That&#x27;s probably true only inside the valley, otherwise there will be a market for contract-based  remote coding, a-la &quot;pay per github commits (which passes all tests).<p>Back in 90s one could easily land a job or a subcontract if one is capable to do so. I used to be UNIX system administrator and Informix DBA, and there were literally tons of requests for complex database server setups and performance tuning even in such shithole like Russia. That was the market.<p>Nowadays, except for bunch of valley startups and megacorps, which routinely select top graduates from the ivy league universities (as we have seen in now famous salary disclosure posts), there is no real demand for programming. There is no demand for high-quality components or specialized solutions outside established insanely beurocratized packer&#x27;s ecosystems, such as Java EE, MS, etc, which allows middle-aged mediocrity to get its salary.<p>Suppose you are a freelance programmer, who has that golden classic CS education (algorithms, data structures, programming languages). Is there any offers beside Jomla theming or JS or occasionally Android coding? Nope. All remaining software engineering action is inside startups or megacorps, and even it is usually nothing but piling up layers upon layers of Java (or nowadays Node) crap, which can&#x27;t even be polit-cortectly called &quot;over-engineered&quot;, because it is simply arrogantly-stupid.<p>The mantra &quot;write your own Nginx first&quot; does not work either. Igor had a nice sysadmin&#x27;s job in an oil company so he was able to spend couple of years for prototyping and <i>slow</i> knowledge-based engineering, as opposed to fast and &quot;productive&quot; copy-pasting in an IDE.<p>If there is a real demand, there must be the market for it. Have you seen any demand for good stuff (Erlang, Haskell, CL, Golang, kernel-quality C)? Me neither. What we see is mere evolution of valley&#x27;s sweatshops for top graduates we call startups.