What is stopping you from selling projects (instead of your time) as a freelancer? E.g. you agree on a price and date for you to deliver software X with features A,B,C ? If you finish the job quickly, you can run multiple such projects in parallel, thereby earning a multitude of what someone slower would earn.
Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
61–70 of 125 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's entirely okay for you to have that point of view. I disagree though, he wouldn't sell at a market rate, he would sell below, and enough below that market saturates at his own price, this either increases the market size or new markets based on the wider and cheaper availability of his product emerge. Recognizing what to do is the most important.
Whether they would sell below market rate is subject to strategic, legal and even political factors. However, bare in mind there are math involved here. If the market sells 1 ton of iron for 20$ (manual labour) and I manage to get a truck I could either sell 1 ton for 20$ as the others and make more profit than them, or I could sell, let's say 1 ton for 10$. This is a strategic move that would squeeze the competition…
You sell 1 ton for $20, and I sell 1 ton for $10 but thereby increase the demand (for my cheaper iron) more than double, I'm not only going to outsell you in "tonnage" but also earn more cash than you. My cheap iron will make people make things out of iron like never before, things you wouldn't even consider back doing with $20 iron.
The scalability of software greatly amplifies this point.
It's not the work being done that creates value, the work must be done, sure, it can be done by anyone.. Most programmers have the technical skill to build billion dollar products, and some of them do (mostly for others), and yet, most of us are not "fu" rich, because we've not had the idea for what to build with those skills.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
#63If you are actually so prolific of a programmer and no one around you can keep up, you are probably in the wrong type of company. If you want compensation for your work, look into an Algo-trader or HFT finance shop. They pay vast amounts of money for prolific programmers that are able to output large amounts of high quality code. FAANG as well, but they have a lot of people working on normal crud apps to. The top end finance shops pay a lot to work on hard problems.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
#64Build a project which can give out value to other people, that way it will benefit and help people in which if they find it useful, they will pay for it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
#65I guess you already know, and you're asking exactly because you know.. But programming does not create value, it creates programs, which may create value.. Programming is a skill sure, but it does not create value, it creates programs. Programs may create value, so, the valuable skill is not really being able to create a program, but being able to find some problem, whose solution creates value. Programming may be re…
> Programming is a skill sure, but it does not create value, it creates programs. Economic value is created when a human being spends man-hours to produce an artifact that other people need and thus are willing to pay for. Programming is a form of working, as is designing, researching, building, plumbing etc. The artifact of programming (ie the program) is the value you create by working. Programs do not by themselve…
>Programs do not by themselves produce value because. if that were the case we would all run "programs " 24/7 on our computers and produce infinite value.
Web shops, they're programs running on a computer 24/7 making money doing a job a person could do, they cost next to nothing.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
#66I think algorithmic trading (Stocks, Crypto, NFTs) is about as close as you can get to being paid for raw programming. You can arbitrage anything in demand, like game consoles and shoes, by using your programming skills to spot opportunities and snipe inventory.
There are a lot of new p2e games that I think you might be able to apply programming skills to.
You can build a small sass or tool that interests you.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
#67If you’re that good pick a niche and go consulting. No doubt you have a professional network that can attest to your ability. Go to conferences and share war stories. If you like that you can just keep going. There are people who charge $50,000 a week. Or you could make it known you want to confound a startup. With lots of management experience and well out of the ordinary programming skills that’s a plausible use v…
Are you referring to the uncle bob martins of the world who mostly do classes? Surely not 50k a week doing implementation work right?
Well that’s just the point: implementation is not worth fifty thousand dollars, but the solution to a business problem probably is.
“Consult”ing with problem-havers and working out how to make the problem go away.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
#68Maybe working at a prop trading firm?
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
#69I've been in similar situations (without the early career exit) but never resorted to stretching out a days work into weeks--that sounds mind-numbing. Instead I would sometimes find creative, challenging ways to get the job done in a more 'complete' or exhaustive/automated manner.
But anyway getting to the core question. Without venturing on your own, working at a large company with strong technical leadership and a deep individual contributor (IC) career path has been my approach. Note that the 'individual' isn't the kind of solo 10x dev, but more like some of that AND the ones that level-up teams and the company. I tried at smaller startups but 'top-out' in around 2-years and either have to go into management or another company.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to monetize actual programming?
#70If you find work for a small hedge fund, writing algo-trading code, that might be one of the most satisfying ways you can monetize code.
If it's a small company, it means you'll be hands on, but also expected to work very, very hard. Compensation is directly linked to how well your code performs, this is especially true if you're in a latency-sensitive environment, like market making / HFT.
However, these jobs tend to only existing in a few locations in the world (Chicago, Boston, NY, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and maybe a few other places), and they're rarely advertised via normal channels. You're gonna have to make best friends with some actually competent recruiters and get on their short-list, and wait for a call.
Alternative might be to look at crypto trading startups. There are a few well-funded crypto "hedge funds" out there that are attempting to develop market making strategies in that space. You may also find that a lot of exchanges, big and small, have semi-secret market making offshoots that do a lot of prop trading on their exchanges, both to keep the order books full, and to skim profits.
Sports betting is the same, a lot of market makers in that domain are secretly owned by the same people that run the exchanges.