Ask HN: How to make extra income as a Sr. DevOps Engineer

3 points by buildmystartup 8 years ago | 5 comments

I work full time but need extra money to support my family and have many hours open during the nights and weekend to do it. I have 20 years experience as a Systems Engineer/Admin/Devops. How can I make extra money? I tried searching for jobs during 2/3rd shift but they are very hard to find. Any creative ideas? I have experience with DC/OS, Kubernetes, AWS, Jenkins, Chef-Ansible-Puppet-Salt, ELK stack, Python, basically all the tools in the devops toolchain. I have a few domain names and landing pages ready to start freelancing if thats an option, but no experience with marketing myself.

peter_d_sherman 8 years ago |

Hi, I think your post is very interesting, because as an individual programmer attempting to start my own startup, I've found (over and over again!) that the one thing I've needed more than anything else was a DevOps/SRE guy who could make sure the Website/Server/Database was up and running and healthy, 24/7. Now, I'm not in startup mode anymore -- I'm on hiatus. And, when I was in startup mode, I had very little $$$, so I wouldn't have been able to pay you that well. But, here's the thing. If you can tough it out without too much money, you might be able to find say 20 startups who are willing to trade some percentages of stock for your services, and in a year or so, if one of them does really well, you might be able to cash out. Now what's neat is that when you're not asking for $$$, your bargaining position is increased hugely. So you could offer a service where say every 8 hours you check a site and you don't spend more than 5 minutes servicing it (if even that). You just basically check, reboot services if they're not healthy (maybe send an email too), and you're on your way to the next customer. If any startup starts to do well, you're then in a prime negotiating position to get X hours at $Y dollars, and whatever kind of schedule you like...

buildmystartup 8 years ago | |

Awesome idea!!! Thank you

peter_d_sherman 8 years ago | | |

The rabbit hole goes a little bit deeper than this though; see, your real goal shouldn't be to get X hours at $Y dollars, your real goal should be to create and scale as much value for as many people as possible (then money will basically find you, rather than you having to find it, it's that old "build a better mousetrap" expression). To understand this, think about walking someone else's dog. That has value. But it only scales a little bit, the most someone can walk other people's dogs is maybe like 8 dogs at a time? So whatever you're doing, you have to figure out how to scale it. Next is perception of value. Different people value things differently. A guy might be in love with some kind of car and be willing to pay $$$$$ for one, but that car to someone else might not be valued more than one which gets from point A to point B. Next is ability to pay. Bill Gates can give you $million$ if you create a value for him; A homeless person would find it difficult to part with a single dollar. Next, customers. Some will give you huge amount of money for simple things and will never waste a minute of your time, others will pay very small amounts of money and expect to be waited on hand and foot from the time you get up to the time you go to sleep. You have to be able to see when customers are taking advantage of you and to make an executive decision to politely but firmly cut them off. Otherwise your life will be hell and you'll be someone else's slave. Next marketing. Why not offer your services for free, but limit the time spent on any one customer per day to 5 minutes? They want more time they pay for it. Use Craigslist and put some ads there. Free sells, but you have to start charging more and more, and cutting off customers as you get better ones. Just remember at the end of the day all of it is business, nothing of it is personal in any way. You are doing what you need to do to support yourself and your family.

peter_d_sherman 8 years ago | | |

Btw, if you want to have an email conversation, my email address is peter.d.sherman@gmail.com. Maybe I can give you some additional ideas...

buildmystartup 8 years ago |

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460430