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218. When Side Hustles For Software Developers Are Valuable · DevQuestions with Tim Corey

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: The phrase side hustle has a lot of emotion around it.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Some people hate the idea.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Other people have multiple side hustles going on at once.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Still, others are curious about them or want to have one but don't know where to start.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Today, we're going to talk about why side hustles are valuable for developers.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to have one, but we'll talk about why you should at least consider them.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Software development is more than just writing code.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about the rest of it.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to talk about why side hustles can be valuable for software developers.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And let's start with a little background on me.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: I've had a side hustle for most of my development career.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I've had multiple at one time sometimes.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start kind of at the beginning of my career where I started off doing things that were just little projects, but then I became a contractor.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I built apps, I built websites, I did little projects here and there.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote some code for people just on the side.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: People would say, hey, you're a developer, can you do a side job for me?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, not a problem.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started doing these little side jobs here and there.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was a consultant for a while where I guided companies on the technology they should use or how to implement systems or how to guide their software development team.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I even spent some time getting into training.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I built an entire company around training as a side hustle to begin with.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about the benefits that have been my career because of these side hustles.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: They put me in touch with a person who would become my first full-time job without work experience.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So my first job was, I'll call a side hustle, maybe call it a part-time job, whatever you want to call it.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was in high school.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: But an engineer said, Hey, I hear you want to be an electrical engineer.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that was my original career goal.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so he said, Would you mind, would you like to do like a, you know, an internship with me and just kind of work on the side while you're doing your normal, you know, school stuff?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I was doing school, I was doing basketball and other things.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, you know, sure, it'd be great.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I spent time working that I then, you know, worked into even more of a role at that company where I was doing all the free time I could at that company.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: But that put me in touch with a person who, when I dropped out of college, said, Hey, would you like a full-time job being a software developer?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Yes, I would, because he knew me from when I was working at that company.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so you might say, well, that was a side job.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't really a side hustle.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so let's talk about the next thing.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I landed a dev job when I hadn't been a primary developer in six years.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I started off at a college working as a software developer, but quickly found myself in the IT director role.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so I spent six years working as an IT director.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you don't get a lot of time to write code when you do.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now I was spending as much time as I could writing code to automate things, make things more efficient, and make us better as a department because of the code I wrote.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I still didn't have a lot of resume to point to and say, hey, I was a software developer too, or I'm still current, except for the fact that I had been working in my off hours as a consultant, as a contractor.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so those projects and showing off what I did for those companies, not my day job, are what landed me my next job.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because I want to be a developer again.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: I said, hey, I want to be a developer.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I could point to all the experience I had as opposed to, well, as an IT director, so I kind of oversaw things, but you know, I only code once in a while.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that allowed me to get my next job when I wanted to even transition my career a little bit.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: It also gave me a media income when I lost my main job.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I lost my job and I didn't have to panic because I already had side work for a number of different companies.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: I said, well, let's just ramp this up.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started doing it full time.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: It paid for additional things outside of my budget as well.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I always tended to have a side job because I was more in interested in picking jobs based upon the work culture and the environment as opposed to just chasing the highest paying job I could.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I chased jobs because of what they would allow me to do and how the culture was.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: But that didn't always pay all the bills, or it didn't give me that extra money that I wanted.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I would do side jobs that would kind of fill in some of those gaps and pay for some things that I wanted, like a better vehicle or to pay off some debt.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then those side hustles also allowed me to launch the company I run right now, the company that has six employees, the company that is growing.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: I launched all of that debt-free.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I never put in outside money into this company.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's always been self-contained growth because I didn't start it where I just, you know, quit my day job and start a company.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's not what I did.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: I started my company while working at my day job.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I had a day job, I had a side hustle, and then I had training.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then that training started to eat up more and more time on my side hustle until it became my only side hustle.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then that ate up more and more time, but also brought more and more income in until I was ready to take the transition from part-time trainer to full-time trainer without incurring debt, without taking a leap or doing anything dangerous that might endanger my financial well-being or drain my savings or anything else like that.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: So these are all things in my life that have been benefited by side hustles.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: They worked for me, but I also think that side hustles are good for most developers.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here are some of the benefits that I've both experienced and I have observed in others.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, you expand your skill set and not just in software development.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're working right now with.NET Framework 4.5 and you're working on ASPNet web forms, and you kind of work on old technology, SQL Server, but it's an older version, and you're kind of stuck there.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that can be bad for your resume because you don't have a lot of modern things to show.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it can also be a little bit stagnating because you're busy and so you spend a lot of time focusing in on those things that you work on, getting better at those things and improving and making your software better in the older versions that it's running.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not always easy to then go home and just practice and study and for nothing.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: But by having a side hustle, or maybe you're doing a little bit of consulting or a little bit of contract work where you say, hey, you know what?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'll do some contract work for you.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'll build a website for you in Blazor.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: I will build a project for you in.NET 8.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're expanding your skill set while getting paid.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's encouraging you to do those new things and allowing you to kind of grow what you're doing.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: But beyond that, it's also growing your soft skills, your ability to communicate with clients, your ability to put together a plan, your ability to lead others, your ability to set boundaries, to figure out what an application should be, to figure out how to estimate what an application is going to take, to figure out how to put together a successful MVP for an application as opposed to trying to put everything all at once, how to protect against scope creep, and how to do all those things that you need to learn how to do, and you're not necessarily getting to practice at your day job.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: So expand your skill set in software development.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can try new things and try new languages, try new databases, try new cloud providers.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: But you can also expand your ability in your soft skills as well.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's number one of one of the benefits I've seen.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Number two is it allows you to practice your ideas.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that has really benefited my current company because I spent a lot of time in companies saying, oh, I don't like how they're doing that.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that was a good choice.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that was a great choice.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I was looking at all these things that companies were doing and saying, these aren't great.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I could change them.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And now I get the opportunity to.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so I got to practice, even when I was small and growing, to say, hey, you know, I don't think that we should just allow the scope creep to happen.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think we should lock down what the initial project should be and not allow it to just change whenever.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I got to practice how to do that because the first couple of times were a little rough.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't easy because I had to communicate and say no, but my client said, I'm paying you.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to do what I say you're going to do.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now what?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to learn how to negotiate that and not just say no, but figure out how to upfront set expectations and figure out how to make sure we have a clear idea of what a project's going to be, and a clear idea of what it's not going to be, and a clear idea of what it's going to take to be successful at launch.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I got to practice these things.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: I got to practice the ideas and maybe find out sometimes that my ideas were just wrong.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: That, yeah, the way that the company I worked for was doing things wasn't great, but my idea wasn't better.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I got to figure out oh, that doesn't work.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Let's try it again.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the benefits of working as a contractor, is you don't typically work for one company just forever.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Usually you have a job here, a job there, and you work for five, 10, 15, 50 different companies over the course of a few years.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, by doing that, you have the opportunity to practice over and over again and maybe even tweak and change how you do things to get better and better and better at it until you figured out what does work and what doesn't work.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you figure out how to improve your processes.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And because of that, you're a better developer, you're also a better leader, you're also a better communicator.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: So practicing your ideas, this is a great opportunity to do that.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And number three, it teaches you what you like and what you don't like to do.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you're currently working with old.NET framework and web forms.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, I want to do something different.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: I want to work in the modern web.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you start doing that, and you work with Blazor and you work with HTML5 and CSS3, and you work with maybe a friend framework as well.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you go, I don't like that after all.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like having to work with NPM.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like having to work with this framework or that framework or whatever the case may be.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: You don't like it?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you've learned something without having to go too far down that hole of I'm stuck doing this.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: You're not stuck doing it forever.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: You just finish up that client and don't go back.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Where you go, you know what?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to do this anymore.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you figure out that, you know, you thought that mobile would be awesome.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you start working on mobile apps, and you're like, I kind of hate mobile apps.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like mobile apps.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: So you've learned something.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: You've learned what you don't like.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe you get into something and you say, you know what?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I thought desktop apps were horrible, but I was paid to do one, so I did it, and I kind of liked it.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And you do it again, you're like, I kind of like this even more.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you figure out, yeah, I do like to do desktop apps, or maybe I just like the back end, or maybe I like APIs and API development.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever the case may be, you get to teach yourself what you like to do.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it tells you and informs you, and you start saying, Oh, I like working with this database, I like working with that system, I like working with this cloud provider, I like working in this manner.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you start to figure those things out because you're working on more than just the one project at work, the one system, the one way of doing things.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: You're working on dozens of different ways of doing things, dozens of different systems, dozens of different providers and application types and so many other things.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Number four, it's gonna provide you a secondary source of income.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, not every side hustle does.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you decide that your side hustle is going to be to build an application.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that could fail.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if it does, you might not have any income from that.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're a consultant, if you're a contractor, if you do side jobs, if you, you know, there's a number of different things that could provide a secondary source of income.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe like you did with Mita training, where you start off with, I'm not doing this for money, but money comes in anyway.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like there can be other things that happen that start to give you an income stream.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: So providing a second source of income can be very valuable for a number of different reasons.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: One, it can just pay down bills, or it can provide you with some additional niceties, or help you help others with that money.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: But number five, another reason why a secondary source of income is helpful, number five is it insulates you against job instability.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: I lost my job.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't lose all my income.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: That was huge.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I could ramp up my side hustle into a full-time job, and I didn't lose a step.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that insulated me from losing my job.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: But more than that, if you are working in different technologies, if you have these experiences, again, I was an IT director for six years.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have a lot of things in that position I could show off saying, yes, I'm a developer too.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: But because I had the side hustles, I could show off the different projects I worked on.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: That also insulated me against a job loss, or in this case, needing or wanting to get a new job.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: It allowed me to get a new job more easily because of the fact that I had more experience than the average person did.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: So side hustles can insulate you against job instabilities.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of having all your eggs in one basket, you kind of spread them out a little bit and you improve yourself as well, which again spreads out your risk.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Number six, it creates a low-risk attempt at building a product or company.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Too often I see people say, you know, I'm gonna quit my job and start a company.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: I really don't like that approach.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think that approach is risky.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think that approach is ill-informed.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, I always say that the first product you build is gonna be the worst because you haven't practiced it yet.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: The same thing is true for your companies.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you start a product, the first product you ever build is the one you want to sell, that's not gonna be the greatest product, probably.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the first company you ever start or attempt to start, that probably won't be the best ever.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I started a company doing consulting.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that, you know what, I do consulting on the side, I'll do it full-time.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: I found out I don't love consulting.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mind doing it, and I love helping people, but it wasn't really consulting itself that was filling that need.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't like a lot of the downsides of full-time consulting.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I figured something out.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I figured out over time what did work for me, and I started to make some changes.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And now, the first time I started a company, I gave up, if you want to call it that, after a year and say, you know what?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna work full-time again for somebody else.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: But then I started the company I run right now, and things were different because I had practice.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: I had tried something, and now this is a very low-risk attempt at a company because I started on the side.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then as it started to take off, I went full-time.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then as the income grew, I was able to start hiring people to help out and make this company better.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was a very low-risk thing, but it was also something that I knew that I could do and wanted to do because I had been doing it.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then I even started it when I had enough income to support myself.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: But also, it gave me time to go.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is this still okay?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Is it is full-time okay?
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Is it all right to be doing this full-time?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer was yes.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a low-risk way to do that.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just quit everything and you've got three months to figure things out and get income in, or six months, or even a year.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't that because that is high pressure.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: And high pressure makes you make bad decisions.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And bad decisions are going to sink most companies.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's why most companies fail.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is it's a hard thing to start a company, it's a hard thing to launch a product.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's hard and not everyone's going to succeed.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, most won't.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: So learning how to do it over and over again, practicing small, will be a very low risk way of you attempting this until you find something that does work and then you grow from there.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're happy with the salary you have right now, if you're confident your job won't be eliminated, and you're comfortable, continue to work in the technologies you're working on currently in a daily basis, having a side hustle might not be for you.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: But for everyone else, I would encourage you to consider picking up one or more side hustles.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Start small, don't make us a massive thing, just try something out.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's easier to change your future with action rather than inaction.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And as always, I am Tim Corey.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to I am TimCorey.com and enroll in a course.