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Comment by uVacCXNiiJCTnYB | Hacker News Reader

I'm building something interesting but it's not something that will make money, because it's an open source tool and open source devs generally don't get paid for their work lol.

Outside of that, and outside of the obvious snarkiness, the whole "why don't you make your own job" thing isn't a real solution. Not everyone can be creating companies, otherwise who would be working at those companies?

I don't have much security net in my life so I can't really take the risk of creating a startup on the hope it might turn out well. There's also nothing specific I'm interested in making that would have revenue at the moment.

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> open source devs generally don't get paid for their work lol.

have you seen this https://github.com/sponsors ?

https://github.com/sponsors provide tiny amounts unless you are in the 0.001% lucky+famous projects.

yeah, I'm thinking of enabling it, but what I'm making is a game engine that only has a few users for now and it would be a very very long way to being able to make a living income from game developers sponsoring it.

Maybe eventually it could get to the point where I could do part time freelancing supplemented with github sponsor income, but even that would take a long time.

I suspect outside of a few super-popular repo managers, github sponsorship doesn't bring much income (don't know if there's any public data on that)

Unsolicited advice: I think you're right, nobody will pay you for it. Every serious programmer interested in game dev writes engines as a hobby. Just search through GitHub. It's partly because it's just tech exploration fun..

If you're serious about games you should make a game. Build an engine too, but only build what you need for the game. This will guide you in making the countless tradeoffs necessary to build an actually shipping piece of software. Otherwise, it's just a tech demo with no constraints or commercial value.

The general game engines (Unity, Unreal, etc) that are commercially valuable spent a lot of time and effort on excruciatingly boring things: supporting a lot of file formats, having very stable tools, being very accessible for beginners, etc.

I worked in the game industry for years and left it, I've made games before.

The engine I'm making is for a very specific need (initially made to help someone else make a specific game), a few people have been using it to make their games, but it's a pretty niche thing for narrative games - https://get-narrat.com/

I'm making it for fun, but I don't expect something like that to ever make money, for that I'd need some big companies to decide to sponsor it and pay me, which is super unlikely.

Don't be discouraged. You're more likely to succeed by targeting a niche.

Sounds like fun. Disregard my comment then.

Plenty of successful, profitable businesses are built on open source.

> Not everyone can be creating companies, otherwise who would be working at those companies?

Those who are not arrogant enough to think they are above the position. Those who tried running their own companies, got humbled by their failure and learned the hard way that perhaps any "uninterested" job is enough. Those who are find meaning in their lives from something else than their daily job.

But the worst group, and the majority of them: those who keep complaining about their jobs but are too afraid to take control of their own lives. These are the ones who keep making excuses like "I don't have much security net (sic) in my life" and "there is nothing interesting that would have revenue at the moment"

I don't know why you keep being so aggressive but you don't know me or anything about me and you're making weird wide ranging judgements just based on the fact that I'm asking for advice on how to find more interesting jobs.

Not everyone has to be an "entrepreneur". I like making things, not running companies and managing people/talking to investors and all the other things that come with trying to create a startup.

And yes, sorry but if you're not aware, some people have life situations that don't allow them to simply quit their job and start a company without a safety net. There's a reason the vast majority of "entrepreneurs" are of a very specific demographic

My issue is not with you asking for advice. My issue is with the way you dismiss the other things, and try to rationalize your preference as something ethically/morally superior.

You started the post making sweeping generalizations about things that you don't like but pay well, then you go to complain about companies that may as well be profitable and a good place to work on the grounds of "not having best practices".

So, what is going to satisfy you... Oh, yes, let's see what you want to do: it's not even a game, but actually you want to bring to the world another game engine... Hippity dickity yawn, that is only interesting for the overgrown children whose only issue in their lives is their total lack of social skills.

You were asking for advice, so here is mine: if every job is so boring to you and yet you don't feel like you have what it takes to be in charge of your own professional life, accept that this is a "you" problem, not a "them" problem. If every job you had is "uninteresting", perhaps your focus should be in developing other skills that can let you see the interesting challenges that exist in every industry.

To be more charitable, I think the original poster wants help finding what they want… but isn’t providing useful feedback. Making it hard to help.

Hopefully rglullis here is helping nudge (if uncomfortably) into actually articulating a positive desire instead of asking fairly generic questions and dismissing everyone’s suggestions and feeling attacked when challenged to show a direction.

There are literally thousands of hiring managers reading these threads. Any one of us could help if the poster opens up with real specifics and what their strengths and desires are. It can be frustrating being one of those managers when the poster doesn’t appear to know what they want other than more money and a challenge. And also doesn’t provide any list of skills and experience.

For anyone reading: original poster is too timid to put their real self out there, making it hard to even help them. When you shoot your shot, step forward unapologetically and say what you have to offer and the challenge you are looking for. The Only piece of info I have is liking narrative text games with relatively simple decision trees, some interest in rust and some reflexive hate for fintech. Also some desire to not move from some unspecified location.

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