A lot of it is during walks and I mostly keep my phone away and almost nothing open on the computer except my programming IDE and a few tabs.

I do noticed that when I need to do other kinds of more shallow work that involves the internet a lot, this becomes quite hard to achieve. The trick is to find a job and be in a situation where the deep-to-shallow work ratio is in favor of you.

I honestly don't know, I think that many of them have just been exposed to a new typed language and this makes it exciting. I've been programming for a very long time, and this seems to go in cycles. There was a time when untyped languages (Visual Basic for example) were flamed for being so crappy, because powerful languages like C/C++ were typed.

Then came PHP and showed us that it's not necessary to have types. Then Python and Ruby came into the picture, people loved them, then eventually typed languages like Go got traction, typescript, rust, etc. Rinse and repeat.

For libraries, typescript is awesome though, it makes it very easy to understand how a library works.

The thing though, is that types (and constants) in compiled languages behave extremely differently on an efficiency and compiler level than in TS (I know this is not as important as it used to be, but still is nevertheless).

Many people have no clue what happening under the hood. Obviously the node (V8) engine is extremely well optimized.

I'd love to have my own income on my own terms. But I'm far from that and have a lot of financial and family responsibilities. Plus my stack is actually really small.

Yeah, I think it is. It seems people who are serious about hiring are always on LI. I'm part of a few freelancing websites (some of them supposed to be only for le cream of the crop) but I haven't had much success there.

Not a fan of their social media part, so I hardly ever check the feed.

that's right. And it's going to become even more accentuated with chatgpt -- which I think it's to the advantage of those willing to do the hard work. It's not even that hard honestly. Hard would be to become a pro in cryptography. Most of us don't even need to get to that level.

I actually kind of have to thank social media / the internet / smartphones for letting me work less time. Since most people are very distracted, just by being a bit more focused you get so ahead of the curve. I still have plenty of distractions (SN mostly) but nothing compared to the average person.

I like that! :D

Cost of living is getting crazy in many countries. I'm doing two jobs not because I want to, but as a hedge to this crazy situation.

If you're already working remotely, I'd recommend trying to find another job in another country (say you are a US citizen, finding one in Europe), which lowers the chances of meetings running over on top of each other, and also choosing jobs where they specifically mention that they don't like meetings helps. Many people have their camera turned off. If I had overlapping meetings, I would simply say that I am at school or need to put my children to bed at that time (both true facts but I use them to my convenience).

If you end up finding a job that pays much less (but has less responsibilities) it's still a win, since from the first job you have to discount all your expenses.

I would recommend against freelancing, in the end you're doing almost the same amount of work as a full-time job but for less money and more micromanaging. Billing by the hour sucks, the book 4000 weeks argues that that's the reason laywers that bill a high ticket on an hourly rate are kind of miserable.

good point, definitely it becomes a commodity when anyone can do that said grunt work. I actually still have money I can earn with my previous employer since they have a feature they want to implement but it requires deep knowledge on everything I built.

For example, I'm one of the only engineers who speaks English and Chinese fluently (both widely used in the company), and as such I'm not very easily replaceable.

спасибо! Но русский язык слишком трудно 😆

We've had a resource that knows everything for years, it's called stackoverflow.com 😃

I find it a very dangerous tool to blindly use because you will end up knowing very little of how to do things if you don't try them yourself. Stackoverflow at least gives you a discussion and multiple answers.

For average or lower quality engineers, I think it might make a big difference. They might be shitting their pants because every single boss now thinks that chatgpt can program everything.

It reminds me of the times when word processors and auto correct became a thing. In Spanish, learning how to use accents is quite tricky. For example:

te compré un té (I bought you some tea)

Many people decided they no longer need to learn how to properly accent words or type correctly and simpli startd tiping like this cuz autocorrect wuld of catched all the errors.

In the end they are missing the point (the point is that if you are afraid of self-driving cars, you need to try to become a Formula 1 driver in the career you pursue, because the rest of the jobs become less engaging, more mundane, and worse paid).

Learning a hard skill (IE: reading programming books) trains your brain to be able to focus in one task. No productivity hack or "app" will teach you this.

I was told many times that making more money won't make me happier and truer words had never been said.

I didn't get more clothes, or start spending more money on the things that I like and told myself I would buy if I had the money, life didn't change much. The stress of having a bit less time is well balanced with the security I get to have two jobs (right now the sentiment in the tech sector in US isn't great with so many layoffs).

I don't think almost any remote job requires people's full attention.

In fact I often see people who do mundane jobs (IE: a young lady sitting in front of a slide in a children's play center) just going through social media on their phones for hours, when they could be reading a book or learning something interesting. I'm not in their shoes, but we as a population are just chasing the wrong things.

I read many programming books on the small screen of my phone when I had to walk and rock my children to sleep for hours every day.

For a second when I saw this comment and glanced through the user name I thought it was DarthCoin 😅

yeah, it definitely does

this is the way!

Unpopular opinion... don't try to find that income in the BTC space.

It's an echo chamber and a very small community. Bitcoin adoption is very small and we're just fishing on a small pond. Unfortunately, it's much easier to get a crypto/shitcoin-related job in the next bull run.

On the past bull run I was offered plenty of very well-paying crypto jobs especially because I understood the fundamentals of bitcoin (Programming Bitcoin is a hard but excellent book). I almost accepted a job at Binance. Had cold feet on the very last minute and the lady from HR called me to my personal phone many times. I'd say if you get the chance do it, turn their dirty fiat into bitcoin, what could be better than that?

Don't get me wrong, I tried very hard to change the world and applied to literally every single bitcoin-only job for a few months. I got a few interviews and most places didn't even reply. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Y combinator jobs is a good place to see what kind of technologies are popular on startups.

If I may suggest, Javascript/React jobs are very well paid (contrary to popular belief, both JS and React are very hard to do well). I read javascript.info and the official react docs and that was enough to be better than 90% of all the other devs.

I couldn't remember the name, thanks Darth. Now I understand the use of bookmarks on SN ;)

I have your repo cloned and running locally, so I was suspecting you're not a fan of TS either :)

I like bootstrap but I'm not a big fan of their predefined classes, though I see you're also using CSS modules, which is awesome.

Keep telling myself I'm gonna send you some PR one day! I know sh*t about graphql though.

Twitter (I'm being serious).

I can't say for sure, but I think all the offers on bitcoiner jobs receive too many applications. I hardly got reply from many of them and I'm the kind of guy that can easily get weekly phone calls if I apply to jobs on LinkedIn.

Best way to go would be to build up a good Twitter profile (or nostr, whatever, I use neither of them) and if you see someone needing a freelancer, shoot them up. Warm intros are the best, and if they know them at least as an acquaintance that's good enough.

As I mentioned somewhere else, bitcoin gigs are tough (your competition is people willing to earn very little), so the best thing you could do is open an LLC in US or use payoneer, etc. and simply find high-paying freelancing work there. I think there's a place that @DarthCoin recommended that helps you accept your dirty fiat and turn it into magic internet money. I might try it if I get a third job (when my daughter grows a bit I might).

Nah, the trick is to find job offers that do not require typescript ;)

If I may give you advice, skip the jobs page or any bitcoin-related job.

I applied for a lot of them and even got reasonably close to being Engineering Manager for one of them. But most of the places didn't even reply. There's just too little supply and too much demand for these jobs. I mean I'd love to work with k00b on SN but this would possibly be a very demanding job.

Choose a job that matches what you know; I don't know graphQL too well but I know MySQL, so I stick with that. And then try to do the hard work that no one wants to do, so that you don't need to do shallow work.

For example, we live with our inlaws, and I don't like hate to clean the floor (it gets very nasty very fast -- toddlers man), so I often instead cook difficult dishes (ie: korean bibimbap) and skip on the tasks I don't like.

Same with programming, I spend the time to read a lot of best-practices and write the documentation for it on our company. I refactor code often which helps everyone work more efficiently. I've implemented localization already three times for different companies because it's hard to do properly (arabic is RTL for example). In exchange, I don't spend time on shitty support tickets such as "ui looks ugly on chrome 78" (FYI, chrome 78 was released four years ago). This is a real ticket I was tagged in btw.

I thought that the best way for me to change the world would be to get a BTC job, but I figured the best way would be to stack a lot of BTC and then at some point use this BTC to invest it on cool ideas. I know a lot of good people willing to work on bitcoin/LN projects, I just need the money to be able to pay them.

When it was just one job, I worked 3 or 4 days a week. Now I work 6 or 7 days a week (we have an MVP release soon). Both jobs are remote.

I sometimes even do extra freelancing provided it's related to bitcoin, but having small children at home makes it extra challenging.

One of the jobs I strictly asked for no meetings (everything async. They've tried to set meetings up, but my friend, who is the director, benefits from me doing the hard work so he covers for me). We're a team of about 8 devs and 8 rent seekers with about $20 million in funding. I'm the best developer in their team, so they kind of let me work on my terms.

The other job I only have two meetings (2x30 minutes per week) for sync ups. I use the excuse (which is kind of true) that I have to put my kids to bed, but since the beginning I told them this is as much as I can commit. Our founder has $100 million in cash from selling his previous bootstrapped business and we're only two programmers. They are in absolute awe that I came up with the MVP a few weeks in advance.

For both jobs, I'm actually praised very often for delivering so well. Almost no bug reports on both ends.

Once I was promoted to engineering manager, but I hated having so many meetings and not doing any deep work.

I do go for very long walks (I walked 20km today) while my children nap or play, where I figure out how I'm going to do difficult work. Cal Newport coined this "walking meditation" (I don't think meditation is the right term).

Basically can train yourself to do hard stuff (for example, try to do difficult math or CS / coding challenges) only using your brain, then try to go home and see if your solution works. It took some time to train, but I can hold and design somewhat complex data structures or database designs on my brain like this.

Not trying to brag, as actually I am not that smart compared to my peers (I flunked calculus and algebra in college). I've simply put the effort and now I see those who were smarter/better than me thinking so slowly that it pains me work with them. They're also highly distracted, which believe it or not takes a huge toll on your productivity.

Cal Newport -- Deep Work changed my life.

I think some jobs simply have less workload, the hard part is to get in and find them. For example, getting into the top Japanese universities (Tokyo Uni, Waseda) is extremely hard, but once you're inside it's extremely easy. Same happens with other Asian countries. I did once work for a guy who was self-funding a Bitcoin-related project and it was very hard work. I worked my @ss off for two months to release an MVP and ended up making only a few thousand bucks (non-KYC sats though ;) )

But I would say most jobs allow this provided you can skip the shallow work. I have friends working for MS, Meta, Google, Youtube, small startups, everywhere. They don't follow the 80/20 rule, they still waste a lot of time in useless tasks. When I get tagged on a bug that doesn't move the needle, I leave it for later™️.