How to make DOUBLE the money as a programmer (Real Advice from Senior Dev)

I am a programmer who learned entrepreneurship and let me tell you why this is so important, especially when the job market is down. In this video, I'll teach you exactly how to leverage your skills as a programmer, how to price yourself for these skills, and the ability to confidently communicate to your clients how much time each feature will take. So my name is Phil and I'm a senior developer who started at the age of 30 without a CS degree. If you find this video useful, please share and like, so that others can find this video too. So number one, you got to network, you got to keep up your reputation, you got to make it clean and you got to not be afraid to go up to people and introduce yourself and see if they have any problems or solutions that you find interesting. So one place you can find other people, there's like something like meetup.com. so I'll show you the website here. You just type in like, I'm in Seoul, Korea, I've typed in coding in the search bar and like there's all these like AI, you know, infrastructure camp, all these kind of coding, coding, meet up in Gangnam, cracking the coding interview that people are meeting up and they just want to hang out with programmers and other ones. It's not just programmers that are going to be there, it's going to be people that want to start startups, that want to meet up, that want to meet programmers, and those are the people that you're really looking for that are going to create those opportunities and you're going to be able to spot them very easy. So you can just talk to them and go up, introduce yourself, tell them you're a programmer, that you can do this, this and this and listen to their problems and see if you can find a solution to it. Like that makes sense for them. Introducing yourself and networking is going to create opportunities. And without putting yourself out there, you're not going to be able to put it like create opportunities for yourself. So when you do hear other people's problems or their solutions and then you build on top of their solutions through brainstorming, you gain respect, right? And then you gain this kind of like, oh, this guy knows what he's talking about or he seems really interested or he can think, he can think a little bit different than me. You know, coming up with a solution is not just like a one thing, it's like everybody needs to think of something and then you can come up with the best solution you can. And as a programmer and to a non programmer, one of the best things you can do when you're introducing yourself right is, you know, you gotta be an educator. The best salespeople are good educators. They're going to educate them on like how to build something, what servers to use, there are server costs and how many users are going to have and all that kind of thing. And you can put those factors that they didn't even think about before into their head to start thinking about it. And that's going to create opportunity because they're going to remember you and then they'll call you and be like, hey, are you doing anything? And then from there maybe you get the idea. So from there you need to learn how to like break down the tasks, right? It's the experience you gain when you're working at a company, but it's not really necessary. But you need to take a big problem and atomicize it into smaller problems that are easily solvable. One thing I use for that is like Trello or Jira. But doing this like it does organize your thoughts, but while you're doing it, you need to learn like, okay, I'm doing this to kind of learn about my skills and how long something's going to take. So if you look at an app and you can break it down, for example, okay, your app has chat, okay, I've done that before. Socket I.O. and socket I.O. client. Okay, authentication, okay, I've done that with Firebase or Keycloak. Okay, it needs Maps and then you know how to integrate Google Maps into the app and some profile settings stuff. You know, you've done all those things before so you can kind of tell them chat takes me, however, so many days and, however, so many days. And then you can break those out down into like not just days but hours. And usually you have an eight hour work day or if you do have an eight hour work day and you have to work on top of that, you can still see how much free time you have, right? And then once you can get your down hours about how long something's going to take you, then you can gauge how long implementing the feature will take and then you can put a price on it, right? And that's very important. So you can break down the tasks so you created the opportunity. You can take their problem or their solution or their idea and you can break it down into small digestible pieces and then you can put time and hours into every single task, like data modeling, chat feature, ui, UX research, all these little things, right? And then you can kind of say, okay. And because people, they think building an app is just put your fingers on the keyboard and then it's done. It's really not. It's research, it's design, it's database modeling. It's actually programming the app, the ui, the server, the deployments. And it's just a lot more than people think it is. And that's my reasoning for telling you to be an educator on how much work it is. Once you can kind of do that, you can kind of start making an invoice and you can put an hourly wage on yourself. So that's like how much money you're making at your job. That's what you're cool with. So there are, you know, I'll bring this back to one of my earlier videos, but there are three pillars to price or, I mean software development. There's speed, skill and cost. You can only choose two of them at one time. If you want something fast and well done, it's going to be expensive. If you want it cheap and fast, you're going to sacrifice some of the skill that's needed and so on. And that goes on to many things in life. I feel like mind, body, spirit. You can only like choose exercising and studying and then you'll have no time for friends or friends and studying, but you'll have no time to study and so on. So it's like 66% of life like this kind of thing. But anyways, after you can break down a project and know in which order to do them right? Because with your expertise, with your experiences, you can put a price and prioritize which tasks need to go first. And let me tell you, at first it may just be your hourly wage that you get at your company because you're fine with earning that right? And you can justify, hey, I earned this much as my company, so if I need to work on top of that, you need to pay me this much money, right? As people like you network a little bit more and more and all this kind of stuff, you can charge more, you know, there's opportunity costs. You know, I'm losing my, I'm losing my opportunity to sleep, I'm losing an opportunity on different project, I'm losing an opportunity to rest and all this kind of stuff. And then you can kind of say you're worth more and more and more and you can explain to them you're not just pulling numbers out of your ass or whatever. Like, right, so here's like an example of an invoice. So UI UX research, I would say it's like 50 hours. So this was like $35 an hour for the whole thing. It was for my friends so it wasn't super expensive or anything. But I mean it was expensive because it's a lot of work. My hourly rate is usually more UI ux research and 50 hours, 50 hours times 35 is $1750. It's in Korean one but I'll $dollars instead of one user flow. So UML diagrams or flowchart diagrams, you know the whole app, it's 50 hours 35 and it will. Actually this is just an example. It's not my friends but anyways UI design implementation. So adding the design from the or database modeling. So how many collections or tables you're going to need, what columns you're going to have. And that takes a lot of thought in the beginning, right? So 100 hours UI design implementation. So like whatever comes from the UI UX research and the diagrams you can put into Figma or whatever and the admin panel and then mobile app development. So these are like a bulk, these three things are like the bulk of a company, right? So a designer does the UI designs, the front end developer or whatever, the web developers do the admin panel and then the app developers to mobile app development. And that's how a company would work. So and then this kind of had features so it had like chat development, E signing, so signing through the phone authentication, profile management, global state management, push notification, meetup booking. So that's kind of like meetup.com and then feed posts and then iOS store deployment, play Store app, Android Play Store deployment, server deployment, server development for the like chat development, the E sign development, integration, authentication and all this kind of stuff. So you know you can put hours on all these tasks and then put a price on the task and then multiply it and then there's some algorithms and stuff like a matching system was needed or maybe for example will be needed needed AWS server deployment, Docker, Kubernetes, whatever you need to do. EKS payment gateway integration, API development, API documentation, deployment documentation for whoever's gonna, what is this word? Take over your, you know, after. Because they're always gonna. Every company, you know, you're basically building a business but they're gonna need a developer and then you need to add the taxes and all this kind of stuff and then add in some more, add in some more adjustments, you know, maybe. And then it ends up being quite a bit of money, you know, so and then you tell them like the payment schedule, maybe there's a start date mid check date and the completion date and very professional. And that's how you're gonna make your money. So, yeah, I mean, that's about it. Maybe please share with me some of your stories of your business ventures. I would love to hear about them in the comments. And this is how you can kind of make money. And if you guys have any questions on how to build your invoice or whatever, just let me know. And I did work in sales and you know, in software development and I was a software developer. So one thing I always have to say is when someone asks you to kind of like make something, mainly you're selling your time, you're selling your hours rather than the product. Because product, you know, in the planning stages, it's always changing. And you need to know and justify when there's a little design change, when there's a programming change, like they're gonna have to pay for it, right? Because say you start building this like E sign development integration and then you spent time on building that, right? But then in the end they're like, no, I don't need it, but I still spent my time on building that and I need to get my money for that. I don't care if after I put in my time and then you kind of said you don't want it. Like, that's why, you know, if you're not like a company really has to be ready or someone needs to be ready to kind of take on the development with all the like research that they need to do and really think about what they're going to do. Because in the beginning stages, when it's an app, keeping it lean until deployment is very important. And then you can always add on top later, right? So you are selling your hours. That's the most important thing. Rather than selling a whole web page or a whole app or whatever, it's the time that you're going to sacrifice from yourself. You're going to put on them, right? And, or give to them. And that's pretty important concept to kind of get because you don't want to be stuck like with people being unhappy in the end. And you know, if they want to change something or add something, you can kind of be like, okay, that's going to cost you more. Or actually let's just finish from what you said because I agreed at this point and I'll finish to that point. And then if you want to change from there, let's go from there. So that's one tip I have for you. And you know a programmer who doesn't know these skills, they will get run over and pushed around. But a programmer who knows how to build their reputation through at work, a programmer who knows how to communicate confidently their worth and value, they will excel and be respected by the businessmen or woman and get the money they want and deserve. I had to go through the trenches and this video is for you. The programmers who are integral in almost every business today. Remember, if I can do it, you can do it too. Coding saves lives work. On top of that, you need to pay me this much money, right? As people like you network a little bit more and more and all this kind of stuff, you can charge more, you know, there's opportunity costs. You know, I'm losing my. I'm losing my opportunity to sleep, I'm losing an opportunity on different project, I'm losing an opportunity to rest and all this kind of stuff. And then you can kind of say you're worth more and more and more. And you can explain to them you're not just pulling numbers out of your ass or whatever. Like, right, so here's like an example of an invoice. So UI UX research, I would say it's like 50 hours. So this was like $35 an hour for the whole thing. It was for my friends, so it wasn't super expensive or anything. But I mean, it was expensive because it's a lot of work. My hourly rate is usually more UI UX research and 50 hours. 50 hours times 35 is 1000.