>but software companies are not willing to hire people my age for good reason I doubt it. I've hired two 18 year olds to work remotely for me, one of whom does

>but software companies are not willing to hire people my age for good reason I doubt it. I've hired two 18 year olds to work remotely for me, one of whom does excellent quantitative analysis I've yet to see out of anyone I've employed with an advanced degree. Companies are by and large very stupid. Don't devalue yourself or your skills. Craigslist is decent. One of the best things you can do is invest in a Github or open source portfolio where you demonstrate proficiency with various technologies, methods, and algorithms. It'll be easy for me (or other hiring managers) to look at it, ring you up, ask you questions to make sure you didn't fully steal all the work, and task you with some basic contract work to see if it's a good fit. Then we go from there. I got a lot of recruiting requests after I contributed a pretty solid amount of documentation and debugging work towards Facebook's HipHop (now hhvm, sort of anyway) repository and project. You won't get paid upfront, obviously, but consider it a good investment. Hiring managers are more increasingly wanting to see proof that you can do work, especially independently. Good luck. And if you're handy with R-stats, quant work, machine learning, and maybe even some Python/shell programming (have an application that could use some freelance work), hit me up. Info in my bio.