Same. The amount of overhead involved in any side hustle is just too high compared to getting stuff done as an employee. even volunteering as anything but unskilled labor is a hassle.
Replying to remind myself to check back here, because I agree with giaour and I'm curious where the misunderstanding is.
Being an employee is simple - do (good-enough-to-not-get-fired) work, get paid. Entrepreneurship requires you to identify a target market, figure out a product that would work for it, create that product, market it, actually sell it, ship it, do the associated financial admin, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of. The amount of potential gain-per-effort is higher than in employment - but the amount of work you have to go through in order to get to that point is also higher.
Yep! To contract, I have to find clients, solicit project work, write invoices, keep after clients for payment; in general, I have to do all the extroverted business shit I became a software developer to avoid doing.
As an employee, I can work on problems I identify, invest time in mentoring colleagues, spend time building a skill that will be of long term but not immediate benefit to my employer, etc: stuff nobody would pay a contractor to do.
Depends on how much you want to do it. If you wanna do full time consulting, sure that's the case.
But a part-time consulting gig on the side, when you've been working for 10+ years and have a solid network? In that case, you can often find opportunities in your network, if you're looking.
Basically, if anyone you know is taking a C-level position in a funded startup, for example, they might very often need help with all sorts of different things and would be willing to pay.
Similarly, any time someone reaches out on linkedin with a job, tell that you're happily employed on not planning on moving, but that you would be interested in helping them on a part-time consulting basis. Done.
if faamng salary is supposedly that high, that's like a shocker, and probably massive hyperbole, unless something bizarre happened over the last 5 years.
that said, total comp could be pretty high like that quite plausibly.
It's not hyperbole, although prior to 2022, getting $400k total compensation as a senior meant working at a handful of companies, even ones like Google and Microsoft weren't paying out that much unless it was through stock appreciation.