I made a few courses on Udemy and wrote a book, over a few years net about 20k, super cool! Relative to how much time went into it I probably didn’t actually make that much money but I had a great time and it feels fantastic to make some money on my own initiative

It was 2017.

I responded to their Craigslist ad via email detailing which parts of their stack I did and did not have experience with. For some parts of their stack I said I have never used this but I have used this similar thing.

Their first email response back to me was an offer which I accepted.

To be fair, sometimes it's not all about money. Better work life balance after making bigger money can be a nice transition as one gets older or starts a family. But yeah, those lower paying jobs have to play some kind of angle other than money. Some are garbage, but some might have perks.

The ones that come to mind:

* If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. If you're only interviewing for a couple positions—people you will work with every single day—take the time to do it yourself.

* If they are a startup that says they are looking for people who are interested in solving exciting problems. For some people, this is going to be an enticement, but based on my experience, what I hear is "we're going to work you like a dog and pay you in equity, and at the end neither your work nor your equity will matter because we're definitely going to go out of business". I recognize this is a bias, but it's happened to me a couple times, and I'm in my 40s now and just not having it anymore. Plus, the problems are never that exciting, they're usually "how to sell a SaaS product that is basically a CRUD app, in a crowded marketplace with lots of competitors".

* If the interview is composed of like 10 rounds of 30 minute interviews, each with different groups in the company, that to me is an indicator that Conway's Law is at the helm of that organization: lots of groups that want input into everything, nobody empowered to make a decision on their own. Plus, it's just not a very good format. Give me a smaller number of hour long sessions where we can actually get into it, rather than racing through pro forma questions.

Making fun of my side project.

An interviewer looked at me with this vicious, incredulous look when I described my side project in ~2019, which was a weather network built on the sensors inside phones. Guy said, “a weather app, really?! You think that’s a good use of your time in 2019? What makes you think a weather app is useful to make today?”

MFer, it was a good idea in 2011 and it’s a good idea today and it’ll be a good idea in 10 years.

And it wasn’t just a weather app omg! But he didn’t care, just kept pressing me for like 5 mins why I would ever think making a weather network service was useful. No amount of explaining the complexity or novel recently-developed techniques that made it possible would convince him I wasn’t wasting my time.