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Ask HN: Do you have side income as a software engineer?

Yesterday, I had a long call with a friend, a tech recruiter with over a decade in the field.

She was tired not from resumes or interviews, but from engineers, still negotiating like it’s 2021.

The “golden bubble”.

Where every frontend engineer was a unicorn and every offer had quadruple-digit equity, that bubble still shapes expectations. But the market today is more like… reality.

It’s not that talent isn’t valued. It’s that value has changed shape.

The engineers who bristle at lower stock grants or extra days in office aren’t wrong to want fairness… they’re just anchoring to a world that no longer exists or might quickly disappear.

I don’t believe in surrender. I believe in recalibration.

What happens when we stop pretending the market is unchanged, and start asking: How do I create a career that isn’t a bubble-dependent bet? What do I build that isn’t tied to a single job title or company’s stock price?

The most interesting people I talk to today are already thinking in parallel streams: mentoring, writing, consulting, advising, building side projects, diversifying, not out of fear, but because the old narrative of one job = stable identity doesn’t hold.

I’m curious: do you have side income as a software engineer? If so, what’s worked (or not) for you?

That sounds like a recipe for burnout, or workaholics trying to justify their drug of choice and push it on others.

Normalizing having a dozen streams of income as what one needs to get by will end up leaving us with economic results that leave this as a requirement, rather than a nice to have. A similar thing happened with the two-income household. As the idea was pushed, it went from a way for some to make ends meet, to what a majority feel they need just to get by. Is this the world we want to create?

Your job doesn’t need to be your identity. That is true with one job, the same as it is with having 10 jobs. If you’re looking to diversify where your identity lies, other prongs to that base can be rooted in family, friends, and hobbies. We don’t need to be monetizing every second and aspect of our lives.

2 minutes agoal_borland