This is just the upside of running your own business. Summer food trucks have been a fixture in my city for decades around the state capitol. Some folks make a great living doing it.<p>My favorite was an older couple operating a small hotdog stand... they made a ridiculously delicious meatsauce and basically worked a 35 hour week in the summer in the Northeast, and a similar schedule for a couple of months down South.<p>They owned a nice house in city, were active in the church and community, and were genuinely good people, who made a great living selling hotdogs, mostly to government and Verizon workers.<p>But... they faced all of the downside risks of small business owners. Rain == slow or no sales. Big vacation weeks for the workforce == slow sales. Get sick? No pay. That said, it's probably still a better gig than being a game programmer.
The streetfood business is awful in the long term. I hope he can quickly move into a brick and mortar restaurant. Depending on the municipality, streetfood vendors get nailed by all sorts of random fines, get shunted around to various "permitted areas" which may or may not have lots of foot traffic, and the worst part: the low barrier to entry. Competitors can come in super quickly, and when they do, they can lower the total revenue by just a few percent for all other vendors in an area and kill profitability.
I really dislike these type of stories. Basically saying "Investor buys lotto ticket; outperforms DJIA by 5 billion percent." Or a more realistic example, the stories that flow when gas prices spike. Like the person with the diesel engine running off waste grease from restaurants.<p>It's nice this person found a profitable niche but the concept itself doesn't lend itself to even linear growth.
The title is slightly inaccurate / misleading. He quit his job and now runs his own business <i>together with his girlfriend</i> (i.e. they both work). Her part in this is not negligible, perhaps she is the main asset of the company.<p>(I don't know why this gets modded down, but let me clarify: his old salary is his personal income. The "doubled" salary is the income from his business, apparently the combined salary of both of them - so it's misleading to say that he "doubled his salary")
For the TLDR crowd:<p>>We had no idea that we'd sell so much—we sold 100 shaobings in a day, business is only getting better and better." said the programmer. "We already earned enough for an apartment and now we're saving up more money. We hope to get married next year.<p>The story has a happy ending. It's nice to see people, if not doing what they love, then at least loving their newfound life. And that's the whole shaobing.
A nitpick about its translation of "Ma Nong" (码农): it doesn't mean "Number Cruncher". Although the "Ma" is the same character with "Hao Ma" (number), in describing the profession of programmer, it means "Code".<p>"Nong" means farmer ("Nong Fu"). It implies laborious work.<p>The closest translation to it should be "Code Farmer".
The numbers in the article don't quite add up. Shao bing is cheap food... usually 1.5 or 2 renminbi, maybe 2.5.<p>If they're selling 100 a day, every day, at 2.5元/each, that would be 250元/day and ~7500元/month.<p>7500元 is only about $1220.<p>So even if the article is only assuming revenue per month (and not profit), they still have to increase their price or sales (or some combination) by 267% to hit the $3,259/month mentioned.<p>If you're talking actual profit, which would be a more adequate comparison to his previous salary, then it's probably closer to a factor of 5.
This will probably be buried, but this conversation needs some serious context and the article title really needs to be changed to "Game Programmer Quits Job To Sell Street Food, Doubles Salary in China".<p>Programmers are almost notoriously overworked and underpaid in China. Working 10 to 12 hours a day for $1000 a month is quite common. It's possible to make more money working six hours a day for half a month working as an English teacher.<p>The view in Eastern Asia is that a programmer is akin to a machine that you hand a specification and code is produced and hence the low pay. You could trade programming in China for a large number of other careers and double your salary. It's not a particularly usual thing.<p>If you were to trade this for a software development position in the US or Western Europe it's going to be a much different story. Culturally speaking, it's seen much more like and engineer or craftsmen rather than a labourer. Switching from a position like this in the US to selling food is much less likely to see the same kind of return.
Strangely enough, when I lived in Japan the guy who owned the takoyaki cart near my office surprised me with perfect English and a Californian accent that he had picked up as a game programmer in the USA in the 90s.
I used to work in the food industry, in fine dining restaurants (which are notorious for long hours, hard work, and mediocre pay).<p>Alot of my friends left to start food trucks, street stands, etc... Keep in mind where I live (a cold part of Canada), you can realistically only sell street food for 4-6 months out of the year. They would all make $60,000 to $100,000 in a season, and now a few of them have brick and mortar restaurants to their name.<p>I worked a street food stand for a festival awhile back, we made $3000 in a day (split 2 ways).<p>Street food doesn't scale too well, and there are a whole slew of downsides, but if you can figure out an efficient way to make tasty food, you can make a lot of money and there's only a small barrier to starting out (likely less start up cost in China).
Strangely enough, this idea has gone through my mind a couple of times, for a completely different reasons though.<p>Mortality is closely connected with the hours we spend sitting each day. So that's one reason.<p>The other one is that after working so hard and saving up enough for the rest of your life, you need something that is much more stress-free. And selling something so basic as food is exactly that.
My first job out of college was writing Super Nintendo games in Vancouver. My starting salary was $28.5K/year in 1994. Had I have been working 40 hour work weeks, this would have been a reasonable salary, but for 80 hours a week (which is closer to what I was working), it was less than McDonalds paid at the time.<p>The difference is upwards mobility. It's hard moving up the corporate ladder while flipping burgers. It was not so hard to turn the game programming job into a lucrative career in software development.
The joke at Origin Systems (back in the day) was:
"We train people for well-paying jobs in the computer game industry."<p>It was funny on several levels... if you didn't work there.
I feel like there's a lot of articles like this, which kinda make it seem like life is easy as an entrepreneur, or that successful business just happen. I feel like this mentality is behind the explosion in early stage financings relative to late stage financings.<p>I know that as an early stage founder that I am part of the problem, but I often stop to think about whether what I'm doing is really that valuable or if I should just join another company in growth phase. I think the 100th engineer at Facebook would have had a lot more impact than most of the failed founders today.<p>I just think that being a founder is a harsh experience that you have to learn from many times over in order to get right, and that even when things go well there's no guarantee of a money pot at the end of the rainbow. I think you really need to have motivations other than cash to truly convince yourself that what you're working on is worth waking up for every day.<p>I think if you have that motivation inside you then being a founder is a great experience. Thinking you should just leave your job for an instant moneypot is just silly though, IMHO.
wtf? 20k a month just by selling 'shaobing'. This is just another shitty marketing 'news' for a MMO called "Yuan zheng"[1]
[1]<a href="http://yz.q1.com/" rel="nofollow">http://yz.q1.com/</a>
I don't know why so many people are saying that it needs to be made clear that this is in China, and that it doesn't apply elsewhere.<p>I'm a programmer in Finance in London, and a good day rate for a Senior contractor is 600GBP/day. I have a good friend who started out doing "grilled chorizo in a ciabatta bun" at a London market, and easily made 1000GBP his first day. Now he uses employees to man that stall, and has moved on to the next idea, at a different locations doing something different to allow him to do something that appeals during different seasons. By now I imagine he is easily making double what I do.
The game programmer part is a bit of a juxtaposition.<p>Hearing that a good living can be made selling traditional street food in China is interesting though. That's some sort of sign.
I know a programmer who quit his job and became a janitor, apparently doubled his happiness.<p>Just because you have the logical mind for something does not mean it will make you happy. I often feel like I lack the logical mind for working in IT but I freaking LOVE the work.
As a game developer in china, We use this story to self-mockery.We work more than 50 hours a week, without girlfriend, without high pay.But We know one day When we has to leave we have another choice. He he~
The average age of the US farmer is 58. In Japan it is 68. There is less and less land available for agriculture. Less and less fresh water (agriculture uses 90% of fresh water in the US). The weather gets worse by the year to produce food. On the other hand there are more and more people in the world. So supply is diminishing while demand is high. That's why food is more and more expensive almost every quarter.<p>All these smart folks at Stanford are wasting their time studying IT, law or finance. Too much competition. Study agriculture, be rich. Farmers are going to drive Maserati's in the future not successful software developers or Wall Street crowd.