from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

by ferennag on 8/16/23, 5:49 PM with 120 comments

• by lun4r on 8/16/23, 6:02 PM

  You could consider apiculture. Yes, that's right, beekeeping. You might wonder how this is relevant to your 11 years of development experience, but let me explain.

  Beekeeping can offer a relaxing, nature-oriented antidote to the stresses of coding, and moreover, there is a burgeoning market for smart apiary technology. Bee mortality rates have increased over recent years for numerous reasons, and technology is beginning to find ways to address these problems.

  As a developer, you could design systems to monitor hive health, honey production levels or even bee activity. This data can be used to predict illnesses, optimize honey production, or understand more about bee behavior, providing valuable insights to the beekeeping community as well as researchers.

  This unique combination of software development and beekeeping could potentially be a lucrative side gig. Not to mention, a proportion of the honey could be sold for additional profit or used for personal consumption.

  So, while it may seem far fetched, your coding skills could help save the global bee population while offering a calming, profitable new hobby.

  (:

• by gsaines on 8/16/23, 6:25 PM

  If you're already a software engineer earning a normal salary in the US (several assumptions there), it's really hard to find side hustles that pay at or above the hourly wage that your employer has already committed to. I personally think that it's a good idea to focus on building a small lifestyle software business over the course of several years. I wrote a long series of blog posts about this over here: https://overthinkingmoney.com/2023/05/02/start-a-business-no...

  My first company (Skritter.com) fits this mold. It's been growing slowly, but steadily for more than 15 years now. In the first couple of years we were able to generate low five-figures per month, now it's substantially higher.

  There are other ways to earn cash outside of tech, but most of the common suggestions (drop shipping, affiliate marketing, laundromats, etc) are mostly terrible if you really do the analysis.

  For better or worse, low risk generally means low upside!

• by yowlingcat on 8/16/23, 6:31 PM

  Not sure if this is the answer you want to hear but "easy" and "side money" are diametrically opposed. Before you think about that as an avenue to increase your earnings, try and optimize your current job. A couple questions:

  1. Are you doing everything you can to put yourself on an upwards trajectory towards a promotion and/or a raise? You spend most of your waking hours on your current job, and the easiest way to increase your life time earnings is bending the curve here.

  2. Have you been interviewing to make sure you're getting fair market value and have? If you are not growing as well as you're capable of in your current role, a new role is a potential option. This introduces risk.

  3. Have you taking a knife to your expense list and maxed out 401k and HSA contributions? Every dollar you don't contribute there is one that you're giving away to the government, so make sure you're using all the tools available to optimize.

  4. Have you begun to invest in real estate? In the USA, the existence of federally backed homebuyer loans and 1031 swaps is an incredible tool to build wealth, and the leverage from the loan is even partially tax deductible on the interest side. You of course need to be careful here given the choppy state of the macro environment and real estate market so that you don't end up underwater.

  5. Are you investing surplus earnings into a safe ETF? Ensuring that your earnings are working for you making passive income from the market is critical for long term earnings.

  None of these approaches are quick fixes, but they're all time tested approaches than anyone can use.

• by syndicatedjelly on 8/16/23, 6:12 PM

  Kinda meta advice, but I'd be careful about converting your hobbies into paid gigs. It's a great way to make yourself hate your hobby, especially when it turns out it's not very lucrative and the customers are assholes. I learned this the hard way with photography.

  People who advocate "hustle culture" tend to not have very lucrative main jobs, or no upward mobility in their current role. So they look for weird "hacks" to make a few bucks on the side, like drop-shipping garbage or starting some weird self-help YouTube channel. In the world of engineering, I think it's way more useful to focus on your core skillset and learn new things around that.

  That said, boringcashcow.com has inspired me to try to come up with a simple programming project that could turn over 4 figures a month. It made me realize in software you can just go for base hits, not home runs, and still make plenty of money.

• by WestCoastJustin on 8/16/23, 6:10 PM

  Get a second remote job. You could effectively double your salary for a few months or as long as you can handle it. Personally, this is much better than the race of the bottom of all these piece meal contracting gig sites. Youtube is likely a major waste of time in that you'd need to compete and build a profile, etc. This takes time. If you want to spend years then you might make it work. I've done this and know from experience. It's well worth it if you have years to put into it. It'll open tons of doors too.

  However, you know how to hold a job. You've had one for 11+ years. So, just get a second one. You could be making double your current salary within as little as 4-6 weeks after interviews etc. That's likely the fastest path if you need money quickly.

• by n_ary on 8/16/23, 6:32 PM

  Disclaimer: Unpopular advice.

  Seek out local folks who wants to go online selling their tupperware, tobaco, small services, books, photos, small mom-n-pop coffee/fastfood shops etc and offer to build them a site they can maintain.

  Then buy them a subscription on no-code sites(wix, weebly, squarespace etc) and get a commission for the initial setup. Worked for my nephew who just wanted something he could do on the nights to save up some money for his summer vacation. He still gets referral offers from folks who are happy with their sites and their friends also want similar sites.

• by diehunde on 8/16/23, 6:30 PM

  You could try writing blog posts for a company[1]. I haven't done this but I know people who have. It's crazy what some companies pay for such low-quality content sometimes.

  [1] https://github.com/malgamves/CommunityWriterPrograms

• by kossTKR on 8/17/23, 8:35 AM

  Interesting that for over a decade these threads were filled with hundreds of optimistic posts, but now it's almost pure pessimism and warnings.

  Maybe earning money on the internet, even with advanced skills and experience has just been met with so much global competition that it's just not that valuable a skill anymore, maybe the monopolies took over e-trade and maybe most users became trapped in silos or on giga-services so the money is really in influencing, not curating, building or creating from scratch?

  Rather depressing.

• by spencerchubb on 8/16/23, 6:24 PM

  Do physical work like cleaning, painting, building fences, and mowing lawns. You can clean houses, pools, gutters, cars.

• by didyoureboot on 8/16/23, 8:13 PM

  If you have your masters, you could try teaching as an adjunct at a local university at night. Pay isn't bad (relative to the amount of work) and you can stay in the field. Rewarding work, and in some state/provincial systems you can even earn a pension. I get speaking isn't your thing, so that might be an impediment, but maybe it's less of an issue in a more intimate setting

• by chasd00 on 8/16/23, 6:32 PM

  Not side work exactly, but see if there's any bonus programs lurking somewhere in your job. My company recently started a bonus program for industry certifications, each certification nets you some points and the more points you get the more bonus you qualify for up to a limit. The bonus is based on % of base pay.

  So, I looked at all the certifications available and plotted a path through them that gets me the minimum amount of points required to reach the highest bonus tier each fiscal year. It's been, by _far_, the most lucrative "side hustle" i've ever had. I study for, and take, about 4-5 cert tests per year and am on year #2 of the program. If they run the program for 5 years and I keep dropping the whole bonus into my investment account I'll have enough to pay for college for both of my boys (currently in middle school).

  /I'm 47 and still paying my student loan, i don't want that hell for my kids.

• by arandr0x on 8/17/23, 11:35 AM

  If you're good at 3d graphics or game programming I have a lead on a contract that could work (it's too much work to do by myself, client wants people in Canada, my network won't do it for less than 5 figures). If not your skill set, my point is reach out to other contractors, they may have overflow work or e.g. design/front-end contractors might need someone to refer for backend/devops work.

• by igotajob on 8/16/23, 6:42 PM

  I’ve been trying to do this as someone who doesn’t have a CS career. I have a good full time job but wanted to learn something different and keep my brain engaged. So I learned iOS development, again no CS degree, made an app and got it into the App Store. The goal is to get going on a second app and get that in the store as well.

  The issue for me is that, since I’m not in the development world, I don’t have any mentors or people to talk to and bounce ideas off of. I’ve been looking into getting an internship at a software company but those are rare for evening time remote work since that’s all I would be able to lend my self to because of my full time job.

  I think I’m heading the right way but there’s just hurdles that need to be jumped over.

  All that to say, try a different field than software development? A reverse of what I’m doing?

• by cmews on 8/16/23, 6:24 PM

  If you are good at security, try bug bounty hunting. Make the web safer and earn some money!

• by mikeryan on 8/16/23, 6:34 PM

  I don't do this now but I used to.

  Wait tables. A lot of service based businesses are struggling to find good staff. Go for a higher end high average ticket place, and or places that close relatively early so you're not stuck there too late.

  Usually at first there's not a lot of quality shifts open but also, frequently, you can pick up shifts from other people and a lot of restaurants are okay with having a few staff who have few regular shifts but whom they can rely on in a pinch. You can make decent cash. The work can be pretty "fun" and the time tends to go pretty quick.

• by qrush on 8/16/23, 6:32 PM

  I've been selling some old game boxes and old controllers on Ebay, and learning a lot about the experience (and selling stuff in general!). Made around $400 so far with some ChatGPT generated descriptions!

• by thereisnospork on 8/16/23, 6:30 PM

  Donate plasma, doesn't get easier than sitting in a chair.

• by Glench on 8/17/23, 3:39 PM

  I made https://extensionpay.com to monetize my own browser extensions and between that and free distribution on the extension stores it’s really easy to try making extensions that make money. So far devs have made over $300k with ExtensionPay. That said, it still take some skill to find a niche that works.

• by buzzdenver on 8/16/23, 6:07 PM

  Can you acquire new tech skills to get a higher paying job?

• by schwartzworld on 8/17/23, 4:52 PM

  If your company has a referral bonus, it might be worth your while to do some networking. Some companies have really generous bonuses. A simple conversation can earn you thousands of dollars. It's hard to imagine that any web app I'm going to build is going to have as good an ROI.

• by jacknews on 8/17/23, 2:05 AM

  Yes forget the freelancer sites. As a new user you'll spend hours, and all your limited 'connect points', or even actual money, submitting applications that mostly won't even be read.

• by henning on 8/16/23, 6:15 PM

  Buy shares of stocks and use that as collateral to sell covered calls.

• by MiguelX413 on 8/16/23, 8:37 PM

  How could an 11 year old be an experienced developer?

• by DishyDev on 8/16/23, 6:09 PM

  I've used respondent.io successfully for a few years doing surveys on new developer tools and cloud provider portals.

• by frontman1988 on 8/16/23, 6:27 PM

  There are no easy ways to make money.

• by cmews on 8/16/23, 6:18 PM

  Not sure what your skill set is exactly and what your interests are but there are lots of hackathons in crypto/AI that have good prizes. You can also apply for grants for certain organisations if you build something that ecosystem can use. Good luck!

• by ipaddr on 8/16/23, 6:12 PM

  Checked freelancer websites, but competition is crazy there (developing a full-fledged ecommerce web application for $100, and such

  Take hourly projects instead of fixed price.

• by shashanoid on 8/16/23, 6:25 PM

  Weekly $SPY options

• by adnjoo on 8/18/23, 9:59 AM

  Lyft

• by more_corn on 8/17/23, 9:24 AM

  Are you cute?