Post: #1

As the title says is it worth the struggle to make more money?
Not as your primary job, but as second source of income.

Post: #2

If you were equally good at sales as you were at programming, I'd choose sales every time.

As a secondary source of income you're going to have to 1) pair your programming with some kind of marketing funnel, which you won't at all have time to build (if you're starting your own business) or 2) compete with Indians/Chinese on Upwork for $10-15/hr.

The best freelance programming money comes from face to face relationships with clients you've met in person. But then again, that's basically sales and marketing. Once you have those contracts, just outsource the work on Upwork/Freelancer.

I'm a software developer and I kind of wish I hadn't gone down this route. The income distribution is very bimodal. You're either making $50k or $250k+ (you have popular git repositories/libraries and maybe speak at conferences). It's like being a musician.

I'm actually trying to figure out how to move out of this right now and into the family business full time, which would basically involve 100% sales, affiliate marketing and e-commerce for a physical product.

Post: #3

Like TheCroatian said, think of programming as a way to solve a problem, like welding or carpentry.

That way when you're working in your new business you could easily whip up a computer program to do something easy instead of paying someone to do it for you.

Post: #4

Programming is in demand but it's also highly competitive. I was lucky enough to be able to switch into programming during the first dot com boom when the talent pool was too small. These days it would be difficult to jump in without having a formal education in computer science. That being said, the programming technologies that you encounter most often don't really require comp-sci backgrounds. It's just that employers (like women) set the bar higher than necessary. If I could have done it again I would have probably gotten a comp-sci degree and not have to deal with a lifetime inferiority complex.

I think as time goes on there won't be too many white-collar jobs that aren't in some way tech-related. It's going to be the last profession threatened by automation.

Post: #5

(11-26-2017 12:46 PM)questor70 Wrote:  Programming is in demand but it's also highly competitive. I was lucky enough to be able to switch into programming during the first dot com boom when the talent pool was too small. These days it would be difficult to jump in without having a formal education in computer science. That being said, the programming technologies that you encounter most often don't really require comp-sci backgrounds. It's just that employers (like women) set the bar higher than necessary. If I could have done it again I would have probably gotten a comp-sci degree and not have to deal with a lifetime inferiority complex.

I think as time goes on there won't be too many white-collar jobs that aren't in some way tech-related. It's going to be the last profession threatened by automation.

Thank you for your replies, what would you recommend for someone to be his second source of income?

Post: #6

Programmers are equivalent to an automotive mechanic. You just need them. I'm always hiring them for projects.

One dev I know is muscling high six figures per year with a team of 2-3 other guys. They build out custom tracking platforms, powerful UIs, apps, websites, etc.

Post: #7

If I learned programming, then I would focus on building popular web products like Pieter Levels is doing.

He runs NomadList, Hoodmaps, and a few other popular products.

Basically, I wouldn't fuck with client work. I would just focus on building valuable products that have a chance of going viral.

The key is to learn marketing skills while you learn programming at the same time.

You have to build products that people actually want to use...which is where learning marketing/sales comes into play.

I'm a big believer that programming + marketing is the winning skill set of the future.

Post: #8

(11-26-2017 10:01 AM)TheCroatian Wrote:  If you were equally good at sales as you were at programming, I'd choose sales every time.

As a secondary source of income you're going to have to 1) pair your programming with some kind of marketing funnel, which you won't at all have time to build (if you're starting your own business) or 2) compete with Indians/Chinese on Upwork for $10-15/hr.

The best freelance programming money comes from face to face relationships with clients you've met in person. But then again, that's basically sales and marketing. Once you have those contracts, just outsource the work on Upwork/Freelancer.

I'm a software developer and I kind of wish I hadn't gone down this route. The income distribution is very bimodal. You're either making $50k or $250k+ (you have popular git repositories/libraries and maybe speak at conferences). It's like being a musician.

I'm actually trying to figure out how to move out of this right now and into the family business full time, which would basically involve 100% sales, affiliate marketing and e-commerce for a physical product.

I'd choose both because programming is the ultimate sales tool.

You can build a digital product or SaaS and then sell that product to millions of people over the internet.

The caveat is that you don't necessarily need programming skills to build a digital product (you can outsource).

But I do think that we live in an age where it helps to know at least a little bit of programming. At least if you like to make money on the internet.

Post: #9

I'd say it's useful to learn however it's incredibly difficult to serve two masters.

I've been (re) learning programming extremely slowly for a while now and have a background in Java and C++ from university courses. I had the same goal as you, to use it as a side gig to earn more income.

I work in a separate industry and with a full time job it's difficult to balance everything. My current gig pays well and my current programming skills aren't at a level where I'm hire-able. Freelancing is out of the question at this point for me. Going home and putting in several hours to learn to program when I don't really need the money was taxing to say the least.

If you want to go this route, you're going to have to hustle hard if you have a full time job.

I agree with stefpdt that programming and marketing are the skills of the future. I haven't heard of this Pieter Levels fellow, but looked him up and he seems to be doing it right.

One other thing I don't like about the lifestyle (especially if freelancing) is that many many hours are spent in front of a computer with little social interaction. In addition it's extremely frustrating when things don't work and it can take HOURS to debug.

I consider myself an introvert with a high pain/frustration tolerance and even I was getting annoyed at times.

Post: #10

(11-26-2017 10:01 AM)TheCroatian Wrote:  If you were equally good at sales as you were at programming, I'd choose sales every time.

As a secondary source of income you're going to have to 1) pair your programming with some kind of marketing funnel, which you won't at all have time to build (if you're starting your own business) or 2) compete with Indians/Chinese on Upwork for $10-15/hr.

The best freelance programming money comes from face to face relationships with clients you've met in person. But then again, that's basically sales and marketing. Once you have those contracts, just outsource the work on Upwork/Freelancer.

I'm a software developer and I kind of wish I hadn't gone down this route. The income distribution is very bimodal. You're either making $50k or $250k+ (you have popular git repositories/libraries and maybe speak at conferences). It's like being a musician.

I'm actually trying to figure out how to move out of this right now and into the family business full time, which would basically involve 100% sales, affiliate marketing and e-commerce for a physical product.

I just wanted to point out that making an individual income of $50,000 right out of school isn't too bad. The median yearly wage in the United States is around $32,000. I'm sure that people will point out that the average household income in the United States is $50,000. But this is misleading because on average more then one person lives in a household. Also extreme highs and lows skew the number when you use the average instead of the median. The United States has a high gini coefficient (measure of inequality) when compared to other first world nations. Making the number yielded from average salaries even less useful for comparative purposes.

Post: #11

Everything is worth learning on some scale. The better thing is to do is to evaluate where you will fall within a given skill set.

Ask yourself, am I a below average, average, or above average person? Do I consistently under-perform, keep pace, or out-perform my peers. Am I a disciplined or undisciplined worker.

If you are an above average person, outpace your peers, and are disciplined, throw a dart at wall full of income producing professions you are interested in. You will do fine in all.

If you're an average all around type of guy, look at the average guy doing said profession, because that will be you. Do you like what you see?

If you're a below average person, you're best looking at your inadequacies and working on those.

Other than that these "is it worth it to learn X" discussion are similar to "what is the best weightlifting routine" discussions. The more time you spend thinking about it, the less time you spend workIng towards you goals. Time is finite, don't waste it.

Post: #12

If you are building and developing a product that you own and sell personally, then yes, it's worth it. Skilled programmers can sell products on an app store or lucrative websites and generate large paydays.

If you are trying to transition your career to something with higher pay or potential location independence, then sure.

If you are trying to sell your hours of labor elsewhere, and don't plan on doing either of the two above, then why bother? You're competing with 5$/hr guys on fiverr. Adopt a barbell strategy or you may as well pick up a second job at a gas station.

Post: #13

For me programming is just a tool, like using a screwdriver. You can't go very far in life "only" using a screwdriver, but you do need the skill to do other cool stuff.

Even if it's not your main source of income, basic programming skills allow you to make computers "your little bitch".

I have accountant friends that use python to speed up their accounting work (get data from ugly unformatted table, format it, parse it to excel, do math, export it to pdf, automatically upload it to backup server).

Sure, they could take 5 hours to do it manually. Or they can spend 10 minutes writing a script, and after that every time they need to do the same task they just double click their script.


So even if you don't plan on becoming a full time programmer, it's worth to learn the basics. A good practical book that I like for non programmers is "automating the boring stuff with python".

It's pretty basic, but useful. Look at the table of contents. If you see actions that you have performed more than once, and found time consuming... think about how awesome it would be to do them with a double click.

Post: #14

You only compete against the $5 dollar an hour fiverr guys or the $8 an hour upwork guys if you perform within their level of pprogramming, which is generally shit. Like everything In life, if you're competing with the bottom feeders, then you are a bottom feeders yourself. Don't be a bottom feeder.

Expand your skills and price yourself out of the riff raff.

Post: #15

I recently went to a demo day of a coding bootcamp and was impressed with the results the participants accomplished after 9 weeks of training full-time, without previous coding experience. They produced functional and great-looking apps for real-life applications.

Most of the participants were young kids in their early 20ies, but also some guys in their 40ies and even 50ies who wanted a career change.

If you work as a content producer, copywriter or just want to have more options making money online, it looks useful to me. I can't say how much you really learn in such an immersive, relatively short experience, but it feels like a super useful skill just knowing how developing works and what can be done.

The tuition fee for the bootcamp I looked at is around 6k usd. The question is, of course, is it worth it? I am genuinely interested in it.

Does anyone have experience with these kind of bootcamps? How useful do you consider them to be?

Post: #16

(11-26-2017 01:37 PM)stefpdt Wrote:  I would focus on building popular web products like Pieter Levels is doing. He runs NomadList, Hoodmaps, and a few other popular products.

At some point, he changed his free nomadlist, a "digital nomad" forum, into a membership site with a heavy monthly price tag. No notification was given before the change. When I tried to log in again after a few weeks of absence, I could not access my profile and my old posts any more. It found this annoying.

Post: #17

I think with the new Blockchain economy and the internet of things idea programming just became 10 times more useful for making money. This is why I am planning to learn it.

Post: #18

What are the major programming languages one should focus on?

I know its probably desired field- dependant but just a quick rundown.

Im starting to feel illiterate without programming knowledge

Post: #19

(11-30-2017 02:35 PM)Beirut Wrote:  What are the major programming languages one should focus on?

For optimal income the language makes little difference. None of the languages are all round perfect. For me, one of the most important aspects is speed and in that vein two of the best are GoLang and NodeJS. I'm not really familiar with NodeJS, but I suspect it is the best. However, it's money that really matters. The language I use is PHP, which is probably the most popular language for web or close, but from a programming perspective it's also the worst. PHP is a junk language that needs scrapping, but because it's so developed and has so much support its uneconomical to move away from it. It's like companies stuck on expensive Windows bloatware but don't want to re-wire their entire company at the cost of a year's profit. WordPress, the popular PHP blogging software is the same. It is a programming disgrace, but it has adoption and support. For me, the cost of changing to a quicker, better, more logical programming language would be at least $100,000. And the $ benefit of doing so would be $0.

You need to learn a programming language for yourself and not others, in which case it doesn't matter what you learn, so you may as well learn something superior like NodeJS. Which leads to the second point...

Programming is the More Economically Rewarding Skill

I disagree with most of the above who suggest sales over programming. As mentioned you want to program for yourself. If you're freelancing you will be lucky to push beyond $30,000. If you are good you can easily push up to $60-80K for a job; up to $250K if you get into one of the big boys. It's a good career that I think will remain safe so long as you keep your skills relevant. But if you want to go location independent, be able to transcend the nation state and make more then you need to make your own site/app. The problem is doing so requires quite a lot of knowledge. You need to know multiple languages and technologies, you should have some economic grounding and ability to spot oppurtunites, some knowledge of psychology is useful, you need to know how to get traffic from search engines or other sources. This will take years to learn and you might not be any good at it. Get your IQ tested. If you don't have at least 110, then you won't be a good programmer.

I managed to get all the skills and knowledge required to select a niche and set up a successful site. There was little cost, just huge 60-100 / hour work weeks with no breaks for years. I don't have any clients, I don't have to deal with any people, I barely speak to any of the companies I make money for, profits are large and about 95% of revenue, I don't have to deal with the government, I could take a break though I never have and am location independent. You can't do that with sales and brick and mortar.

I haven't read this, but this guy seems to be on the same track. Though with multiple sites instead of one.

For me the biggest selling point of programming is being able to do what would take the programming illiterate years in hours, minutes. For my site I've programtically achieved what would probably be 10,000+ years of grunt work in 5 years. A sales guy can only do a year's work in a year. Also I would say that you can't efficiently manage the huge economic potential that can be unleashed by programmers if you can't program yourself. Most programmers are generally good at nothing else, other than LARPing. They also tend to have poor social skills and get pushed about by management dicks who don't know how to efficiently organise.

A programmer who is driven and has other key areas of knowledge is worth far more than a sales guy. It's just they are rare. Sales is easier with more players, there is a lower bar, hence less fruit.

Post: #20

(11-30-2017 03:37 PM)gework Wrote:  I disagree with most of the above who suggest sales over programming. As mentioned you want to program for yourself. If you're freelancing you will be lucky to push beyond $30,000. If you are good you can easily push up to $60-80K for a job; up to $250K if you get into one of the big boys. It's a good career that I think will remain safe so long as you keep your skills relevant. But if you want to go location independent, be able to transcend the nation state and make more then you need to make your own site/app. The problem is doing so requires quite a lot of knowledge. You need to know multiple languages and technologies, you should have some economic grounding and ability to spot opportunites, some knowledge of psychology is useful, you need to know how to get traffic from search engines or other sources. This will take years to learn and you might not be any good at it. Get your IQ tested. If you don't have at least 110, then you won't be a good programmer.

Couldn't agree more, most people cannot pull this off, the combination of skillsets is just too rare.

(11-30-2017 03:37 PM)gework Wrote:  I managed to get all the skills and knowledge required to select a niche and set up a successful site. There was little cost, just huge 60-100 / hour work weeks with no breaks for years. I don't have any clients, I don't have to deal with any people, I barely speak to any of the companies I make money for, profits are large and about 95% of revenue, I don't have to deal with the government, I could take a break though I never have and am location independent. You can't do that with sales and brick and mortar.

I haven't read this, but this guy seems to be on the same track. Though with multiple sites instead of one.

Kyle's a beast, for sure, his productive output is insane, however, he isn't a web developer, or at least he didn't program his sites, I believe.

As far as pure programming, I'd say Levels.io is a better example. That fellow is transparent about everything, he even posts his actual revenue figures.

Either route, Kyle's or Pieter's, is a valid one, Kyle's is more affiliate marketing/copywriting/content creation/sales, while Pieter's is more programming/sales, while having the users create the content.

Both paths require a high IQ and a work ethic far above the norm, so they have that in common, the difference is one, Kyle's, is more about sales, but still requires some technical skill, and the other, Pieter's, involves much more technical skills, but still requires sales.

Both require a CEO type of personality.

For your niche sites, you actually coded them up yourself, right? You didn't use a CMS? I'm curious whether you fall more under the Kyle model or the Pieter model.

Post: #21

I'm personally going the Django route for my backend, as I have some pretty decent familiarity with Python.

I believe that programming with the desire to be a freelancer or employee isn't terrible, you have location independence and a likely low 6 figures to look forward to.

However, starting a software business, or implementing your skills into tangibly making the world better, that's where I'd direct my efforts.

Post: #22

(11-30-2017 07:24 PM)TheFinalEpic Wrote:  However, starting a software business, or implementing your skills into tangibly making the world better, that's where I'd direct my efforts.

Post: #23

(11-30-2017 10:39 PM)Suits Wrote:  

(11-30-2017 07:24 PM)TheFinalEpic Wrote:  However, starting a software business, or implementing your skills into tangibly making the world better, that's where I'd direct my efforts.

Please kill me should I ever end up in Silicon Valley.

Post: #24

(11-30-2017 11:46 PM)TheFinalEpic Wrote:  

(11-30-2017 10:39 PM)Suits Wrote:  

(11-30-2017 07:24 PM)TheFinalEpic Wrote:  However, starting a software business, or implementing your skills into tangibly making the world better, that's where I'd direct my efforts.

Please kill me should I ever end up in Silicon Valley.

Why? Don't you want to make the world a better place by providing scalable, tolerant, distributed solutions?

Post: #25

I attended an in-person bootcamp in 2014. My starting salary was $50k w/benefits in a second-tier U.S. city. I now make $70k. If you can keep yourself motivated, I think there are some excellent online options these days for learning this material. Here is an excellent one, which I've done a lot of the coursework in (though I've had to take a break due to work getting busy): https://learn.co/sign_in. You should do the free portion and see if you can stomach it (or if you like it).

If you just want to create a niche website, you probably don't need much programming knowledge. That's the whole point of squarespace, wordpress, etc. I would probably use one of those if I was just going to create content and not a custom application which pulls lots of API data (e.g., an app that pulls prices/deals from around the web via an API or web scraper). This way you don't have to deal too much with infrastructure and security.

I will echo what others said: I think your most fruitful endeavor would be to create your own application/venture. There does seem to be a bimodal salary distribution (80/20?) based on the facebook/google/SV superstars and the rest of us. When it comes to contract work or studio work, you can get some good experience, but the pay is paltry. People just don't understand how much work goes into these projects. "You just do html and css and a little javascript, right?" Uh, no. It's especially undervalued because CMSes are so ubiquitous these days. Many of the concepts from more-mature software engineering have been ported over to the web (especially frameworks like Angular, which is what I write for). A computer science degree (could do that online too: http://www.regis.edu/CCIS/Academics/Degr...ience.aspx) might help you here, but is not totally necessary (I don't have one); everything can be learned with interest and dedication.

One possible path: find the problem first. Then if programming is the solution, you'll be motivated to learn and apply it.