People sweat about all the “Business Stuff” you have to do in addition, but I find it’s not really any more of your day than the normal boring admin stuff of being a rank and file developer. Certainly less than being a manager at a bigco.

It also does away with ageism concerns.

I go to bed every night not worrying about whether my company remains sustainable. If they don’t, as long as it is a microeconomic issue (company failed) and not a macroeconomic issue (economy is in the toilet), I reach out to my network and get another job relatively quickly.

The same amount of money appears in my account every other week whether I go on vacation, call in sick, etc.

And I’m 45. Ageism is way overblown if you keep your skills current with the market and your network strong.

I go to bed every night not worrying about whether my company remains sustainable.

As do I. The key is to build the business to the point where it replaces your income before you quit your dev job. Once it's ticking away, there's very little that can happen over the course of the night (or a month) that can much affect its profitability.

The same amount of money appears in my account every other week whether I go on vacation, call in sick, etc.

Same here, with the addition of it still coming in if I decide to drop down to 20 minute weeks for the next year or so while focusing on something else.

You're right about the Ageism thing though. I do still hop back into the working world from time to time (to keep the skills fresh and buzzword-compliant), and companies seem more than happy to hire an experienced guy to build things for them.

But yeah, back to the point at hand: try not to scare yourself off by the "business stuff" of running a business. You can do as much or as little of it as you like, and so long as the product is good and your marketing is in place, it's just not a big deal.

And you’re still “managing” your business - the whole subject of the article was about people who didn’t want to manage.

But yeah, back to the point at hand: try not to scare yourself off by the "business stuff" of running a business. You can do as much or as little of it as you like, and so long as the product is good and your marketing is in place, it's just not a big deal.

It’s not that “I’m scared” of managing a business. I’m a proud MBA drop out, I have plenty of business acumen. I don’t want to manage a business. People were commenting about giving up management and dev lead roles because they didn’t want them - as did I. If I don’t want the headaches of being a dev lead, why in the world would I want the headache of owning a business and managing employees?

You can do as much or as little of it as you like, and so long as the product is good and your marketing is in place, it's just not a big deal.

You mean all I have to do is create a product people want, get funding, find the right people and then life becomes easy? Wow, I didn’t know it was that simple. Do you have a newsletter?

> The key is to build the business to the point where it replaces your income before you quit your dev job.

So your counter argument is for people to build a successful business on their own that will last for the remainder of their careers while working a full time job (and most likely while supporting a family and raising children)? Yes...it's just that simple.

You appear sceptical, but it really isn't hard to do. There are lots of examples here that come up every time anybody asks.

And even if it is "survivorship bias" and for every 1 example of someone that succeeds there are 1 million examples of people who have failed, the cost of failure is so low that you should try anyway. It costs you nothing and you have potentially everything to gain.

Ever hear about the story of the two wolves? You're feeding the wrong wolf.

And any money that you invested in your company.

If you are talking about starting a business on the side and working full time, that means you are sacrificing some combination of time with your family, exercise, and time that you could be putting in getting ahead at your current job or acquiring skills that would help you get a better paying job.

It doesn’t make sense statistically to take on “one million times the risk” unless the upside is much higher. These days, a CS Major can spend a year learning “leetCode” and study “Cracking the Code” and easily get a job at a FAANG making a quarter million - not that I would personally want to.

> If you are talking about starting a business on the side and working full time, that means you are sacrificing some combination of time with your family, exercise, and time that you could be putting in getting ahead at your current job or acquiring skills that would help you get a better paying job.

You think you somehow learn nothing attempting to build up a side project? I've yet to see an argument made successfully that you learn absolutely nothing marketable by working on a side project.

But let's say you manage to pull that off: all you've lost is a little bit of time. That's extremely low from a business perspective. Software is rather unique in that you don't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars setting up supply and manufacturing lines. And, the potential payoff is huge.

Now, maybe running a company isn't your thing. That's a fair argument. But fear of failure is a terrible way to go through life.

On a side note, why are you so relentlessly negative? Most of the comments you've made in this thread are needlessly hostile, sarcastic and bitter. Did a side project touch you inappropriately as a child?

What are the chances that a “side business” is going to make $150K to 200K a year?

On a side note, why are you so relentlessly negative? Most of the comments you've made in this thread are needlessly hostile, sarcastic and bitter. Did a side project touch you inappropriately as a child?

The whole point of the article is about people who don’t want to be in management. It’s makes no sense to start a business if you don’t have any desire to be in management.

Also, one thing that I’ve learned over the years, is the easiest way to make money during a goal rush is to sell shovels. There are plenty of opportunities out there to make good money working for a consulting company that matters to well funded startups and corporations who want to outsource development/infrastructure. Guess what my two areas are?

If I had to guess, I'd say that for every hacker news user that ships and markets an mvp, probably somewhere around 1-10% hit 150k/year from it. It's hard to find good data on this though.

One that made money was spreading malware and the author who seem to be making a decent return said.

It was really hard to write - took me 1.5 years, tons of research and re-writing. This isn't something I slapped together over a weekend. Far from passive income.

One side project doesn’t have to earn 200k/yr. you can have 5 of them, each making 50k. Running them as single software company is way less management work than managing your team in big company environment.

Let's say you need 1-2 hours a day for every of your product (all activities combined)

Being a manager means 5-8 hours a day managing people, not working on products.

So the time is similar, but your work on product, not manage people. Way different.

I built a business 5 years ago while I was working. The tech for it took me a weekend to complete and I had over a million in annual revenue within 2 years.

Coding became 20% of my job, but I loved the new skills I gained and challenges outside of coding.

Two. You're not going to multiply your salary by 2x-20x unless you start to take on more responsibility, like worrying about sustainability.

Oh wait. I’ll already be able to do that as a bog standard enterprise developer/architect in a mid cost of living area as part of a dual income household. So why do I want the headache?

If you have a household income of $434K, you’re already in the top 1% if you have a household income of $600K you’re in the top .5%.

If it were that easy, don’t you think more people would be doing it?

Well damn, I guess I am going to have to make do with 200k being a rank and file developer at a FAANG company.

You’re not an employee so no performance reviews or line management and you are responsible for running your own company, but at the same time many contracts will be working with teams of permanent staff for 6 months or more so it’s not like you are off totally on your own having to invent new products or hunt for projects. I’d guess the remuneration can match that of a manager after you’ve been doing it for a while, but you’re essentially a technical expert who’s expected to be able to hit the ground running quickly and add a lot of value at each client.

My impression is that demand for good contractors outstrips supply right now (it can make sense for companies with fixed budgets or tight timelines to hire contractors despite a higher per-day cost) and the business side really isn’t that complicated, so it is a fairly well trodden path by good developers at a certain point in their career. Of course, if you are someone who feels like they benefit from having the company structure (eg in terms of management, training, etc) or doesn’t like changing company fairly often it’s probably not for you!

Edit: forgot about this guide posted to HN a while ago: https://github.com/tadast/switching-to-contracting-uk/blob/m...

So: email everyone you know (also non-programmers) a 4-sentence email that you're now a contractor. Explicitly list the domains and technologies you can "hit the ground running" at, and focus on those. People need to be able to see you as "a great Java programmer" or "a great iOS programmer". People have a hard time wrapping their minds around "a great generalist" so don't make that pitch.

Set a high rate from the start. Ask around what's common in your area and go a bit above average - some of your peers are likely charging to little. You'll find that customers don't typically negotiate rates - instead they'll just assume that this must be what a proper contractor costs. You might miss a customer that way, but that's the customer you don't want, the kind of customer that will make you regret contracting. Time-sensitive customers are ok (after all, that's what you sell right? hitting the ground running?). Avoid price-sensitive customers, they're hell.

Sell by the day or week. Not by the project, cause projects always blow up and you don't want to take that risk.

That's it, really.

Would you then use a recruiter or something like that? I don’t think I would get any gigs using my network.

One thing you might find is getting your first contract is hard if you are in a permanent job - companies generally are looking for contractors to start ASAP, so a one month notice period (with the risk that you get tempted to stay at your existing company) is often not acceptable to them. Some clients will wait for the right person but you might find you need to quit your job first before finding work which can be a bit nerve wracking - so it’s wise to survey the market, talk to recruiters etc. for a while before doing so!

If you’re UK based https://github.com/tadast/switching-to-contracting-uk/blob/m... may be interesting.

One way is to try and get some sort of security cleared job. Once you do, you immediately elevate yourself away "from the crowd" of developers in the market and you will find major global companies want you and they pay well. And when you get your first gig, you can be sure that another company will want a security cleared engineer, so it's good for job security.

Just be careful how you say no when they ask you if you want to join on a perm basis :)

you become an "employee under guise" and then you will be taxed as such. then you get the worst of both worlds.

We havent had anyone get promoted to this level, but several are close.

In one instance that I know, a Tiger Team of 6 delivered run away hit TV streaming product in 8 months. From conception to design to prototype to factory production to launch.

Another, albeit larger scale example would be Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

It may be semantics, but I think "stagnating at a pretty high level" may be a pretty good endgame for a smart engineer who does not want to go to either people or technology management.

If this means significant autonomy, mentoring role and decent compensation what is wrong with stagnating at this level? This is not for everyone, bit may be OK for some. An honest question.

Engineers are the most cautious lot I've ever worked with. Among the most intelligent, but I can't imagine them making ballsy market moves.

I watched my father get promoted into unhappiness. He didn't realize it until it was too late. For his most recent promotion they had to threaten to fire him to get him to take it.

Counter to my own point, I have had conversations with HR individuals who encourage managers to fire employees that don’t get promoted every ~2 years. Basically their thought is that is an easy way to identify “bottom” performers. I don’t agree with this sentiment, but it’s not an unheard of position.

I guess it's nice for the devs at first, but creates a lot of waste. They're basically spamming the world with programming languages, libraries and products only to wind them down and start again.

Replace libraries, languages and products with statistics, hypotheses and figures and you have described scientific research.

The point is that each iteration learns from the last, in principle, even if they aren’t backwards or forwards compatible.

Well, yes - and the inability to build on previous research code because people don't publish it results in a colossal waste of (usually) public money. Nonreproducibility in science, and Google's abandoning of products, are phenomena that resemble one another somewhat.

This particular group had a manager. One of my favorite bosses, who was very sharp as both engineer and manager, honest, humble, and supportive (and formative of some of my ideas of what I should aspire to).

And did you? — I'm really curious as to whether there ended up being a positive ROI from dedicating those top engineers to that task.

My personal ROI: moving to that group might've been the best decision I ever made. I learned a tremendous amount, got to work with great people, and afterwards it catapulted my career in the direction I wanted to go. Had I not been determined to go to grad school, I would've followed the original team lead anywhere.

It's not that different than any project with a novel component. Some projects ("Uber, for cats!") are mostly a matter of executing in some well-understood ways as soon as you hear the idea (set up your tools, use these frameworks, on this cloud configuration, and have frontend and backend start grinding through the tasks, while you're plugging them into the plan, and scheduling for demos or MVP launch or whatever). But other projects have more upfront domain knowledge to acquire, brainstorming, requirements analysis, market analysis, prototyping, figuring out possibilities, deciding what you will do, etc. In the latter, eventually it probably turns into a conventional fairly predictable project (although there might still be tricky problems to solve in the pieces, but you have a good idea where you want to go and what the pieces are).

I think a principal engineer is the right mix of (still) developing, planning, mentoring and potentially leading small teams, while staying out of a full-on managerial role.

It's rare to see a big tech company with as many engineers as managers at the Director compensation level, for example.

I do free one on one mentoring for managers, and my business also has a manager training program we run twice a year that really helps people perform better in the role. A lot of studies say some people aren’t “meant to be managers”, but I really believe that’s the exception not the rule.

Would be happy to help!

The only successful special projects I’ve ever seen are ones that are off the books initially, possibly even pissing off product managers or others because engineers essentially have to flippantly disregard the official prioritization of tasks according to non-engineers and just override it with what the engineer can easily see is actually more important from a genuine business/product perspective but can’t waste the time trying to jump through the hoops of political jockeying disingenuously asserted to be sincere evidence gathering to satisfy all the other competing interests and credit grabs.

I have been thinking about that too. I am pretty experienced and the best use for me would be to get something off the ground quickly to working through a hard problem . I have seen a lot so usually my instincts are pretty good and I am much faster in responding to problems than the less experienced are. I also have the confidence to make decisions and take responsibility without needing approval from multiple parties.

A lot of companies like to talk about being "agile" and "like a startup" but they rarely let engineers stay focused on a problem, leave them alone and let them work through it.

When I work with managers who need to create change, I remind them that it took years for institutional baggage to grow. It’s reasonable to assume that it will take at minimum months to unravel.

You are literally a one man marketing and finance department.

Sure, if you don't mind failing. :)

I agree with blub. Coding and designing is part of a startup but if you spend a second more doing that than you have to, you are setting your company up to fail. Instead you should be talking to customers and churning out whatever the absolute minimum code is that will validate your market.

In my mind they were called "swat teams".

That being said, it wasn’t codified in our career mapping. It was sort of a “one off” experiment.

As far as I’m concerned they’re the people that run around flooding every meeting with words that have already been said by the developers, and by extension do not need to be said.

Big orgs with lots of outsourcing, architects are supposed to police the result to make sure it's semi decent. But since they've long since gave up doing any real work, they tend to be people who buy really expensive crap to cover their arse.

In smaller orgs, it can almost be just a lead dev with a fancy title.

Rarely does the title seem appopriate, but some of the folks with the title are good regardless.

Its taken a while to get to this point, with a fair bit of pushing back on more traditional project management stuff, but I’m ridiculously happy with what I get to do for a living now. That was definitely not true when I was in a pure technical management role, where 80% of my week was spent in meetings.

End of the day, if you're happy and delivering value your title doesn't really matter. But it might when you want to move role in the future, so you might want to keep one eye on what the market is branding you as.

Fow what it's worth, I'm glad you're happy with your role. :)

*or maybe just changed, who am I to decide what words mean

> down to the woman who worked the front desk

Maybe she's on to something.