[carapace]

Years ago, there was a man who would stand on Market St. wearing a suit and just kind of dance back and forth singing "Gotta keep smiling". It wasn't a song as such, just a refrain that he would roll around over and over, and he would shuffle and sing and point at passersby and smile, encouraging them to smile.

One day my dad stopped and asked him, "You seem sane and well-educated, why do you do this?" (I'm paraphrasing here.) The man told him, "Sir, I make a hundred dollars a day, tax-free."

(My dad saluted him and walked on.)

[coldtea]

Plus it beats working your ass off in most professions...

[therein]

Especially given that post-tax you would be making only a little bit more as an entry level software engineer.

[aioprisan]

I doubt that very much. $100/day post-tax = $36500, pre-tax is't about $42000. If you're making anywhere close to $42000/year as an entry level software engineer in SF, you're doing it wrong. Even entry level folks should be able to start at double that.

[azernik]

And that's with no vacations and no slow days.

[bcook]

Commenter therein did not specify the locale of the entry-level software engineer. Busking is much, much more reliant on locale than programming.

[aioprisan]

I was keeping it in the same context. The buskin therein was in SF, so I made a comparison with a software engineer salary in SF. If the busking was in Alabama, I'd expect the busking revenue to be quite different, and so would a comparable engineer's salary in that locale.