Her initial reaction:
"If you had a regular job and you didn’t have all that travel time, would you make better money in the end?" She gave a small laugh. "But I love what I do. So I try not to think about that."
Fast forward:
She has been auditioning to teach at new studios and e-mailing former clients to offer private lessons, and she added four hours a week of office work for Karma Kids Yoga.
That's what won't happen to most of us. Rather than filling out the form for food assistance, we will be filling out recruiters info sheets describing "a time I worked as part of a team" and rating our C++ skills on a scale of 1-10.
And as for the lifestyle choice part of your criticism, this site is very much a glass house in which to throw that particular brick; if you're working on a startup and doing your work in a popular scripting language, that's a lifestyle choice; a more financially rational decision would be to go and fix someone's J2EE monstrosity of an accounting/ERP project too big to fail.
And if some clever person comes up with a machine that can crank out code to spec, better and with fewer errors than human programmers... Some of us will adapt to the new situation and carry on as Dev/PM dealing with AI instead of coworkers, but some percentage will be left high and dry.
She is being criticized because she refuses to enter a different market even though her current market has collapsed.
I'm also not criticizing the lifestyle choices. I'm criticizing the unwillingness to reevaluate those choices when circumstances change.
Did you mean "Rather than" or "Before"?
Food stamps. iPhone. The incongruity of that alone should be enough to excuse any unwarranted judgement, if there has even been any in the first place.
It's not impossible that her services are systematically undervalued currently; after all in the real world markets are not at all rational.
Then I read the article; now I'm disgusted, with the attitudes on display here.
I hate to break it to you guys but what's happening to her could happen to you. To put it in terms of a startup she got into a booming market and was moderately successful, when the economy started tanking she invested in improvements that would help her differentiate her offering in an increasingly competitive market. Then the customers went away.
From reading the article it sounds like she works pretty hard and has to go to her customers unlike self important web developers (like me and thee) who can work from the comfort of our chairs without needing to get up if we don't want to.
And as for the iphone, from my reading of the article it sounds like that was acquired when it represented less than a days net revenue.
If you think it can't happen to you because you believe in Ayn Rand and program in Ruby; well guess what, it can; and if it comes down to holding on to your principles or feeding your kid, you will be filling out the form for food assistance and be glad it's there for you.