Context: I'm a JavaScript developer working a nice day job, and I just keep hearing (in stories and comments on HN and elsewhere) about engineers who moved into freelance consulting and make hundreds of dollars an hour, and I feel like a chump getting <$60/hour at this day job.
But I'm only 23, I've only been programming for 5 years, and while I'm decent at what I do, I'm not a whiz and most importantly I'm rather slow to grok new code bases and infer the relationships between arbitrarily designed system components. I understand the technologies I work with pretty well, but I have a hard time understanding what people are trying to accomplish a lot of the time.
Ye of HN with more experience, could I consult anyway? Do I have to be really, really good? If you've done it, what was your experience with consulting? What skills served you the best?
But I'm only 23, I've only been programming for 5 years, and while I'm decent at what I do, I'm not a whiz and most importantly I'm rather slow to grok new code bases and infer the relationships between arbitrarily designed system components. I understand the technologies I work with pretty well, but I have a hard time understanding what people are trying to accomplish a lot of the time.
Ye of HN with more experience, could I consult anyway? Do I have to be really, really good? If you've done it, what was your experience with consulting? What skills served you the best?