Hi guys, I am Ivan, the creator of Photopea :)

I made almost $1 million in the last 12 months, 90% from ads. The rest is from Premium (users paying to hide ads) and licensing a self-hosted version of Photopea.

When you start your own project, you never know, if it will ever make $250k a year. But if you get hired, you can be quite sure, that you will never make more than $250k a year.

Follow Photopea to see my progress :) http://facebook.com/photopea , http://twitter.com/photopeacom

I mean even in germany it's not easy. The average salary of a SE here is about 65k before taxes. Most senior engineers I met make about 80-85k before taxes (~50k after taxes) (I am located in hamburg). Even for well booked freelancers about 1 in 10 people make more than 200k a year (140k being the average which results in about 72k profit after taxes).

I just had a quick look at google, netflix, twitter and facebook and they don't even offer any SE positions here. Amazon has some in Berlin but they pay around the same salary as stated above.

Eh I used to want to work for Google, but now I see it about as sexy as working for AT&T. Doing something like this gives you respect and freedom instead.

Not even underdeveloped countries, I live in a G8 country and there is hardly any significant FAANG shop here.

For example if you want to work for Google in Europe it's either UK or Switzerland, which are interestingly the two developed european countries outside of the EU :)

Also, for many people, making $100k as an indie is infinitely more satisfying than making the same cash working for a FAANG.

Another point is that he is now free to go out and get another job if he wants to, while still getting the ad money from Photopea every year. That's the whole point of building up a passive income stream - once you uncouple the income from actually working, you are then free to do whatever you want with your time - including selling it for a salary like most people so.

Yep, I also have the impression you need a lot more to land a job at a FAANG than to simply be an excellent programmer. The interview process at companies like Google can be pretty byzantine and hard to master without an internal "champion" I heard.

Indeed, it sort of assumes that working at FAANG with a pension plan and 200k+ is what the author should be striving for (the objectively better option), and I’m not sure if that’s accurate.

While there are obvious benefits to FAANGing, there’s also a lot to be said for working for a smaller team, or even yourself. Money isn’t the soul (or even main) motivator for a lot of people.

And some people, even if they have the chance to move to the US or some rich city where FAANG has engineering offices, would rather stay with their friends and family at the city they were born and make a lot less.

I'm not sure it would even make much sense for them to work at a FAANG. Running a small entrepreneurial business is so different from succeeding in a large corporation. In one you need to be a master of everything from marketing through to development, in the other you are going to need to be highly specialised to merit a large income.

My guess is he wouldn't want to work in a FAANG and they wouldn't want to hire him.

I don't know what it's like in other countries, but here in Belgium, if you want compensation that is anywhere near FAANG levels, you have to go the freelance route and charge high day rates. Then we'd have to be talking rates of 1000eur/day or more, which is extremely rare. And if you didn't incorporate, you'll be taking home less than 500eur/day. Which is still three times more than what the average SE employee gets to take home. But it's a far cry from US FAANG levels.

Does FAANG let you delegate your time to other people. E.g. if I don’t feel like coding today I can just hire someone to do it for me and collect my FAANG salary? Can I sell my job for a million when I’m fed up of it? No?

Ok then running photopea is not comparable to a FAANG 9-5

Besides the fact that he might not want to, I suspect many FAANG companies aren't optimized for hiring developers capable of making something like Photopea. Very little about the hiring process at somewhere like Google or Facebook is about what you can make on your own.

FAANGs hire for people who can make a small part of a larger whole incredibly well. That's mostly good for what they do, which often requires deep knowledge of specialist algorithms, but they miss out on hiring generalists who aren't necessarily good at the deep stuff but who can make lots of simple processes work well together. Which,in my opinion, is what you need to be a good front end developer.

> Some people simply live in underdeveloped countries where their talents can't shine and they have no way to get an interview at FAANG

And there's a high chance they would be rejected for lack of culture fit anyway. Or fail one of the quirky whiteboard tests.

Kind of goes without saying also that 250k is going to go a lot further in the Czech Republic than it is in SF. 3000 EUR / month in Prague is going to get you a top end 2/3 bed apartment.

> I'd bet there are hundreds or thousands of genius programmers living in Russia, Brazil, the Balkans, Guatemala and many other countries that simply couldn't land a job at FAANG even if they wanted to.

Maybe they know they are just too clever for FAANG companies and can do even better for themselves by starting their own businesses?

We have to stop this constant submission to FAANG companies as 'the dream job' when in fact there are smaller companies out there that are just as good as they are and are also extremely profitable.

I don't they are interested in the glory days of the 2010s which the FAANG companies were the talk of the town. Fast-forward 10 years, they are now under scrutiny by everyone and it's not looking good for them. It's time to find new and emerging companies that will define the 2020s or 2030s.

> Some people simply live in underdeveloped countries where their talents can't shine and they have no way to get an interview at FAANG

Some other people would consider morally reprehensible to be accomplices of FAANG. I wouldn't work for them even if I could. It would be like working for Fox News.

I don’t intend to jump through all the hoops FAANG makes you. Some candidates spend more than one year to get ready for the whiteboard interview.

Regarding not being able to work at a faang: Don’t forget social anxiety where your mind blanks when they put you in front of a white board.

Or also simply not being a cultural fit. What if you’re a republican?

He is also building an asset which he can sell.

Also there are plenty of excellent programmers that could, but choose not to work in a FAANG for a number of reasons.

In Ivan’s case he has clearly achieved success and financial freedom on his own terms, so kudos to him.

Many of us would love to be able to do that, even if it meant taking a pay cut.

Not sure what it's like these days but back when I starting university Google had just acquired a local company and setup their first Latin America office in my hometown(Belo Horizonte), salaries were probably a fraction of its SV counterpart but they were still 5-10x higher than just about any other company in the region. It was notoriously difficult to get in, only way to get an interview was to either have a phd or a masters with an impressive resume, even then you probably needed some connection to refer you.

Honestly I hoped their presence would help push local companies to up their game and drive salaries up for developers in a low wage market, unfortunately that is yet to happen 15 years later.

Couple pointers.

1. I have worked for FAANG adjacent companies(similar market cap) in the silicon valley. It is not exactly a badge of honor, sure - if other people want to honor you and you want to ride it why not. But it is not a badge of honor IMO. Horror? Sure.

2. People talk about 200+ guaranteed for a long time now. I think no one has caught on to it yet. Programmers of this caliber can and do pull ~600K regularly in FAANG and FAANG adjacent. If they are capable of people management at the same time (very few at this programming caliber are), then they will be pushed into the executive situation with millions in stock.

> it irks me when people say stuff this assuming that an excellent programmer always has easy access to a FAANG

...or assuming that an excellent programmer (or, in fact, just a programmer) wants to deal with FAANG in the first place.

At FAANG he'd be living in a place where 200+ is worth way less.

> I'd bet there are hundreds or thousands of genius programmers living in Russia, Brazil, the Balkans, Guatemala and many other countries that simply couldn't land a job at FAANG even if they wanted to.

I could make more money as a waiter in Germany or Austria than in my devops job in the Balkans, but a) money isn't always the main motivation, especially in Europe and b) the same amount of money goes a lot further than in Silicon Valley.

It's not that comparable.

That, plus the fact that building your own shit, being your own boss, and making your own mark on the world is probably a lot cooler and more satisfying to most of us here than helping sell more ads or get people to watch even more TV.

Or simply photopea could have just never been found and became yet another thing to add to a GitHub resume that some hiring manager looks at and says "what's your work experience?"

my issue is with that comment assuming Photopea is full-time job. maybe it is idk, but maybe it isn't and he can still work a day job and this is a side business. regardless of FAANG ofc.

He reminds me of the oldie irfanview.com from the 90s.

Also why would a talented programmer or a true hacker want to work for FAANG. The pirate mentality of not working for a big box corpo seems to have faded.

Its just shocking to think that wasting your talent into making people click more ads for some faceless corp can even be compared to creating something great like Photopea.

It's the "plus the right skills" part that makes it not actually an equalizer. No one is born with the skills to write amazing software. It takes a lot of hard work to learn those skills, and in order to do that hard work you need to have the available time and resources both to study/practice and to meet your material needs (and the material needs of anyone who depends on you) in the meantime. Not to mention that it's not just the skill of programming, there are a hundred other prerequisite skills that can't be taken for granted either, a big one of which is language skills. If English isn't your first language, you're starting way behind.

GIMP is OSS and doesn't pay the bills. I'm sure much more man-hours went into Photopea (even with a single contributor) than in GIMP and the [ad revenue / promise of passive income] is what allowed that.

My guess is that if you have enough traffic, they will probably bend the requirements.

Thanks a lot! Photopea can do many things other editors can not do, e.g. opening a PDF in a PSD way (with editable text layers, vector shapes, clipping masks, bitmaps as smart objects etc.).

You can also use it to convert Gimp, Sketch, Figma, SVG and other formats to layered PSDs.

Stylebot [or similar]:

  .app > div:first-child {
    min-width: 99vw;
  }

  .panelblock.mainblock {   
    flex: 1;
  }

I saw lots ads from Adobe pop up. Can anyone help me understand why Adobe is funding a guy in the Czech Republic to give away for free a pixel perfect closed source clone of their flagship product? I also can't find the privacy policy.

I wonder why there's no way to pay to hide those ads.