[watmough]

If you're not a 'hacker' now, then the odds are against you becoming one.

On the other hand, you don't really need to be a hacker to make a good living. I know quite a few really excellent programmers / software engineers / designers who can perform all those roles, and who are emphatically not hackers.

For most programming tasks, like billing software, or web-sites, there is a fairly straight-forward way to design something, and a reasonably straight-forward way to implement it. Reliable, predictable timelines and implementations are the high-end of business software consulting.

You can be pretty good at software engineering, and be fairly well-paid, even working regular hours and not letting it consume your life.