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> The idea, I hope, is that through partially remote consulting work one can make a wage which is disproportionately high compared to the cheap area in which one lives. It remains to be seen if any of this speculation is actually true. This is precisely what I've done with my life for the last five years. It works, on one condition: you must find, connect with, and sell the Right Kind Of Customers for it to work. If you're just a programmer (which, of course, Patrick famously recommends against identifying as), you are competing against every other "programmer" with your list of bullet-point skills, many in places a lot cheaper than even your "cheap area in which one lives"— e.g. eastern Europe, former Soviet states, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages The trick is to position, market, and brand yourself as a specialized, boutique consultancy that incorporates various highly-sought-after technical skills in a complete "special sauce" package for businesses to achieve business-ey goals. People LOVE good abstractions, and are willing to pay for them. Be a problem solver/revenue increaser, not a "programmer". If you try to compete on a specific, easily-defined technical skillset, you'll lose to vast hordes of internet-connected Romanians, Latvians, and Ukranians every time - they can maintain a very comfortable standard of living at prices way below what you could offer your services for. |