[darigo]

I feel this so hard. Whenever I read HN people are like "obviously we SWE's are economic elites who will never struggle financially, unlike everyone else"

Bro I have over ten years of dev experience, dozens of significant bug bounties including well-known projects like Chromium and Github, am a great competitive coder (love leetcode and codewars type challenges), and my brother makes much more money fixing air conditioners than I do as a dev.

Appsec is my specialty but my background is in React frontend (Node and Flask backend).

If it's hard for me, it must be brutal for new grads and people just coming out of bootcamps. I'm lucky that I focused on open source instead of going to college, because when I started looking for work I already had a portfolio and real experience, plus FOSS friends.

If anyone is looking for an appsec person who can find vulnerabilities, report them in a way that clearly explains the issue to other devs, and then write patches, please do reach out. Glad to work for WAY less than $60 an hour lol.

Currently I'm a freelancer, can show projects I've worked on. I don't mind hoops at all, send me a coding challenge or CTF or whatever you want :)

[mixmastamyk]

The job market is not great right now, but sounds like you could have moved up last year.

> Glad to work for WAY less

That might be the issue, that kind of work is worth more.

> instead of going to college

It's fine if you just want to have work. But won't cut it if you'd like a coveted job, as your resume is filed to /dev/null within minutes. Ask me how I know.

[darigo]

>The job market is not great right now, but sounds like you could have moved up last year.

What do you mean by moved up?

I have more work than I can even do - but I may have a different idea of what a coveted job is.

>That might be the issue, that kind of work is worth more.

ikr <3

[mixmastamyk]

Moved up to a higher position/salary/rate.

"More work than I can do" ---> raise your rates; econ 101.

I recommend the patio11 piece about charging more, should be easy to find at the search box at the bottom of the page.

But as mentioned, at times of slowdown expect a lower upside.

[darigo]

Oh yeah, I understand, last year I was indeed making boatloads of money.

Right now I'm focused on something other than making tons of money tbh. There's a job I covet, so I've been just focusing on maxxing relevant skills so I can join this elite club of extremely cool people working on this very cool thing.

But after that I'm gonna go back to money, for sure.

Btw I love your blog. That same essay "How to be a hacker" is the one I consulted as a teenager, which led me to switch from QBASIC (my first lang, on the recommendation of an IRC channel that was probably trolling me) to Python.