I love the personal acomodation they make for developers. Althought I am more for not having corporate overlords and I see more of an advantages of NOT being an employee and instead doing your own consulting. For once, you dont need permissions, no title, or certification (althought helps) or special badge or medal can make you a developer expert. So you can start with no money and just use your time and work to gain the expertise needed and become a reference.
Once an expert, looking for clients is relatively easy, most business need IT, so making IT even thought might not be your ideal task, can find enough demand to get paid for it.
Once you have a client book you can rely on them and just work on specializing or jump to the next big thing. Providing support is great, but actually building the next new shinny thing might also be something that you can do if you want.
Another thing is that the industry is pretty open so you can find Linux user groups, Cloud, Bitcoin-Blockchain, Google Developer groups or Oracle Database user group. Really there is no shortage for special interest groups specially in larger cities. And is all global, you can go with your skills and build for companies in Borneo or Sweden or Japan. It's all the same. This flexibility is what makes the IT industry like no other.
I also prefer to not being an employee and work on "my stuff" instead. Having a background as a programmer is really helpful today.
Yep, the industry is really open. It makes things much easier for both - single developers and companies itself.
The best way to start your own clientelle is to work on weekends on side apps or just make it stronger and stronger until it can be a product. I think thats how many Sun employees 'retired' from Sun Microsystem and became Iphone App developers and eventually made very popular apps. It was a popular story when the App Store first came about. Now you have Android, IOS, Nintendo and so many software publishing platforms and you can just get the internet to pay you to code.
Another popular story was the creator of a silly bird game (flappy bird) and was able to make 50k a day. Enough to retired for life in Vietnam where the average yearly salary is only 16k usd a year.