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

I feel that I was lucky early in my career. I got a job at an early-stage startup which bootstrapped with agency-style work. I got a generous share in the company, so pumping out high quality work products very much directly contributed to my own interests. I worked a lot, but at the end I was rewarded very well for this when we had an exit.

Since then I have failed to find an incentive structure which actually rewards programming. I've worked inside of standard agile teams, and typically I can handle the tasks which management can prepare for work within a matter of a couple days if not a number of hours. I'm not incentivized to excel in these environments, since I'm not rewarded more for producing output faster than the rest of the team, and there's social consequences for making other programmers "look bad" and increasing management expectations.

In principal I would be happy to just finish my tasks, and then spend the extra time working on projects which interest me, but due to IP clauses in contracts, it's not possible to do this during the many unused work hours without causing issues.

I have tried freelancing, but it seems that most clients want to have a time commitment. So basically they want to have someone acting as an employee, but only for several months vs. a long term commitment. So the same problems arise as you have with the FTE situation.

Currently I transitioned into management, just because I was so bored having to find ways to stretch several hours of work across multiple weeks. I'm a fine enough manager, but it seems kind of silly since I have much more unique value I can add as a programmer of my experience relative to what I can do as a manager.

So basically I am a very prolific programmer, and I am capable of producing a very large amount of value per time on the keyboard. It seems like there must be some way of monetizing this skillset, but I have yet to find it.

Maybe you should renegotiate those IP clauses or find a new job that doesn’t have them. It seems to be the main blocker for you to do what would make you happy.

I am incentivized by the software that is to be built and not by the money offered. I feel that if someone is motivated by money to create software we will just end up with more Microsoft and less Linux.

No one wants to pay you a load of money to do something you like :-)

They might pay you to do something they don't like or something that can make you a load of money. You need to get into something lucrative e.g. funded startups, Banking or any business field where they are lacking technical skills that can be applied to their particular issues.

In the past I've been involved in banking, startups, domestic utilities supply, national gas infrastructure. The work was interesting but you need to pick up the domain knowledge to become interesting to clients.

People don't want someone to do programming, they want someone to make them money or solve their problems.