If you want to conserve time so that you can eat while doing non-programming things you really enjoy, I'd concentrate on increasing earning efficiency and flexibility.

A better choice would be building up a consulting practice. At the very least, consulting gives you more control over the times and places where you work. In some cases, if you can develop a needed but hard to find expertise, you can charge a lot for your time. Integration of management, design and technical skills is one combination, but I'm sure there are others, including niche technical specialties.

If you were to go that route, you might begin by taking on side jobs while you stick to your day job. When you are confident that you can get enough work to live off of, only then consider replacing your day job with going back to school or a non-code project. This strategy lets you build up juggling and self-employment skills as you go.

As for "writing a project" - it is a lot more work than it might look. If the project is successful it will grow. It is very hard to keep innovative start-up projects small and successful. If it grows and earns you money, you will need money, people, and management skills. Finding this eats up time when you least have it - you are busy trying to meet customer needs! Codebases are quick to write, but maintaining an extensive project codebase through many versions quickly becomes very time consuming. Test beds have to be maintained. As projects grow in complexity old build tools become irrelevant and new build frameworks need to be set up. The time involved grows exponentially. During growth periods human and financial resources generally fall short of demand for services. Time becomes their replacement and the work can quickly become 24/7.

All of this can be great fun, but only if you (a) profoundly enjoy the project itself and really, really want to share its benefits with the world or (b) are extraordinary long-visioned and are willing to spend 3-5 years making something you only maybe care about your main thing in hopes that you maybe will earn enough to be financially independent at the end. It can happen, but more often than not it doesn't. The common wisdom (I'm not sure what study backs this) is that on average only one in 10 VC funded projects make it to a successful exit (defined as buy-back, profitable trade-sale, or IPO). Small organically grown business start-ups fair better but the survival rate is not good - 1 in 3 die after the first year, 50% after four years (see here (courtesy of SBA). Small businesses, however, rarely provide enough of a windfall to make you financially independent.

Best, beth

In reply to Re: An alternative path by ELISHEVA
in thread An alternative path by spx2

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.