My 2022 review, how I made $10,000 in my second year as a software engineer

Hi, Happy New Year! (better late than never)

I spent a while deliberating whether to do this or not, which is why it’s a bit late, but what the hell, there’s no downside to doing this. The main purpose of this is to document my progress, and hopefully inspire people as I have been inspired, so don’t see it as a flex (I don’t think it even qualifies as one), t for thanks.

The year 2022 was officially my second year as a professional software engineer and the biggest year of my career, if you’re new here, I am a software engineer primarily focused on building mobile apps (android apps natively and hybrid apps with Flutter).

Let’s back up a bit, I started my software engineering journey back in 2017 when I used sites like Codecademy and w3schools to learn web development, however, I made a couple of mistakes that slowed down my progress (link here to mistakes I made as a beginner programmer), coupled with jumping to different paths like game and backend development, I made the decision to settle on mobile development in 2019 where I got into the Google x Andela developer certification scholarship (a different story entirely).

From there, I just kept practicing and grinding, and fast-forward to November 2020, I got my first freelance gig as a mobile developer to build a simple android app for product recognition for $300, not much but I felt on top of the world that my hard work was finally paying off (this project ended up turning into a long-term engagement that paid a lot more).

2021 marked my first official year as a professional developer as I had just started making money two months earlier. Having worked as a freelancer for the year, I was able to make around $4,000. The growth was crazy and I was just getting started.

Now to the main point of the story, 2022 started off quite slow, as I had graduated and was doing my NYSC (a year of service to the Nigerian government done by graduates) and had no current job or ongoing freelance projects. I kept applying to jobs on Upwork, LinkedIn, and jobs posted on a couple of Whatsapp communities, I did some volunteer work and joined Pandascrow, an escrow startup with the aim of building my skills and portfolio. Surely enough, by April, I was able to land a full-time role as a Flutter developer with a Nigerian company, the salary was about $600 at the time and I felt on top of the world, all the uncertainty of the year was finally disappearing. Unfortunately, this only lasted for a month as when the crypto winter came and the whole recession, the company wasn’t able to continue, and just like that, I was back right where I started.

Luckily, this did not last long, and a few weeks later, I landed my second full-time role with a company in India as a Flutter developer, with a salary of $1000 (a $400 increase over the previous job). Everything happens for a reason, I thought to myself because I wouldn’t have looked for another job if the previous one didn’t fall through. I ended up spending just over 6 months at the company before getting affected by the global lay-offs at the end of November. This was really painful as I had a few issues going on, and this felt like rock bottom, I learned a really valuable lesson here which I’m going to state at the end (so make sure you stick to the end or skip if you want 🙂). Although, 4 days before this happened, I was invited to a freelance contract on Upwork which I accepted, so not all was lost 🤷🏾‍♂️.

And so, I ended the year as a freelance developer, the pay ($750) was a little lower than what I had in my previous engagement, but still higher than the first role I got earlier in the year.

Lessons: Well, after getting laid off, I took some time to reflect on my performance, it is quite easy to get relaxed and not try as hard when you finally get that full-time role. Although I wasn’t a terrible employee, I am certain that working a lot harder would’ve made me less expendable. This doesn’t mean you should work 12 hours a day, but make sure you work on meaningful things where your contributions can be seen. I realized that my tasks gradually shifted to more of fixing bugs as opposed to creating new features, so it wasn’t also as easy to defend my contributions in the last month with the company.

I also learned to look at the bright side, at some point during my time with the company, I felt I had peaked, I didn’t really have time to learn new things, or work on side projects because I was working really long hours (They got their money’s worth lol), and so moving on to 2023, learning new skills (thinking of exploring network engineering), improving on current skills like my native android development and working on side-projects like my medium blog and trying out Youtube amongst others are things to focus on.

Conclusion: I had crazy growth in 2022. Skill-wise; Although I did not interact with native android development a lot, I can confidently rate myself as a mid-level mobile app developer. Finance-wise; I made just a little over 2x ($10,000) of what I made in 2021. And it was a lot better as I was able to grow with my friends and family who are also in the tech space (Selwyn, Radeeyah, Timi, Tom, Jesse), it gave me a whole new level of satisfaction and I can’t wait to see what we’ll achieve in 2023.

If you’ve read this far, thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I hope I have inspired you in some way moving into 2023.