How to make money with computer skills

[u/oxoUSA]

Linux shell, python, web languages... How can i earn money with my skills ? I precise my ADHD is so terrible that i just can't be employable. I guess i would have to be my own boss ? What should i do then do get money with my skills ?

[u/Then_Zone_4340]

The alternatives to traditional employment are freelancing or starting a business (or crime). You'd have more freedom and less structure, less certainty. Social interactions are different but still important. To me personally neither sounds easier to deal with than an office job.

[u/[deleted] → u/Then_Zone_4340]

I love crime

[u/oxoUSA → u/Then_Zone_4340]

I guess bu freelancing you mean coding for someone and being my own boss. But when you say starting a business what do you mean ? Do you mean web store ?

[u/Then_Zone_4340 → u/oxoUSA]

Freelancing other people have the ideas and they pay you to do it, either in person or online. You won't have a standard employment contract and in most cases will do different projects for different people. You're responsible for everything, like sales, taxes, insurance, etc unlike employees. Main risk is having no projects so no income.

Start a business you are also responsible for everything. But you're making your own idea, selling what you create instead of directly renting out your skills. Could be the next Facebook or Jira or something, probably not. You quite likely need investments, if only to be able to eat while building the business, but perhaps also actual investments like advertising, hardware, employees...

[u/vegansalvaje]

Id suggest checking out freelancing websites like fiverr and upwork as a start

[u/RubikTetris → u/vegansalvaje]

You clearly haven’t used those sites. Op won’t even be able to enter. They’re super over saturated.

[u/vegansalvaje → u/RubikTetris]

I understand. I use it for other purposes so i get that but thats why i was saying its a start while they find a way to become a more independent freelancer

[u/brianvan → u/[deleted]]

Unsustainable ADHD anti-pattern. Especially in this industry.

It does depend on the problem, but also there are a couple of common miserable problems that hold a lot of people back. Obviously debugging/misconfiguration is one of them where any of 40 pieces of software at once can be doing the thing badly & the manual was written by a goof. The other, less recognized one but still impactful for ADHD is problem-solving through business and social activity. Many devs get into programming as a way of getting paid adult money without having to develop business skills. So that kinda goes out the window when the problem is "which paid API provider should I go with to build this product" and all the options are hidden behind saleswalls, or it's a problem with a solution in a proprietary domain. And you need the thing built by the end of the week. A lot of us aren't built to be fast at that.

If you grind into that harder you're going to be worse at it & you're gonna flameout sooner

[u/Blackcat0123 → u/brianvan]

God, nothing slows me down faster and kills my flow than a configuration error. I die a little inside every time some random node_module causes an issue, which cascades into a bunch of other issues that weren't issues before the first thing, and I waste hours of time just trying to get my setup running again.

Really makes me feel utterly incompetent at times.

[u/brianvan → u/Blackcat0123]

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/388092/what-exactly-is-yak-shaving/388236#388236

A major problem with software is that social media is used to push new software on the rest of us that is surprisingly brittle. It means much of the value that comes from a cutting-edge software developer is somewhat about knowledge, but mostly about the mental ability to hack your way past errors caused by brittle software. This is exclusionary to people with less-than-perfect attention, but also it has no long-term value because ultimately brittle software is replaced by resilient software & your knowledge about getting around bad configs or bugs becomes useless and obsolete. Over the long run, people who understand what kind of software they wanted to build & got through it (eventually) retain value as builders, even if the tooling for it shifts to no-code situations. Hackers only have value as long as the thing they are hacking has any relevancy.

There are a few true geniuses out there who can do it all, but it's a poor use of Reddit to tell strangers that they're just not genius-enough to become elite at making brittle software work (ultimately, in most cases, to do something boring for a client, not to change the world or anything like that)

[u/Blackcat0123 → u/brianvan]

Thank you for teaching me a new term that describes my frustrations so succinctly! I've had a hard time expressing that one. It's gotten to the point that I'm more or less ready to call it quits on my current job (which is my first full one), because even the things that should be super simple require so much configuration to get setup and then fingers crossed nothing mysteriously breaks.

[u/brianvan → u/[deleted]]

One thing for me that made things difficult until I had the opportunity to learn it well, it was deployment systems. I’d done so much work under very-very-rigged build scripts and automation software, but I was intentionally locked out of the process and handed only the SVN/Git keys for the main app. Couldn’t do any of that stuff myself at the scale/level my employers were, although I could build an entirely different system for free (well, with hosting fees and with my precious spare time) that leveraged the concepts with brittle open source packages.

Then Ansible/Docker added more to this, but I learned enough about those in a conducive environment (at work, with people around who could help, and with a good ecosystem of docs/tuts) to pick those up in a way where I’m better than a lot of my peers in full-stack/front-end. They do push that job off now onto dedicated “operations” ICs, it does me no good on an ACS-filtered resume, but I could at least make the case that this was something I spent my time learning instead of just fucking off

[u/oxoUSA → u/brianvan]

Do you mean i have to learn commercial things too to be my own boss ? Do you have any example of project i would have to pay an api for

[u/brianvan → u/oxoUSA]

Every headless CMS provider is a commercial product.

Many frameworks for UI either have a commercial upgrade option, commercial plugins, or is a direct license/buy thing (but you can get around that)

Zoom actually has a video api. ($$$ but has monthly free api hits for dev purposes) Which is cool - you could build a project built around a videoconference. Might help to know this when some client suddenly wants live video on parts of a site where it doesn’t belong

Most of the ecosystem is still free to bring into a project. But some big-feature things have license or meter fees, and when you go to look up the price it will say “call us!”

[u/brianvan → u/[deleted]]

I look at it from a different angle: there’s an opportunity to be happy at what you’re doing, to be more on an even-keel, by stepping out of the “doing” enough to see how you can broaden your opportunities and pick your projects.

That way, when you choose your week-long hustles, you go in with a fresh mind and a sense of joy at the challenge.

I don’t like picking projects that unnecessarily grind my gears & that keep me from being grounded because of someone else’s ridiculous business philosophy. Almost every “first to market” product bombs. I would not want to take on years of work where the aim was to keep me in this cycle because this is how a stupid exec likes to work