Two days ago, a reader asked me such a question: “Elder brother Zhang, I am a programmer who has been working for about two years, but I want to earn more money, so I think of outsourcing. I wonder if it is feasible?

I personally think it’s great to want to make more money, and I’m all for it. In most cases, making money will help you advance. But is private work a better way to make money? Let me break it down for you.

We work, essentially selling our time for income. The difference is that some people sell their time at a high price, while some sell at a low price. However, everyone has 24 hours a day. If you only want to rely on this way, you can work hard and live a comfortable life, but it is difficult to get rich by this way.

But some people said, I don’t want to get rich, I just want to work for more money, improve their quality of life. If you’re in this mindset, that’s fine, and you want to make more money by selling your time, there are only two ways to do it:

1. Increase your price per hour. It is easy to understand that the salary of senior engineers is higher than that of junior engineers, which is essentially because the unit price of senior engineers is higher than that of junior engineers. Therefore, by improving your ability in the professional field and accumulating experience, you can achieve the purpose of increasing the unit time price no matter you are promoted, raise salary or change jobs.

2. Increase your sellable time. What does that mean? The same unit price, others work 8 hours, spare time 3 hours, you also work 8 hours, spare time 2 hours to continue to work, then the total income will be higher than others, this kind of pile time, rely on piecing to increase income.

There is no doubt that private work falls into the second category of “increasing the time available for sale”. So, it is perfectly ok for programmers to work on private work, but there is a problem of cost performance.

If the current unit time price is not high, there is a great potential for improvement, then it is the optimal strategy to use the time of private work to improve their ability, so as to improve their unit time price. And if you take private unit time price is also ok, then you can consider, and I also suggest that the unit price of private work must be higher than the unit price of your work, which is more cost-effective from the point of view of economics.

But private work is not after-sleep income, so what is? As the name suggests, you can get paid to sleep. Needless to say, this is not the case. You have to do one job after another in order to keep earning the hard money. So what qualifies as after-sleep income?

Programmers can accept things like writing a book or recording a course, which is “after-sleep” income. You spend a certain amount of time writing a book or recording a paid course, and then rely on channels to help you promote it. As long as people keep paying for it, you can always sleep and make money. Of course, this is just an example, writing a book or recording a course is not that easy to make money from, whether your writing is good enough, whether you have influence, whether you have channel resources to promote you, etc., all determine whether you can make a lot of money while sleeping, but they are a form of “after-sleep” income.

And early years mobile Internet just started a few years, traffic dividend period, a lot of smart programmers did some App, integrated some ads, and then lay to make money, early, and also can earn a lot of money, before a few years of websites, blogs, etc., and stresses the point aggregate content, put some ads, are all belong to “sleep” income approach.

After you will find that “sleep” income does not necessarily can make a lot of money, but as long as you write the book on the fire, your App with more people and word of mouth is good of course, you do have channels to help you recommend propaganda, so it’s easy to make money this way, you don’t have to put in much time, almost late really asleep to give money to earn, compared to the selling time to make money, “After bed” income potential is great, and the imagination is much bigger.

In addition to the above, there is a way for everyone “sleep” income, this is what I had been to popularize the finance and investment, finance and investment in plain English, is to help you make money with money, think about it, the rich are getting richer, because they know the money, some investment companies, some play stocks, futures, Someone buy fund, finance, government bonds, etc., may be some people listen to me, a finance and investment, a n experienced person experience tells you that it’s really important in investment and financing, and this is everybody can increase the “sleep” income is the most straightforward way, and said, I this two years of financial management and to be cast surely, would it be possible for me to have a less struggle for two years. However, we ordinary people do not have financial expertise, and I do not recommend you to play some high-risk investment varieties in public occasions. If you are interested, you can learn some knowledge of funds and financial management, which is worth trying.

In short, if you want to earn some extra money, give priority to recommend choosing the way of “sleep” income, and then choosing the way of increasing your price per unit time, and then choose the way to heap of time to make money, although probably not much difference at the beginning, but after a long time, the way you choose will cause gap is differ in thousands ways.

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