Software salaries have always been good, usually a bit better than middle middle class. For contrast, I've worked as an auto mechanic. Good, middle-class living that. Left that for software, made a bit more money doing software.
After a bit, but still before the dot-bomb, I went to work for Microsoft. Salary was shit, but the stock options were still enticing back then. All the dot-bombs were paying better, so MSFT upped the salaries. Based on performance reviews, I was apparently a pretty good employee, so the mileage of many might vary. But after one review I got a 35% salary bump that year in an effort to keep MSFT competitive.
One more comparison: my responsibilities aren't much greater than they were back in the day, but I'd say I live a more comfortable lifestyle now than I did then.
tl;dr: it's super-hard to make direct comparisons, but I'd say salaries are better now than back-in-the-day.
I'd say given inflation, cost of living etc, that pay back in the day was on average, over average for upper figure salaries. There are more devs/techies/IT literate people about these days so although there are sought after roles, positions are easier to fill these days. IMHO, Obvs.
I was hooked up with front end development at the time (simple things, the site is still plain HTML/CSS and jQuery) and I wanted to create a simple webpage as a final project. At the same time, I saw an election prediction map for my country, Greece, and tried to find a way to make one for myself, but could not find any tool for it. Thus, I spent some time creating the first map chart page for Greece and then extended it to the World, USA and Europe maps (and more; there are now almost 22 different maps).
The competition in this niche is either stale (old sites that don't have a modern interface and/or many options) or premium services (whole suites of applications that cover a range of options), so it is currently the #1 Google Search result for queries like 'create my own map', 'make a world map', 'custom USA map' etc.
Wasn't there some "Twitter alternative" launched by someone who used HN? Its entire business model was to bill users. I can't remember the name of it, or the founder, but I think the service failed to gain traction.
edit: The service was/is App.net, and it was founded by Dalton Caldwell. It used to make the rounds on HN all the time.
IMO the best way would be to do microtransactions and go whale hunting. For example, you could charge a quarter for every character past the current word limit and a dollar per character after 200 and kill two birds with one stone.
Instead of charging all users, they could offer premium accounts that allowed longer posts, did not display ads, have private circle-like channels that you could post to for closed conversations, etc. They haven't expanded the feature set to take advantage of these opportunities, though, so senior management seems to lack the imagination to drive it towards profits.
I don't know if Twitter has ever spoken about it but the lack of premium accounts has long puzzled me. Surely there are worthwhile features they could offer without degrading the free tier experience. My circles are perhaps atypical but for those of us who use it as a fairly important professional tool, a $50/year pro account would be a complete no-brainer. Maybe there aren't enough people like this to deal with the complications. It seems unlikely they haven't thought about it. But the lack is still surprising.
Most of the people I talk to on Twitter don't have money to spare. They're the kind of people who have to toss up a fundraiser to make rent because they had a surprise medical bill or car repair.
I understand why people don't want to take this money. Basically, here in Kenya we're brought up in a way that there is nothing for free, you have to work to get what you want. So someone giving you free money is very suspicious there must be something they want in turn.
I think it's true anywhere poverty is a common economic status for folks. You live with less, so every thing you get you want to own 100% of. Gifts are just deposits (implicit) on favors in the future, so I always avoid them unless they're from family or good friends. Strangers and gifts aren't a good mix in my opinion here from the US side of things.
Yes, it's understandable that people are suspicious. But before, GiveDirectly was able to convince them that it's not a scam so it's a bit surprising that it didn't work this time.
