Ask HN: What technology earned you the most money? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What technology earned you the most money?

15 pointstonteldoos11 comments

Hi HNers,

We all know what technologies (hardware, software, etc) is popular based on TIOBE, StackOverflow surveys, news, etc.

However, in your career, what technology has actually earned you the most money? This can be hardware, software, systems, over contract jobs, fulltime employment, or side projects. It could even be a niche product.

By 'most money', I don't necessarily mean as an absolute amount - it could also be on a per hour, or per project and time spent on the project.

Surprise us!

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I don't think it's a specific technology that made me the most money. Rather, skills like the demonstrated ability to learn new technologies quickly has been far more useful. In particular I have been hired at jobs where I knew neither the domain nor much of the technology stack.

In general I think programmers overestimate the value of knowing specific technologies, and underestimate other skills (for example, more here on how productivity takes far more than knowledge of technology: https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills-pro...).

Stock brokers providing APIs - this is the best since sliced bread, because I can automate my hobby (stock trading) and make more money than my regular job with very little overhead...

Like itamarst said, it wasn't a technology for me either. Instead I got a 33% raise for applying my existing C++ skills to some finance knowledge I learned over a year.

Basically, I learned a key part of our industry, built some software that helps the business operate, and got a raise after it was successfully running in production. It certainly helped that the software increased the company's profits and I was the only engineer in the company with that industry knowledge.

It actually pretty easy to figure out what skills will help you earn more money. Go on Glassdoor or Indeed and look at technology jobs in your industry. Then see which departments pay what salaries. Try to learn the skills for the high paying departments so you can build the technology for that department: http://www.climbuptheladder.com/how-to-know-if-youre-paid-wh....

Android.

Though a lot of the work I do is "full stack", Android is what earns me the jobs.

Biggest income source was selling an app startup, where 90% of the work was Android.

That event also highly accelerated my career. Got some CTO jobs and teaching jobs after that. Most of the work after that was fairly trivial, but the hook was my Android ability in all those opportunities.

I had a lot of contracts fail because the team I joined were not competent in APIs so I wonder if things would have turned out better if I was better with setting up APIs.

> Surprise us!

The Spring framework is my cashcow.

Critical thinking, vbscript, SCSS, Ruby, Rails, Flash ActionScript (!), JS, Photoshop, Lightroom, my camera, lenses, and strobes, Nonviolent Communication.

Does Google count? A lot of my income is based on the simple fact that I know better than my clients how to use a search engine.

Facebook ads, since I can use them to make clients money.

Python, pandas, tensorflow, SignalBox (my own creation)

Big Data stack (Hadoop, Spark, Kafka etc.)

being a fluent c++ programer I think.

it helped me quickly adopt other technologies.

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