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

Find another company to work for. Not making people look bad for being less productive is absurd, and there will be many high performance teams where that is not an issue. Shoot for more prestigious companies, and there will be rewards for productivity. Either that, or find an early stage startup where you can help set the tone and culture.

A salaried remote job is perfect for your skillset. You can get FTE market rate, but have plenty of leisure time.

You can try to convert they leisure time into more money, but I'd recommend putting it into yourself and something you enjoy. It's like halfway being "retired" while still making big money.

This problem inspired me to found Supersynchronous.

While I’ve been more of a product leader than engineer, my best friends are engineers and we’ve had many long talks about the experience.

After serving as an agile coach, SaaS founder, and doing lots of freelance web dev/digital agency work, I came to the same conclusion.

How is there not a model for harnessing the genuine power of programming?

The other answers I’ve seen here are ones I’ve said myself many times before, but they’ve just proven unsatisfying.

So here’s the conclusion I came to:

We need a new business model design explicitly to achieve this outcome.

I ground it in intrinsic motivation:

(Some) engineers love building things that help people

That’s the beauty of a small startup, as an engineer you are proximal to the user.

You don’t just get to build something helpful, you get to feel when it’s helpful. You get rich feedback, you can use your intuition.

So my question was - could we create even more intimacy between engineers and the people they help in a way engineers enjoy?

At first that might sound scary. We’ve all faced the overwhelm of engaging with users who don’t “get” the process.

So the key is to edit the context.

First, we rule out “growth at all cost.” The engineer needs full autonomy to regulate the pace at which they engage with the user.

So at the entity level we’ve made the decision to never sell - meaning no investment capital, no board with a vested interest in overriding the engineering experience.

That also means we need to edit the alternative model - a service company. The engineer must have decision making power over whether or not they want to keep working with a client. We put that into our agreement with each client.

We’ve already fired our first few clients that weren’t a culture fit. It’s amazing. Our engineers now work with companies and people they want to work with.

Once the engineer has autonomy and real control over pairing with users, something magical happens - they get really excited about the novel problems they uncover and just dive in. The productivity is ridiculous.

And we keep it at 80% WIP.

Here’s the technical innovation that has enabled this: Coda.io

It turns out sophisticated low/no code tools enable computational thinkers to solve business problems so fast they can even design internal products in real-time with the user.

Talk about feedback loops.

The emotional payoff is incredible - we’ve literally had users on calls cheer, cry, and say they feel like they have hope again that their work won’t always be a grind.

If this all sounds a bit unbelievable, you aren’t alone. Every engineer who has joined our team has gone through a journey of testing “wait, is this for real though?”

I’m not sure if we’d be a fit for you or you for us.

The wisdom you’ve gained, and that you seem to still have your curiosity and heart, makes me so curious to get your take on what we are up to.

Everything we are doing is so new most of the time my answer to questions are “I don’t know” but I’m having the most fun of my life figuring it out with our team.

My info is in my about section.

Good luck on your journey!

Would you like to describe some of your history and day to day life now? Its so far away from what I do I'm fascinated what HFT job entails.

Well, it's not really all that different from any other programming gig, just very low-level. If you have enjoyed systems or maybe embedded programming in the past, you're probably at least a decent candidate.

It's a lot of fun overall, but still, not 100% of the time, for instance you have to interact with dozens of different protocols, all of which are braindead in their own special way. People skills are also more important than a "pure tech" kind of role.

I did have some trading experience already, which probably helped but is not required. It probably did help paper over some softer spots I had on the technical side, though :)