I’m now a full-time professional open source maintainer

> He's an outlier in the industry.

...even more than that. He's an outlier in the industry and has chosen an industry with access to pyramid scheme money.

Neither the investment bubble surrounding FAANG, nor the job market bubble surrounding the talent pool that FAANG recruits from (namely SE talent that happens to be localized in the Bay Area) were sustainable.

Now that the market seems to finally be correcting away from that unsustainable local equilibrium, he's hopping right into the next one by becoming an open source crypto bro.

> "proves the thesis that it’s possible to be a professional maintainer earning rates competitive with the adjacent market for senior software engineers."

"Prove" is a strong word but "possible" weakens the statement.

"It's possible to earn 95th-percentile compensation." True, by definition, for 5% of all people. Nothing to see here. "There's more than one way of getting there." True. "Honest pay for honest work will get you there." Probably not. "Just seek out the bubbles and jump right in is a reproducible way of getting there." Probably not, you'd have to get the timing right, and that's mostly luck.

> His experience is totally unique. Please don't let this make you think you can quit your job and earn the same you did at your high paying FANG job. He's an outlier in the industry.

…and yet…

I run a self-funded SaaS business. I regularly pay (sponsor) developers of libraries that my software depends on. These are not large amounts, but they slowly grow over time. Additionally, there are some libraries (Semantic-UI for example) that are critical for me, but have been unmaintained for a while, and I'd gladly pay significantly more, on a regular basis, to have them maintained.

I am pretty sure I am not the only one. The money is there. The problem is in gathering critical mass: both for any single developer, to make a living, and for the entire movement, so that we shift from a culture of "FREE FREE EVERYTHING IS FREE" to a more responsible and sustainable "it's free, but if you depend on it, you better contribute money every month".

The “thesis” he speaks about only needs one example to hold, and he is it. So, not much of a “thesis” but a data point.

It is possible to survive a shark attack. Well, yes, but do not count on my to try.

With six clients one could think, ok it's not so expensive for them, but still sums up nicely for the developer.

Still I think the situation is highly exceptional. Which employer/client would be happy with someone working for them only 1 day a week? And think about the adminstrative overhead for a single person to deal with 6 contracts all the time. With some clients the paperwork can be significant.

I quit my job a couple years ago and secured several small retainers over a few weeks using my network. My employer at the time generously agreed to be my first client to smooth the transition.

Today I have am managing 8 active retainer clients, and regular 1-2 week audit contracts, while rarely working more than 40 hours a week. Virtually all code I write is open source, or on track to be so soon, and I only work with clients okay with that.

I am making triple my previous salary, and am actually onboarding new team members as a "tier 1" to help me meet demand without overworking myself.

I am a full stack security engineer with 20 years of experience, and most companies can't have access to senior security engineers without paying GAFAM money in the range of $600k+ total comp, which they just can't afford.

Instead I offer most companies start a retainer with my team and I for as little as 10 hours a month and we can be there when they need help with security architecture, important code reviews, risk assessments, conducting interviews, or just to help unblock people in general.

This model is a win for companies that can't yet afford experienced full time security hires in house, and it is a win for me who can be in control of my time and life with higher income, and only have to focus on the most interesting problems of many different companies with minimal exposure to internal politics.

I can't express how much happier I am. Best career choice I ever made. YMMV.

> I’m sharing details about my progress to hopefully popularize the model, and eventually help other maintainers adopt it,

Hopefully this won't inspire people who don't meet the right conditions and whatever luck contributed to this existence proof.

I've known a lot of poor people trying to make it as independents in open source. I once sent a laptop to a homeless kernel hacker (and, earlier, sent them food), and had to find a laptop specifically to be small and discreet, because they feared being stabbed for anything flashy-looking. Another, who has done talks on their novel work at major hacker-as-in-HN conference, as well as other accomplishments, I had to tell them about Medicaid, because they couldn't afford to go to the doctor when they really needed to. One who accomplished something major that most HNers have used or heard of, was living in a trailer, and died. I've also known plenty of people in open source who had modest day jobs and were pretty stressed and depressed from money problems, and the cascading effects of that, despite being at least as tech-skilled as people making FAANG money.

If you happen to find yourself as the official maintainer of multiple open source components that are recognized as key by numerous enterprises (and cryptobro ventures) that are flush with cash, and you have ins at some of those, and you have a safety net warchest from years of FAANG, and enough reputation you could probably go back if the whole indie open source consultant thing didn't work out... sure, consider a consultancy like this post describes, as a lifestyle move.

Otherwise, it's like the movie star child of a Hollywood producer evangelizing this great career success formula they've found, prompting a bunch of aspiring actors to buy one-way Greyhound bus tickets from Kansas to LA, where most of them will be lucky if the worst that happens is they end up waiting tables.

The number one rule of transitioning to contractor is _do not start from zero_. This can't be stressed strongly enough!! The amount of time and energy it takes to get the ball rolling in that space before momentum kicks in is enormous. Hoping to rely on the goodwill of the anonymous masses, and not leaning _extremely_ hard on your existing direct network is absolutely a failure waiting to happen in 99.9% of cases. If you are working full time, and plan to transition, you absolutely should be moonlighting it first and/or have hard contracts in place with your first 'medium/long-term' client already (i.e. not a one-off engagement).

A few people seem to agree with me, so to flesh this out a bit:

Not all of us are going to fly a unicorn to a glorious multi billionaire finish. Most of us would like to be able to sleep at night, have a reasonably comfortable income and basically "get by". As this is HN, I will require a certain amount of "get up and go" but not too much!

I fell into the triumvirate thing 23 years ago. I became an IT contractor at a helicopter factory in the UK around 1996. Helpdesk n that. I learned quite a lot quite quickly and by 1999 ("party like it's") I was in the NETS team - sysadmin land. 2000 - we were Facility Managed off to ... ourselves and our company was started. I was recruited by two other NETS chaps to be the MD of their idea. It wasn't my idea.

So we have three blokes with equal shares of a nascent company. It works really well out of the box. Two can always gang up on one. We would have screaming arguments about direction or whatever but in the end there was always resolution.

23 years later, it still works. The three of us are quite different but we do completely trust each other. The trust thing is where my advice might become unhinged but the model is still very decent 8)

I'm so isolated. I never got a degree in this field and I don't socialize much. So I feel permanently trapped working for a company. It sucks, but not enough apparently to get me to change.

Yeah, I was wondering how his kind of arrangement could work if one needed or wanted to take weeks/months off at a time. The traditional model based on features or projects might be a better fit, unless one partners with others as you describe.

Find a problem people have, especially less engineering-type people, which you would love to help them solve. (Not "solve for them"; it's always a mutual process.)

Wherever people use Excel as the centerpiece of their work, there is an opportunity to help improve things, for fun and profit :)

In general, most opportunities lie on the seams between well-understood areas. Knowing more than one area helps. Many of these opportunities are too small for hockey-stick growth which VCs crave, or for huge contracts which large corporations desire. They are perfectly sufficient for a mid-size sustainable business though. Specialized things, like the bespoke work on and around open-source software from the post.

With any luck, that work may be pleasant.

So now he will start selling books and courses how he did one off thing. Because he did it once he somehow thinks that now he has all the answers.

Fairly typical as I see same with traders or rentiers.

Either they know it is one time trick and they have to milk it out before it goes bad or they are really clueless and think they have all the answers.

I don’t know which one is worse but I lean on milking strategy to be worse because they become snake oil salesmen by choice.

The bloke has found some measure of success that HN readers might generally applaud.

To be fair: he has only generated a single data point and not enough for a "thesis".

I think the main caveat is “Senior” and he means fairly senior at that anyone less will definitely have trouble, but if you’ve been in the industry 10-15 years and are looking to be your own boss and are very competent, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to do this and make comparable compensation.

Wow, TIL about the Association of Dental Support Organizations.

Now I'm imagining a future where independent open source maintainers are common and successful enough that there's a conference for the Association of Open Source Maintainer Support Organizations.

I heard it first time too but I don't find it creepy. Actually, I want more fields run like that.

In medicine those kinds of arrangements exist, but they charge 30% (I forget if it's off the top or the bottom).

So it's kinda like a music tribute group but in the software world? Substituting for something that may be gone (the original FOSS author(s)) but for the die-hard fans who don't want to let go?

Isn’t that what orgs like the Apache Software foundation do?

That's because they must be open source, what other sense of accountability could you possibly give if you're asking money to a crowd upfront based on a piece of paper?

From the number of logos, it's 6 clients, and I would put 4 of them into the blockchain bucket, with smallstep and tailscale being the two non-blockchain exceptions.

Also note that for blockchain projects, it's important that they associate themselves with famous people to give their projects credibility. So they are willing to pay huge amounts of money to get celebrities like him on board.

What is your project?

I suspect there's a sideline wink and handshake agreement to feature associated companies and indirectly promote them as case studies, etc. as the maintainer maintains. Not that that changes anything this is still a great arrangement and hopefully a positive example for our industry, but Smallstep and Tailscale are both trying to gain an authoritative hold in the production identity space and a little name dropping here and there by <famous dev> certainly doesn't hurt (:

There are a handful of these companies out there. Collabora, KDAB, D. Richard Hipp's SQLite company, and if you're lenient enough you could also include companies that productize their open source package such as NextCloud or The Qt Company. Heck, Red Hat (sorry, IBM) regularly gets pulled in to improve software across their stack, kernel or otherwise.

You could also include non-profits like the Linux Foundation, Blender Foundation or (new!) Godot Foundation, which do the same thing but without having to disguise as consulting, because development of the software itself is important enough to the industry that can pool its resources by donating to the respective foundation.

Still only works for important enough packages. I don't think there's a way around that. An open source project generally has to provide massively outsized value so that a handful of developers can capture a fraction of that value for paid maintenance.

They're not paying him to do custom freelance work for him. They're paying him to continue contributing to the projects that he is already maintaining.

The higher tier plans also get what sounds like a few hours of custom consulting time (think calls with their team) per month.

In beloved memory of n-gate?

In the very first paragraph of the linked article, there is this clause which may provide some clarity:

> I’m making an amount of money equivalent to my Google total compensation package

He goes on to write,

> My Google compensation was dominated by stock grants, so it varied wildly. What I’m earning now per year is: slightly less than my first year at Google (which included a significant signing bonus), drastically less than I earned in 2021 (when the signing stock grant overlapped with three stock refreshes, and $GOOG was at record highs), and more than I would have made in 2022 had I stayed (even accounting for all benefits on one side and the salary of my assistant on the other side).