"Connections". You worked on connections to get in a YC startup (an amazingly small number of potential opportunities in the universe of opportunities).
I'm suspecting that you had a hankering to work at a "startup" and that colored your behaviour. I know many people without any major credentials who are doing just fine in freelancing, making good money doing what they like to do.
Never bother with odesk - you wouldn't have gotten a YC-startup gig on odesk - why look for anything else there? Work your network/connections - if you don't have any, build them up - that's what takes time and effort.
I also suspect many people on this forum (and on specific topics) are 'startup' focused. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I do feel it sets a lot of people up for failure ("fail fast! fail often!") when many of them aren't psychologically or financially prepared for so such failures. We rarely read about the failures of people who attempt 'startups'. Even when we do, it's often a post-mortem look from someone who's now writing from a position of success, reviewing their own failures in public for others to see. The implicit (sometimes explicit) message is "see, even if you fail, you can be successful later in the same space".
That's exactly the issue. I didn't have that. At all. Before that I just hacked on stuff because I thought it was fun / interesting. I also came from a tiny country without a tech scene.
>I'm suspecting that you had a hankering to work at a "startup" and that colored your behaviour.
I do love startups. But I before starting my job search I spent about a month trying to figure out freelancing. In the end I decided against it (for reasons listed above) and went onto what I -- at the time -- considered the second best option: employment.
It was a great success. Instead of trying to cold-email people for dev-scraps that are so un-important that they'll let someone with no degree and no industry experience and no references work on it vs. someone with a CS degree + 5-10 years of industry experience + heaps of people with impressive business titles who can recommend his work and doing whatever crappy work I can get my hands on just to "work on connections", I now get to work every day among a set of incredibly smart, compassionate, warm, successful people who want to invest in me and want me to become the best programmer and contributor that I can be.
That's why I chose the employment route: Once you're in, you're in and you can focus on what you love and growing yourself instead of constantly having to worry to put food / contracts on the table.
I'm suspecting that you had a hankering to work at a "startup" and that colored your behaviour. I know many people without any major credentials who are doing just fine in freelancing, making good money doing what they like to do.
Never bother with odesk - you wouldn't have gotten a YC-startup gig on odesk - why look for anything else there? Work your network/connections - if you don't have any, build them up - that's what takes time and effort.
I also suspect many people on this forum (and on specific topics) are 'startup' focused. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I do feel it sets a lot of people up for failure ("fail fast! fail often!") when many of them aren't psychologically or financially prepared for so such failures. We rarely read about the failures of people who attempt 'startups'. Even when we do, it's often a post-mortem look from someone who's now writing from a position of success, reviewing their own failures in public for others to see. The implicit (sometimes explicit) message is "see, even if you fail, you can be successful later in the same space".
Good luck to you on your journey.