How to Earn Money as a Software Engineer

Among all other career options, software engineering is one of the most popular due to it's increasing use across different industries and fields. The rapid development of technology has led to expansion of the existing software engineering positions and creation of new areas of employment for those interested in technology and computer science. This article aims to summarise ways of making money as a software engineer and create an easy to understand breakdown for our readers.

1) Get a job

One of the most obvious ways of making money as a software engineer is to get a regular paying job. Having a job will result in earning a steady income. This will enable you to support your basic needs and power up other side hustles you may have in order to generate even more income. Depending on your location and position at work, you may earn different amounts of incomes.

2) Invest

Although investing your money on stocks, real estate and other profitable options is a good idea, it is not our main focus here. Instead, we are talking about investing in your future. Purchasing an online course or enrolling in a boot-camp to learn a new skill would be a nice investment towards your future. By using this new skill, you can negotiate your salary up or build something else which is going to generate you more income in the long run. Let's be more specific and give some examples:

• Imagine you are a freelance web developer. You have designed and developed a website for your client. Your client has liked the website and asked you to develop a mobile app for his/her business. Learning mobile development will help you with increasing price of your services and therefore, earn more money.
• Imagine you are a data scientist working for a company. You have analysed and found different trends in the given data. As a result, you have produced tons of insights for the company. Now, executives of the company need a platform to share their findings with the clients or other business partners. If you invest in learning that new piece of skill which is going to help you with building what the executives need, you can negotiate an increase in your salary in exchange for your skill or talent.
• Imagine you have purchased an online course about machine learning and become an expert in this field after some time. Now, you can put this new skill into work and start teaching about machine learning in order to generate an income.

These days, being T-shaped and having various skills in the software development process is particularly valuable in small to medium sized companies as they may not have enough resources or employees to allow each developer to focus on only one aspect of the development process. Another way you can pick up and learn new skills is through taking part in and completing certifications. There are countless certifications available in numerous areas such as cyber security, cloud development, data science, machine learning, and general programming and software engineering. These certifications are becoming increasingly sought after in the industry and are a great way of showing off your new skills and abilities to employers and recruiters.

3) Freelance

According to Wikipedia, a freelancer is someone who is self-employed and not devoted to a particular employer or company long term. Freelancers sell their skills, knowledge and other services in return for money. These days, the popularity of freelancing has raised with the increase in the usage of websites such as fiver and upwork. These websites allow people to find freelancers who have potential to solve their problems. As a software engineer, you can sell your skills and services using any of the available freelancing websites. This process does not have to be strictly over the Internet or through the freelancing websites. In fact, you can find customers who need your skills and services through your contacts, friends and family.

4) Teach

This is another popular option for earning money as a software engineer. Today, we live in a world where information circulates freely around us. As a result, people would like to access the information they are looking for instantly. But most importantly, they would like to do this from the comfort of their homes. As a result, demand for online tutorials, boot-camps and resources have increased dramatically. As a software engineer, you can create useful tutorials, boot-camps and resources around the topics you are comfortable with (programming languages, algorithms, etc). This can be a written, audio or video content and you can publish it on platforms such as YouTube, Udemy, Skillshare and many more. Here are some of the ways you can monetise your content:

• Run ads. If you are publishing your content on social media platform like YouTube, then you can run ads in order to earn money.
• Subscription. You can create a business model where people join your subscription programme in order to be able to access your content. It can be weekly, monthly or yearly subscription model depending on your strategy.
• One time payment. Alternatively, people can put down a one time payment in order to access your content.

5) Side Hustles & Projects

It is very common for software engineers to have side hustles and projects which generate some sort of active or passive income. This can be a YouTube Channel, website, game or software. Here are some of the ways you can monetise your side hustles and projects:

• The most obvious way is to display ads on your side hustles or projects. You can display ads on your games, mobile apps, websites/blogs, YouTube Channels or any other project you may have. Depending on the ad provider you may get paid on number of clicks, number of visits/downloads or other suitable metrics.
• Affiliate Marketing is another popular way of monetising your side hustle and project as most of the well known companies have affiliate marketing programmes. By promoting a product on your website, blog, YouTube Channel you can get commissions based on sales being made through your personal affiliate links.
• You can arrange paid deals with other brands for product reviews or get early access on a new product in return for a deal or service.
• You can sell your side hustle or project (this is more for computer programmes, games or any other product and service which can be sold) to relevant companies and individuals.

Conclusion

To summarise, investing in yourself is one of the key takeaways of this article. Without having the right skill-set or knowledge, you cannot exchange it for money. Therefore, consider learning as much as you can. Investing towards your future is never a loss. Once you accumulate enough knowledge, you can use one the ways described above and generate some sort of income. Although there may be other ways of generating an income as a software engineer, we wanted to summarise the ones we believe are the most effective. You should carefully evaluate your own situation and make a responsible decision when it comes to choosing a way to generate income. Finally, it is important as a emerging software engineer for you to find motivation and drive to persist with your learning and training as the more you put in the more you will get out of it in the end.