"You are more valuable to your employer than they are to you". That is, once you prove you're good at writing software, you can spend the rest of your career p

"You are more valuable to your employer than they are to you". That is, once you prove you're good at writing software, you can spend the rest of your career picking and choosing between employers as they suit your whim. There is very little you can do to sabotage your ability to find good gigs in this market (again, once you have established yourself as capable of doing the work). That means you can treat work as a source of capital to bootstrap the rest of your life, picking it up and dropping it as need be. As you get more valuable, you can ramp down the number of months you need to work to save up the runway you need to last out the rest of the year. And you can spent the rest of your time doing whatever you want. Personally, I spent a dozen years of that extra time traveling the world, climbing rocks, and building the software product business that's finally letting me skip the "employer" part entirely. Start doing that when you're 25 and you will have a very fun 30s and 40s. Good luck!