The Secretive Lives of Developers And Their Side Hustles

Strategies for Balancing Day Jobs and Dream Projects

David Goudet
4 min readAug 28, 2024

7:00 am. Coastline of Costa Rica.

Alex starts his day by having breakfast and going straight to his computer. He begins by checking the emails from one of the three jobs he has as a software engineer.

Alex is a genius, I have to admit it, and he works hard, approximately 12 hours a day. He has a complex system to avoid meetings overlapping, but it doesn’t work every time, he stopped working for several companies after he couldn’t maintain their pace.

He makes around $300,000 in a country where the median salary is $20,000. His profile is in high demand, and he’s working for American companies.

Alex keeps the most interesting position on his LinkedIn profile; the HR departments usually don’t ask questions.

While this scenario is not so common in other markets, like in Europe, where the demand for developers is not so high and there are more regulations, developers still work on side hustles that sometimes duplicate their salaries.

This article is part of Peak Performance, a newsletter (not in Medium) where I showcase the science behind becoming the best version of ourselves and how we can find our true purpose in life. You can subscribe here.

Indie Hackers

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David Goudet

Senior Software Engineer from Venezuela living in Madrid. Top Writer in AI and Technology. US Dept of State alumnus. www.davidgoudet.com/peakperformance