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Comment by purple-leafy | Hacker News Reader

First off, for what purpose?

If it’s for money, side projects aren’t worth it. I went down this road for years, and DID make money, but ultimately it’s not worth it.

If it’s to learn, great! Start by solving problems you have. Doesn’t matter if it’s reinventing the wheel, solve it in a way you come up with yourself.

Here’s an example: I do our household budgeting on a spreadsheet, it’s okay but not very user friendly. So I can make a web-tool I can share over local IP so my partner who can’t spreadsheet can contribute. That’s a side project.

Also, do something different to your main job role. I work in web development all day, so my side projects are low level programming graphics projects, or game mods.

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Hard disagree that doing a side project for money is not worth it. Almost all bootstrapped companies started this way. It should be self-evident by now that VC-driven "startup" is just one potential path to build a product, not the only way to start your own thing. The best gigs I've had in my career started as someone's side project that took off enough to become a company.

Even if your goal isn't to grow into a company, it is not always a difficult slog. My best side project accidentally made money. I wrote it for my kids, put it online, and forgot about it. As it was all client-side functionality, it was just a free static HTML page from my perspective. But 2 years later, I find out people had found it and were using it constantly, so I added some paid features, ran it for a couple years, and sold it.

I hard disagree, solely for the money is NOT worth it.

You’re much better off focusing down on your career and maximising your paycheque.

Doing it solely for money you will just burnout. A 40 hour week + life commitments + a side project to make money is not sustainable for anyone.

Doing a fun side project that somehow makes money is fine, but think of the overwhelming amount of failed side projects out there. Statistically it’s very unlikely your side project will make much money.

Yeah, you said that already. We already knew you disagreed, which is why I posted a dissenting opinion in the first place. That way, OP hears different perspectives and can make their own call.

Personally, I've seen way too much anti-employee politics and policy in the corporate world to trust that maximizing checks is right for everyone. I say that as someone who did that for much of my career, too. If you have ambition to do more, you should. If you are happy to just collect checks, you should do that. But people should decide for themselves because what burns one person out would make a different person thrive.

I more just mean solely for the money doesn’t quite work so well. I see your viewpoint regarding anti-employee politics and policy and agree the world is becoming quite anti-worker so can see where you’re coming from.

I’ve found the best approach is to reduce work hours per week/fortnight by 1 day, and spend that day on side projects and learning.

If you approach side projects with the intent to learn and share your creations, I think the money can follow.

That way you can still juice up your career, but potentially open up a diversified second income stream. If the finances look good, you can even reduce work hours and increase side project time

Why aren't side projects worth it if they're just for the money?

I would guess because with solid software engineering skills you can (could?) make more money consulting in the extra time to make money. I think that might have been true a couple years ago but now is exactly the opposite. Although side projects are not that "side" for the current unemployed.

From experience majority of side projects that set out to make money, don’t make any money.

And the projects have to make a large amount of money to be better than a typical software developer salary.

Consider then that you’re probably already working 40 hours, where are you finding the time for a sustainable side project that generates income?

That takes months, years to get to any reasonable amount of income.

That being said, I have made money from side projects, I made 1/5 of my yearly salary in about 1 month of conception (from a software sale).

But that was a pure fluke, right place right time right tool right amount of luck. I’ve been making side projects for years, 9/10 of my projects lose me money lol

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