Working at a FANG in software development has been pretty outstanding income wise. Much better than hustling a few different freelance/contracts/side hustles for me at this point in my life.
what do you make and how long have you been a developer?
Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
321–330 of 448 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#322My PhD was in image processing - never really got to use it in any day job, but I published an iPhone app that back in the day that would read a sudoku puzzle and solve it. That led to a few side gigs and I’ve done off and on consulting jobs in the image processing space over the years. Most problems tend to be amenable to “classic” techniques (eg OpenCV) and if you can get involved early enough there are a lot of af…
Can you share the link to your youtube channel?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
if faamng salary is supposedly that high, that's like a shocker, and probably massive hyperbole, unless something bizarre happened over the last 5 years. that said, total comp could be pretty high like that quite plausibly.
It's not hyperbole, although prior to 2022, getting $400k total compensation as a senior meant working at a handful of companies, even ones like Google and Microsoft weren't paying out that much unless it was through stock appreciation.
total comp is possible, but salary? that's weird
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#324https://bennuaine.com/ I was inspired by "do things that don't scale". My business creates European hand-blown titanium crystal stemware for whisky and spirits. This started as my quarantine project and has grown fairly rapidly relative to my expectations. The product is very expensive to produce because each glass is made entirely by hand in Europe but the results are pretty beautiful. It's not a golden ticket finan…
I love the video. I'm not into whisky, but you would have got me if I was. That's fantastic!
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#325Passive investing with savings from my tech job. My wife and I earned around 150k per year for 10-12 years but lived happily off of 40-60k per year for that time. The difference went into savings and retirement accounts and now we live off that nest egg and do what we want. I started a business teaching whitewater kayaking, packrafting, and swiftwater rescue which really took off during COVID but honestly the nest egg is what allowed me to do it pretty risk free.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#326I built a web-based game that integrated into a popular MMO. The game was free to play but I monetized through an affiliate agreement with the MMO company. Eventually they realized they could just copy the game and run it inside the MMO itself, so they terminated the partnership. At the end it was grossing 20k/month, but it literally consumed every moment of my free time so in some ways it was a relief to shut it dow…
Can I ask which MMO?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#327Built a hobby informational web app back in 2005 related to a collectible item I was interested in. It basically tells you if your X is considered common or rare (potentially valuable). Determining that is nuanced and people don't want to figure stuff out on their own, so my web app became popular. At this point it has earned over $400k USD lifetime with 75% of that being in the last two years. 100% Adsense. The audi…
If you are actually generating that much on adsense I think you'd likely make 20-30% more if you moved your ads to a high quality agency like adthrive or mediavine (those 2 are the only ones I'd firmly recommend over adsense). I'm sure you'd be approved by at least one of them based on the description of your site. I used to use adsense on all my side sites too and just focus on the content and UX, but once you reach…
Thanks. I'll look into those. I get a few pitches per week from ad agencies but don't know which are legitimate or worth it. It's doing so well that I'm paranoid about touching anything revenue related.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, can you elaborate?
When I started my "gig", I just kind of threw it out there. I fairly quickly started getting a lot of orders every week. Over time I had a few really good regular customers, my orders were about half from them and half from random one-offs. A couple years into it I started reading in the forums about changes to the search algorithm and how it was hammering people and killing their existing gigs. It was all speculatio…
>I'm left with a gig with over 500 completed orders with a perfect 5 star rating, that never gets seen by anyone.
So if you're not getting orders with what seems like a very strong rating, who is?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#329A few years ago I was frustrated with how difficult it was to setup a solid React.js stack with auth, payments, etc so I built a codebase generator at https://divjoy.com
It does around $5-10k a month. Fairly passive. A few hours of support a week. Was full-time on it for the first few years, but decided to join a company recently and keep growing this on the side.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#330None of my “passion projects” have paid nearly as well as my $dayjob’s IPO. Went from highly in debt to multi-millionaire over the course of about 6 hours one day last year. I published a few smutty short stories and a couple of apps that I’d made for my kids, all of which together might have netted me a few thousand in total. No marketing or anything.
IPO, smutty short stories, and kids' apps. You win the most-well-rounded award! ;)