More or less everybody starts at 0. I don't exactly mean 0 as absolute nothingness, but some a low enough value of opportunity possible. That's the seed available to you, and from there you have to bootstrap.
Of course not every one will make it big in this game. But a sure shot way of going failing, is to not try.
I started in mid-2012 after being fed up with every employer out there, but was well aware that I was one of the best people someone could hire for things that are necessary, but not glamorous -- database performance tuning, data warehousing, ETL process development, and cleaning up disasters. Yet getting market rate for salary as a senior dev was like pulling teeth. At the time I was gritting my teeth to collect a paycheck. I got fed up with it, quit after managing to line up an engagement (and getting contracts drawn up), and struck out on my own.
In 5 1/2 years I've averaged 42 hours of billing a year, with the big gap mostly being because I decided to take 6 months off in 2016. I started hourly, but I learned exactly what Patrick learned and switched to weekly for the bulk of my engagements (which are short term), with a more amenable rate for long-term projects (we're talking 6+ month with many small projects, or one huge one). Most of it has been putting out fires to save a director's or VP's job, which gets you solid recommendations from said directors and VPs when servers go from on fire to twiddling their thumbs being nearly idle. Though I've built data warehouses and the teams to manage them as well.
There is a lot of selling. I'm either sourcing or making a ton of calls or emails every week, which isn't easy for someone that doesn't like to toot their horn. However, working remote affords me the ability to do that, as well as work with anyone in the US. If a local client wants me on site (preventing me from doing sales) there's a heck of rate increase for that, which causes most to let me work off site, though a few bite and the bump more than covers my opportunity cost.
There's also a bit of contingency recruiting. Employees take note when you turn a disaster into boring, easy to manage calm. More so when you teach them what you know. Keep in touch, and when you see the writing on the wall, perhaps your current client is what both of them needs. After all, you're already an approved vendor, so might as well make things even better for your client (and the top-notch candidate) and stick another $40-50K in your pocket for your trouble.
From when I started I TRIPLED what I was making (and am not in a cheap market), and making more than senior AmaGooFaceSoft devs in the Valley (incl. options and benefits) despite living nowhere near Califonia. Yet I'm still some nobody that's been on Hacker News since mid-2009 that just does fairly boring database things. Though there's a ton of database work out there.
Should that be month instead of year?
So I average about 32 hours a week (or billing 4 out of 5 weeks) over the course of a given calendar year. As I said, I'm very busy all the time. I took 6 months off for a reason.
>I was one of the best people someone could hire for things that are necessary, but not glamorous -- database performance tuning, data warehousing, ETL process development, and cleaning up disasters. Yet getting market rate for salary as a senior dev was like pulling teeth. At the time I was gritting my teeth to collect a paycheck.
The skills that you polished -- to the point of being "one of the best people someone could hire" -- seem heavily reliant on experiential learning. For example, I can't see how someone could get to be really good at "cleaning up disasters" without cleaning up a lot of disasters first. Would you say your experience as a (chronically underpaid) senior dev is what prepared you to be able to go out and perform the work that companies value so highly? Is the trick for us less-senior folks just to... keep working?
Oh, I wasn't chronically underpaid. I got paid 95-100% of market rate, but you were basically held in contempt for getting it, even if you proceeded to vastly outperform all expectations after starting. A lot of places would offer 70% of market rate and not budge (was their budget), and I swiftly killed negotiations in response.
These places that tried to get more for less were great to remember though. Years later, several have become clients, and I can confirm they definitely got what they paid for after having done a lot of cleanup. They are a solid leads, because eventually their hiring strategy catches up with them, and they need a pro to bail them out.
>The skills that you polished -- to the point of being "one of the best people someone could hire" -- seem heavily reliant on experiential learning. For example, I can't see how someone could get to be really good at "cleaning up disasters" without cleaning up a lot of disasters first
This is easier than you think.
Cleaning up disasters is mostly two things. A) Knowing how to make a simple solution that does a task exceptionally well (objectively) and B) Knowing how to read and profile code to know what's worth replacing with A. The only other thing I would say is C) Constantly tell yourself that everything you write can be better, so you constantly improve A.
This isn't high-falutin' bleeding edge architecture astronaut stuff. Most of what I deal with are basic things done badly. I've walked into shops in the past few years where people couldn't reliably load text files into tables. In one investment firm about 4 years ago, they had a 24-core server backed by tons of solid state LUNs, and the effective throughput of the ETL process was less than 10KB/sec because instead of write once, they decided to write once and then update the same data thirty eight times (no exaggeration -- actual number). As basic an application you can think of, I've seen some very memorable disaster versions of them. I've seen things, man! Including identical disasters in the latest NoSQL database, with an application glued together using the language du jour.
If you genuinely know what you're doing, and are willing to always convince yourself that you still don't know enough (and keep learning), age 30 can easily be the time to give it a shot.
I wont mention the UK jobsites name but I found a bug (a trivial cockup with canonical tags) that had cost them > £500,000 is lost traffic and that was in less than a week.
BTW I am looking so if anyones interested hit me up
After that experiment, I hear any similar question as, "Would you consider working for less than half of what you make now, for someone who doesn't know how to manage a group of people?"
I do get a lot of executive headhunters in my inbox, and clients tender a lot of offers as well, but nothing remotely competitive nor interesting has yet come my way.