We need to teach that owning your time is the path to wealth

Re:We need to teach that owning your time is the path to wealth by brnewd on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @08:39AM (#35167360)

If you choose the right niche and use stable libraries there is no need to constantly chase the latest framework or software architecture. A lot of the endless development cycle is self induced work.

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Re:We need to teach that owning your time is the path to wealth by ChuckNorris89 on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @08:49AM (#35167486)

Yeah sure, if you build a simple website/app for a mom&pop shop then yes, but the pay is equally poor and it's a race to the bottom.

Even in old cobol codebases coders are still needed to keep up with the changing environment.

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Re:We need to teach that owning your time is the path to wealth by brnewd on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @09:54AM (#35168367)

You're not wrong, it is almost the default to end up with a high maintenance stack and the (perceived) need to churn out new features.

I've done a few hype driven migrations myself. But if you set out with the primary goal to reduce the amount of time required to run and maintain a software/SaaS/paas/you name it business you can make huge wins in the time department.

Maybe I'm just lucky with a niche subscription based platform that doesn't need much tuning and perhaps 10 support emails a day. It doesn't return a FAANG salary but does net me €90k with minimal operational costs.

The key is not build that app you don't really need (and indeed requires constant baby sitting to please Apple/Google) not rewrite everything to the latest fad eg Svelte + CockroachDB using edge compute on fly.io.

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Re:We need to teach that owning your time is the path to wealth by throwawayscale2 on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @10:22AM (#35168724)

I.e., it's all made-up resume-driven development funded by woo-huffers with too much money that needs to be thrown somewhere.

There are enterprise B2B niches where a single small shop can service hundreds of clients, without needing uber-scale (see: you will never exceed 1mil concurrent users).

You can run everything on a single bare metal server if your dev team knows how to not waste resources (see: no ORM/toy databases, sane/strong-typed and compiled back-end language, use a mature package environment and tools, etc.).

Give a decade, and you can then cash-out when a bigger enterprise B2B shop buys you out. It's not an adderall-fueled manic-depressive roller coaster of a time; but it's honest work.

Best part: the only problem I've ever hit with scaling was people being stupid with their databases.

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