What career path to choose?

[re1ser]

A bit of backstory,

due to generally bad financial situation in Serbia, I started working as a fulltime remote programmer when I was 20 years old for one startup in EU, so I could support myself through the college. Startup didnt work out and eventually ceased after ~2 years. Shortly before that I started working short-time freelance jobs over Freelancer/Elance. This worked out very well (as much as it possible over those types of sites) and I opened my own IT consultancy company few months after.

Few months ago, since I was fully working remotely, I decided to start traveling. I dropped out from college with one class left, which I've been dragging for few last years, and I'm currently located in Thailand. I am 25 years old now. I have several clients that I charge 50-100$/hour, however this can change overnight and I can drop to zero income. I have enough money buffered up to support myself for the next few years.

Now the main reason why am I seeking for advice from HN crowd - I do my work in Delphi. I'm currently limited with the tech that has 0.01% market share and I've realized that I would never progress further in a professional sense if I don't change this and would get stuck forever with mediocre job opportunities. Also I want to get off the freelancer/elance type of sites. There are dozens of different techs that I can choose to learn and all of them are viable. Most appealing to me is to either get proficient in C++ and eventually in C# and work as a developer, or jump into web sphere (node/angular/whatever) and do some contracting or give it a shot to make some lifestyle business which can generate me some passive income.

I am honestly kinda lost and scared by all of this, and probably overthinking a bit, but I'm not really sure where to head at. I've been stuck with Delphi for years, and now I need to change that.

Have you guys been there, and do you have any advices?

[phantom_oracle]

Personally, I'd hold on to your Delphi skills for now. Those Fortran guys who stuck with the language when everyone else left, are now earning fat paychecks maintaining legacy stuff that nobody else can even touch.

Master another skill in parallel.

I am into web development, but personally, web work runs on "flavour-of-the-month". There was the PHP boom in the 90s-early2000s, the Rails boom from 05ish-11 and now there is a Node boom since then.

How accurate these booms are in terms of actual work/jobs, I'm not sure. However, there is a lot of noise around it.

If you've got the patience and acumen, learn C/C++ and stick with it. These languages won't go away, no matter how many Rusts/Gos pop-up (there's about +30 years of code invested in both by thousands of people).

As far as freelancing goes, you're one lucky guy. 98% of the cubicle Joomla/WordPress hackers would gladly switch places with you for your $75 p.h job. I'd stick with freelancing if I were you (you must've seen plenty of places by now).

Also, about your degree ... You don't really need it anymore, but finish it, for your own sake (peace of mind).

Lastly, keep milking your Delphi cow. The grass isn't greener at all in an office job. You will not have the freedom to stop work at 2pm cause you feel like it. If you really want to secure your cow, keep going with your long-term clients and when the time comes for them to move to another tech, you should have some knowledge (C/C++ or even Java) to move with them and keep your long-term contracts.

[saluki]

Two years is a pretty good runway . . .

Listen to StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com lots of good advice there for building SaaS/Products/Lifestyle business.

This will give you some ideas of what options are out there.

As far as remote consulting it seems Rails is the best language for remote positions that pay well.

I would recommend learning Rails . . .

I usually recommend HTML->CSS->js->jquery->Rails(ruby) or Laravel(php)->angular (or other js frameworks)

That will give you a good foundation of full stack web development if that's the type of company you want to work for or build your own.

To build up two years of runway you're doing well . . . so I would keep up what you're doing, choose and new skill to learn and start on your product/SaaS idea.

Here are some other people you should check out: Brennan Dunn (double your freelance rate) Patio11 Nathan Barry Amy Hoy Rob Walling (Start Ups for the rest of us podcast)

[rayalez]

I want to add Django as a great alternative to rails, and Ember as a great alternative to Angular. Just for OP to consider.

Python is a very universal language, and the main benefit is that you can apply it in almost any area of programming.

[almassapargali]

While I agree that Django is great too, by some reasons Rails community have very positive attitude towards remote work. And yes, I don't know Django/Python community much, but that's what I noticed in Rails community.

[lingua_franca]

forget about C#, it's dying.

[KhalPanda]

Not sure if you're joking or just trolling (or both), given the recent massive announcements surrounding the platform/IDE/etc...

[lingua_franca]

i hope u r joking or just trolling, instead of being ignorant. What Microsoft does w/ C#/.Net doesn't matter; what industry chooses matters. Nearly all big data jobs require Java/JavaScript/Scala/Python.