You can sell carpentry work directly to people in your community as an individual, and make a profit on every customer. Programming needs a larger customer base to break even, and you generally won't be selling software to individuals.
You can get started with programming for $15 for a monitor/mouse/keyboard from Goodwill and $50 for a PC off ebay (or $125 for a new N150 minipc, which are insanely powerful). Startup capital costs are negligible next to even (first-world) poverty living costs.
Sure, but how are you going to find customers? Within weeks of beginning carpentry you can make useful products that people will pay for. Even using less than $100 of hand tools (A saw, a chisel, and sanding + polishing can make useful and beautiful kitchen tools.) How long to go from beginner programmer to break-even revenue? Maybe if you're really smart and hit it big, at least six months. For most people closer to 2-6 years.
My answer to this question, having been a victim of this economic crash, is bug bounty programs. Chaos is a ladder. All this outsourcing, layoffs, and AI slop is an opportunity. That Apple AirPlay wormable RCE CVE is an indicator of how bad things have already gotten. It's pathetic how far even Apple has fallen in this race to the bottom.
These companies are running on fumes. They cut to the bone, through the bone, and everything is being held together by a thread.
But security research is really far removed from the skillset of a startup app developer. Realistically, even if you were capable of learning, which most aren't, it'd take longer for you to get up to speed than it would take for the market to improve.
The more relevant answer would be to bootstrap an MVP and pitch it to investors to get funding to scale. There's no piecework model for consumers like "install can lights" or "build a she-shed."
