/Career-job-opportunities

In 2019 I sold a service to a stranger for the first time, and I felt like a fraud for three weeks. Not because the work was bad. I delivered on time, the client replied with a thumbs-up and a two-word sentence, and he transferred the money without haggling. I felt like a fraud because the amount seemed out of proportion to the effort, and because nobody had told me that this feeling comes free with your first client and takes months to go away. Anyone who says monetizing a skill is a technical problem has never been through this. That's where almost every conversation on the subject goes wrong, right from the start. The thing gets treated as an equation: I have skill X, the market pays Y, so all I need is to connect one end to the other. Except the skill is the easiest part of the equation, and maybe the least important. I know people who write code with an almost irritating cleanness and can't sell a Sunday of work. I also know, and this hurts more to admit, people who write mediocre code and bill more than I do, because they know something it took me years to learn: nobody buys the skill. They buy relief from a problem that is ruining their week. It sounds banal. It isn't, because it forces you to look at what you can do from the outside, with the coldness of someone appraising a used car, and almost nobody manages that with their own work. I didn't, for a long time. I thought my value lay in the elegance of the solution, in how I structured things. The client saw a form that finally sent emails without landing in spam. Two parallel universes looking at the same screen. Let's get to the concrete paths, because that's what people are actually trying to figure out. The most obvious one is selling hours. Freelancing, consulting, what is pompously called "services". It has the enormous advantage of working fast: in two weeks you can have money coming in, and none of the other paths can promise that honestly. And it has a structural disadvantage hiding behind that speed: your income gets a physical ceiling, and the ceiling is the hours in the day minus the ones you spend finding the next client. I did the math once, in a graph-paper notebook because I felt like it, and discovered that of the 41 hours I spent at the computer in a typical week, only 23 were billable. The rest was proposals, emails asking whether the quote had been seen, calls that were "just twenty little minutes" and lasted an hour and ten, and my specialty, rereading ambiguous requirements in search of a certainty that didn't exist. In other words, your advertised hourly rate is a pleasant fiction. The real one, the one that matters, is always about 40% lower. Someone who starts freelancing and sets a price based on their previous salary divided by the hours in a month is miscalculating, and only notices at the end of the second quarter, when the books don't balance and the available explanation is "I'm not working enough". That's not it. The arithmetic was wrong from the beginning. I'd like to say the solution is to charge more, and largely it is. But there's a trap that almost never gets mentioned: raising prices changes the type of client, and the expensive client brings a completely different kind of work. Less code and more conversations. Meetings with people who will never use the product but have opinions about the color of the button. They pay well, they delay payment with equal enthusiasm, and at some point you realize you're selling patience, not technical skill. Some people like that. I learned to tolerate it, which is different. An aside, because I just remembered: at my first job there was a dot-matrix printer in the hallway that only worked if you gave it a sharp knock on the left side, roughly at the height of the paper tray. Everybody knew it, nobody had written it down anywhere, and when the maintenance guy replaced it with a new laser printer, half the office was genuinely a little sad. I don't know why I'm telling this. It stays. Back to the money. The second path, the one that attracts people tired of trading time for money, is the product. A course, a template, a library, a small tool that solves one specific thing. This is where the gurus' pitch reaches its peak of dishonesty, and I have a firm opinion on it: the "passive income" narrative is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a category error. Passive means it requires no work. A digital product requires work before, during and after, only the work is of a different nature, and it's that change of nature that gets sold as the absence of effort. Think about what happens after you launch a template. First, the launch: three weeks of real work, testing, a sales page, copy. Then the silence. A very specific silence, the silence of a page that exists and that nobody visits. This is where the problem nobody tells you about begins, and one I feel firsthand every month with the sites I maintain: the product has no distribution. You have, at best, the 340 people who follow you and who, with luck, will buy one in every twenty. You do the math. It's depressing, and it's the right math. And what follows is interesting, because it reveals the structural truth of the whole skills economy: what you actually sell is access to an audience, and the skill is just the pretext. Someone with an audience can sell anything reasonable. Someone without one sells excellent things to nobody. I've seen a Postgres course better than most of those sold at 200 euros sell to nine people, and I've seen a nineteen-page PDF sell out in two days because the author had a channel with half a million subscribers. Quality counts, but it counts the way a wheel counts on a car: without it you don't move, and on its own it won't take you anywhere. Hence the third path, the one that interests me most and where I made the most mistakes: build the audience first, or at the same time, and leave monetization for later. Content, community, SEO. It's slow. Very slow, with a slowness most people can't stand, and honestly I don't blame them. When you have a new site and Search Console shows you 11 clicks in a week, and 6 of them are you checking whether the page opens, the temptation to quit is almost rational. I've let a project die like that. Not for lack of quality. Out of impatience, plain and shameful. After eight months of regular publishing the organic traffic was ridiculous, I changed direction, and a few months later I discovered, by accident, that the traffic was starting to climb. It climbed discreetly, with that gentle slope you only notice in retrospect. I shut the project down about three months before the curve started making sense. Even today, when I talk about this, I change the subject early. Mind you, and here I contradict myself a little: I don't think patience is always the answer. Some projects go nowhere and persistence is just stubbornness with good marketing. The hard part, and I have no formula, is telling apart the project that's in the valley before the curve from the one in a dead end disguised as a valley. The signs are small. If the people who arrive stay, if they come back, if they write to say the thing was useful to them, even with little traffic, that's a better indicator than any chart. If nobody comes back, the problem was never time. There's a technical mistake I want on record, because it was expensive and because almost everyone who builds for organic traffic ends up making some version of it. During a server migration, I carried a staging robots.txt over to production. One line: Disallow: slash. It stayed there eleven days. Eleven days telling Google, very politely, that I didn't want to be read. Impressions dropped 37% and the recovery took far longer than the lapse that caused it. I now check robots.txt before any deploy, the way you check the stove before leaving the house, and I still forget once in every so many times. But let me return to what matters, the point I think really separates those who manage to monetize from those who keep trying. It isn't talent, or even discipline. It's tolerance for doing things that seem beneath your level. Answering the same support email for the fourteenth time. Writing the description of a product you find obvious. Calling someone to ask why they didn't renew. Technical skill creates the illusion that valuable work is whatever requires intelligence, and therefore everything else is waste. It isn't. The work that pays the bills is often the most boring of all. This leads me to something that bothers me in today's discourse, and I know I'll sound cranky: the obsession with the "personal brand". I understand the logic. In a market where technical skills are getting easier to reproduce, differentiation becomes who you are, so you'd better tell a story. But I've watched this idea degenerate into something grotesque: people spending more time posting about their work than doing it, manufacturing vulnerability in post format, turning every stumble into a life lesson with three paragraphs and an invitation to comment. Some of those people make money, I don't deny it. But they make money from the performance, and performance is a different skill from the one they claimed to be monetizing. They became content creators about a field in which, in many cases, they no longer work. Not all of it is cynicism. Some people manage to mix the two honestly, and the best examples I know share one trait: they still have to solve real problems, for clients or for their own projects, and the content comes from there. They write about what they just learned, not about what they think the audience wants to hear. It's a subtle difference and you can feel it in the reading. When someone writes from a problem they solved on Tuesday, there are details you can't invent: the exact version number that broke everything, the error message with the strange punctuation, the comment on line 212 that said "do not touch" and that, of course, was the thing that got touched. Let's talk about hidden costs, which is where this conversation almost always evaporates. The first is attention. When you monetize a skill, you start thinking about it differently. Before, solving an interesting problem was an end in itself. Afterwards, there's a background voice asking whether it's billable. And that voice, once installed, doesn't leave. I know more people than I'd like who stopped programming for pleasure the day they started programming for money. I felt it myself. I went through a period of about four months in which I didn't open a code editor outside work hours, when before I did it out of compulsion, insomnia, stubbornness over a bug that wasn't even mine anymore. The second cost is shape. Clients mold you. If the market pays more for a certain type of work, you end up doing more of that work, and after two years you've become a specialist in something you never chose, just because it sold. There's a healthy version of this, called specialization. And there's a version that's just drift, and the difference lies in whether you chose or were pushed. The third cost is the most treacherous: instability. Anyone monetizing skills on their own lives on a roller coaster that average numbers disguise. You bill 4,100 one month and 900 the next, and the average of 2,500 is an abstraction that doesn't pay the rent in the bad month. Cash management for the self-employed demands a coldness most technical people haven't trained, and which is learned the hard way, usually in the first month a big client pays six weeks late. I've had a personal rule since then, which I recommend to nobody because it has no scientific basis: never spend money that isn't already in the account, even if it's invoiced. It has saved me about three times. Now, the question people ask with an almost palpable anxiety: what about artificial intelligence? Will it make all this irrelevant? I have a position, and it's unpopular on both sides of the debate. I think it will compress the value of everything reproducible, and that includes a good deal of what is sold today as "skill". A simple corporate website, a data-cleaning script, a landing page: the price of this will keep falling, and anyone living exclusively off such commissions should be looking at what comes next, with some urgency. At the same time, I think the apocalypse talk is lazy. Whoever says "nobody will need programmers" has never had to explain to a client why the tool he generated himself in twenty minutes stopped working on a Friday night and now he needs someone who understands what's inside it. Value shifts. It shifts toward diagnosis, toward judgment, toward knowing what not to do, toward responsibility. Knowing that this database won't handle the expected load, and saying so before it's too late. Having the history to know that a certain library is a time bomb. This isn't glamorous and it doesn't fit in an ad, but it's what will keep getting paid. If someone asked me where to invest today to make money from technical skills, I'd say this: invest in being the person they call when things go wrong. Not in being the one who produces fastest. Incidentally, and this is a digression I won't tidy up: there's something nobody says about online community as a business model. Building a space where people talk, share and get to know each other seems like the noblest thing in the world, and it is. It's also the hardest to monetize without spoiling it. The moment the first ad appears, or the first subscribe button, something changes in the air, and the oldest users, who are usually the best, feel it first. I've seen healthy communities wither because they tried to pay for themselves too hastily. And I've seen others that never paid for themselves and closed from the owner's exhaustion. I haven't found the balance point. I think maybe it doesn't exist, and that what exists is a series of ugly compromises that keep being renegotiated. Back to the core of the thing. If I had to sum up what I've learned for anyone now trying to figure out how to monetize what they know, and I hate summaries, I'd say there are three questions worth more than any business plan, and I'll cheat and say them in separate sentences. Who has this problem? How much does it cost them not to solve it? How do I reach that person without depending on luck? Most people answer the first well, the second reasonably, and the third badly. The third is the one that decides. Distribution, at bottom, is the product. I like this phrase less and less because it's too clean to be entirely true, but it's truer than the alternative you hear, that "if you build it well, they will come". They don't. They never did. There's an entire industry of success stories suffering from a monumental survivorship bias, and the tens of thousands of excellent projects nobody found don't write articles about it. Which brings me to something almost never discussed: the role of luck. There was a time when it bothered me to admit it, because it implied that part of what went well for me wasn't merit, and that the other part, what went badly, maybe wasn't my fault. Now I think honesty about this is a practical advantage. Whoever believes everything is merit makes arrogant decisions. Whoever believes everything is luck does nothing. The useful position is somewhere in the middle, and it's uncomfortable, and it's where you should live: do what's under your control with discipline, and increase the number of times luck gets a chance to show up. Publish more. Contact more people. Keep projects alive long enough for the curve to have a chance to appear. Honestly, this last part is the one I find hardest to apply to myself. There was a time, I was looking at the stats of one of the projects on a Sunday night, with the coffee already cold next to the keyboard, when I realized that 62% of the traffic came from four articles written more than a year earlier. Four. Out of hundreds. I stared at it for quite a while, trying to understand what was special about them, and the conclusion I reached was disconcerting: nothing. Nothing I could have planned. They answered concrete questions people were asking, written directly, without detours, by someone who had just solved that problem and still remembered the irritation. That was all. I spent months afterwards trying to replicate the formula, and the formula didn't exist. I think that's what keeps escaping people looking for the shortcut. There's no elegant shortcut. There's a stubborn accumulation of small, useful things, done over a long time, by someone who didn't quit before it was too late, plus a dose of chance nobody controls. Someone with the skill and the will to do this for two or three years, with no guarantee, has a reasonable chance of getting somewhere. Someone looking for the formula spends the same time buying courses about formulas. I don't know whether this text helps anyone. I wrote it partly for myself, because I'm once again weighing something I should have decided already, and I tend to think better when I have to put the sentences in order. What remains is the idea that the first client is the strangest and the most important, and that the fraud feeling passes. It does, eventually. It takes longer than you'd expect. Ah, and check your robots.txt.