Ask HN: Should I climb the software engineering Ladder or build a side hustle?
I have little over 2 Years of Experience. I had joined the Industry in 2021 when developers are making a lot money here in India thanks to Startup VC Funding. I had job-hopped a bit and got to a decent salary at my current role but the market has changed dramatically. I have been applying to several companies passively and actively since couple of months resulting in vain. Now, I am very much passionate about software but I am also flexible. I do get some decent ideas in IT sometimes. Should I just keep upskilling myself in promotion to mid-level engineer/ grinding leetcode or do a side hustle completely unrelated(or related) to software? I am flexible with anything. My Long term goals are Financial Independence and stimulating work If you only have 2 years experience, especially if that experience is limited to your job, you might not be as ready to move forward as you think you are. I recommend first proving to yourself that you can do what others cannot before taking risks that will limit your ability to become a stronger and more competent craftsman. This is gatekeeping nonsense. I’ve been programming for 23 years professionally and have worked with junior devs that school me. I’m a strong developer too. If you are good, go for a side hustle. If you are decent, work and go for a side hustle. Its a form of Dunning Kruger. First of all, how do you know you are good? If you are guessing (or imagining) you aren't good. This implies you need something to measure. Secondly, how do you know what to measure? If you don't know what to measure you have no idea whether you are good. You could be good, but you have no ability to determine this. Third, if you do know what to measure you need to know how to measure it. If you don't know how to conduct those measures this is where reality begins to set in, because you know enough to determine your competency but not enough to qualify it. Finally, if you know how to conduct such measures you have to determine their validity and that just takes experience, such a various forms of competing measures. If a person can make these measured determinations with a few as 2 years experience then they are likely excellent. Excellence isn't at question though. Its the ability to appropriately determine excellence that matters. Dunning Kruger is typically the opposite of gatekeeping. Its where under qualified people believe they are better performers than other people determine them to be. That distortion of reality is often on full display in embarrassing fashion to those making the determination and third party observers. If gatekeeping were in effect under qualified people would not be provide these opportunities to embarrass themselves. like what? Your question is too vague to understand. So, instead I will invent an appropriate question for you to ask and then answer that question. How do I know I am achieving higher performance compared to my peers or capabilities they cannot perform? Once you have enough experience you don't have to guess at this. You will know how to measure your own performance with numbers. For example you will know the last 50 times you completed a given task it took about x number of hours to complete. You can then look at your peers to determine if you are slower or faster and you know how long it will take you to perform the same action into the future. You will also see that your peers are stupid and blindly fail in the same ways over and over or you won't ever see this because you are that peer failing in the same way over and over. Once you solve for that and fully automate away that specific stupidity you will know you have attained some capability vastly superior to your peers. If you cannot do either of those then you are absolutely not ready to go out on your own. In 2 years, you job hopped quite a bit. That means you don't have deep experience in anything yet and for most companies, you will be seen as entry level unless you can show that you are the real deal. The answer to whether you should climb the ladder or start a side hustle depends on what you want for yourself and where you want to be in few years. You are most likely to make good money in a job than a side hustle. So if the goal is just to make money, I would say go for a job for now. That doesn't stop you from doing some side projects of course but then it comes down to how bad you want to do it. Unless you have the entrepreneurial itch so bad that you just can't do anything else, I suggest you get another job and at least stay at one place for 3-4 years and gain real deep experience. If you keep job hopping, you wont be very valuable after another 2-3 years. Just my 2 cents as someone with 20+ years of experience in the industry who runs his own thing. I think it's always a good idea to be building things outside of work (if you enjoy it). If you want to build a side hustle, then even better. I used to build a lot of projects after (and before) work. I had over 100 projects before I built my first successful side hustle (which is now my sole income, > $2MM). I can't imagine going back to working for a company. I was an engineering manager and working my way up the company, but it's not for me. I am a big advocate for job hopping, but in your case I think you need to stay on at one company for at least a few years and develop skills, and see a project through long term. You can always try starting something up, but it is honestly pretty difficult to beat the cost/benefit of just getting a promotion! My current conclusion is that I should do side hustle. Because at work, opportunities don't simply come to me because I'm good. Opportunities don't come to me, because my manager lose an internal turf war to another manager, i.e. there are a lot of factors out of my control, even my technical skills are strong. Secondly, if I put all my energies into the work, I will be tied too much to the technologies used by the work, and I will miss the opportunity to grow myself. Why not both? Keep getting money from employer X, and experiment with your ideas until one works out. 2 Years of Experience is the time to start singlehandedly delivering larger features/modules, maybe some limited scale/complexity software systems. Mentoring interns/junior developers. It's probably not enough experience to move into architecture, much less a fully managerial role. But you do you. If you have energy and motivation for building something of your own — go for it without a single doubt! Being a financial slave of a corporation is an always open door if you don’t succeed. I'd advise gaining some more experience first. Also, financial independence is first and foremost a state of mind. As an extreme example, Diogenes the Cynic was arguably more financially independent than Elon Musk is.