If you're a halfway decent programmer, you can easily get consulting gigs that will earn you multiples of what you will ever make at these jobs per unit of time.
You could do something like consult for a week and take the next three weeks to work on your project, or you could consult for a month and take the next few months off to work on your project. Your financial situation will be similar or better when compared to the low-paid jobs.
The low-paid grinder jobs you mention are definitely not worth doing in terms of money or time.
2. Show them a small portfolio of relevant work. The code should be clean and should solve a problem.
3. Tell them your availability. Something regular like 20 hours per week is probably more desirable, but some will take what they can get.
4. Invite them to "try before they buy" on a small paid gig. Ramp up size of projects as you gain trust.
5. If you are able to say things like "I am able to talk to customers and develop bespoke applications that solve their problems in an elegant way", expect to dictate your own terms and get rewarded handsomely (at least for someone not doing sales).
6. If the agency compares you to low-paid offshore programmers, you're talking to the wrong agency.
Keep in mind that most good agencies have more work than they can handle -- their bottleneck is on the "good and reliable developer" side.
Also note that they work may be incredibly boring -- but certainly no more boring than "sales clerk" or "security guard", and also certainly more lucrative.
> I am indeed a halfway decent programmer
Ask someone who pays programmers if they agree with this assessment. Most programmers I know tend to self-evaluate themselves a bit on the high side. Some folks may find that they have some programming idiosyncrasies that make their code less than ideal for anything other than personal projects that they themselves will maintain.
Otherwise one's liable to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for CL/freelancer site jobs.
Anyway, based on what I constantly hear on HN, freelancing may be overrated. I find it difficult to compete against Indian or Bangladeshi programmers, even when I can clearly provide much higher quality. Either clients don't understand what they are getting for the price or the project requires little competence anyway.
Where are you from?
> Anyway, based on what I constantly hear on HN, freelancing may be overrated.
You and I must be reading a different HN. Running your own agency or consulting business if you're not a sales-oriented person may not be the best thing, but subcontracting to an agency is hardly sales-oriented.
Freelancing with an orientation towards very low-end commodity-type of gigs is fantastically bad. Don't do it. Focus on connecting with an agency that does programming work with businesses with revenues that would make your desired wages be a rounding error.
> I find it difficult to compete against Indian or Bangladeshi programmers, even when I can clearly provide much higher quality.
Hmmmm... Based on this comment, you might be limited by geography. If you are in the US, there are trivial things you can do that make it so that you are not competing against Indian or Bangladeshi programmers.
That said, even if you are in some far-off place and need to work remotely, good programmers are not easy to come by. The "cost" of being remote and unknown is that people who are looking for good programmers are often not willing to spend the time separating the wheat from the chaff. The solution to this is to do some quality work, post in on GitHub, and then show your work to agencies.
Unless you were seeking the novelty factor of trying out a new field, and assuming you’re a hacker, it seems you’d hit the ground running faster if you’d just switch how you earned your income or spend your money.
It does entail taxing the same muscles you'd like to use for your own projects, but at a multiple of what you'd expect to be paid in the other fields mentioned. (And as has been said before, you could always "pay yourself first" by doing your own work before clocking in.)
I'm very fortunate to have reached a productivity/income level requiring me to work only 4-6 hours/week. I enjoy working more, but also love the free time to pursue outside hobbies, business ideas, pro-bono, etc. Once you reach a point where you set the price/terms, the sky's the limit!
* also, the value generated by high status jobs only need to occur in short bursts, only the value-per-time-unit is much higher; the skill required here will also be much harder to acquire and scarcer to find... one needs time and experience to get to this level.