It hasn't always been stable but once you get enough work under your belt things start to get easier in that regard.  My main advice to anyone who wants to work as a freelancer or as a programmer in general is to make a portfolio of projects etc.  The easiest way to sell yourself as a programmer to an employer is to just show them that you can do the job and visual/flashy projects help a lot towards that end (even if you want to do systems/backend programming).  Just fill up a github repository of work and contributions.