I'm trying not to make this sound as a generic LinkedIn business advice, but get a better profile picture. Maybe a picture of you in front of one of the art pieces. Something that gives me an impression of who you are and what kind of art you collaborate in.
It may sound stupid, but first impressions do really matter, even on Github. A dark, blurry picture of you drinking beer does not give a good impression.
This. Oh my god this. I can't believe people put up a TikTok-value photo on a professional site and wonder why they aren't getting 6 figure offers - no matter how technical they are.
> I can't believe people put up a TikTok-value photo on a professional site
That's interesting - for the longest time, for me Github wasn't anything related to the professional world, just a website to put the hobby OSS projects or uni group projects on. Things have obviously changed - it's nice to get a reality check regarding it.
I've been sitting on GitHub sponsorship setup for htmx, but this motivates me to get that done. It would be amazing to work on a passion project and get paid for it.
I have a bunch of projects which seem to be popular, and a lot of followers. Income received via sponsorship? €0.
I think a lot depends on luck, and the kind of repositories you manage/create. Some projects are obviously more commercially useful than others, and those are the easier ones to receive income from.
The thing that struck me most was the podcast appearance. I was distantly affiliated with the music industry at one point and I saw over and over the value of being in the right place at the right time. Great bands languish because they just weren't seen.
I don't mean to diminish the work, either the technological or the effort of finding sponsors. I just want to caution about extrapolating success stories to utopianism. Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming.
> Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming.
An excellent sentiment, if less common these days than it should be. Reminds me of a quotation from Chapter XXV[0] of Machiavelli's The Prince: "Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less."
Over the course of an entire lifetime, the random good vs bad luck tend to wash out and people usually end their lives financially roughly in line with their capabilities. - my personal opinion and experience.
Demonstrably false considering massive wealth inequality and poverty. It's incredibly harmful and uneducated to hold such a callous opinion. It also goes against the plentiful studies showing that socieconomic status (SES) is more significant predictor of success than almost any other attribute.
Simple scenarios:
- immigrants/refugees moving to a different country
- getting visas in what is largely a lottery system
- injury luck with respect to athleticism
- access to equipment and instruments with respect to musical talent
- slavery and generational poverty
The idea that _capability_ is anywhere close to as important as luck fails so many simple tests (let alone empirical studies) that your statement offends me a little bit.
Back when I applied for an H1B visa, the chances that I'd be outright rejected was 30%. The next few years I believe it climbed to 60%. Just the fact that I found a company willing to apply to my visa involved a lot of luck. Even me being on the US before the H1B involved a lot of luck. Then luck to get the visa. So much of my career was based on luck. Sure, I seized some opportunities when they flew by, but it's not like I was steering super hard to make them happen. Some people will make success happen because they're super smart and relentless, but for a lot of people like me, I believe there's an incredible amount of luck involved.
It kind of grinds my gears when some people give lessons on how to be successful and don't acknowledge that luck was a part of it.
Looking at life as a massive state machine, I think it’s clear that some parts of the state machine are much more beneficial than others. Luck often pushes people into a bad area or good area, and it can be quite difficult to transition out of that area of the state machine, for better or worse.
Competency and hard work are obviously very important, but luck is an enormous factor as well. And luck, along with its compounding effects, is not uniformly distributed across all individuals.
I would agree, with the caveat of "all else being equal". There is a danger in ignoring vast socioeconomic divides that can put people at a disadvantage that can make things more difficult for certain demographics.
Well, "luck" is a phenomenon of perception, not reality. Since it's people who perceive, being anthropocentric makes sense. On the other hand, that also makes it subjective, hence describing it may reveal more about the describer than the effect.
“Luck is probability taken personally.” – Chip Denman
I’m amazed at how many comments piled up insisting that luck is a major or possibly the most significant factor. Even if true, what a self-defeating outlook. Every accusation is a confession.
Perhaps consider that some people are talking about luck as a way of reasoning about how we should organize society (if luck is a factor that may imply stronger safety nets) while others (like you, I'd gather) are talking about how to approach one's own life? That's how I've been reasoning about the discussion and it helps clarify things.
What you wrote is insightful as to the underlying thinking, but I’m not sure I buy the premise. If luck is the dominating factor, how is the outcome of any election legitimate? Aren’t the winners merely the luckiest? Where’s the safety net for the unfortunate also-rans? Who are the rightful representatives to do the organizing? The questions are interesting because the ancient Athenians would reject what we call democracy due to our reliance on popular elections, which they viewed with suspicion as a tool of oligarchy. Although some posts were elected, they largely preferred sortition or luck of the draw.
Current and former gifted students are likely overrepresented on HN. Underachievement (whether real or perceived) is a source of stress or depression for this population[0], and defense mechanisms[1] are a common coping strategy. In [1], the authors define quadrants based on high or low success orientation and fear of failure.
1. Optimists - high success orientation, low fear of failure: low sense of helplessness
2. Overstrivers - high success orientation, high fear of failure: risk of burnout, tend to have high “defensive pessimism”
3. Acceptors - low success orientation, low fear of failure: tend to have low self esteem and high helplessness
4. Self-protectors - low success orientation, high fear of failure: tend to have high defensive pessimism and self-handicapping
They define defensive pessimism as “artificially lowering expectations of performance when a performance will be evaluated in order to lessen the hurt of failure and turn success into an unexpected surprise” and self-handicapping as “generating conditions that will produce an excuse for failure through actions such as procrastination, task avoidance, withholding effort, and other strategies.” They label both harmful.[0]
To this optimist, assigning everything to luck looks like all of helplessness, defensive pessimism, and self-handicapping: “I’m smarter than that bum, so his success must be due to dumb luck.”
> If luck is the dominating factor, how is the outcome of any election legitimate? Aren’t the winners merely the luckiest?
On the one hand, I think this may be conflating different senses of luck. On the other hand, yes, luck played a big role in the winner of the election ending up in that position, but not because the election itself was akin to a coin flip (hyperbole), but because luck has a small impact innumerable times in the goings on of that individual's life leading up to that point.
> Where’s the safety net for the unfortunate also-rans?
Thinking about this, it's actually a good question. If the goal of an election is to select the person most able to perform the role of the elected position most satisfactorily, then providing a mechanism by which those without access to traditional campaigning resources and capital to participate could allow more qualified individuals to participate in the election who otherwise wouldn't have been able to.
And this is, I think, precisely the point of saying that luck is a bigger factor than people acknowledge because in order to be elected today, you need to have the connections and capital necessary to execute a successful campaign while continuing to fulfill any other obligations you have during the time leading up to the election, and you need to have something in place to deal with not being elected, something to fall back on. That's a whole bunch of moving parts that need to align before it makes sense to participate in an election.
Cohorts that graduate into a recession earn less over the course of their lifetimes than cohorts that graduate into normal times. It can take a decade or more to catch back up to their earning potential, meanwhile those who graduated a year earlier or later able to earn compounding interest on their additional income.
I find it hard to believe that birth year is strongly correlated with capabilities.
Our capabilities are also luck: genetics, access to education and compounding that the rich will enjoy more often. The homeless person from a broken home trying to stay alive is less capable of writing distributed software. On average. Yes there will be rags to riches stories that make great reads, and set the standard of the “insert country” dream.
Yeah; I have been trying to find ways to support my open source work and educational work over the past year, and I finally struck YouTube algorithm gold with a couple videos last month... but trying to replicate that success is hard.
Sometimes I can spend days or more polishing a blog post or video and making it really good—and it falls flat.
Other times I'll write up a post in an hour or so and it front pages on HN, gets traction on Reddit, etc.
It seems more random than anything, though the fact that I've put in lots of hours on other content means I'm not starting from zero here.
For GitHub sponsors, I didn't get any real traction until I explicitly started asking people to be a sponsor. I don't even have 'rewards' or anything... maybe that would help, maybe not. But it's still hard to get people to commit money to my cause, and I think the same skills are required for this that would be useful in nonprofits and charities soliciting donations.
So just checked out one of your videos, and you seem to have a good process.
I recently bought a mic and a nice webcam (March) to do recordings and live streams, but got hung up on recording processing, etc.
Don’t know if it makes sense for you to do a meta video on that, or just share your thoughts on the OBS software and post processing, or if that’d be something worth reaching out to you on.
Like you, I’m very engaged in OSS, so I’m happy you’re seeing success!
But I'm considering doing a little more in the realm of 'how its made' type videos, because you can do most of the things 'professional' video producers do on a budget, depending on how many nice things you want to do in a video.
Hey there -- I came across your blog a year or so ago via the Rpi Drupal stack. Cool stuff.
I didn't realize you had such a large YouTube presence. I'm curious how you got started. You seem to be quite interested in Ansible so I imagine you just started there and it grew organically?
FWIW -- I'm looking to start making YouTube videos on full-stack web development. I used to be a high school teacher before teaching myself programming well enough to do it professionally so I think I'd be pretty good at this topic/market (entry-mid level). I'm just not sure exactly where to start, how to make myself standout compared to others doing the same thing, etc.
Maybe you've written a blog post on this topic before you could direct me to? Is entry level full-stack web dev too broad? Thanks in advance, keep up the good work!
I started live streaming one project pre-COVID. Then when lockdowns started, I used the experience I gained there to do my Ansible 101 series, and it kind of snowballed a bit from there.
I also have a media production and communications background (from college / post-college days), which helps a lot, because even if the tech changes, the techniques don't.
I started out doing video with a mini VHS camera that I put into an old Performa Mac through a TV capture card and I forget what NLE I used at that time. Then I jumped to MiniDV with some nice Canon SD equipment and got some good audio gear and worked from a G3/G4 with Final Cut Express for a while, before I stopped doing much video work for a decade.
Skip forward a few years and now the whole world's 1080p minimum/4K often, and lighting and technique is way more important—but knowing the basics from back in the day means I can still make decent quality video with the equipment I have available.
While what you write is true, quite often lead engineers of big open source projects quit working on the project because they get frustrated of all the people demanding features from them.
As patreon got more successful over time and youtubers make part of their content payed, I would be surprised if many open source engineers without other revenue didn't adopt more of the sponsorware business model.
Perhaps, but I think a lot of people tend to say that, then conclude that they should just wait around for luck (not saying you're doing this, though).
Another approach is to do everything you can (podcast appearances, for example!) to increase your "luck surface area".
> Perhaps, but I think a lot of people tend to say that, then conclude that they should just wait around for luck (not saying you're doing this, though).
I'm curious as to why you think that? It could be cultural differences but I have never seen that behaviour except from those that are already depressed and have given up.
IMO the simplest analogy for success is poker. You make the best decisions you can given the information you have. You adjust as new information is revealed. Ultimately, success or failure is less relevant than the process.
Yet the same faces seem to show up over and over at the final table because some are better than others at executing the process, maintaining control of emotions, bankroll management, and so on.
Of course given a large enough sample size process wins out! People's capabilities and knowledge differ. The issue is in determining _what_ good process _is_ given the vast environment that is a globalized economy.
That is why socioeconomic status is so important with respect to success. There's a difference when you can play a thousand hands vs. ten.
Luck is arguably the most important variable, so optimize for it. It's less like buying lottery tickets and more like betting on horses but with outsized returns.
If you bet on one horse, in one race, you'll probably lose and blame luck. But if you keep on betting, you're going to get lucky.
5% chance of success on a given attempt just means try 50 times. Which is also why it's important to test ideas fast and cheap, killing bad ideas quickly.
Practically speaking, who you know, who knows you, where you are, and when seem to be the external factors, and the number of distinct attempts seems to be the internal factor.
Work and prayer are not enough. While one's nose is to the grindstone, beavering away at whatever task, someone slightly wiser will notice some shortcut worth a year of diligent labor and prayer. The leisure time that shortcut buys will enable the identification of other valuable knowledge... It may be better yet to join such ingenuity with the labor you're talking about.
But ingenuity is part of work. Granted, knowing when to take a step back from brute force is a skill that must be developed and one at which some seem to have stronger natural aptitude than others.
How so? They took the time to share their story and itemize and outline the whole approach for anyone to read.
Of course it's anecdotal and YMMV but to dismiss all the hard work and clear demand (people are paying) for the work by saying timing is a "big factor"? That seems unfair.
Of course timing matters in all things, but all the timing in the world won't help if you don't put in the work, or build something that people want.
Before someone points out an exception to the above, of course there are exceptions and people who get luckier than most, but this doesn't come across that way to me at all, and sharing the journey and the learnings is not something they had to do.
Yes, picking the right thing to work on at the right time is crucial; it takes insight and creativity, not just luck. He also had the determination to follow through on his idea.
It's inspiring to see that oss can provide a comparable income to the more traditional software engineering career path. It looks like some salesmanship is required, I wonder if there's some service out there that takes care of that aspect to help oss projects to find sponsors?
$100k is still not even close to how much you can make in SV as an engineer. Specially an engineer at this caliber. But working on OSS full time is probably 100x more fulfilling than building CRUD for a boring ad company.
Yes but the author is American So he'll always have to pay US taxes even if he moves out of the US.(I'm aware about tax treaties but in most cases they still have to pay the difference)
It is true depending on the country he lives in. As he's a US citizen, even if he lives overseas he needs to fill in a W-9 form to get the money from GitHub.
He can spend $300/month in many parts of Europe, get good healthcare. Even with paying some taxes to support the US billionaires, he'll live a very good life. In SV for that money he'd have to climb over zombies to go get the groceries
It may depend on what country you're in, but in the US if you're just some rando, "donations" are still taxable income. The form GitHub sends you for filling purposes is the same one used for contractors.
If the earnings are made outside of the US then he doesn't pay tax on less than 100k. The earnings are in the US so he would need to pay, he still has to fill in a W9 form as he's a US citizen.
You'll see wild swings in these numbers depending on how specific you're being about the type of place being rented and even between services doing the reporting.
Here's a March 2019 article from CBS bay area (based on data from the rental site Zumper):
"Median 1-Bedroom Rent In San Francisco Soars To Nearly $3,700 A Month"
"Elsewhere in the Bay Area, San Jose’s median rent for a one-bedroom was $2,540 (5th highest in the country), while in Oakland it was $2,320 (9th highest)."
The difference is even more pronounced. A very nice house in Nebraska is well under 300K but out of reach of almost all in most of California. Why you would live in either Nebraska or California though is up for debate...
Don't forget that California is a big state and a lot of it is not very populated or popular. A house in the bay or LA will probably run you a lot more than that.
First, I think you're overestimating how much you can make as an engineer in SV. It's more, but it's not fair to say $100k is "not even close".
Second, there's more to life than working at, say, Facebook/Netflix/etc for money. The pure happiness of working on something you care about is worth a lot of money to some people.
Third, if this person ever wants to get a real job, the $100k won't go away, and they'll easily add $50k to their starting offer for running a prolific open source project.
Lastly, look at that graph. It's going up. Zero to $100k is really good for 6 months, and in another 6 months it'll potentially double. Most startups don't get to $100k this quick. More people will use this as time goes on, they can start new projects, they can do high-end freelancing for companies using it, etc.
Unless you're doing interesting things at google for that 300-500k, 100k to work on OSS problems seems immeasurably better to me especially because they don't have to live in the bay area.
100k in pretty much anywhere but the east or west coast may as well be 300k.
If we're talking raw numbers, that doesn't compute well.
My last rent in Houston for an actual cool place to live (downtown Westheimer area) was a solid 1.3k, or 15k a year. So after taxes rough estimate 70k - 15k = 55k into your savings account, before expenses etc.
I have the best apartment I've ever had in my life practically on top of 16th mission station right now for 2.1k. I'm not making 300k but if I was, let's see: 210k - 25k = 185k into savings each year, not including expenses. That's 3x the amount of money for investment, savings, playtime in places where the money goes the same distance no matter where your permanent address is.
State and city income tax aren't going to eliminate that 3x difference. Brunch costing 50$ vs 20$ isn't going to make up that difference.
We can talk about quality of life as well but that'll be a much, much longer comment from me, and feels like a pointless conversation (city folk gonna city).
I see the time spent making that 300k at a fang as 40-60 hour a week opportunity cost on better work with the caveat that if you are doing work you consider personally interesting then good for you. I think ultimately we have very different priorities from each other though and view money differently as well.
Well that's fair, though a different discussion. I would argue you could probably find a project at Google that promotes your values, who knows though.
In any case, my numbers hold up for bay area startup salaries as well - if they didn't, I wouldn't live here lol.
I'm currently working on founding a search engine that is in direct opposition of Google's values, or potentially lack thereof, so I think that might be a hard sell for them ;)
And the numbers don't really work out for founders for the first couple years in terms of any salary so I think again we view money differently. I'm not really disputing that your numbers work for being an employee but they don't really hold out for people working to start their own thing, at least in the short term. As I'm sure the OP is aware there's intangible benefits that don't take the form of a retirement account associated with running your own thing.
Edit: I'll also say we may be at a point where we're starting to talk passed each other, your math checks out for sure I just don't value the benefits associated as much.
That's really cool, care to link? I'm slowly extricating myself from Google and Facebook.
I think we don't disagree for reasons other than raw money about why working somewhere other than FAANG would be good. Probably reasons similar to why I don't work at FAANG ;P
Those numbers are real, no doubt about it but even if you potentially have the skills and knowledge to compete for those positions, your odds of getting such a job are still incredibly slim. If you are young, immensely talented(for the lack of a better word), and in a location near the job offering, then yes, there's a chance. But even giants such as FAANGs will have their doubts when you're 30+ and on the other side of the planet, even if your profile fits the needs of a senior engineer better than the youngsters next door, because they are well aware that at this point in your life, your priorities are increasingly becoming children and elder family members and it is incredibly likely for you to pack your bag and leave the moment something goes wrong with your family on the other side of the planet. And with such salaries, you'd be perfectly capable of doing that in 6 months, just when their investment is starting to pay off. Strictly speaking, you are looking at a very small subset of a subset that was tiny to begin with. For most people that doesn't happen even in dreams.
From experience I would say running the OSS project is definitely harder, but the type of person who is capable of making a successful OSS project is not the type of person who can chain themselves to a chair for 3 months and practice interview questions. Studying for FAANG interviews is arduous and extremely non-rewarding. It is like the extreme opposite of an OSS project, where you put in the same hours and have exactly nothing to show for it.
> Third, if this person ever wants to get a real job, the $100k won't go away,
It's true the $100k doesn't immediately disappear, but it seems safe to assume that taking on a full time job would leave a lot less time to do OSS work and would probably result in a non-trivial loss of sponsorship.
Yes it's a numbers game. Apply for as much job as possible and ask for a minimum of $200k base. With a little bit of back and forth you can settle for $180k and then get a lot of equity.
This is true, but a senior at google is nothing like the median senior in the valley.
This is the problem with level.fyi; it's good information but too many people point at it and say "look how much software engineers make in the valley". This isn't even close to representative.
It's a bit like looking at biglaw salaries in NYC and saying "look how much lawyers make".
> indeed.com puts the average software engineer in silicon valley at $112k with a $5k bonus per year
That figure or the number you edited it to at $141k, is on the low side. The median software developer in the US is at ~$110,000. The top 10% bracket starts at around $165,000.
Emphasis that $110k figure is median, average is higher. The average software developer in SV with 10 years of experience is going to be a lot closer to $200k or over.
I haven't checked the data and I'm not sure why you're being downvoted since you don't seem to be breaking any of HN code of conduct.
That said, isn't median a better measure in this context, though?
There can be a set of salaries that skews the average by a significant amounts, but most receive ~110k$
Mean salary isn't a very useful number if the distribution isn't close to normal; Without all the data it's hard to be sure - but that plausibly seems to be the case for SV salaries. Certainly matches my personal networks experience (sample biased as that may be).
Where did you get that 110k figure, by the way? That sounds very high for me for a median across all US software. Maybe California specific?
If I'd take $100K and move back to my country, I'd have the lifestyle 99% of devs in SV could only dream of. It wouldn't even come to my mind that I would want to work for FAANG.
You must be kidding. $100k a year is more than enough to not think about money (for one person) in all European cities, including London. Except if you suck at personal finance and spend all your money for unnecessary things.
It's enough that you don't have to worry about your ability to save money. It doesn't mean you never have to think about money at all.
When I moved to London I was surprised how low salaries were, even after factoring in social services like the NHS. 100K USD (80,000GBP) is a very good salary there.
If you have more than a single child of school age, £90k in London is not that much. Two kids at a private school in Northern England will run you £30k, I imagine in London it will be a tad more.
Never mind private schools, housing costs go through the roof if you want them to have their own room or, god forbid, a garden. Not to mention nursery fees if you both need to work to cover the mortgage and bills.
I explitliy mentioned: for one person. Of course, if you want to raise a family with private schols and a big house in the middle of London, that won't work. But let's not twist my words here.
I've lived and worked in two of those cities (and one other almost as expensive european city) for much less than $100k/year. It's a pretty comfortable lifestyle from about $50k upwards.
Sure, if you are happy living like a student. If you want to own a place in a reasonable part of town? If you want to be able to have a child? If you don't want to have to rely on two incomes to pay the mortgage? I didn't say it wasn't possible to live on that, only that that kind of salary was table stakes in those cities i.e. it's adequate but hardly living like a king.
Personally I can think of a plenty of other places I'd rather live in where you could truly live well on that kind of money.
Source: I live in the first of those on a similar salary.
There's a world of a difference between living like a student and owning property in a reasonable part of Dublin/London. a €45,000 salary (which is roughly $50k) is definitely a comfortable, non student lifestyle. It's not going to buy you a decent house in Dublin, but it's a comfortable lifestyle, and more than adequate.
€45,000 does sound a bit low. I lived on €40,000 (after taxes, rent was only 8-10% of the yearly income) in Croatia and lived like a king (travelling, restaurants, buying stuff without worrying about the price, massive amounts of good quality food).
Moving to any other major European city would require me to at least double the income to maintain my standards.
$100K before taxes is decent salary in London. It's not a lot a lot but that's what a senior developer would make in most companies (excluding financial sector+ some extremely funded shops). Would you stop worrying about money? No,of course not.But you could afford to live in decent area,drive normal car,have some nice holidays in pretty places + put some aside for rainy day.Of course,this is London,so no matter what kind of money you make, there's always someone making x10 times that. But isn't that's the case anywhere?
Doable but it won't be something amazing.
$100K would translate to about £4600/monthly (after tax).
Housing: £2000-2500(2-3 bed, decent area)
Food: £600-800(normal food)
Transport: £500-£700(public transport for both +1 car/)
£80k income puts you in the top 2% of the UK. Something that 98% of people (lower in London but not vastly lower) manage without can hardly be called "table stakes".
Yes HN is weird like that. Every time salaries are discussed people jump out with comments like : " 100k yearly after tax? That would merely serve you to live in a rented room and eating just ramen every-day".Then you go check and that kind of income is like top 3% , so either they are bullshitting or capitalist societies are in a dramatic state.
> Yes HN is weird like that. Every time salaries are discussed people jump out with comments like : " 100k yearly after tax? That would merely serve you to live in a rented room and eating just ramen every-day"
This one isnt really HN alone. Mostly just extremely privileged developers without much perspective.
In Denmark after taxes you would probably have about 329,000+ dkk, which yes, that is a pretty good half a middle class couple. So you can take care of half a family on that reasonably, not astoundingly great, but quite reasonable.
on edit: actually looking at wages in Denmark I see I am somehow doing a lot better than I thought, which is pretty much amazing to me considering how badly I thought I was doing. Since I am making about that amount after taxes. hmm.
Eh, I live in Sweden and I make around that much before taxes and me and my wife could manage with just my paycheck if we really had to. That's with a mortgage on a house, two cars, and a four year old kid.
I doubt the cost of living in Denmark is that much higher than Sweden, so I'd say you're living beyond your means if you can't make it work on 329K DKK after tax...
Have you been to copenhagen? If u’d head out to eat you won’t find anything for less than 500 SEK/pp unless u want fast food. Drinks are cheap though :)
You can't compare US taxes to EU taxes. Paying these (taxes and social contibutions) you also get something in exchange: free public medical care, free education, state pension, various safety nets. Although quality and amount depends on country.
You think that initially. But vacation costs the same or everyone and you also wanna splurge too. Appliances cost same, building costs slowly approach rest of Europe.
>$100k is still not even close to how much you can make in SV as an engineer
Oh, well then fuck this idiot, right? What a dumbass loser - doesn't even realize they can be a s i l i c o n v a l l e y e n g i n e e r and make a lot of money.
Jesus it's so exhausting reading the knee-jerk "SV engineers make more money" reaction to everything. You know what this person has that 99.999% of all SV engineers will never have? Complete freedom. You know what else this person has that 99% of all SV engineers will never have? The option not to have live in San Francisco, a dismal place that very few people want to actually be in anymore.
I'm not sure it's accurate to say that doing open source gives you "complete freedom". In some way, you are responsible to your contributors / users and they are kind of paying your bills.
The endless masturbating to "VC comp" on this site is a dumbass meme that needs to die a proper death.
Why would I move to that ghetto called San Francisco? I'll continue clocking my $250K in a non expensive city, with my 5 minute commute, and tons of disposable income. I also have the plus side of my government not being tolerant to people openly shitting on my streets.
I could also make much more money in SV. I like working from home in a smallish (150k) town in the northwest. I hate traffic. I hate commutes. I hate $5000/month apartments :)
I actually really want to live in San Francisco, but I don't want to and am not smart enough to work for a FAANG-type company. It's one of the few American cities where you can be a first-class citizen without owning a car and comfortably bike/walk everywhere year-round. SF has a really fascinating history and cool culture. I wish it was possible to work in academia there without already being wealthy.
I've lived in many US cities, including SF, and your characterization rings hollow for me. Unless you're focusing exclusively on climate, SF without a car isn't all that much better than dozens of other cities. Notably, unless you live near a BART stop, most transit commutes are going to involve some bus, switching to a separate system, 30+ minutes daily commute, $12+ round trip, etc. Or paying for rideshares. Dozens of cities in the US have the equivalent or better, without all the other associated baggage of SF. Here are a few examples I've lived or spent significant time in:
- Chicago, IL: The L reaches a lot more neighborhoods, is a single integrated transit system.
- Columbus, OH: Great bike lanes and dedicated paths, bus system that covers the entire city.
- New York, NY: By far the most walkable city in the US.
- Philadelphia, PA: Decent subway system, good connection to NJ and NY via NJ Transit. Very walkable core and neighborhoods.
- Washington, DC: Far superior version of BART with a lot more coverage.
Unless I've just happened across a half dozen of the best cities in the US, SF isn't all that remarkable.
I do love NYC, Chicago, and Philly, but I've always wanted to avoid winter entirely as I get pretty severe SAD. San Francisco seems like the only walkable city where that's possible.
That's fair. I imagine that there are parts of LA that are similarly walkable, but it's not like LA is immune to the problems SF has, and it has unique problems of its own.
There are bound to be some pretty cool places in AZ, NM, TX, and the southeast. I've been casually researching this topic for a while, and I've found it to be incredibly difficult to find a useful, non-biased index of walkable and interesting neighborhoods from all corners of the US.
"am not smart enough to work for a FAANG-type company"
Have you tried to apply for a job?
Don't underestimate yourself. I had the same thoughts about myself, then I tried an interview just for fun. Now I'm working for a FAANG company, moved to Canada, and having the best year of my life.
> The option not to have live in San Francisco, a dismal place that very few people want to actually be in anymore.
Dismal? Lol I love it here. People are moving out of cities all over the country because of coronavirus, sure, but only because most of the perks of city living are non-existent right now. I know a couple people moving and they're not going far, because of the nearby available amenities, that being excellent cycling and motorcycling roads, great mountain biking trails, climbing rocks, whatever water sports you could want...
Never quite got the hate. It's good weather and a great region.
It's a great city in a beautiful location... but if you come from another developed country or a part of the US where homelessness is very uncommon, it's extremely shocking to see people camping on the streets pretty much all over the city, it feels like you're in a shanty town and it feels unsafe.
I could see that if you came from somewhere where homelessness is uncommon, but something that shocked me on a recent roadtrip was how common homelessness is now. It seemed EVERY town we stopped in, except for the extremely remote or tiny, had camps or at the very least people looking worse-for-the-wear at street corners with a sign. I expect the painkiller epidemic combined with covid is not doing great things to this country.
I make $400k a year on a side project. I can do no work on it at all and still make $400k this year because the money is residual. It took 5 years to get to this point. The first 18 months, I made $0.
I could sell this side project for $1M easily.
I could grow it if I want to and make $500k next year.
I could write a blog and grow my personal brand on how I made this side project.
There are lots of opportunities this side project has opened up that working at my SV eng job can't provide.
Happy for you & thanks for sharing, not sure what the purpose or point is though... Side projects are great in terms of opportunities but although all you mention is the money that's generally the least common benefit they have.
I've worked on my own from home for the last 20 years. Would not trade it for any full time employee position. And thought of being in FAANG makes me shudder
I made significantly more than this working in SV. IMO it's totally fair to say $100k is "not even close" for certain roles in certain companies.
But then I moved. I'm here to tell you, the Bay Area has a quality of life problem that far exceeds the cost of living difference.
After moving, my monthly _mortgage_ payment is almost $1k less than the rent I was paying for a not-so-nice house in San Jose. When I run the numbers on my current house (considering only the property and not the HOA), trying to find something comparable around San Jose, I come up with around $10 million at a minimum. When you consider the HOA I live in - we have 20 miles of maintained trails and an HOA park almost every mile - the quality of the schools, the quality and cost of restaurants... the list goes on... this quality of life literally can't be purchased in the Bay Area for a software engineers salary, no matter what they do. And here is the thing: after moving I could take an 80% pay cut over my Bay Area salary and maintain this quality of living changing _nothing_ about my spending habits.
But money aside, I'm actually happy after moving. In the Bay Area I binged, ate, drank, and smoked every night. I put on weight, my mental and physical health was deteriorating. I was depressed. I felt like every time I left the house someone was trying to trick me out of my money. I saw societal decay at every corner, homelessness, unmaintained property, crumbling infrastructure. I felt it was the least progressive place I've ever lived and it made me feel guilty that I could afford to stay slightly above the decay. The Bay Area is a place that required significant effort for me to be happy and that wasn't possible when investing significant effort into maintaining my high salary job.
My advice to folks living in the Bay Area: take stock of why you are there. If the answer is a paycheck, I find it very hard to believe it's worth it after my experience.
Given that he lives somewhere around Buffalo, NY, the cost of living is about twice as much[1] to maintain his standard of living in SV, so I would say he's doing pretty well, and he gets to do what he loves!
Even at FAANGS, the salary for the same role at the same level can be significantly lower outside of California ... not just a couple of percent, but I've heard reports of 60% difference between e.g. San Francisco and London for just someone moving offices.
Comparing working as a W2 employee doesn't really compare to working as a contractor. Getting to choose your own hours, the direction of your project, who you get to work with, etc. is far more valuable to me than a bit more money.
The article is the one that compared the two, saying that he now makes "more". It is completely correct that you cannot directly compare W2+Benefits to Contractor Revenue. The rule of thumb is to add 50% to a W2 salary to include health insurance and other benefits.
I worked as a contractor in 1099 for years. It was exactly the same as W2, except I had to pay estimated taxes 4 times a year. I didn't get to choose hours, direction, who to work with.
I think you're confusing it with personal projects.
If you set the entity up correctly and work with a decent accountant, your $112k turns into more like $40k taxable, and if you are married, that $40k drops to $20k @ 10% + $20k @ 12% or ~ $4500 in taxes.
I think what he's generally saying: aggressively deduct expenses used to support your business. This would include rent, home office, computers, phones to conduct business, business meetings, travel, health insurance, retirement, etc. Then the member and spouse would draw low salaries putting you in low income bracket and thus low taxation. The 2017 TCJA further reduced taxation for business owners via the Qualified Business Income (QBI 20%) deduction.
I suspect a large part of it is a SEP IRA which lets you pack away like 57k in a tax advantaged account. Business deductions are almost like icing on the cake vs that.
Deductions sound good to people who haven't actually run a business or thought very hard about it. You have to be purchasing stuff to deduct. As a software engineer why not just not buy stuff since all you really need is a computer. Then you keep 100% of that money rather than 10%.
Some outliers are home office and utilities and things like that.
The attraction of deductions for sole proprietors working from home is not buying new stuff, it is the opportunity to pay for stuff you would buy anyway with pre-tax dollars.
In lots of countries you definitely can't deduct rent, non-business travel, health insurance, or retirement. And home office only if you have a dedicated room for it.
I'm freelancing currently myself, and available deductions are honestly miniscule and well-defined.
The IRS has rules (typically unenforced) regarding this. You are supposed to draw a salary that matches your job in your local area. So if you are based in Tinyton, Flyover State, you could probably get away with paying yourself $30k/yr, but in NYC (where I'm based), my accountant told me $70/hr is basically as low as I can safely go. So I do $70/hr and then $14/hr in my retirement account.
The $70 turns into ~$78 after all the employer taxes add into it, and I take home only $52 after employee side of taxes are taken out of it.
I only pay my accountant around $2000 to handle a bunch of housekeeping at the end of the year that I'm to lazy to do during, and to file my taxes. For years I did my own taxes using Turbo Tax Self Employed and Turbo Tax Business Editions, but in 2016 I decided to outsource all of that headache, the first year, my taxes were half of what they were the year before with similar income. Then after the TCJA in 2017, my taxes were only 1/5th what they had been before the accountant, with close to double the raw income.
The biggest changes from doing it myself: I got an accountant; I incorporated (s-corp) instead of doing self-employment income; I draw W2 income now (using Gusto); I set up a SEP-IRA and put 20% of my W2 earnings as an automatic debit from my business account (in Vanguard); TCJA chops off 20% of my distributions on my K1; and I'll state again, I hired an accountant.
I hear this advice a lot, but what does an accountant actually do differently? It always sounds magical. Are there super secret deductions and credits that aren't on Turbo Tax, and only accountants know about?
I feel like I'm doing 90% of the work already, having organized all my expenses and income. What are they doing other than typing it into their own Turbo-Tax-equivalent?
“TurboTax will take what I did last year and minimize my taxes. My accountant will tell me what to do differently this year to minimize my taxes next year.”
In other words a good accountant is a forward-looking advisor, not just a calculator.
Aha. And now you understand why we don’t have universal healthcare, crumbling infrastructure, and so much cash in the hands of the wealthy that interest rates are near zero.
We pay a "national insurance" tax in addition to income tax, but this is mainly to cover the state pension from what I understand and maternity allowance etc.
As I understand it, NHS comes from general taxation.
Obviously there is no actual "fee" to use the NHS at the point of use - it is all free apart from prescriptions which are the same price regardless of what you get (and you might get it for free anyway depending on your circumstances)
This is sorta already how it is in the US. While we obviously don't have universal healthcare, or a national pension, we do have Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. These are separate than income tax. On your pay stub, it's the FICA ("Federal Insurance Contributions Act") deduction. There is also a smaller separate supplemental Medicare-specific tax. Federal income tax is a separate deduction.
This. In US there are many benefits of owning a business. Cars are an expense, home office is an expense, etc. When you work for someone else you don't have this flexibility but your risk is lower and you are not worried about finding clients.
Its difficult to deduct cars as an expense--that is one of many expenses that the IRS will scrutinize.
The broader point still remains, for a business (a 1099 is considered a sole-proprietorship) generally net income is taxed, and as a W2, your taxes are witheld per pay period.
I'm not an accountant or tax lawyer, so this isn't advise, only my back of the envelope calculation, not even using things like the 172 deduction, or business expenses, but my estimate was actually way off almost double.
Gross Income: $112k
- SEP IRA 25%: -$28k
- Owner Health Insurance: -$15k
- 199-A Deduction (20%): -$12k
Total business income for taxes: $47k
- Married Filing Jointly Deduction: -$24k
- Total taxable income: $23k
Tax on $23k (10% of first $20k, 12% of next $3k): $2360
I do not. Bookkeeping for a small business really doesn't take much time. I spend about 2 hours a month working the books, then come January, I have my accountant's clerk come back and do a final pass over everything to prep for taxes.
With S-corps you do have to actually pay yourself wages, thus incurring some FICA taxes. Rule of thumb I believe is 50% of net income, up to ~$100k. Given that, you can then also contribute (and deduct) as the company up to 25% of salary towards 401k
Another gem many people don't know about is "Increasing Research Activities", for certain industries this essentially translates to 5-10% of your total payroll becoming a credit. That's huge.
I was doing my estimation based on an LLC, since most people don't set up S-Corps. I do operate through as an S-Corp, and I pay myself ~60%, and put 20% into my SEP-IRA.
WTF? Who pays $15k PER YEAR for health insurance? That's nuts. In most countries USD$15k would pay for healthcare for 2 or 3 people for their entire lives.
That’s actually fairly “cheap”, if it’s covering more than one person.
For a brief period I lived in Virginia and had no medical coverage through my employer. The legal minimum coverage was $1,400 / month for my family of four... and it was basically worthless; I would have had to have paid out something like $40k in a single year for medical services before I would have broken even.
I'm privy to my company's books to see the employee cost (free for the employee, usually ~$150/month to cover their family as well) as well as the total cost for all of our employees across several states. We have very high quality insurance as standard, and the full coverage plans are more like $20k - $25k/year. It's completely out of control.
$15k is a cheap family policy in most of the country. My wife and I pay $24k/year for the cheapest silver option with a low deductible. My wife gets pneumonia and bronchitis almost annually, and every few years gets hospitalized. On top of that, she has 5 medications she takes for her asthma and allergies that without insurance would add up to almost $1000/mo, so sure we could go uninsured and save close to $12k/year, but the second she gets pneumonia and ends up in urgent care or the ER, we've lost all of the savings. And that is just her, I have to get my blood drawn quarterly for a thyroid condition, and each time they bill that to the insurance it's $1600.
So sure $15k is ridiculous to pay for health insurance, but in the US, its the cheap option for a family.
Many expenses related to the operation of the business become tax deductible. At minimum, that usually includes internet access, hardware/software upgrades, and potentially some % of your living space dedicated to the business. If you do it properly (usually via documentation), you can often include miles driven to meetings, professional travel, meals with customers, prospects, and contractors, and a ton of other things.
And still none of that considers things like Simplified Employee Pension Plan (SEP), health insurance, home maintenance, etc, etc.
The list can go on and on depending on the type of your business, jurisdiction, and supporting documentation.
* Talk to someone about your local tax rules before taking action.
You're right. The 112k as his own small business is far, far better. What he's built has real durable value and new people will continue to pay for old content.
Well, yes. Isn't it great to know that if you happen to create a repo with 4k stars it is possible to get something out of it besides random people hate?
wow kudos, I also find it generous that github takes no cut on this giving that they offer the service.
Some people here are comparing with the pay at FAANG, you'll have to factor in the satisfaction of seeing your own ideas coming to fruition and the fact that you are free to do whatever the hell you want, anytime, anywhere. Is that worth the 200k+ difference? maybe, maybe not, it's up to you.
I'm not sure what is more impressive, the thought of 100k in 5 months from sponsorship or that the author ported a solution to another environment and got 100k sponsorship out of it?
Wow, Good job!
Not really understanding the comparison to SV salaries. This opens up many doors for the author, something that money wouldn't be able to do.
Also you've mentioned github sponsors. Did not know about that program. It is severely restricted by small list of countries. Seems unfair as so many people contribute through github but looks like large chunk is unable to apply for this type of sponsorship because of location. Frankly I am quite disappointed with such policy.
Sponsoring the official screencasts/educational content for an open source project is a great idea. I run a company[1] that provides a service targeted at software engineers and I'd pay several hundred to several thousand a month to have a 30 second promo at the start of a video, depending on the size of the project.
Is there a website out there where I can find content I can sponsor?
Also, keep in mind that when you are self employed you need to make 20-30% more than your salary as an employee if you want the same take home pay. That covers the extra self-employment tax you have to pay, health insurance, business insurance, etc. If you charge by the hour, you might find this article on how to calculate an hourly rate helpful: https://help.facetdev.com/docs/how-do-i-calculate-my-hourly-...
Although that doesn't sound like a bad idea, that is unfortunately not what he was talking about.
By sponsors he meant patrons that get a perk of accessing screencasts when they subscribe (sponsor him).
The biggest difference would be that GitHub Sponsors has no fees [1], so everything people put in will go to the developer. Where Patreon can take 5-12% depending on the plan [2].
Additionally, GitHub is just so much closer to the actual open source work and more easily discoverable for users of your product.
As a supporter, I'll pick GitHub over Patreon anytime.
It's a promotional incentive. Fees will happen, and matching will end. But in the meantime, it means my sponsoring a project I care about magnifies my money for a cause I value, so I'm happy to participate.
I don't have the feeling that I have to give something in return. It's a voluntary donation, people can donate, or not. They can cancel at any time. I don't feel any pressure to 'deliver' anything. They're paying because they want to reward the value I have provided, and likely will continue to provide. If I stop providing it, I assume people will slowly cancel their donations, which is how things should work.
If anything the fun-level has gone way up because a community has formed around one of my projects, which has been great.
I have my own little company and I feel like since its profitable (7 figures/year) I'm able to take my time and perfect parts of the project (like SQL indexing, UI/UX, new features). The money allows me to have the freedom to have fun. I've built internal libraries where I could have just used an open source version, but its mine and I enjoy it.
I had started another company before that I spent over a year on and I made $0. Not fun.
That is actually quite cool. If people had to pay for facebook they wouldn't. What do you think is missing for self-hosters, easy sign up ? I don't think it is easy create to DNS and private server for normal folks.
I left feedback the moment it entered "feature preview", left feedback on all the accessibility it lacked (mainly reducing contrast everywhere), and well, looks like they just rolled it out anyways.
Really wish they would take things like people being able to see their product without difficulty seriously.
Ignoring the fact that the majority of the source code is not open sourced and that "impact" biggest variable is going to be chance.
Impact of one open source project measure slightly more than developer talent. It is a combination of a lot of skills, development skill just one among other like marketing, business sense, ability to make video, ... Extreme example would be Zuckerberg: is he the best developer in the world and wouldn't you waste a bit his potential if you hired him as a PHP dev?
And in any case, impact is always going to be a star system. You are going to have a tiny percentage of developers (like a few thousands in the world) that have impact and all the other that have 0. You are back to square one at trying to find a way to differentiate between a loser that can code and another loser that cannot.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 424 ms ] threadI'm trying not to make this sound as a generic LinkedIn business advice, but get a better profile picture. Maybe a picture of you in front of one of the art pieces. Something that gives me an impression of who you are and what kind of art you collaborate in.
It may sound stupid, but first impressions do really matter, even on Github. A dark, blurry picture of you drinking beer does not give a good impression.
it definitely does not haha, I put a better pic. Thanks !
That's interesting - for the longest time, for me Github wasn't anything related to the professional world, just a website to put the hobby OSS projects or uni group projects on. Things have obviously changed - it's nice to get a reality check regarding it.
I've been sitting on GitHub sponsorship setup for htmx, but this motivates me to get that done. It would be amazing to work on a passion project and get paid for it.
I think a lot depends on luck, and the kind of repositories you manage/create. Some projects are obviously more commercially useful than others, and those are the easier ones to receive income from.
https://github.com/skx/
The thing that struck me most was the podcast appearance. I was distantly affiliated with the music industry at one point and I saw over and over the value of being in the right place at the right time. Great bands languish because they just weren't seen.
I don't mean to diminish the work, either the technological or the effort of finding sponsors. I just want to caution about extrapolating success stories to utopianism. Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming.
An excellent sentiment, if less common these days than it should be. Reminds me of a quotation from Chapter XXV[0] of Machiavelli's The Prince: "Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less."
[0]: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm#link2H...
Simple scenarios:
- immigrants/refugees moving to a different country
- getting visas in what is largely a lottery system
- injury luck with respect to athleticism
- access to equipment and instruments with respect to musical talent
- slavery and generational poverty
The idea that _capability_ is anywhere close to as important as luck fails so many simple tests (let alone empirical studies) that your statement offends me a little bit.
It kind of grinds my gears when some people give lessons on how to be successful and don't acknowledge that luck was a part of it.
Looking at life as a massive state machine, I think it’s clear that some parts of the state machine are much more beneficial than others. Luck often pushes people into a bad area or good area, and it can be quite difficult to transition out of that area of the state machine, for better or worse.
Competency and hard work are obviously very important, but luck is an enormous factor as well. And luck, along with its compounding effects, is not uniformly distributed across all individuals.
I’m amazed at how many comments piled up insisting that luck is a major or possibly the most significant factor. Even if true, what a self-defeating outlook. Every accusation is a confession.
Current and former gifted students are likely overrepresented on HN. Underachievement (whether real or perceived) is a source of stress or depression for this population[0], and defense mechanisms[1] are a common coping strategy. In [1], the authors define quadrants based on high or low success orientation and fear of failure.
1. Optimists - high success orientation, low fear of failure: low sense of helplessness
2. Overstrivers - high success orientation, high fear of failure: risk of burnout, tend to have high “defensive pessimism”
3. Acceptors - low success orientation, low fear of failure: tend to have low self esteem and high helplessness
4. Self-protectors - low success orientation, high fear of failure: tend to have high defensive pessimism and self-handicapping
They define defensive pessimism as “artificially lowering expectations of performance when a performance will be evaluated in order to lessen the hurt of failure and turn success into an unexpected surprise” and self-handicapping as “generating conditions that will produce an excuse for failure through actions such as procrastination, task avoidance, withholding effort, and other strategies.” They label both harmful.[0]
To this optimist, assigning everything to luck looks like all of helplessness, defensive pessimism, and self-handicapping: “I’m smarter than that bum, so his success must be due to dumb luck.”
[0]: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...
[1]: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-14500-001
On the one hand, I think this may be conflating different senses of luck. On the other hand, yes, luck played a big role in the winner of the election ending up in that position, but not because the election itself was akin to a coin flip (hyperbole), but because luck has a small impact innumerable times in the goings on of that individual's life leading up to that point.
> Where’s the safety net for the unfortunate also-rans?
Thinking about this, it's actually a good question. If the goal of an election is to select the person most able to perform the role of the elected position most satisfactorily, then providing a mechanism by which those without access to traditional campaigning resources and capital to participate could allow more qualified individuals to participate in the election who otherwise wouldn't have been able to.
And this is, I think, precisely the point of saying that luck is a bigger factor than people acknowledge because in order to be elected today, you need to have the connections and capital necessary to execute a successful campaign while continuing to fulfill any other obligations you have during the time leading up to the election, and you need to have something in place to deal with not being elected, something to fall back on. That's a whole bunch of moving parts that need to align before it makes sense to participate in an election.
I find it hard to believe that birth year is strongly correlated with capabilities.
The article it was created for is at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...
Sometimes I can spend days or more polishing a blog post or video and making it really good—and it falls flat.
Other times I'll write up a post in an hour or so and it front pages on HN, gets traction on Reddit, etc.
It seems more random than anything, though the fact that I've put in lots of hours on other content means I'm not starting from zero here.
For GitHub sponsors, I didn't get any real traction until I explicitly started asking people to be a sponsor. I don't even have 'rewards' or anything... maybe that would help, maybe not. But it's still hard to get people to commit money to my cause, and I think the same skills are required for this that would be useful in nonprofits and charities soliciting donations.
I recently bought a mic and a nice webcam (March) to do recordings and live streams, but got hung up on recording processing, etc.
Don’t know if it makes sense for you to do a meta video on that, or just share your thoughts on the OBS software and post processing, or if that’d be something worth reaching out to you on.
Like you, I’m very engaged in OSS, so I’m happy you’re seeing success!
But I'm considering doing a little more in the realm of 'how its made' type videos, because you can do most of the things 'professional' video producers do on a budget, depending on how many nice things you want to do in a video.
I didn't realize you had such a large YouTube presence. I'm curious how you got started. You seem to be quite interested in Ansible so I imagine you just started there and it grew organically?
FWIW -- I'm looking to start making YouTube videos on full-stack web development. I used to be a high school teacher before teaching myself programming well enough to do it professionally so I think I'd be pretty good at this topic/market (entry-mid level). I'm just not sure exactly where to start, how to make myself standout compared to others doing the same thing, etc.
Maybe you've written a blog post on this topic before you could direct me to? Is entry level full-stack web dev too broad? Thanks in advance, keep up the good work!
I started live streaming one project pre-COVID. Then when lockdowns started, I used the experience I gained there to do my Ansible 101 series, and it kind of snowballed a bit from there.
I also have a media production and communications background (from college / post-college days), which helps a lot, because even if the tech changes, the techniques don't.
I started out doing video with a mini VHS camera that I put into an old Performa Mac through a TV capture card and I forget what NLE I used at that time. Then I jumped to MiniDV with some nice Canon SD equipment and got some good audio gear and worked from a G3/G4 with Final Cut Express for a while, before I stopped doing much video work for a decade.
Skip forward a few years and now the whole world's 1080p minimum/4K often, and lighting and technique is way more important—but knowing the basics from back in the day means I can still make decent quality video with the equipment I have available.
As patreon got more successful over time and youtubers make part of their content payed, I would be surprised if many open source engineers without other revenue didn't adopt more of the sponsorware business model.
Perhaps, but I think a lot of people tend to say that, then conclude that they should just wait around for luck (not saying you're doing this, though).
Another approach is to do everything you can (podcast appearances, for example!) to increase your "luck surface area".
I'm curious as to why you think that? It could be cultural differences but I have never seen that behaviour except from those that are already depressed and have given up.
IMO the simplest analogy for success is poker. You make the best decisions you can given the information you have. You adjust as new information is revealed. Ultimately, success or failure is less relevant than the process.
That is why socioeconomic status is so important with respect to success. There's a difference when you can play a thousand hands vs. ten.
Luck is arguably the most important variable, so optimize for it. It's less like buying lottery tickets and more like betting on horses but with outsized returns.
If you bet on one horse, in one race, you'll probably lose and blame luck. But if you keep on betting, you're going to get lucky.
5% chance of success on a given attempt just means try 50 times. Which is also why it's important to test ideas fast and cheap, killing bad ideas quickly.
Practically speaking, who you know, who knows you, where you are, and when seem to be the external factors, and the number of distinct attempts seems to be the internal factor.
Do you have any other insights to add?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Of course it's anecdotal and YMMV but to dismiss all the hard work and clear demand (people are paying) for the work by saying timing is a "big factor"? That seems unfair.
Of course timing matters in all things, but all the timing in the world won't help if you don't put in the work, or build something that people want.
Before someone points out an exception to the above, of course there are exceptions and people who get luckier than most, but this doesn't come across that way to me at all, and sharing the journey and the learnings is not something they had to do.
1) Writing some software people need
2) Being very entrepreneurial / thinking of and trying different tactics to get people to sponsor him
There‘a a bit of luck in the equation, but not a lot.
In most parts of the world, $100k/year allows you to live very comfortably indeed.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...
Medicare and social security alone account for nearly half of the US fed govt spend.
Taxes do not support billionaires. The lack of them does.
Here's a March 2019 article from CBS bay area (based on data from the rental site Zumper):
"Median 1-Bedroom Rent In San Francisco Soars To Nearly $3,700 A Month"
"Elsewhere in the Bay Area, San Jose’s median rent for a one-bedroom was $2,540 (5th highest in the country), while in Oakland it was $2,320 (9th highest)."
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/05/median-1-bedroo...
Yeah I think 100k a year would go a little farther in one of these places than the other...
Second, there's more to life than working at, say, Facebook/Netflix/etc for money. The pure happiness of working on something you care about is worth a lot of money to some people.
Third, if this person ever wants to get a real job, the $100k won't go away, and they'll easily add $50k to their starting offer for running a prolific open source project.
Lastly, look at that graph. It's going up. Zero to $100k is really good for 6 months, and in another 6 months it'll potentially double. Most startups don't get to $100k this quick. More people will use this as time goes on, they can start new projects, they can do high-end freelancing for companies using it, etc.
I will let you decide if 3.5x - 5x is "not even close".
100k in pretty much anywhere but the east or west coast may as well be 300k.
My last rent in Houston for an actual cool place to live (downtown Westheimer area) was a solid 1.3k, or 15k a year. So after taxes rough estimate 70k - 15k = 55k into your savings account, before expenses etc.
I have the best apartment I've ever had in my life practically on top of 16th mission station right now for 2.1k. I'm not making 300k but if I was, let's see: 210k - 25k = 185k into savings each year, not including expenses. That's 3x the amount of money for investment, savings, playtime in places where the money goes the same distance no matter where your permanent address is.
State and city income tax aren't going to eliminate that 3x difference. Brunch costing 50$ vs 20$ isn't going to make up that difference.
We can talk about quality of life as well but that'll be a much, much longer comment from me, and feels like a pointless conversation (city folk gonna city).
In any case, my numbers hold up for bay area startup salaries as well - if they didn't, I wouldn't live here lol.
And the numbers don't really work out for founders for the first couple years in terms of any salary so I think again we view money differently. I'm not really disputing that your numbers work for being an employee but they don't really hold out for people working to start their own thing, at least in the short term. As I'm sure the OP is aware there's intangible benefits that don't take the form of a retirement account associated with running your own thing.
Edit: I'll also say we may be at a point where we're starting to talk passed each other, your math checks out for sure I just don't value the benefits associated as much.
I think we don't disagree for reasons other than raw money about why working somewhere other than FAANG would be good. Probably reasons similar to why I don't work at FAANG ;P
I don't believe that's a correct assumption. It's been a while but: https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/01/zed-shaw-puts-the-smack-do...
It's true the $100k doesn't immediately disappear, but it seems safe to assume that taking on a full time job would leave a lot less time to do OSS work and would probably result in a non-trivial loss of sponsorship.
[0] https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries/Sil...
A senior at google makes 170kish in salary and another 130-150k in stock.
This is the problem with level.fyi; it's good information but too many people point at it and say "look how much software engineers make in the valley". This isn't even close to representative.
It's a bit like looking at biglaw salaries in NYC and saying "look how much lawyers make".
That figure or the number you edited it to at $141k, is on the low side. The median software developer in the US is at ~$110,000. The top 10% bracket starts at around $165,000.
Emphasis that $110k figure is median, average is higher. The average software developer in SV with 10 years of experience is going to be a lot closer to $200k or over.
That said, isn't median a better measure in this context, though? There can be a set of salaries that skews the average by a significant amounts, but most receive ~110k$
Where did you get that 110k figure, by the way? That sounds very high for me for a median across all US software. Maybe California specific?
When I moved to London I was surprised how low salaries were, even after factoring in social services like the NHS. 100K USD (80,000GBP) is a very good salary there.
1950 called, they want their mononuclear family stereotypes back.
Personally I can think of a plenty of other places I'd rather live in where you could truly live well on that kind of money.
Source: I live in the first of those on a similar salary.
Moving to any other major European city would require me to at least double the income to maintain my standards.
https://ie.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php Says take home on $100k in ireland is ballpark €55,000 ($62k), and living costs are here - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Dublin -
This one isnt really HN alone. Mostly just extremely privileged developers without much perspective.
In the UK that pre-tax income would put you well in the 95th percentile.
Post-tax the 97th percentile.
on edit: actually looking at wages in Denmark I see I am somehow doing a lot better than I thought, which is pretty much amazing to me considering how badly I thought I was doing. Since I am making about that amount after taxes. hmm.
I doubt the cost of living in Denmark is that much higher than Sweden, so I'd say you're living beyond your means if you can't make it work on 329K DKK after tax...
If you go out to eat there at a normal place, it'll be more like 300-400 SEK (~280 DKK) per person including 1-2 alcoholic beverages.
Just for the context,that's what I could afford back home in the capital: https://m.aruodas.lt/namu-nuoma-vilniuje-antakalnyje-bistryc...
I am sure the HN crowd is probably aware of compensation at tech companies in general, especially in SV>
Oh, well then fuck this idiot, right? What a dumbass loser - doesn't even realize they can be a s i l i c o n v a l l e y e n g i n e e r and make a lot of money.
Jesus it's so exhausting reading the knee-jerk "SV engineers make more money" reaction to everything. You know what this person has that 99.999% of all SV engineers will never have? Complete freedom. You know what else this person has that 99% of all SV engineers will never have? The option not to have live in San Francisco, a dismal place that very few people want to actually be in anymore.
The endless masturbating to "VC comp" on this site is a dumbass meme that needs to die a proper death.
Why would I move to that ghetto called San Francisco? I'll continue clocking my $250K in a non expensive city, with my 5 minute commute, and tons of disposable income. I also have the plus side of my government not being tolerant to people openly shitting on my streets.
- Chicago, IL: The L reaches a lot more neighborhoods, is a single integrated transit system. - Columbus, OH: Great bike lanes and dedicated paths, bus system that covers the entire city. - New York, NY: By far the most walkable city in the US. - Philadelphia, PA: Decent subway system, good connection to NJ and NY via NJ Transit. Very walkable core and neighborhoods. - Washington, DC: Far superior version of BART with a lot more coverage.
Unless I've just happened across a half dozen of the best cities in the US, SF isn't all that remarkable.
There are bound to be some pretty cool places in AZ, NM, TX, and the southeast. I've been casually researching this topic for a while, and I've found it to be incredibly difficult to find a useful, non-biased index of walkable and interesting neighborhoods from all corners of the US.
Good luck!
Have you tried to apply for a job? Don't underestimate yourself. I had the same thoughts about myself, then I tried an interview just for fun. Now I'm working for a FAANG company, moved to Canada, and having the best year of my life.
Dismal? Lol I love it here. People are moving out of cities all over the country because of coronavirus, sure, but only because most of the perks of city living are non-existent right now. I know a couple people moving and they're not going far, because of the nearby available amenities, that being excellent cycling and motorcycling roads, great mountain biking trails, climbing rocks, whatever water sports you could want...
Never quite got the hate. It's good weather and a great region.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
... since the parent comment already made the same point, in the part you didn't bother to quote.
Also, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN generally. It's not what this site is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I could sell this side project for $1M easily.
I could grow it if I want to and make $500k next year.
I could write a blog and grow my personal brand on how I made this side project.
There are lots of opportunities this side project has opened up that working at my SV eng job can't provide.
I am in the same situation as you in your first 18 months. Got a product, need to get eyeballs and customers!
$100k iS sTiLl NoT eVeN cLoSe To HoW mUcH yOu CaN mAkE iN sV aS aN eNgInEeR
jokes aside, you can do even more money with less taxes in the united arab emirates.
So, when are you moving?
But then I moved. I'm here to tell you, the Bay Area has a quality of life problem that far exceeds the cost of living difference.
After moving, my monthly _mortgage_ payment is almost $1k less than the rent I was paying for a not-so-nice house in San Jose. When I run the numbers on my current house (considering only the property and not the HOA), trying to find something comparable around San Jose, I come up with around $10 million at a minimum. When you consider the HOA I live in - we have 20 miles of maintained trails and an HOA park almost every mile - the quality of the schools, the quality and cost of restaurants... the list goes on... this quality of life literally can't be purchased in the Bay Area for a software engineers salary, no matter what they do. And here is the thing: after moving I could take an 80% pay cut over my Bay Area salary and maintain this quality of living changing _nothing_ about my spending habits.
But money aside, I'm actually happy after moving. In the Bay Area I binged, ate, drank, and smoked every night. I put on weight, my mental and physical health was deteriorating. I was depressed. I felt like every time I left the house someone was trying to trick me out of my money. I saw societal decay at every corner, homelessness, unmaintained property, crumbling infrastructure. I felt it was the least progressive place I've ever lived and it made me feel guilty that I could afford to stay slightly above the decay. The Bay Area is a place that required significant effort for me to be happy and that wasn't possible when investing significant effort into maintaining my high salary job.
My advice to folks living in the Bay Area: take stock of why you are there. If the answer is a paycheck, I find it very hard to believe it's worth it after my experience.
1: https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...
Even at FAANGS, the salary for the same role at the same level can be significantly lower outside of California ... not just a couple of percent, but I've heard reports of 60% difference between e.g. San Francisco and London for just someone moving offices.
Here is OP's repo - https://github.com/livewire/livewire
On the other hand, his amounts are going up, so I'm interested to see how high they will go, and what it will consistently level out at.
So he is nearly there, but not yet.
I think you're confusing it with personal projects.
There is nuance in that statement. The IRS has a test for whether a person is an employee or a contractor.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contr...
Some outliers are home office and utilities and things like that.
I'm freelancing currently myself, and available deductions are honestly miniscule and well-defined.
The IRS has rules (typically unenforced) regarding this. You are supposed to draw a salary that matches your job in your local area. So if you are based in Tinyton, Flyover State, you could probably get away with paying yourself $30k/yr, but in NYC (where I'm based), my accountant told me $70/hr is basically as low as I can safely go. So I do $70/hr and then $14/hr in my retirement account.
The $70 turns into ~$78 after all the employer taxes add into it, and I take home only $52 after employee side of taxes are taken out of it.
What's the risk - audit? And if so, what's the risk from the audit? A fine for tax fraud? Jail time?
It's actually a very interesting little booklet.
somewhat relevant reading on what can be done if you're well versed with tax laws: https://scottestill.com/buy-new-used-car-2018-get-100-tax-de...
Surprisingly, this dealer has an entire page dedicated to it this, and why you should buy one of their SUVs: https://www.landroverhuntvalley.com/business-tax-advantage.h...
I only pay my accountant around $2000 to handle a bunch of housekeeping at the end of the year that I'm to lazy to do during, and to file my taxes. For years I did my own taxes using Turbo Tax Self Employed and Turbo Tax Business Editions, but in 2016 I decided to outsource all of that headache, the first year, my taxes were half of what they were the year before with similar income. Then after the TCJA in 2017, my taxes were only 1/5th what they had been before the accountant, with close to double the raw income.
The biggest changes from doing it myself: I got an accountant; I incorporated (s-corp) instead of doing self-employment income; I draw W2 income now (using Gusto); I set up a SEP-IRA and put 20% of my W2 earnings as an automatic debit from my business account (in Vanguard); TCJA chops off 20% of my distributions on my K1; and I'll state again, I hired an accountant.
Almost every accountant out there will be better than an H&R Block or Turbo Tax.
I feel like I'm doing 90% of the work already, having organized all my expenses and income. What are they doing other than typing it into their own Turbo-Tax-equivalent?
“TurboTax will take what I did last year and minimize my taxes. My accountant will tell me what to do differently this year to minimize my taxes next year.”
In other words a good accountant is a forward-looking advisor, not just a calculator.
It’s pretty easy find an accountant but they might not be good and it’s hard to tell, especially in advance.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/how-...
As I understand it, NHS comes from general taxation.
Obviously there is no actual "fee" to use the NHS at the point of use - it is all free apart from prescriptions which are the same price regardless of what you get (and you might get it for free anyway depending on your circumstances)
Isn't that enough to fund the programs you are speaking of?
https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-ta...
The broader point still remains, for a business (a 1099 is considered a sole-proprietorship) generally net income is taxed, and as a W2, your taxes are witheld per pay period.
Gross Income: $112k
- SEP IRA 25%: -$28k
- Owner Health Insurance: -$15k
- 199-A Deduction (20%): -$12k
Total business income for taxes: $47k
- Married Filing Jointly Deduction: -$24k
- Total taxable income: $23k
Tax on $23k (10% of first $20k, 12% of next $3k): $2360
Another gem many people don't know about is "Increasing Research Activities", for certain industries this essentially translates to 5-10% of your total payroll becoming a credit. That's huge.
WTF? Who pays $15k PER YEAR for health insurance? That's nuts. In most countries USD$15k would pay for healthcare for 2 or 3 people for their entire lives.
For a brief period I lived in Virginia and had no medical coverage through my employer. The legal minimum coverage was $1,400 / month for my family of four... and it was basically worthless; I would have had to have paid out something like $40k in a single year for medical services before I would have broken even.
So sure $15k is ridiculous to pay for health insurance, but in the US, its the cheap option for a family.
is more than they make in their entire lives.
Trying to compare US COL to "most countries"
And if you wanna only look at western countries that's obviously demonstrably false.
Whatever people pay as part of the healthcare tax is gonna come out to about $15K for someone who is making $100K in most EU countries.
And still none of that considers things like Simplified Employee Pension Plan (SEP), health insurance, home maintenance, etc, etc.
The list can go on and on depending on the type of your business, jurisdiction, and supporting documentation.
* Talk to someone about your local tax rules before taking action.
https://gimhub.com/shop/buy-github-stars/
Wow, Good job!
Not really understanding the comparison to SV salaries. This opens up many doors for the author, something that money wouldn't be able to do.
- add sponsors as collaborators in the project
- give sponsors access to all versions from the get-go
- set a $ limit, when reached, will trigger full open-sourcing of the project
- have public sponsor income page where people can follow the progress
Also you've mentioned github sponsors. Did not know about that program. It is severely restricted by small list of countries. Seems unfair as so many people contribute through github but looks like large chunk is unable to apply for this type of sponsorship because of location. Frankly I am quite disappointed with such policy.
Is there a website out there where I can find content I can sponsor?
Also, keep in mind that when you are self employed you need to make 20-30% more than your salary as an employee if you want the same take home pay. That covers the extra self-employment tax you have to pay, health insurance, business insurance, etc. If you charge by the hour, you might find this article on how to calculate an hourly rate helpful: https://help.facetdev.com/docs/how-do-i-calculate-my-hourly-...
[1] Shameless plug: www.facetdev.com
Hopefully this story will help tone deaf people to make the right decision next time.
Nice work, I should think about having paid only videos as well, I believe I can do that pretty easily on Patreon. Good tips in here.
Additionally, GitHub is just so much closer to the actual open source work and more easily discoverable for users of your product.
As a supporter, I'll pick GitHub over Patreon anytime.
[1] https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source... [2] https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing
That seems superior to basically every single platform out there. It's an instant win for GitHub Sponsors.
Say you are a marketer and you bring hundreds of paying users to a platform, 5k is cheap.
Do calling it "work" it is too little. Won't pay the time spent on a job.
At the same time it is an amount of money, causing responsibility. Giving the feeling that one has to return something for it ...
So how does at affect your fun-level?
If anything the fun-level has gone way up because a community has formed around one of my projects, which has been great.
I had started another company before that I spent over a year on and I made $0. Not fun.
Not really serving industry, self-hosters and home-labbers.
I left feedback the moment it entered "feature preview", left feedback on all the accessibility it lacked (mainly reducing contrast everywhere), and well, looks like they just rolled it out anyways.
Really wish they would take things like people being able to see their product without difficulty seriously.
Wouldn't it be awesome if developer talent was judged on the impact of one's open source projects / contributions versus leetcode competency?
Yeah, I know - it'll never happen.
Impact of one open source project measure slightly more than developer talent. It is a combination of a lot of skills, development skill just one among other like marketing, business sense, ability to make video, ... Extreme example would be Zuckerberg: is he the best developer in the world and wouldn't you waste a bit his potential if you hired him as a PHP dev?
And in any case, impact is always going to be a star system. You are going to have a tiny percentage of developers (like a few thousands in the world) that have impact and all the other that have 0. You are back to square one at trying to find a way to differentiate between a loser that can code and another loser that cannot.
The problem is that developers like this are very very rare. They are superstars who can code and build communities.
It doesn't happen because there aren't enough candidates.