The going rates in NYC/SF also have going rates for living expenses. A single person might not mind having a small apartment or sharing with someone - people with families or other priorities can't live like that.

It doesn't have to be telecommute - mid-senior developers can get jobs making $70-$80k in many major areas around the US (Minneapolis, Raleigh, Atlanta, Nashville, are just some I know of off the top of my head). Junior devs with no experience would probably be hard pressed to start off much over $50-60k in those areas, although there may be exceptions.

Consulting may be 'unstable' in that you'll have periods where you're not billing - at first that'll be because you have nothing else lined up. Later, it'll be by choice - you'll scheduled out breaks between engagements, and have a bit of a life in between. And you'll have charged enough, and budgeted your earnings enough such that it won't matter to your day to day living.

I would suggest that if you do the consulting/contracting route, that you be willing to travel. I know people can't always sell a house and move, but most people can get a car or plane to visit clients on a regular basis - it helps a lot to solidify relationships. And I'm surprised at how many people who want to do independent consulting remotely focus way too much on the remote part and not enough on the independent and consulting parts, then wonder why they can't find clients.

Keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities - they sometimes come up in places you wouldn't expect (both geographic and industry).

> A single person might not mind having a small apartment or sharing with someone - people with families or other priorities can't live like that.

Actually, people can. Immigrants are notorious for doing that in the US. If you're willing to rearrange your perceptions of what can be done... you could definitely have 3-5 people in a 800-900 sq. ft apartment. :-)

I thought that might be brought up when I was writing it, and you're right. Yes people can, but not everyone wants to, of course, and it's a pretty big sell to tell someone "pay $2500/month to live in this small apt to be close to company X" when there's far different options out there: bigger space, less pollution, better schools, cheaper food, perhaps closer to other relatives, etc. So yes, it can be done, but I think many companies are doing themselves a disservice by requiring people to be onsite and live nearby or commute long distances.

> I think many companies are doing themselves a disservice by requiring people to be onsite and live nearby or commute long distances.

Me too. But I believe that the cramped apartment is worth keeping open as an option.

I second your post here-- I am currently idled through the end of summer by choice (we're moving and then traveling), but it's not a big deal-- I live in the sticks, but I do drive into Austin, TX pretty frequently. There are indeed a lot of opportunities, but you do have to focus on business development as part of what you're doing; while I don't have a lot of specific offers on my plate for the fall, I'm not worried about finding fun, interesting development projects.

I'm in TX too (not Austin, but another big city). I'm curious how you're liking consulting here and how it's going. Do you find most of your clients in Austin or are they remote? And do you feel like you would be better off just getting a salaried full-time job with benefits given the going rates here for salaries vs. consulting? If you don't mind spilling the beans (I understand if not), how much are you generally able to make (and how much work does making it involve)?

I ask because I'm seriously looking into transitioning into consulting over the next few years. I'm a little dissatisfied with the developer wages in Texas in comparison to the cost of living inside the city (Houston, probably similar to Austin). The wages are great in comparison to the suburbs or further out, but I don't want to commute 1.5-2 hours every day if I can help it.

I can't give you any insight into developer wages. But as far as commuting in the Houston area goes, I used to commute from Fort Bend County to Bush Airport (which really was an absurd commute) and it took me about an hour each way. So if you're trying to keep your commute under 45 minutes each way, you may have a wider area of acceptable areas to live in. Especially if you are thinking of companies inside the loop.

I'll be making about $83k/year this coming June (haven't graduated yet...) working in the Greenway area in the loop. I have an apartment lined up which will actually be in walking distance, so life will be easy. But I'm the sort of person who tends to think too far forward in the future, and I don't want to be renting an apartment my whole life. To me, the sooner one owns a home (and by own I mean own, not a mortgage) the better, as that's one major step towards true financial independence, as it means no rent or mortgage payment at all. And short of striking it rich, the only way to outright own a home early on in life is to make a lot of money with a permanent residence in a very cheap area.

At the same time, I really don't want to commute and don't feel comfortable spending more than double my salary on a house (I don't want to be "house poor").

In striving to satisfy all these desires simultaneously, I'm led to the consideration of consulting in the next few years. A few posters (patio11 and a few others I don't remember) here on HN have convinced me that, if done right, consulting can be a path to financial independence without the unpredictability of the startup "lottery". 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.

> 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.

Here's my case study:

Because of my wife's business (she's a violin teacher with a large, productive studio) and because commuting is not something that I am willing to do, I feel compelled to find clients for remote work.

While it'd be fun to move to Austin and I feel like I could find a stable "good" job there pretty quickly, I like working for myself and ironically (as a musician- It's as profitable side business for me) there are probably more paying music gigs out here in the sticks.

About three years ago, I started out doing brochure marketing sites for a shyster local "social media" salesman who knew very little about web marketing but who loved to sell. At the time, my skills were basically photoshop, the (relatively extensive) programming classes I had as a child in high school, and some knowledge of markup.

I did about 80 sites for the guy over 8 months plus countless odd jobs like domain name transfers, troubleshooting email problems, writing annoying forms (the first routine I wrote that really solved a problem for me was a short bit to take a keyed array of field names and labels to generate/validate/process a form based off those values)... I spent almost all my free time on educating myself about whatever I though would be useful, and built sites for myself and some "on the side" clients in Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress.

I also had to hire and help manage a three-person technical team and deal with all the over promising that the sales guy would do. This was a good education in and of itself.

At the end of that period, I reasoned that the sales guy/owner could sell websites not knowing how they worked, I could probably sell 1/10th the number of websites and double my income. So I sold two local web sites and quit... it didn't hurt that my income was already only around $16/hr with no benefits, so replacing that was not a big deal.

For the next six months, I sold more sites and did a whole lot of cold calling and contacting folks via craigslist, and found an agency client who would pay 20/hr and give me plenty of work, and then using the same process I found an agency who would pay 30/hr, and for the last year I've been at around 65/hr and as busy as I'd like to be.

Mostly, after the first few craigslist clients, my new business comes from personal referrals. It doesn't hurt that I make myself very available, I'm quite friendly, and I do a whole lot of free consultation that I consider to be business development-- people are really happy to direct work to folks who are helpful.

I don't usually sell work directly; mostly I work with agencies in Austin who are marking up what I am doing by around 50%.

I brought in around 65K last year, which is not great, but I also worked a lot of 4-day weeks (if I don't count checking in and doing a half hour of work on a late Friday, or occasionally spending a Sunday reworking something that had to be done ASAP) and I usually am able to do my work in two 3-hour sessions... still no benefits, but I am young and paid off a substantial chunk of the student loans accrued pursuing an unfortunate PhD in English.

By studying consistently, playing with new technologies, and being willing to take on a lot of work on odd jobs troubleshooting stuff, I've gotten to where I can build modules for Magento or aMember, themes and plugins for WordPress, and generally working in clean, patterns that seem elegant and satisfying.

I've learned how to deploy AWS EC2s, how to work on the *nix command lines, git, ssh, enough SQL to understand joins and how to root through a database and make changes to an entire managed site at once... nothing awesome or special, but stuff I find interesting and fun.

My feeling is that I have just started getting a "good" grasp on programming, but if I can keep this going for another couple of years then I might actually get good at programming... I'm getting a little tired of doing marketing oriented work, but to be honest my skills up to the last year really weren't all that unique (other than the fact that people like working with me for whatever various reasons).

I hope that is helpful for you... as I said, I am currently idled for personal reasons and am both cleaning out my development machine, the last couple of projects on my plate... and reevaluating what I'm doing, so it was helpful for me to write all that out.

We are hiring in Tahoe. Housing in nearby areas is far cheaper than the Bay Area. See my profile.