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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Not true. One of the people I'm referring to was under 25 when he landed a $500k USD remote job at a FAANG company. I'd share more, but too many people would figure out who it is. He didn't get that offer by applying directly.

The point is not that OP is going to make $500k a year. The point is to be smart about the language and project that you pick and to be reliable, professional, and open to learning quickly and delivering. He's asking for such a paltry amount that even if he only gets an $80k offer it's still leagues better than what he's asking for.

Or he could grind it out on Upwork and land a $30k offer after finally hitting a client that likes him and has long term work.

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> I'd share more, but too many people would figure out who it is.

Feels like your example is very specific and would not generalize to the average programmer.

I know many people that did this. Not all of them are making $500k a year, but here is some more examples:

- Multiple Rails contributors, one that turned core. Those folks are making well north of $200k a year.

- Ember contributors or contributors to projects around ember-data or similar. Multiple people making north of $200k a year.

- A guy that dove into contributing to Postgres. He wouldn't even share how much his offer was because it was so insane.

The point is that if you actually put in the work to projects and you network and learn from seasoned developers it's going to be far, far better for your career than grinding out little Fiver or Upwork contracts.

Put another way: Your pay is related to your skills, your professionalism, and your network. Working on the right OS project exposes you to people that are really good at software. Sure you can do the same working for money at the right company, but this guy isn't in that position. So, in my opinion, his best bet is to skill up and network and contribute. Even if he's applying to remote work positions absent a network, a string of commits to Numpy or Rust is going to look a hell of a lot better than "freelancer that did rinky dink work for marketing guys" or "I built a todo list app to show off my skills" and I don't really see why this is so controversial. I'd like to see a counterpoint, honestly. Someone here that worked on a real OS project for a prolonged period of time that has trouble finding work at a reasonable salary.

This frustrates me a bit, personally. I've been a professional developer (as in getting paid to do it) for 15 years, full time. I know a lot of tech terms are overused and misused, but I consider myself full stack. Frontend, Backend, Database, some devops. I've worked, in depth, with MSSQL, .NET, C#, Apache, Nginx, MySQL, PHP, Python (Django/DRF), JS, NodeJS, React, Flash/Flex. I've dabbled in Java, Clojure, ClojureScript, Objective-C and probably some others I'm forgetting.

I'm in the low, low $100k range. Maybe it's because I'm introverted and don't really network? Maybe it's location: Ohio, now Orlando? Maybe I just don't push myself - imposter syndrome is very real. Maybe I just like the job security and steady paycheck over really reaching for the stars?

I know money isn't everything, I'd love to contribute and be known in the community, but not sure I have the chops.

Curious if anyone else is in this boat?

I'd consider myself in the same boat. Also been a professional developer for 20 years. Wouldn't say I'm full stack anymore as I'm a little out of the loop with all of the changes with front-end development in recent years, but trying to improve in that area and become a better, more-rounded developer.

Also in Florida and in the low $100k range. Always a bit surprised to hear these stories on HN and elsewhere of developers making $150-200k+ salaries, and wonder how I can get to that level.

Imposter syndrome is very real for me too, especially in my current role where my coworkers all seem much smarter and more technological-savvy than me.

Would also like to contribute to open source projects, but not really sure where I'd start and whether I am good enough.

fastest way to big bucks is to create an auction market (have multiple simultaneous offers) at companies with revenues growing fast enough that they don’t care

Sounds like you're my technical doppelganger. Hopefully some of the comments on my post are helpful to you as well. I can't change location right now, so I think I'm going to work on the imposter/confidence aspect and try to find some projects to contribute to.

col in florida is so low though plus no state income tax right?

100k in orlando is like 220k in sf so you're probably doing alright.

Location is a factor but also tech salaries have seen tremendous continued growth over the last 20 years.

new grads are getting jobs at FAANGs out of college starting at 150-200k+ tc these days.

granted these are mostly in higher col areas - sf, seattle, nyc.

you just need to get a new job if you want to make more money, it's that simple.

in 2015 i had my first job as a junior engineer at a startup at 60k. over 3 years i worked my way up to a tech lead and 100k. not bad but i could've made more faster had i just switched companies sooner.

i finally started interviewing and got up to a 150k offer at another startup of the same size, same area - my current company valued me at 100k and this new company 150k.

a year later this startup was acquired and i negotiated my way into a 200k+ offer at the acquiring company - mostly because the bigger company was bigger and just paid more in general than my small startup company.

making more money isn't that closely tied to your job skills actually. it's tied to your interviewing skills and desire to get a job at a FAANG or similarly large tech company that pays high comps.

i'm not saying it's the easiest thing - the FAANG interviews are fairly hard and require quite a bit of prep. But if you really want it I'm sure you could do it - it's more about dedication, preparation and time than anything else.

A lot of it is probably location, and also comparing yourself to anecdata.

But some percentage of it needs to be standing out. There are a lot of developers in cube farms working with stacks that look exactly like your resume. The javascript stuff is very quickly becoming devalued as boot camps crank out front end devs by the hundred.

Maybe becoming (or just advertising yourself) as a leading specialist in one or two of those technologies, or becoming an expert in an emerging technology would do it.

I've been in a rather similar boat. I spent a few years in "the show", but am back down in the real world now. Not sure I regret getting it out of my system, but it did harm my life.

Am also an introvert, and it does reduce the possibilities, in my opinion. Still struggling with that. But trying to meet technical people who can hire or refer you is pretty useful (and try to maintain relationships like that when you leave a job).

Location is a problem. If you move to a place like BA or NY, you can probably double your salary right off, even if your skill level is rather low. This is very hard, though, if you have a family or your local social connections are important.

I doubt you're an imposter. Most of the people I met at my high-paying jobs were no more skilled than those I meet in the hinterlands. (And the brilliant ones are often insufferable.)

Rich companies are rich, so they can pay more. That's about it. There's a lot more competition for high-paying spots, but generally the people hiring are doing it pretty randomly. Having a resume that looks good and being able to talk a good game are more important than actual skill.

Appreciate the insight. Definitely seems location is a big factor, but I'm not incentivized to change that right now - so I'll need to look at this from different angles. Networking seems to be key.

Sure thing. Either way, don't torture yourself about it. Probably getting a dog or learning to ride a motorcycle would give you more enjoyment than working at a big-bucks tech job.

We have 2 dogs and a cat. Pets aren't my thing. I'd love to learn to ride though.

Location is definitely a factor. The only way I've heard people making make Bay Area money in places like Ohio is to land a remote gig with a Bay Area company, which isn't easy.

You probably have better quality of life in Ohio with your salary than many much higher paid people in the Bay Area. A starter home near Google costs around 2 million.

There’s more to life than owning a home as soon as possible.

Not much, if you want to have kids and raise them with a decent quality of life.

You can do that once you amass wealth in your 20s (and even early 30s if that's your style, not necessary though) and then move to a lower COL.

Amass wealth in your twenties sounds so ridiculous to me. My bank balance for most of my 20’s was barely positive. Now that I’m mid thirties my salary is finally high enough that the savings have started to increase, but it’s still far from anything resembling ‘wealth’.

That’s a shame. I’m sorry if you didn’t have the opportunity to do so. It’s very possible and practical to build wealth in your 20s and many people move to high COL places to do so when they don’t have the burden of kids or strong ties. Even small wealth in your 20s will balloon into big wealth 20-30-40 years later that you simply won’t be able to catch up to saving in your 40s and later. You’re investing in your future by delaying settling down, buying a house, and having kids in your 20s. Whether that’s worth it is up to you and your life goals.

Great advice, but too late for me.

Fellow Orlandonian here, the salaries are not great. I haven't seen the ODevs salary survey from 2019, but if you look at 2018 you're good for the area: https://orlandodevs.com/blog/salary-survey/

I recommend working remote.

Yeah, that’s all on you. I don’t know if confidence training is a thing, but you could hit a huge ROI if you level up your extroversion/confidence game.

The first leap is the hardest. Once you've got your foot in the door of somewhere "prestigious" that you can list on your resume, a lot of doors open.

One of the easier ways to make that first leap is to attach your name to something marketable. I did a few contributor articles for PacketPushers back when they first opened up to letting pretty much anyone write articles. Then I added something like "Contributor at PacketPushers" to my LinkedIn and published a few of the articles on my LinkedIn feed. I ended up getting hired by LinkedIn as an SRE out of it.

I also think you have to find a way to differentiate yourself by having some kind of a personal style or mantra. You aren't just out there to prove you're good enough for a job, you're out there to prove that you're a better candidate than the other people they might hire.

For me, on the SRE side, I lean heavily on the people side of things (which I find is often neglected). Which is not to say that I ignore the tech side, I can hold my own against other senior SREs. But I use that focus on people to try to edge myself out against the other candidates who are equally technically skilled. SRE doesn't do anything a developer couldn't do given sufficient time and motivation. Why don't developers do it themselves? Because it's hard (read: out of their SME), and because it takes time. That's a UX problem to me, so I frame that as something I would fix by making it quick and easy for my developers. A system that increases your availability to 99% that is quick and easy to set up is almost always more valuable than a system that increases it to 99.9% or 99.99% but takes 6 meetings and a book to use effectively.

So find your style or flair. I don't know what that would be for developers, I've never done a pure developer job. If I were going to pick something off the top of my head, I would pick abstractions. Everybody does abstractions, but if you can be the person that can frame a hard problem in a simple abstraction, that's a ton of bonus points. I would talk about the time I can save other people by building a simple abstraction that can be reused over and over again.

Or you could go people oriented like I did. Maybe you can frame yourself as the person that's really good at getting key stakeholders and your PM in a room and translating what the stakeholders want done into actionable work units for your PM. Sure, it's often a thing managers do, but managers love people who can free up some of their schedule.

I've been interviewing people for jobs that pay in the 200k+ range for about 6 years. You have to have something that sets you apart. I've interviewed a lot of people that basically said "Yep, I can solve that problem". Cool, you get to go in the queue with the 7 other people that could solve that problem, and we'll probably decide who wins later on based on who we think we would like most as a person on our team (i.e who's not going to be a wet blanket at lunch). On the other hand, some people stand out. I interviewed a guy who was really particular about writing unit tests and documentation, and really enjoyed doing that stuff. That guy went to the front of the line, because those are two things most people are bad at. I would've given him a really good rating even if he was technically less able than other people.

Once you find your flair, market yourself. Tailor your LinkedIn to your flair. Publish some dumb fluff pieces on LinkedIn about why your specific flair is important to a company. It's not really to inform other people, those fluff pieces exist to cement your position as "that guy/gal".

If I were going to make a wild guess, I think you can do it. I've worked with plenty of people that were making 200-400k that didn't write their own RDBMS at 13. They were just normal go to school, get a job, then get an offer from FAANG kind of people. I've even worked with a couple people in that range that I think we could have replaced with an intern without problems.

I don't think I've done anything spectacular tech-wise, mostly CRUD apps, fairly run of the mill architecture and CLIs designed to make things easier or faster for devs. My LinkedIn and email still rings off the hook just from marketing myself as something more unique than another SRE that does SRE things.

Your story is carefully tuned for "No True Scotsman" in advance. What are you going to say when OP spends 3+ months of their limited runway and ends up in the same place? "I said a real project, you didn't contribute to a real project" or "I said be smart with your choices, you must not have been smart", or "I said be professional, you must have been rude" or "I said network with experienced people, you must not have done enough networking"? "Worksforme"?

> I don't really see why this is so controversial.

This is you strawmanning. "Commits to Numpy or Rust are going to look better than a todo list" never was the controversial part, that is not controversial. "Be world class and people will want to hire you" isn't controversial, even.

The controversial part is "win the lottery - anyone can do it if they just try". Picking an appropriate project is a gamble. Becoming friendly with the core developers is a gamble. Picking the right issues to work on that people might notice you is a gamble. Being good enough that they actually do, is a gamble. That it translates into a job offer, is a gamble. That some people can do it isn't surprising, that everyone can and should prioritise that, is controversial.

That you should give away months of full-time equivalent work to profit-making companies, in the hope that it results in a job paying high above national average household income in first world countries, instead of spending that time elsewhere, is a huge gamble.

Upvote for you, I wish 3pt14159 quantified the probability of getting a $200 k for an average dev after having spent x month on an opensource project.

There is also tons of people that work on OS projects and get paid nothing. The ones that get paid a lot are the exception.

I hypothesize that the people who get paid are the people who actually set out with the goal of getting paid.

I really doubt there are many long-time FOSS contributors who want (as their top-level goal) to be paid to do FOSS, but still haven’t managed it after months/years of trying.

Most people who do FOSS don’t do it with the goal of being paid for it. Just like most people who play a sport don’t do it with the goal of being paid for it. For most people, it’s either a hobby, or a byproduct of the efforts they go to in their day job (i.e. fixes to their company’s private fork of a FOSS project, that can then sometimes be upstreamed.)

>Most people who do FOSS don’t do it with the goal of being paid for it.

It depends how you define "doing" FOSS. Yes, certainly there are many people who casually fool around with FOSS with no expectation of payment. And even a fair number of people who have some sort of spare time FOSS hobby.

But most of the big FOSS projects (especially server infrastructure/platforms) depend heavily on developers and others getting paid to work on them full-time.

Most of the big FOSS projects depend on their core contributors being paid to work on them. Most sports teams pay highly too. It doesn't mean that most people playing sports are playing on a professional team. It also doesn't mean the professional teams pay their fans anything—despite said fans doing, in aggregate, as much (in PR et al) to earn the team their high pay scales, as the team itself does. Both big FOSS projects, and professional sports teams, are long-tail efforts, with a hard line between the core contributors (paid) and everybody else who helps (unpaid.)

Also keep in mind that many critical FOSS projects aren't big. Many are one-man shows. HN has a habit of frequently "finding out for the first time"—to much amazement and distress each time—that some project everybody's using is just kept alive by one person in their spare time.

>Also keep in mind that many critical FOSS projects aren't big. Many are one-man shows.

Absolutely. That's why the Core Infrastructure Initiative was created a few years ago for example. While I haven't made an exhaustive study, my sense is that the situation is at least better today than it was a few years ago, especially with respect to security issues. Though always more work to do to support developers working on critical infrastructure of course.

Yes, there is a long tail on projects like the Linux kernel. But a lot of that long tail doesn't individually do a lot of work. And, according to the seemingly latest Kernel development report that I have: "Well over 85 percent of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work."

I'd love to be paid again for contributing to an FOSS project. There's something liberating about writing software that you own and get to decide how things are designed. A lot of devs don't enjoy that kind of flexibility if they work on projects used by more than a handful of people.

But yeah, it's hard to get paid. I was lucky enough to have a company pay me to contribute to an OSS project, but they didn't hire me for that purpose, I had to hustle for it and was blessed with a great manager who supported the idea.

You keep referring to the "right" OS project, what do you mean by this? A project in Github trending?

> ike most people who play a sport don’t do it with the goal of being paid for it. For most people, it’s either a hobby, or a byproduct of the efforts they go to in their day job (i.e. fixes to their company’s private fork of a FOSS project, that can then sometimes be upstreamed.)

What would be good OS projects related to C++/Python that can generate the figures you're mentioning? Asking for myself here.

I would put it this way: for a person in his situation, skills and professionalism are table stakes (others in more privileged position can get away with less of those). Pay is relative to networking ability.

3pt14159 did not say "Any programmer can make $500K by doing open-source full-time for a while," though.

But the statement is in response to "this is bad advice for brand new developers." If the advice is so specific you end up doxing the single person in the world who's ever done it, then it sounds like that's a perfectly fair criticism.

I think the point is more "this general strategy works for most people; but not everyone is going to get a $500k job from it".

It's a reliable strategy to get noticed and make a good impression. How much money you manage to make from that opportunity obviously depends on many more factors.

The problem is that people are conflating "one guy got lucky and got a $500k remote job" with "here is a repeatable process to generate a full-time income by working on open source on spec." Even getting a $50k remote job is not a guarantee, and telling people to work for free on open source is the Hacker News equivalent of telling a designer that you'll pay them if you like the logo they make you. Only this is much more insidious because you're telling them to work full-time, for free, for "3 or 4 months."

We complain about job interviews taking an entire day yet have no problem telling this person to dump 750 hours into something with the hope of "getting noticed."

People attend college and spend enormous money & time with no guarantees. The unpaid time spent is not throwaway.

If I was 19 today - and wanted to code for the most $$$ possible. I wouldn't be in college. I'd be building up skills + know people. Know people even tougher I'd argue for technical people who are often introverts.

And being a reliable open-source contributor on projects people use can open doors that college could never open. From personal experience Open Source is also a great way to get to know people, especially if the project has an active IRC or Slack.

I would love to contribute to open source but in 10+ years I've never found a project. Is there a good website that matches developers to projects?

What projects have you used over the last 10 years?

Probably a lot of utility ones but none that made me jump into the code

>People attend college and spend enormous money & time with no guarantees. The unpaid time spent is not throwaway.

It is throwaway for most people. 'Most' being >75%. Just my guesstimate.

Well there is another way to look at it if you wish, if you want to bolster your self-esteem and confidence by having a college/university degree, then do it. My observation is that most people who do not have a degree suffer a life long I-do-not-have-a-degree self esteem syndrome, despite being just as capable as everyone else.

> Only this is much more insidious because you're telling them to work full-time, for free, for "3 or 4 months."

Specifically, donating that time to a project which a company uses to make money.

Sounds you're like just walking around the point

> It's a reliable strategy to get noticed and make a good impression.

If its so reliable, there should be many repeated examples of it happening. So far, all we have is a single case.

As a 26-year old at Google, this example sounds surprising to me. I'd rule out Amazon, Apple and Netflix, and you'd have to be ~L6 to get $500K at Facebook or Google, which I don't see any of them hiring fresh grads at no matter how good/famous they are, and definitely not remotely.

L6 is damn hard to get also, especially as an engineer.

Was it @feross?

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