If it is true, how are you guys managing it? How do you practice self-discipline? How do you forgive yourself for slacking off? And what happens when you aren't able to perform and feel guilty about it? And finally, how to find balance between relaxing and working?
I have had many side projects. One of them became a full time job in 1999, and which I sold in 2010 and then prompty scratched an itch to start another, which I am still doing. I am not wealthy, I have a mortgage for a much bigger house than I need.
To be honest I feel like I have failed at life and stayed inside instead of enjoying the sun. I look back and feel that there are much better ways to have spent my life...and yet I still do it.
Also, I have an idea that might change the world and that's what I want to work on next.
I seriously enjoy exploring ideas and writing code. If I could I'd do it all day every day.
Work addiction, delusion, or a fundamental problem with my perspective of the Universe - all seem likely to me.
My advice; You know if it's something for you. You feel it. You don't need to ask anyone else's advice or whether your idea is good, or how to manage it. You get on with it, make the sacrifices nessecary and wince through the pain knowing in your heart that it will be worth it, or not as the case may be.
I didn't have a problem with the work. I do wish I knew how to recognise defeat and quit though.
Sorry for the long lecture-rant.
"Show HN: I showed up at work and did nothing else this week"
or
"Shown HN: I read some blog posts and a chapter of a book today"
or
"Show HN: I followed the tutorial for this language/framework"
or
"Show HN: I had an idea to build something but I gave up after the 1st weekend working on it"
then you would get a much different picture of the distribution of users with actual side projects.
I make under $100k. Before getting married and having a kid I setup an LLC for my honey business and worked about 16-20hrs a week at Lowes. The honey business makes a couple hundred a year (plus honey for us), and $750/month from Lowes doesn't help too much. But many side projects don't make that much either.
Outside of a select few excessively expensive areas, $110k a year makes for a great lifestyle. We're talking nearly 2.5-3x the median salary of an American worker here. I don't know if the deviation follows, but how is a 2-3x higher median not lucrative?
Now that can be different if living in a rural area, but the costs in just about any city suburbs will provide a decent lifestyle, but not great.
After all, I was incentivized to work a low paying job for extra income.
> $110k just barely supports a family with a chance at retirement.
This may or may not be true, but I was talking about individual earners here, and median household income averages >1 earner per household. In this example, a 110k household income is less than double the national median household income, so it will definitely feel less lucrative when raising a family.
The conversation was that software development is "too lucrative" to incentivize people to work on side projects. In my experience, that's simply not true.
I feel comfortable saying that most developers don't have side projects and of the small minority that do, an even smaller minority make any money at it.
I'm running to B2B SaaS with subscriptions. The more customers I have, the more time I spend on support tickets or billing stuff. I'm really bad at self-discipline, but after 6 years working from home I finally find a routine that works for me. I start working very early (around 4-5 a.m.) and try to keep my afternoon for my own projects or time outside. I also try not to use social media before 1 pm.
I've stopped judging myself when I sometimes have days where I do absolutely nothing. It's fine. I like to relax my mind and wander off a bit. There are other days coming where I'm working till late and are much more productive.
Nah, hundreds of thousands of people participate here and you only see a scant few posts like this. Lately it's been more, things like this tend to come in waves, but it'll die down again. The culture here is one oriented towards startups, so the things that will be submitted and upvoted are going to have that success-oriented "I built this" slant.
With my side project, initially I was working on it because it was fun and fulfilling. When I started to get bored with it, my wife really encouraged me to keep working on it which motivated me to see it through. I'm still trying to figure out how to balance a healthy lifestyle. Juggling a job, a family, a side project, and 8 hours of sleep at night isn't working very well.
I would assume the former - that they have a side project, but not the latter part of that statement - that it makes them money.
I have about 3-4 serious side projects along with a lot of smaller stuff on github. Only 2 of them make money, with one of them taking the lion's share.
This side project operates in a niche space - it's basically a SaaS for an area that works in pretty antiquated ways. I manage it by recieving emails from the users and copy pasting them to github repo in the form of issues, and I respond to the email.
For the self discipline part, honestly, I feel this strange sense of craftsmanship/ownership mindset when it comes to these projects, and there's a natural "pull". When I slack off, there's usually some underlying issue at play. Most people just reprimand themselves, but I dig deeper and find the thing that's bothering me. For example, maybe I'm not getting enough exercise/sleep or something is deeply disturbing at work/school. I don't feel guilty about not working (maybe that's just me).
I don't really see the project as "work" because it's what I want to do, so there is no balance to be established.
I actually have the opposite assumption. I think fewer than 50% of HN regulars have a project that makes them money.
Also, if you work hard on your job/project/startup for 7-8-9-10 hours a day, that's probably already past the point of diminishing returns.
I quit my job last year to pursue my ideas full time but prior to that I had a pretty strict invention clauses (I'm in a state where those are enforceable) and purposely avoided side projects because on my contract my employer would have owned them.
I don't have any experience with FAANG contracts or even any outside of my state so I don't know how common it is for a contract to essentially prohibit side projects but for what it's worth, I never had one this entire time I've been on Hacker News (I know I'm "throwaway" but if you look at my karma you can see I've been around).
Most of my current side projects are flavors of what I am already good at and have success doing.
These haven’t made money (yet), but I think of them as successful because the learning translates to my day job which earns money. They also scratch the creative itch so I don’t needlessly update my normal website because I’m bored.
This helps me in my normal job as I can solve similar problems in news ways and some of those new ideas work themselves into my other projects.
I assume I'm part of the majority. Thinking otherwise would damage my self-belief and self-confidence.
I taught myself how to program via side projects and it's still where I do 99% of my learning.
I gotta say it’s pretty hard to work on side projects and have a life if you hold a regular job and family but it’s doable.
My utopia is to build side projects that are fully automated and self sufficient so I don’t need to spend times on things I don’t enjoy like support etc.
I do have side projects, but they are tools to help me with my hobbies. One of them once did get enough traffic that I monetized it... but then sold it because the maintenance is not how I wanted to spend my time.
I don’t feel guilty because I am a bit underpaid at my day job anyway.
I've been doing it for about four years straight now, so it's just a habit at this point.
If I'm feeling tired or whatever I just sleep in, no need to get stressed over something you do on the side.
I struggle with the notion of this activity being "working on side projects" because I was a consultant for 20 years.
I come from an age where PDPs roamed the Berkely campus and LSD came from the drinking fountains. There was no commercial internet. Software development and uptake was not driven by advertising air wars. There was no GitHub; there was no GPL. Since even then my poorly formed notion was to work horizontally across industries, it was important that I be able to retain and reuse a collection of tools and libraries and I wrote that into contracts as "software tools of the trade"; and one of the key differentiators was that I did work on them for multiple clients, or for my own account.
That was then, this is now.
I went to work for a cybersecurity company and ended up playing a lot with DNS. The first few years were complete chaos, but hella fun! But that changed, and my suggestions weren't listened to. In my opinion, Sand Hill Road has ruined the threat indicator space (omitting the journey for brevity).
I suppose what I'm doing now is 1) illustrating cool or quirky things about the technology and 2) making winners and losers in the DNS / DDI space.
I don't know that someone without the discipline to run their own business (and the wisdom not to if you don't have to, IOW move fast or go far) is going to be able to make money on side projects consistently. I'm not really trying to. So let's talk about the non-monetary rewards.
I meet the other fanatics in this space. When I make winners, they're allies. When I make losers, they provide me with free publicity. I have an awesome rollidex (look it up). <--- these are the true reasons I do it
Does this ever make me money? Indirectly yes I suppose it does. I know what I can do, and other people at the top of their game know what I can do; and I know who's at the top of their game (and oftentimes who's not). People reach out to me about quirky opportunities: I spent last winter hunting medical devices on a network (because DDI).
Would you do anything for money? Would you do anything your heart called you to do? Think about what truly motivates you and why. How does your project align with your motivation?
Make a pitch deck for your project, or for the problem area it addresses (a plea for help). In my case, I always produce working code; so that's what I do. Then publicize it, see what feedback (any kind) you get; be gracious (ok, at least try).
How'd it go? Check back with your motivation compass: is the path from here to the North clear? If not, can you plot a course? Yes? Pivot. Repeat. Just like a business, really. No? Move on to something else.
Meta: You're using words like "managing", "discipline", "slacking", "guilt"... and also "relaxing" and "working". But you don't use them in the same paragraph as "money".
1) Above, I made a comment about "move fast or go far": in my experience things oftentimes start out as "move fast" and transition to "go far". Are you a go-it-alone person, or do you find safety in numbers?
2) Baseball. Do baseball players make better baseballs because they know how to hit home runs? Is winning the game the result of discipline and training, or is it just something that tends to happen more often when you're part of (or are) a cold-blooded, well-oiled and single-minded machine?
I haven't paid attention to it, but probably the people who mention "my side projects" aren't regulars, and it's probably a Baader-Meinhof thing for you.
If you want to be methodical (or me, since I'm just guessing with no data), you could go through the top 10k commenters here: https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-... (it was mentioned on HN a few days ago) and see if they wrote "my side project" or something along those lines...