Ask HN: How to make money as a CS student?

[aaronwalker]

I'm looking to make money to support myself during the school year while putting my dev skills to use.

I'm doing a SWE internship this summer, which is a great experience as I'm learning a lot about RESTful APIs and AWS. Unfortunately its unpaid though, which has made me realize how valuable it is to me to have a source of income.

Not sure how difficult it is to get a part-time paid internship during the school year but that's something I'm looking into. I'm also curious about smart contract development because firstly I think it's cool but I also hear that there's money to be made there. Advice?

[ev1]

How did you end up in an unpaid internship? I don't know a single person that didn't have a near 15k-20k/m-equivalent stipend tier internship for SWE/SDE. I'm genuinely concerned because I don't think I have ever heard of unpaid software internships outside of f.e., office wordpress-type labour scams or similar.

[aaronwalker]

I found the listing on angel.co, a website for finding jobs at startups. I applied to many paid positions, but for the vast majority of them I never heard back, and I was becoming drained from the internship search. I figured that with unpaid positions there'd be a higher success rate and I'd still be getting good experience (although I'm kind of regretting that now).

The startup that I'm working for is pre-funding so they don't have any money to pay to anyone.

[pacarvalho]

Are you getting equity from them?

[aaronwalker]

The role description said that there'd be a small amount of equity included but so far we haven't discussed it. Should I bring this up with the founders?

[pacarvalho]

I would recommend discussing anything related to compensation before starting at a company (definitely before signing contracts). So would recommend sooner rather than later.

[coletonodonnell]

After internship searching for a while, there are quite a few internships that are "volunteer work," most are upfront about this, but others don't make it so clear. It is a little annoying to say the least.

[ev1]

Interesting. I almost never find any (for actual software roles), just checked Indeed again and still don't see any for here (SF). If I remove the word software they start appearing and are typically for nonprofits, arts, advocacy groups, etc and the maximum extent of tech is writing a blog article or sending emails.

[coletonodonnell]

Yeah, to be fair I never got the full scale of the tasks as if they ever disclosed they were unpaid, I didn't apply.

[bjourne]

I suggest tutoring. Teaching CS to kids, non-CS students or other interested people. Lots of people pay good money for programming tutors and the experience will be very valuable.

[aaronwalker]

Thanks for the advice, I will look further into this--I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities for tutoring online or through craigslist/nextdoor.

[psyklic]

I would contact some professors and see if you could be an undergrad TA or research assistant!

[aaronwalker]

Also a good experience that would strengthen my CS knowledge and pays some. Thanks for the suggestion!