My biggest mistake for most of my youth was that I valued technical complexity over business utility. As a result, I kept moving from one trendy thing to the next one in technology, skills and domains.
Very late did I realize that putting simple php scripting to good and right use is enough to make the same money as trendy job and skill hopping. (on average ... i.e. ignoring outliers)
Can you tell me more about simple php scripting? I enjoyed php when I was new to the industry a while back, but do you mean that someone can be good at php and just work contractually and actually get by still? That’s pretty incredible and tempting tbh.
Sorry ... the message I was trying to convey was to focus on business value from any technical skill and figure out a smart way to monetize it. The technical medium isn't particularly relevant.
A small script can (has) paid $1K in an hr due to the business value. This is an outlier and isn't repeatable due to the limitations of the approach. So, skill selling isn't particularly scalable ... value selling is scalable.
However, there are more experienced hackers on this forum who have done such stuff way more meaningfully and at scale. That can be a topic for an Ask HN and will likely gather lots of insights if it gets momentum.
PS: Pls don't mistake this as a get rich quick idea. The message is to figure out and deliver business value (functionality, time, organization, entertainment) ... what have you ... and figure out a way to deliver it through a technical medium (be it HTML/CSS, Node, PHP, Rust, Scala, Python, R ... or whatever). PHP can do it too!
There are many things to learn and become good at. Technical prowess in isolation is surely not one of them.
Very late did I realize that putting simple php scripting to good and right use is enough to make the same money as trendy job and skill hopping. (on average ... i.e. ignoring outliers)