I think that is the most important essay pg ever wrote, honestly. Don't read "hacker" as "programmer", read "hacker" as "maker of valuable things." Yes, you can make astoundingly more than your day job salary by making valuable things. Maybe not $3 million -- though that's less than what MicroGooFaceZon will pay per hacker at a talent acquisition these days -- but certainly more than the day job salary.

I'm 29 this week. The market wage for a 29 year old programmer in this region is about $35k annualized, or under $12 an hour. I worked for that in 2010. Also in 2010, after quitting, I did consulting work at a variety of price points. One of those price points was $200 an hour. It was in the middle of the pack, and I would need a non-monetary reason to work for $200 today, but let's take that as a starting point.

The difference between $12 and $200 an hour was not a sudden quantum leap in my programming skill. It wasn't all that spiffy to begin with -- many of you are better programmers. The biggest single difference was that I moved from a place where programming skill provides fairly little value at the margin -- writing CRUD apps to universities to e.g. print out the list of students in a particular class -- to places where I can credibly sit down with a decisionmaker and show him why N weeks of work stands to make the firm a few million dollars. Often, this translates into the decisionmaker personally making a million dollars. ("A 5% increase in conversion rates does this to the value of your stock options.") This is a nice place to be in negotiating.

Another thing which changed since I "negotiated" pay at $12 an hour: I started negotiating seriously, based on the value I could reasonably be expected to provide. The best single tactical suggestion was from Thomas (tptacek): rather than compromising on rate, compromise on scope. If $20,000 is too dear for the project budget, rather than offering to cut prices 25%, offer to cut scope 25%. OK then, no problem, we won't do that review of your email autoresponders this time. Bam, $5,000 saved. (Of course, after the "how many millions this is going to make you" discussion, price in thousands often becomes less than material.)

Does this carry over directly to product businesses? Yes, though again, you're not going to double your income because of a quantum leap in programming ability. If you succeed, it will likely be a combination of ability to make things (not to be underestimated: most people can't, after all) with a plethora of soft skills which are very difficult to find in a single person or small group of people. If you do it yourself, you get to keep the salary of the employee/consultant a firm would have to hire to get the benefit.

Bingo cards, for example, is really, really no great shakes in the programming department. The lion's share of my (modest) compensation for that isn't for programming ability, it is for identifying and alleviating a huge unmet need in the bingo cards publishing industry, which I use to sell a complement (my software). I publish more bingo cards on more topics than every "real" educational publisher worldwide combined.

And even then, BCC has many suboptimal choices about the business model. One big takeaway from bootstrapping AR is that recurring revenue -- the SAAS model -- really, really rocks. (More to come on that sometime when I get a day free to blog.)