A fortuitous decade as an indie software developer

Because ultimately a lot of corpo tech is ads bullshit or not nearly far enough from it.

Or it's healthcare bs. And not the cool kind where you help people (tremendous respect for doctors and nurses). The bs kind where you make it slightly more efficient to bill them into bankruptcy.

Or it's generic SaaS which is more or less the most you can hope to get to work on. (It's where I am).

Then there's reams of poorly paid positions where you software mill excel-adjacent LOB apps.

I agree with the sentiment of parent comment. Corporate programming sucks. If you have the opportunity to not be alienated from the product of your labor, do it.

We need more of these stories. A week or two ago game engines came up where I see so many wanna-be indie devs effectively throw away their chance at shipping before running out of money by spending time making an engine instead of getting to the game by using an existing one. The comments were generally "so what if they had fun". My reply should have been "it would be nicer to have shipped and kept the fun going longer than not ship because of wasted time and therefore have to give up the dream"

+1 I did a few android apps in the goldrush years and building the app was the easy part, and this was before Claude code.

The hard part was the customer and technical support. Huge time and energy sink fielding those requests - some totally lucid and well written, some incomprehensible, some just kinda sketchy obviously looking to manipulate/exploit/whatever you, some from people using phones and software versions you've never heard of, some from people using a totally different app than yours, some who think you are Google/apple/Microsoft and please reset their password to hunter2 etc etc etc. Then you have the endless API churn and mandates from the app stores etc about what you can and can't do, what SDK needs updating for whatever, new requirements, new deprecations etc etc etc.

It was maybe 10% coding and building something, with the rest just dealing with bullshit that gained you basically nothing (and certainly not making you any revenue).

I made some small time hobby money, but obviously I pulled all the apps eventually and never looked back really. I would not recommend doing this to anyone if you have a stable job that pays reasonably well already. Keep the day job, it's less hassle.