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I've built an entire business around some personal programs that I've written (all Python scripts). Currently working about 4 days a week with no commute and p

I've built an entire business around some personal programs that I've written (all Python scripts). Currently working about 4 days a week with no commute and pulling in 2-3x as much as I was back when I was an SWE. This is only going up as things get more automated and optimised. I think a lot of young people obsess with the high-status fields (AI, Robotics etc.) but there are plenty of ways to make a good living doing low-status work extremely efficiently (I'm in used video games, for example).

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
Can you provide examples? I've never managed to make money from scripting and short of going into freelancing I don't see how I would even start.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Specifically in our case, we sell used video games. A lot of very labour-intensive work (pricing, writing listings, getting images) is all done by machine now, and I've recently made some semi-automated flows for shipping (think stage 1 of Manna[1], where a script tells you the optimal way to do a manual job). The next thing is to automatically decay the prices with a cron job to get rid of stale listings. I think the important thing to point out is that we're not a software business! We're a retail business that happens to use software to increase productivity and competitiveness in certain areas. The value doesn't come from the fact that the software is particularly technically impressive, but that it allows us to achieve in 50 man-hours per week what takes others 200. As a side note, I think the whole "I'm a software engineer, therefore I should focus on making software" way of thinking is an incredibly common trap that leads many people towards creating worthless startups. Ultimately, good software solves some kind of real-world problem, and your understanding of the problem that you're solving is in many cases more important than your programming skill. [1]https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago

Can you provide examples? I've never managed to make money from scripting and short of going into freelancing I don't see how I would even start.

AussieWog93 5y ago
Specifically in our case, we sell used video games. A lot of very labour-intensive work (pricing, writing listings, getting images) is all done by machine now, and I've recently made some semi-automated flows for shipping (think stage 1 of Manna[1], where a script tells you the optimal way to do a manual job). The next thing is to automatically decay the prices with a cron job to get rid of stale listings. I think the important thing to point out is that we're not a software business! We're a retail business that happens to use software to increase productivity and competitiveness in certain areas. The value doesn't come from the fact that the software is particularly technically impressive, but that it allows us to achieve in 50 man-hours per week what takes others 200. As a side note, I think the whole "I'm a software engineer, therefore I should focus on making software" way of thinking is an incredibly common trap that leads many people towards creating worthless startups. Ultimately, good software solves some kind of real-world problem, and your understanding of the problem that you're solving is in many cases more important than your programming skill. [1]https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1