Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that is happening more often in the initial stages. And with a bit of experience/reputation you can command very favorable terms in the early stages of a start-up, at least in the present climate where seed type funding is relatively very easy to come by. Or let's say you don't have much money and you want to avoid early VC due to loss of control and hefty dilution. In the US market, move to a college town (o…
Man, I hear a lot of horror stories about working at Walgreens and the like on Reddit, even among pharmacists I guess that just going there part time as part of a bigger plan will be a lot lower-stress than trying to make a living off it, but that still sounds like a bad idea You might be better off working as an engineer for a year and then saving 3-4 years' worth of minimum wage money instead I had a friend who rea…
And it only works well for younger people without a family, as it'll involve 70-80 hours of work per week (at least in the beginning).
It's a poor(er) person's scenario. It's what I might do if I were 19-21 years old again. Back then, circa 1999-2001, I did a lot of web development contracting to fund building things I wanted to build with the rest of my time. It was a quite unreliable path though, as some months were flush and others were bleak. Poor people in that scenario usually don't have degrees from nice universities, they often can't easily get good engineering jobs early on. And if they have an aversion to working for other people/companies, as I always have, then that complicates the context further (CVS & Co are mostly drone jobs; POS, scan bar codes, greet customers, bag items, stock shelves, repeat; and it might help reduce development burnout, as it gets you away from code and out of the house). If you're young'ish, poor'ish and without a ton of experience, it provides a highly workable avenue to go after building a thing you want to build, self-funded, while cutting out the need for early outside capital (the need to give up a piece of your soul to the sharks).