[2016/08/06 updated]

While few programmers have girlfriends, they often cost a fortune. VPS, domain names, a bunch of fee-paying apps on the Mac, and all those devices Apple updates every year, are often the rhythm of a kidney shortage.

Fortunately, as programmers, we have more ways to make money.

Some classmates should shout: not be to do private sheet. Yes, but not quite. It is indeed a simple and direct way to do private orders, but in my opinion, the input-output ratio of private orders is poor and not optimal. But now that I mention it, let me start.

Private single

The ideal list is to work directly overseas, such as Freelance.com. On the one hand, it is cheaper to earn $us. Before, I saw a project like writing payment for WordPress + sending registration code, which can be done in a weekend, can also cost $200~ $300. On the other hand, the list is more hidden in foreign countries.

Prices on Shixian.com in China are also very good, but I strongly recommend that you do not disclose your real name and company department information in your introduction, because it is too high profile. Some students said, this is my weekend time, I love how to use how to use, the company can accuse me how? Although part-time work is not prohibited by many companies’ employment contracts, such a high profile private job online is a provocation to HR: “I’m not working enough”, “the company is not working enough overtime”… Now imagine telling your product manager that you can’t do it all, but you have time to do it yourself. You wouldn’t promote someone like that if you were your own boss.

(I checked again these days, the talent page no longer shows the name, only uses the avatar. This can be avoided if you include a little attention in your work history.)

This segment was contributed by TVvocold. There is also a software crowdsourcing platform called CODING Code Market in China. As a communication and supervision tool, Coding.net, a cloud software development platform based on cloud computing technology, connects developers and demanders quickly, aiming to improve the efficiency of software delivery through cloud crowd-sourcing. As a third-party monitoring platform, the market will review all projects to ensure the clarity of project requirements and provide payment guarantees so that developers can be paid for completing projects on time. You can see developer reviews of the code market here.

Of course, pig eight quit this station I don’t say much, not quite suitable for professional programmers to depreciate.

Side Project

It is more cost-effective to do a Side Project than a private one.

The great thing about Side projects is that you can generate revenue over a long period of time with only a sustained investment in a specific area. This allows your knowledge to branch and grow on a tree, forming a good knowledge structure rather than becoming a bottle of outsourced snake oil.

There are two ideas:

One is to be small and beautiful, develop a functional application for a niche and sell it in the market.

The other is to make big, basic apps (think WordPress) that others can just add code to and customize.

The former is faster to do, but you need to do some sales work yourself; The latter is usually open source/free + premium and is easier to promote.

Some students will say that my Side Project just didn’t sell. The selection of project direction is indeed quite skillful, but the simple and crude solution is to find a project that sells very well now, but the product and technology are not so good, and make a rival product at half the price.

For example, there is a very famous writing software called Ulysses on the Mac. I tried it and it was pretty good, but it was expensive, 283RMB. Later, WHEN I saw Mweb, the free Lite version covered the main functions of Ulysses, and the full version was only 98RMB, so I bought it without thinking.

Do consulting

Consulting is an easier way to make money if you have a reputation in the tech world, or if you have expertise in a particular business. A couple of hours in a coffee shop, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Domestic products in this respect, I know the following several:

  • Be good at: this is the fruit shell subordinate, do relatively early, the content is the whole industry, so the above technology is not much.
  • Yuanchuangpai: Yuanchuangpai’s light partnership column is mainly for entrepreneurs, suitable for technical experts who like to feel the entrepreneurial atmosphere.
  • Extremely cow: you can think this is a programmer version of “line”, I browsed. although the number of times is lower than the line, but the professional is stronger, expect them to be promoted as soon as possible.
  • Zhijia: This is a project I participated in. It’s a paid voice q&A for programmers. It just started private beta, with some students from Silicon Valley tech companies. If you’re interested, check it out.

Consulting is a real job, but it is completely different from private work. Consultation time is short, will not affect the normal rest, but will not affect work; And most companies encourage technical exchange, so everyone’s acceptance is very high.

In addition to APP, I think charging groups can also be done. For example, we can set up a technology entrepreneurship group, which is open to those who want to start their own businesses, such as those who have succeeded in starting their own businesses, those who have invested in them, and those who have done legal affairs. Each student will receive an annual fee of several hundred yuan. Then you’ll have someone to answer all the questions you have as you go along, and you won’t feel like you’re alone. If there is a problem, the people in the group can solve it; Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t run into problems? Kind of like selling insurance, hahaha.

Write an article

Many students like to write technical blogs, but you can actually get paid to submit your articles to some websites. InfoQ, for example, likes to receive in-depth technical articles of 3,000 to 4,000 words. The fee is 150 per thousand words. It’s not much, but it’s enough to buy an entry-level Cherry keyboard for a long article. What I like about InfoQ is that they are very relaxed about copyright requirements. You can post to your own blog after Posting to their website; And articles can be published as long as they are originally from InfoQ.

For more details, see here: www.infoq.com/cn/article-…

By the way, there’s actually less money to be made from publishing a book through a traditional distribution channel than writing an article. I used to get 8% in royalties, and the figure would be lower if I sold it online or elsewhere. I’ve written an article on how to Publish a Small Book through the Internet.

I’ve always written graphic books, so Markdown is a great way to use it; However, recently I started to write a technical tutorial book, and FOUND that Markdown is not enough. The main problems are ① it does not support video tags, especially local video solutions, ② it is very difficult to highlight the code, and ③ there is no preset footer note, text description area.

Asciidoc is highly recommended. You can think of it as an enhanced Version of Markdown, preloaded with a lot of common formats that GitBook supports directly (just change.md to.adoc), and Atom has a live preview plugin. I used it for a while and liked it very much.

I will update my experience using Asciidoc to “How to Publish a Small Book via the Internet” later. Please follow my wechat official account.

Rambone added that the article can also be posted on Weibo, wechat, Jianshu and other platforms that support tipping.

The teaching video

Weibo @ guagua shot classmate gave his experience: applying for the position of lecturer program web site for program lecturer teaching website, a video + tutorial, the platform to pay by the hour, this don’t know calculating do not calculate to earn pocket money, I calculated last year, a year about 20 hours of video, reach is the appearance of less than 60000, is take the time to get over the weekend at ordinary times.

With the advent of online education, it is possible to make money by recording educational videos. The benefits of recording online courses have not been widely known to programmers. However, after chatting with students of 51CTO College and netease Cloud Class recently, I found that the annual income of an excellent micro professional course of 40 to 60 lessons is comparable to the income of senior directors in first-tier cities. No wonder there are so many people doing training recently 😂

Personally, I prefer designCode. IO with text and video. On the one hand, learners can quickly skim over what they have already learned. On the other hand, there will be more microblog headlines, wechat public accounts, Zhihu and Jianshu columns, such as long promotion channels.

Of course, the content itself is the core. With all the free videos out there, why buy your paid version?

In fact, most of these videos are really just teaching, which is very different from the problems that we encounter in the real world. It’s a bunch of dumbed down fake projects, designed to teach.

Here’s an idea I wanted to do.

After I decided to start an open source project, I used video software to record the entire process. Open source screen recording tool OBS, 1920*1080 screen recording in FLV format, one hour only requires 1G, a terabyte removable hard disk can record thousands of hours, is enough for a medium-sized project.

When the project is finished, open source on GitHub for everyone to use first. After the iteration is stable, a series of tutorials and articles will be edited from the recorded videos and put on the website for charging courses.

This has several benefits:

  • Ensure that all problems encountered are real, not imaginary, and those who have learned this course can independently complete the whole project.
  • There is no deliberate recording process, so tutorials are a by-product of software development, with a higher input/output ratio.
  • If your software is really well written, people who have used your software can become your customers or referrers.

Internal and headhunter referrals

If you work for a top-tier Internet company like BAT, and if you have a group of like-minded programmer friends, you will probably run into colleagues and friends who want to change jobs every few months, so don’t miss the opportunity to earn referral fees.

Generally speaking, the company’s internal recommendation of the money will be less, I have seen the majority of 3000~6000. But because it is their own company, will be more reliable, so the risk is smaller. Regularly recommending talent to the company will also increase your favorability, so make it a priority.

Headhunters can charge much more for referrals than internal ones. A programmer with an annual salary of 300,000 RMB can get a recommendation fee of about 10,000 RMB after successfully joining the company. However, the problem of the headhunting channel is that the quality of the resume is very high, with a well-known company background is easy to order; Collection cycle is particularly long, generally after entering the probation period to get all the recommendation fees, less than half a year.

If you don’t have a good recommendation channel, here is a recommendation fee between 5000~4% annual salary channel: JobDeer talent recommendation platform. Different from other recommendation channels, candidates will receive wechat push when their resumes are put online, viewed or invited for an interview. Note: Due to the requirements of clients, JobDeer has much higher requirements for candidates, and the chances of applicants with non-well-known company background are very low. Alas, this label-reading society ┑(￣ ￣ ￣)┍

summary

Learning how to make money is very important. It gives you an understanding of how business works, helps you understand the company’s product logic, and gives you a solid foundation for a possible technology venture.

So I encourage you to earn your pocket money, and try all of them. They’ll be fun. If you have better skills to earn pocket money, you are welcome to send PR to me and I will select good ones to incorporate