[dangrossman]

It doesn't seem that uncommon, if you're very good at what you do. There's a monthly HN thread for telecommute jobs and quite a few hiring ads from YC companies say they're open to it.

When I was in high school I got my first contract programming job building a CRM app for sales from the ground up. The guy I built it for was building a business around that app, selling access to businesses with small to medium sales teams...

When I finished that, I immediately thought "why did I just build all that for him, so that he can make the real money selling the app I just built, when I could have done it for myself?"... and that was the end of contract programming for me. I started building web apps of my own and work from home running them.