I am projected to break 6 figures in revenue by December as an independent consultant.
I was interested in web design as a kid. Built my first website when I was 11. Back then, there was no facebook or myspace — those wouldn’t be created until 2 years before I learned the basics of HTML and CSS. There really wasn’t a well-fleshed our career path in the web either — e-commerce hadn’t really blown up back then either. So I was just genuinely interested in the ability to publish for the web.
I learned by going to the library and borrowing books that teach you by you following along. But still, it was mostly just HTML and CSS, no JS or any real programming yet.
It wouldn’t be until college that I’d pick up programming. Not that I majored in CS or SWE or anything — I majored in Biological Science and Studio Art, wanting you become a medical illustrator.
Nobody that I was around ever told me that “hey, you should check out CS”. It was always presented as this complicated and difficult subject. Something that was for others, but not for me. Much harder than Biology =p (they were wrong, lol, Biology is harder IMO, but I am genuinely interested in the topic and continue to learn more about it too)
During college I got involved in organizations outside of the classroom, and this was right around the time when facebook was a few years old and social media was emerging as a tool that can be used to market a cause and actually raise funds. The first viral video campaign came out this year, for the Ora Brush. So I ended up making a website for one of our events, linking it with google payments etc, promoting it on facebook via a video shared among local groups, and it registered people, kind of like what eventbrite does now. We were able to raise a couple thousand dollars the first year, and ~$20K total by junior year. So that experience exposed me to some of the cool things I could do with my web skills and I focused more intensively on learning to program more.
That landed me my first software engineering internship my Junior year, where although I had no experience with the backend programming language that they used I was able to pick it up and ship a finished admin client by the end of the internship. I was offered a full-time position as a software engineer at the completion of the internship, although I did not have a CS / SWE degree. However, one thing that I discovered about myself during the internship was that working a desk job all day made me very depressed. Aside from QA sessions and design briefings with management I hardly interacted with people during my internship, due to the nature of the engineering job. And it felt like taking the job would be me sitting behind a desk in front of a computer all day for the rest of my life, not really interacting with many people... and for some reason that was very depressing and unsettling to me, personally. So instead of seeking employment I decided to go the freelance / consultant route, and try to build my own clientele.
It took ~4 years to actually get any real consulting traction though. Partly due to some false starts in startup land... So I’m not sure if I would recommend it. I think for many people, the happy ending would have been getting a full time offer before graduating college. And the advice there for someone in their early 20’s would just be to network, get involved in things, build a portfolio, and seek out internships. An internship is basically an extended interview with a potential full time job offer on the other end... But unfortunately my particulars made that somehow undesirable, and so I decided to go the hard way.
Today I consult with business owners and partner with design agencies, helping businesses in e-commerce bring their business requirements to life. Sometimes it’s just giving general advice on how to build stuff, what they should be considering during the design process, and the rest of the time it’s programming. It’s all remote. Although many people have given remote work a thumbs down during the pandemic, I’m happy with the flexibility.