I became freelancer 8 years ago, while being product manager of successful antispyware software, leading quite a big team spread over three continents. It was nice job, but I find myself to wake up at 5am, code for few hours, then go to work, hate to deal with politics, get back home and code for few more hours.

Then one day I found ad on job board: "Looking for programmer", there was nothing else than this, no description, just header and phone number. So I just ring the phone and the rest is history.

This was my first client and I still working with them today. It is old rusty Delphi 5 codebase. There is nothing fancy about this gig, but it is ongoing thing, the client pay on time and don't demand much. You find to appreciate jobs like this once you become freelancers and will want to stick with this profession for decades.