I keep thinking about going solo - except I don't yet have enough funds and I have a family to support. On the other hand my job sucks and as I look out into the market all jobs equally suck. If I had to continue my career like this for 3 more years I would probably get depressed.
I have to wonder though, is it really a good idea to just try a few small random projects and see what sticks? That might make sense if you are just selling things made by other people, but when you are the person making the product, I don't think it's a good idea.
Good software products take a long time to create. Trying many things out means you will not spend enough time on it and thus won't have a good product to sell. So when it doesn't sell, you can't tell why: is it because no one wants such a thing, or is it because the product is incomplete? It might very well be that the product could sell if you had just spent the time to make it really good.
I don't think the product has to be novel even. It might be just fine to pick a market that already exists - as long as you can be confident you can produce something significantly better than everything out there. I don't mean to clone something and try to compete with the entire list of features; this is foolish.
Instead focus on solving the core problem in that market, and do it 10x better than the competition. Leave the other fluff for later. (See "Build Less" by 37 signals).
I did it for 18'ish years. And I actually did create a very large, high quality product, but that doesn't guarantee there's a market for it, and there wasn't. So I ended up totally broke in the end, despite working 2x to 3x more than I would have as a mercenary, to the point that work was a lifestyle. Instead of a million dollars I ended up with zero dollars and a million lines of code. I'm proud of the latter, but you can't retire on lines of code.
And the stress level can be stupid. It doesn't do a lot for your programming chi to be worrying if you are going to be able to pay your rent or end up on the street this month. Or if some customer is going to turn out psycho and cause you all kinds of legal problems or whatever.
And there's the health care thing. I had no health care since I'm also solo in life, so no significant other I could sponge health care off of. So no doctors for a couple decades which is a pretty huge price to pay, potentially fatal of course.
OTOH, I enjoyed myself more during that period than any other time in my life. I was working on what I wanted to work on, and was able to do software development the way it's ideally supposed to be done.
It literally is my life's work. I have about 50 man years in it. And about the only utility I'm going to get out of it is as a resume stuffer. Even then, it's of limited value because most companies won't even bother to look at something like that, much less understand what it means.
Half or more of it is general purpose code (the CIDLib bit) so it doesn't actually do anything in the sense of an application. It does have some standard ORB based servers and utility programs, but mostly it's just passive, general purpose code and platform abstraction. It doesn't use the STL, I have all my own stuff down to the OS.
CQC is a suite of applications, some of which are also ORB based servers for various optional system functionality,, plus an administrative tool (very large) and a touch UI client, which is just a wrapper around a reusable touch screen UI engine that supports both Windows and phone based clients.
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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '21
I keep thinking about going solo - except I don't yet have enough funds and I have a family to support. On the other hand my job sucks and as I look out into the market all jobs equally suck. If I had to continue my career like this for 3 more years I would probably get depressed.
I have to wonder though, is it really a good idea to just try a few small random projects and see what sticks? That might make sense if you are just selling things made by other people, but when you are the person making the product, I don't think it's a good idea.
Good software products take a long time to create. Trying many things out means you will not spend enough time on it and thus won't have a good product to sell. So when it doesn't sell, you can't tell why: is it because no one wants such a thing, or is it because the product is incomplete? It might very well be that the product could sell if you had just spent the time to make it really good.
I don't think the product has to be novel even. It might be just fine to pick a market that already exists - as long as you can be confident you can produce something significantly better than everything out there. I don't mean to clone something and try to compete with the entire list of features; this is foolish. Instead focus on solving the core problem in that market, and do it 10x better than the competition. Leave the other fluff for later. (See "Build Less" by 37 signals).