Lower Florida Keys here, haven't had a job within 300 miles of my home since 2003. Although I've lived in a few large cities with decent job markets, I settled

Lower Florida Keys here, haven't had a job within 300 miles of my home since 2003. Although I've lived in a few large cities with decent job markets, I settled here for reasons of personal choice and sanity. Like the author of this piece, I'm utterly unwilling to move (I'd sooner change professions; I'll be a USCG licensed boat captain soon). I understand the tradeoffs involved, and I work in a partnership of like-minded individuals around the country. The partnership gives us healthcare and retirement benefits, while the senior partner in LA has physical access to a large job market to keep us stocked with contracts, if we need more work. Yes, there are tradeoffs. I probably won't advance in your company or have a prestigious resume, even though I've been working on Internet technologies since the early 1990s. I don't want to be a founder or first employee, I want to be your first contractor. You can even meet me, too; I've been known to fly out to conferences and company meetings. For my part, I use the partnership's Redmine ticket system religiously, and the customer can see the solid results I deliver by working for the agreed-upon amount of hours (or more!) per day/week/month, and if the customer doesn't like the results (experience suggests most do, but some are better suited to cheap stuff from India), then they do not renew the contract. Besides my zipcode, I get an interesting choice of working situations. I've been on conference calls while I had two divers in the water getting lobster. A week ago, my office was on the tailgate of the truck as my wife and I worked blue crab fishing holes. I may even be on the sailboat moored near a coral patch reef, a few miles out to sea (there is LTE up to 5nm out to sea generally, around here). I don't tell all clients about this; Some are cool with it, others would prefer to think I sit in an office all day. It doesn't matter, because in the end I'm serious about productivity, regardless of my surroundings (and this is why you won't generally find me trying to work from the countless bars down here, experience suggests it's bad for productivity, to put it mildly). It isn't for every company, and it isn't for every developer. But it certainly works very well for some companies and some developers.