Is there any skill a highly experienced software engineer can learn in a week and start earning money?

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Learn how to handle your money. Then you can be satisfied with what you make.

Look, software engineers already command ludicrously high salaries compared to the norm. There’s literally no skill you can learn that can out-earn you just finding a job. You’re at the top of your food chain. If you’re a wolf bagging antelope, picking up a side hustle chasing down mice is just going to feel beneath you.

You can try client work but I gotta tell ya, it sucks. It’s basically a full time job on top of your other full time job. They just ask for more and more of your time and attention and don’t want to pay for it. If you gave me the choice of earning an additional 500 a month doing client work vs just spending time at home farting around, I’d take the farting around every time.

Now that I’ve established that there really aren’t any good options here, let me talk about my suggested solution, learning how to handle your money.

First off, why do you think you need more money? You have short term goals and long term goals. I suggest you swipe all short term goals on a credit card and pay it off slowly over time, and don’t take on any new liabilities. Trust me no side hustle is going to pay you enough to make it worth it over just paying the 20% interest on credit card debt.

If this sounds dangerous, then you have poor financial discipline and no amount of side hustle money is going to save you from that. You’re just working harder to dig yourself deeper. Fix the hole in your soul with something other than money or things you buy with it.

For long term goals, consider approaching them as “career goals.” A common one I hear from people is that they want to start a company. Dig a little and inevitably you find they hate their jobs. The solution to hating your job is to find a better one, not a startup. Or learn to love the job you have. People really have an irrational hatred towards working for a living.

My job is effing awesome. I play ping pong for at least half an hour every day, my company pays for my train pass, I make a boat-load of money, I get all the paid vacation time I want to take, a bonus at the end of the year, really good benefits.

When I first got there, I was dissatisfied by what I perceived as the poor quality of the codebase, and a few other gripes I don’t want to get into here. Point is, over time I mellowed and learned how to turn all those things into positive points. I like refactoring so improving the codebase is something I’ve worked into my workflow. Everything else I treated as things to improve rather than things to hate.

Whether you like a job or not really can come down to just mindset. Or you can just switch jobs. Whichever you think will be better.

Once you’ve done that you can turn your attention to your cash flows. Chances are there’s money going out that doesn’t really need to. You should focus on big wins here and not nickel and diming yourself. You can afford a $60 a month Starbucks habit. A $1000 a month coke habit is something else entirely.

You really should be able to afford a stellar lifestyle with the money you are making now. If you can’t then there’s a hole in your boat that you need to fix. Bailing out the boat with a side gig is only going to stress you out.

If it’s an ex-wife and child support / alimony that’s got you down, then I’m sorry, you’re kinda screwed there. Maybe client work isn’t so bad after all. Good luck.