of hate from the HN crowd, precisely because their expectations are to make $50-100+ per hour. And that's much much harder to d…

I started my career 10 years ago doing exactly this (also from a 3rd world country). Within 3 months I reached 1.5k/mo while finishing my engineering degree. It wasn't that hard (not sure about now) since all you had to do is demonstrating that you're capable of completing the project in your bid. I did this by describing what kind of stack that I'll use, potential problems that will likely arise and how to address it, or even try to steer the project owner to use stack I'm more capable of by describing its benefits compared to their chosen stack (if they requires the project to be written with a specific language/framework).

I imagine those freelancing sites is 10x more saturated now than 10 years ago, but perhaps it's still possible to reach 1.5k/mo in a few months. Like other people said, it's probably best to pick your niche to narrow down potential projects and reducing competition. I was mostly bidding on python projects back then (not as many python programmers back then and a gazillion of php programmers).

After I got my degree, I emailed one of my past client that I'm now available for full time work and he connect me to someone that was looking for full time developer and the rest is history.

Re: Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bad advice for someone who has only been coding for 3 years (according to OP). People who can make $500k/year through connections they make contributing to open source projects could most likely just apply to a FAANG company directly. It is way more common to see brilliant developers make $0 from open source projects.

> People who can make $500k/year through connections they make contributing to opensource projects could most likely just apply to a FAANG company directly This vastly overestimates the efficiency of FAANG hiring channels.

Or underestimates how many others they compete with

What if among x00 ppl actually talented enough to work there, maybe faang only needs to hire x ppl

That's no problem for faang but could be for those who applied

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