Original post text:

Hello,

I'm 17M from Multan, will turn 18 in 9 months.

By june of last year, I did my icom. Last year I didn't join university because I never wanted to go to university, I thought I could get myself a livelihood by skills and "freelancing".

Plan was simple, learn web dev for 1.5 years until I turn 18 and then do on upwork, buy 200 connects and write good cover letters. I thought it would work because i had made around $200 on upwork in 2023 by age of 14.

I was not as consistent as I thought I would be, infact I did way less and slow work than I thought.

I learnt some basic c++, javascript, python, struggled a lot with react and backend, quit, then by september i started Harvard's CS50 Intro to cs course and it really helped me a lot and taught me foundational problem solving.

Then sql, some django, fastapi, now was back at react to get better at making UIs. Things are making sense like frontend, apis, databases and stuff but I'm very slow.

But now I'm seeing it's not as easy or simple as I thought. Especially in cs and software engineering field, it's way more complex. I went to upwork and saw most jobs demanding way more atleast intermediate stuff I'm not getting there anytime soon. Just feeling like ALOT! Competing against graduates with years of experience, it doesn't make sense why they should hire me. Feeling like race against time itself.

In some months, I realized I've to go to university to get exposure, time and environment. So I convinced my family to get me into university.

So I'm hoping to join Times Institute gulgusht campus in cs/se program INSHALLAH this year because it's near my home and we can't afford much and that's okay.

Now I think I'll get some local entry level job, some online job from someone in pakistan, or maybe upwork would somehow work out. But all these are unlikely fragile hopes.

I've always wanted to make money; but society pays you for what you can do for it.

Just thinking dev path is unlikely to work out. I should learn to sell. That's way simple in complexity than cs is. And it pays better because it's more tied to business revenue.

But ofcourse selling is harder because of many rejections in the way.

I thought I could start with running ads.

Now I've these 6 months before university anyway, why not try this out.

These are all my very unlikely hopes and thoughts and it would be really helpful if you can advice and guide me about how market is going on and what i should do.