I fail to understand your study status. The point of going to CS studies, is to obtain CS background. Nobody can expect to have a CS background before going t

I fail to understand your study status. The point of going to CS studies, is to obtain CS background. Nobody can expect to have a CS background before going to CS studies. On the other hand, once you've passed thru CS studies, if successful (ie. if you've learned anything), you should have this CS background. In anycase, computer science and practical software engineering are two things, unfortunately. Thanks to the Internet, it shouldn't matter too much where you are located, when you want to work in IT. As I see it, you have to distinguish two different things: - earning a living or financial independence, to be able to feed, clothe and house yourself, as well as provide yourself with required computer hardware, electric energy and internet connectivity. - growing in knowledge and abilities in computer science and software engineering you're interested in, to be able to develop the projects you'd want to develop. It may be possible to collude those two different things into a single activity, this is what is advocated by "do what you love" (and love what you do), meaning, that we are lucky enough that doing programming can also bring bread. But as you've realized in this startup, professionnal work is not always fulfilling the brains, only the stomac, and even... Also, of course, there's the question of being employee, where you don't get to decide much about your work, and the distribution of its product. Therefore being a free lance or an entrepreneur is indeed an option that may seem favorable. But in that case, you will now have to deal with customers and while you may reject unwanted customers, you will still have to work with the constraints contracted with the customers you choose. This is not necessarily better a situation than being employed in a great company, but at least, you'll have more freedom and more decision power to what, when and how you'll do things. While you may find local customers, and be happy servicing them, if it is difficult given the economic situation of your area, you can also choose to address international markets. This is easily enough done thanks to the Internet. For example, you may develop and sell smartphone applications (iOS and/or Android). Then it may be an advantage of being in a third world country, where living costs are much cheaper, because a dollar earned selling a smartphone app will go much father where you are than in the Silicon Valley. But this requires investing the time needed to develop this application, and with the risk that it may not be entirely succesfull. In the meantime, you may need to earn some money to seed this development. Another way would be to find remote customers thru the Internet, and work remotely. There are web sites designed to match customers and free lance providers, such as https://www.freelancer.com/ https://www.freelancer.com/ and a lot of others.