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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

(I don't want this to come across as overly negative but it might. That's not my intention.)

There are many reasons why quitting your day job and growing a presence that will get you sponsorships is worthwhile, and I am a strong advocate for paying open source devs who maintain the packages you use. However, if you're thinking of trying to copy Caleb's success, remember that it'll take 28 years before he'll have earned more than he would have if he'd kept his $90k/year job.

Arguably a talented dev will never earn more than if they'd had a job instead. Open source is a route to working on something you love, but you will be leaving money on the table to do it unless the landscape changes a lot.

There is still a ton of change necessary in the open source model before it becomes a viable 'job' for most people.

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> it'll take 28 years before he'll have earned more than he would have if he'd kept his $90k/year job.

Sorry, I'm having a brain fade here. Are you talking about the time required to make up for lost earnings (and ignoring that the current 112k is not a fixed amount the way a salary generally is)?

I think there's a small error in the calculation. The article is from 2020. So looks like he hit 100k about 1 year after leaving his full time job. Using his current sponsor count of 832 and the minimum sponsorship level of $14 he's making $138k/year.

With all that said. There is definitely some survivor bias here. He found a great niche and a appears to already have had an audience which helps tremendously compared to starting from scratch. Not everyone will have the same success experience.

Hoping I can get a similar thing going in the near future.

"leaving money on the table" is not the same as "becoming a viable job". For many, enough money is enough, and the culture of the workplace, who you work with, what product you're building and more, is more important than the amount of money you earn. At a certain point, you earn enough money monthly to be happy and increasing that some percent but having to work a lot harder (or worse: working on things you don't really care about) is a shitty tradeoff.

If you work on Web3 projects you can easily make a living in the open source model. I did it for a year; there is a large amount of work and funding available on Github through gitcoin.co. and other organizations. If you have the skills you can pick and choose projects at will and get paid handsomely for it.

More than the amount of money, he's trading dealing with all the bullshit rituals of being employed in a company with strangers writing crap on GitHub issues.

Open source is still a better deal, you can just turn issues off and never hear any strangers writing crap in GitHub issues. "Turn off" your ears at a company to avoid crap and you'll be fired quickly.

Curious how you got to 28 years? Can you help explain? Thanks!

He cut his salary by $70k for 4 years ($280k 'lost'), and now he's earning $100k which is $10k more than the $90k he was on. It'll take 28 years to make up the lost salary.

I mean, the math is very much simplified. People get raises, and change roles, and there's tax to deal with, and jobs have benefits, etc. The core point is that you'll probably earn a lot more in a job. If you can find one where you're paid to maintain a library you like that's probably better for you financially than trying to get sponsors.

This assumes a static number of sponsors, which I doubt is the case. Somewhere else in the thread I read there are currently over 800 sponsors now.

True, but salaries go up too.

I make more money than I did when I wrote the article ;)

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