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

[throwaway34135]

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.

[dusted]

I 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 required if the problem can be solved by a program, or if a program can solve a problem so much better or faster or cheaper that there is additional value in employing the program..

I'm a programmer, I love programming, but I'm entirely aware that actual programming is not what makes the money. If I had _the_idea_ pop into my head, I'd probably start developing prototypes, that's where my skill would be best applied at that stage.. If they showed promise, I'd likely start full-time development on it, but I'd be looking carefully for the point where I'd be able take on additional programmers and focus more on _the_idea_ and what's around that, I'd definitely hire marketing and leadership too, since those are also not my core competence.. I realize that means that my obvious core competence (programming) is unused, and that's true, my main role would be to try not to screw it up.. Nobody got rich on technical excellence, it's half the time not even a requirement for success.

[malthuswaswrong]

A penny saved is a penny earned. Many programmers are employed to automate tasks and reduce labor requirements. That adds value to the organization. You are splitting hairs by saying "the program" vs "the programming". You are a wizard that casts spells to make people's jobs easier. What exactly that means depends on the management. Once a job becomes easier they can either pay fewer employees to do the job or they can take more clients with the staff they have. That's not my decision. My job is to add value to the enterprise by reducing labor costs.

[gtsop]

> 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 themselves produce value because. if that were the case we would all run "programs " 24/7 on our computers and produce infinite value. Programs help other human beings produce value by putting in the man-hours in a more efficient manner than without the program

[willcipriano]

With this explanation I'm not sure how managers add value. If you asked me previously, I'd say they pick what problems we solve but since I'm apparently in charge of that as well. What do they do exactly?

The way I see it is I'm like a contractor. If you want me to put a purple roof on the house you are building, fine but don't come crying to me when nobody wants to buy it.

[tpoacher]

I will answer you question by answering a similar question. (i.e. argument by analogy ... yes, yes, I know)

"I'm a pianist. I'm good at it. How to monetize piano playing?"

Well, first off, someone has to listen to your music. Playing for your own ears is nice and all, but if nobody else can hear your music, then it's not going to generate income.

Second, that music needs to be the kind of music that someone appreciates/needs/values. If you're into weird experimental random-generator-style music that nobody else enjoys in practice, chances are you won't be able to monetize it.

Finally, even if you manage to get good music to the ears of people who want to listen to it, it needs to be delivered in a manner that actually generates income for you. This may require a significant investment to begin with. Do you sign up with a record label? Do you create a channel and monetize via ads? Do you rely on donations? Do you create a company to manage your music?

I realise I have answered exactly zero of your question, but I think talking about music seems to make sense, and suddenly exactly the same problem with coding elicits a "yeah but...". So the point I'm making here is that there is no yeah but in reality ... all the above that applies straightforwardly to music, also applies to coding.

[valdiorn]

If 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.

[boring_twenties]

> 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)

This is changing as of late. I started an HFT gig a few months ago and it's 100% remote.

[thorin]

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.

[barry-cotter]

If 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 of your time.

Why not try FAANG/MAGMA if you haven’t before?

[mooreds]

I concur. Consulting is probably a great path. You might not program all that much, as you'll be focused on solving the problem, but you can get paid a lot.

Here's a great playbook from patio11 on this topic: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

[throwaway34135]

Thanks

Do you mean trying to get a job as a SWE inside FAANG/MAGMA? I guess my concern would be that although the pay is good, it wouldn't really solve the QOL issues. I.e. my impression is that the work isn't necessarily more interesting when you're talking about companies with thousands and thousands of developers, and if you want to advance it would have as much to do with jumping through the right corporate hoops as it would have to do with actual value creation. And I'm sure if anything the IP shackles are much much worse.

But I could be totally wrong, that's mostly speculation and maybe those companies are very good at finding ways to allocate resources to where they can produce the most value.

[granshaw]

Are you referring to the uncle bob martins of the world who mostly do classes? Surely not 50k a week doing implementation work right?

[nerbert]

> Or you could make it known you want to confound a startup.

How would one go about that effectively?

[hutrdvnj]

I think it's called MAMAA instead of MAGMA these days.

[CaptArmchair]

Reframing your perspective may help you here. In your post, swap out all mentions of "programming" with "building construction", take a step back and try to formulate and advice for a construction builder who turned into management.

Sure enough, there are certainly many differences to be found between construction and programming. But testing the details of the method of comparison is besides the point. The idea is to do it on a high enough level which is good enough to drive a point home:

Both construction and programming happen in a broader context. There are reasons why you write code or lay bricks. e.g. you derive satisfaction from the act of making leds blink in certain patterns, you leverage your expertise to scratch your own itch e.g. build your own RSS reader, or solve a problem other people have which you think is worth your while e.g. you build a teaching platforms for students to get access to learning resources. Or in construction: school buildings, library buildings, campuses and so on.

That last part is key. Nobody is going to use code or build walls they have no need or want for. You don't get paid to erect walls or scaffold controllers. You are paid to cater to someone else's need or want. You could directly go to the consumer as a business owner; or you could do it through someone else's business as an employee.

We tend to look at technology as a separate industry distinct from other industries. But that's not exactly true. SpaceX is an aerospace business, Netflix is a movie rental business, Amazon started out (and arguably still is) a book shop. All the cool technology they have developed is subservient to core business goals which are anything but technological.

> It seems like there must be some way of monetizing this skillset, but I have yet to find it.

Looking at programming as a skillset you want to monetize in it's own right, you will always end up at consulting gigs as a freelancer or employee, doing work for disparate customers, problems, industries, etc.

Far more interesting: What's an interesting problem space I would like to get into, providing solutions, and building out a career, through my programming / management skills?

[cryptica]

It's quite unusual to find agency work which rewards good programming. Most agency work involves adding unnecessary complexity and bugs to keep the client coming back for fixes... Then after some time the client becomes dependent on the agency... At that point you can take longer and longer to implement features to bill more and more hours. It rewards bad code. Most software agencies sell labour hours, not quality software; so they optimize for maximizing lock-in (via poorly written code and/or contracts which allow them to retain ownership over the code); this later allows them to maximize billable hours.

I've worked for companies as a software engineer where the CEO insisted on using a third-party agency to host and develop part of their software... When it would have been trivial to develop everything in-house and to host it ourselves on Amazon EC2... I told them it was a bad idea but most of these CEO types are too dumb to understand... I since learned to keep my mouth shut and let them make their mistakes. It's not my business. My goal since then is also to maximize my billable hours.

[greyman]

≥ there's social consequences for making other programmers "look bad" and increasing management expectations

This isnt that serious, is it? At my previous job (a large company) we even had one so-called 10x programmer (which some people claim doesnt exists, but I saw him with my own eyes), and it wasn't such a big problem overall. He was assigned more difficult tasks or more tasks, and that was it. (Although yes, his salary wasn't 10x).

[BiteCode_dev]

It depends of the context, as usual. It's usually not a problem for me, but sometimes I ask some of my clients that they do something technical on their part so I can continue my mission. Then someone at their IT department says it can't be done, or say it will take <very long time>, cost <lot of money>, etc.

My client arm wrestle with them for a bit, then turn back to me and ask if I can do something anyway. So I charge them to do the task that can't be done, and it doesn't take that much time or money.

But I learned to do that with gloves, and tons of ass licking, because it does make the other party look bad.

[malthuswaswrong]

If you work 40 hours a day and you feel everyone around you is moving in slow motion and you need to fill your day with extra stuff just to give everyone else a chance to catch up then you probably aren't supposed to be working a salaried job. You are supposed to start your own company.

[dnautics]

> You are supposed to start your own company

This is not always good advice. Maybe you suck at marketing. Maybe you suck at coming up with things people like. Maybe you suck at raising money. Maybe you don't have any network at all. You probably want either a few of these qualities to bootstrap off of, or, start off as a millionaire, before starting a company.

[edmcnulty101]

How do you get the clients is my biggest issue.

[nkingsy]

All work I’ve done that earned me raises was not fed to me by managers.

I spend a few months knocking out work that’s fed to me and I use that time to understand the business and the code base and where they’re not playing nicely at a high level.

Once I understand the code and the business, I generate and argue for my own work. If I’m successful with this, the evidence of my contribution is plentiful and I get rewarded.

Pretty soon my code is legacy and my days are filled up mentoring, debugging and reviewing other peoples contributions, which effectively lets me focus on only the tricky bits and identify dev ex rough patches.

My own limited coding time is filled smoothing out the dev ex of my system. This is basically the top of the heap as far as I’m concerned. If you get bored, rinse and repeat with a larger problem space or bigger org.

[soneca]

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.

[Cthulhu_]

If you have to work slow on purpose to avoid making others feel bad... find a different job? Plenty of companies out there that need someone productive and/or don't care if one is faster or better than the others.

I mean don't take this the wrong way, but your post reads a bit like you're humblebragging about how good a developer you are. I think you know the answers to your question already.

[throwaway34135]

I have had this experience inside quite a few companies by now between full-time employment and freelancing. It's entirely possible I'm just landing in the wrong companies, but if so I have yet to find a heuristic to understand which jobs would not present with these issues.

It's not my intention to brag, and in fact I am quite embarrassed to speak about this predicament publicly which is why I have posted this anonymously.

[jacquesm]

- Build your own tools to allow you to do your work faster than anybody else.

- use your knowledge to troubleshoot broken systems, companies that are in trouble are utterly price insensitive

[dgreensp]

Have you heard of a guy named Paul Graham?

Obviously the advice “start a start-up” has some caveats, but this is Hacker News, I mean this whole site/community started with the idea that “hackers” should just start start-ups, for similar reasons to this.

[rexstjohn]

Similar experience

The good news is there is nearly unlimited demand for programming work. However, you have to filter it very carefully, learn how to market yourself and become very selective and specific about what you want to do.

Pick a very specific niche which is specifically designed to be highly profitable, low custom work and doesn’t involve whole cloth creative agency work (trust me; you don’t want it).

Strongly recommend finding a simple, repeatable system or workflow that allows you to constantly come into contact (in a valuable, engaging way) with your target audience (people who are going to pay you to do stuff).

This can be a podcast, community, dinner series, workshop, roadshow, summit you organize. The objective is to make it valuable for you to be constantly reaching out and getting in touch about something OTHER than selling that person your services.

I also recommend designing or developing your own IP. Create your own stack or best practices, turn that into a brand and go promote it. Try to only get work applying that exact stack. You don't want a disconnected stream of random work with no narrative. You want to anchor your consulting work or business in some fixed constraints so it becomes repeatable.

Furthermore, you should be very specific about what work you want. You probably don't want to be doing end-to-end full stack "from zero" development. You would be better off applying some repeating system, taking over maintainance of running systems or selling your own IP.

Find a community or start one where your target market hangs out and make yourself useful, visible and valuable. Learn how to select clients and stack retainer revenues. Quality over quantity.

[jamauro]

Interesting. Which route did you decide to take?

[davidbanham]

It’s very difficult to get paid a multiple of your colleagues in the same role even if you’re multiples more effective. It’s more possible to command a high day rate as a consultant, so long as you can give people confidence you’re able to deliver.

Another option is fixed price, fixed scope builds. You price in line with the rest of the market, then build it fast and pocket the profit.

Both of these, however, require a lot of work that is Not Programming. You’ll need do some sales, some client management, some project management, etc. That’s the gig, but these things can be fun too.

The big factor is that you’ll be 100% exposed as to whether the high volume of code you’re putting out is all truly effective. Your clients on the above kinds of projects don’t care how much code you wrote and they may never see your PRs. They care if their thing does what they wanted it to do. You have to deliver value, not just code. That can be exhilarating, just make sure you’re ready for it.

[fxtentacle]

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.

[pabs3]

Join an open source consultancy like Igalia, Collabora or RedHat. There is basically infinite work in open source.

PS: some resources: https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

[InfiniteRand]

I would advise working for a small company. Small company's usually have a backlog of unrealized dreams and if you're careful you can take on extra projects which interest you. Small company's have plenty of downsides like lack of clear career path, lack of HR resources (like guidance on how family leave works), lack of clear roadmaps, etc. but flexibility is an upside and that can help you keep your job in the role you want.

Just my two cents, coming from someone who has worked mostly for small companies but often observed big companies through the lens of a consultant.

[matt_s]

Can you elaborate on "very prolific programmer" and "very large amount of value per time on the keyboard"?

On an agile team once, I was anticipating a vacation before a larger project came up and for whatever reason I completed a bunch of work tasks in a couple days. The PM at the time had said that work was supposed to last the team a couple weeks before the larger project kicked off. So I get the social/team consequences of just pumping out a lot of quality work. That work mostly languished until my return because nobody really had time to oversee it getting thru the process to being deployed to production.

As you know there are a lot of other elements than programming needed to deliver a software product. Analogies usually fall down with any close inspection but I'll use one here. If we replace software development/programming with house construction/wall assembly and someone was very prolific with wall assembly and wanted to monetize that skill-set it sounds kind of odd. Usually someone would be a carpenter and be able to work on walls, staircases, trim work, roof trusses, decks, etc. Someone prolific with just wall assembly skills can't really build a house for a company where it is safe and profitable and it doesn't really make sense to have someone like that on staff because they are doing a very narrow part of the overall job.

The software development job market doesn't really work that way either where a specific skill, like time on keyboard and programming, is an entire job by itself.

[fsloth]

"The software development job market doesn't really work that way either where a specific skill, like time on keyboard and programming, is an entire job by itself."

I think this varies a lot. I can be as prolific I like to in my current role, but our team is a bit of a "special case" in the sense we are all acting as individual contributors in a number of mission critical core libraries. For me the dev cycle is mostly about programming, closing tickets, updating unit tests, and releasing. We deploy modules to products, but don't have production systems ourselves. If bugs emerge in production they return to our desk for fixing, but the interval between doing a release in project X does not stop me from progressing in project Y.

I guess we are chugging quite a lot of added value for the org - it's not obvious from the paycheck, but the environment is surprisingly low pressure (we try to hire only high performers hence everyone is trusted). Low pressure from the point of view I can work at the exact velocity I like, that is, and have not heard complaints so far.

The whole setup was "instigated" by a few high performing programmers in the org years ago and since it has produces continuous value ever since I suppose nobody wants to change it much. I presume this is quite atypical, though.