Ask HN: How do you earn your money?
I've been in software development for 20 years now. Started to work as a student at a top consulting firm in my country, at the expense of dropping out of CS studies - real work (and earning good money) was so much more interesting than studying.<p>After that I switched a couple of regular jobs and enjoyed every single one of them: working on real-world problems (electronic banking, multimedia production) together with bunch of talented and all-around nice people.<p>My carrier was interrupted by unexpectedly getting stuck in remote mountains of east Tibet for almost two years. After returning home I felt professionally disoriented and took on a couple of terrible freelance gigs, working for a year like crazy and earning about 2 EUR per hour (in EU) because of feature creep on a fixed amount project.<p>Then I got to my senses and started a consulting firm doing mostly web development. Since childhood I dreamt of having a company of my own. When I got it, it was far from glamorous - trading time for money that barely paid for my rapidly growing expenses (marriage, mortgage, kid).<p>Software development is one of the rare professions where you can relatively easily create something that has a value on its own - scalable and not directly dependent on how much time you put into it.<p>Selling products instead of my time was my goal throughout this time. Now, seven years later, we (I run the company with my wife) are finally getting there [1] [2].<p>I made a lot of mistakes in these 20 years, but in general, if I could go back, I would not do it much differently. Mistakes are an important stepping stones on the path.<p>So, what I'm trying to say is this: you're young, do the things that excite you. There is nothing wrong in working for and with others. At any time, you can decide to try creating something on your own. At this stage in life you can probably take on more risk than later when/if you get a family. But no point in over-calculating things. As long as you breath and your heart beats you have the freedom to steer your life in any direction you choose.<p>[1] <a href="http://pinegrow.com" rel="nofollow">http://pinegrow.com</a> [2] <a href="http://getbooklers.com" rel="nofollow">http://getbooklers.com</a>