It seems every day someone or other discovers this, and the sheer magnitude of money there is to be made (and the bonus: having fun while doing it). I discovered it early this year, when I realized I was only one of two open-source developers in the entire world with my specific expertise... and the other apparently has been rather difficult to hire.

- Code exactly what your client wants, not what you think the world wants. -

I had to point this out. Having been a leader on a good amount of projects that involved programming, I have completely lost count of the number of times someone didn't do their job and coded something completely different because they thought they were superman and could save the world by coding something else or coding it differently than what we thought. It turns out when their submission goes to be implemented, it doesn't work at all with the rest of the system.

As someone looking to hire people like this, I whole-heartedly agree. The one thing - make sure that you write for both the technical and the suit audiences.

It's my job to find resources and present them to the technical team, who make the final decisions. But they decide from what I present to them. If you can't speak suit, you can't get to the techs, who make the hiring call. (But the check has my signature on it, so make sure that you're nice to both of us.)

What areas are ripe for this sort of consulting? (Ignoring the fact that if you go into an area to make money rather than because you're rabidly interested in it, it's probably a bad idea.)

It seems there are two characteristics that would make an area ripe for this -- companies needing it badly, and some (real or perceived) barrier to entry that keeps legions of geeks from learning it.

Any other likely candidates?

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An inspiring article - so are the comments from darkshikari!

Excellent article.