The last thing you want to do is game dev. They overwork you and underpay you. You pay the “passion tax”.
There is a huge difference between “staff augmentation” where you are just another more disposable cog in the wheel and strategic consulting where they hire you for your specialized experience and you are in the room with people who contribute budgets. Staff augmentation is a shit show.
I have most of the prerequisites at this point to do alright at independent consulting - skillset, network, credentials, customer facing experience, a little sales experience, etc and I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. I like having benefits, a steady paycheck, and the backing of an entire organization.
As a husband and a dad, do you really want the hustle, inconsistency and lack of benefits of freelancing? What special skillset do you have that would make companies want to hire you?
As far as my history - currently 51.
- 1986 - started coding as a hobby in the sixth grade in AppleSoft Basic and assembly
- 1996 - 2002 - first job out of college and changed jobs once in 1999 doing C but twiddling across multiple architectures
- 2002 - 2008 - career stagnated and became an “expert beginner” at my second job
- 2008 - 2016 - changed jobs three times and became a competent enterprise developer. Regardless of title, I was pulling well defined tickets off the board. I was a “mid level developer”. I stuck mostly in the .Net ecosystem.
- 2016 - led my first major initiative at my sixth job as the first technical hire by a then new CTO and led the integration of various acquisitions as the PE firm was trying to do the whole rollup small businesses and IPO. I belated discovered AWS. My first job with what I would consider “senior level responsibility” and dealing with strategy
- 2018 - I was the second technical hire of a then new CTO of a startup. Two non technical brothers founded the company and used an external consulting company. They found PMF and wanted to bring development in house and be “cloud native”. I became the de facto cloud architect + development and got all of my practical experience with AWS.
2020 - hired at AWS Professional Services - their consulting arm (full time) and pivoted to specializing in “cloud native development” consulting half strategy/half hands on in a mid level (L5) role.
2024 - staff consultant working at a third party cloud consulting firm (full time). Some pre-sales support, some doing everything myself from leading the project and doing the work (small projects), to leading larger projects and a little managing style consulting.
There is a huge difference between “staff augmentation” where you are just another more disposable cog in the wheel and strategic consulting where they hire you for your specialized experience and you are in the room with people who contribute budgets. Staff augmentation is a shit show.
I have most of the prerequisites at this point to do alright at independent consulting - skillset, network, credentials, customer facing experience, a little sales experience, etc and I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. I like having benefits, a steady paycheck, and the backing of an entire organization.
As a husband and a dad, do you really want the hustle, inconsistency and lack of benefits of freelancing? What special skillset do you have that would make companies want to hire you?
As far as my history - currently 51.
- 1986 - started coding as a hobby in the sixth grade in AppleSoft Basic and assembly
- 1996 - 2002 - first job out of college and changed jobs once in 1999 doing C but twiddling across multiple architectures
- 2002 - 2008 - career stagnated and became an “expert beginner” at my second job
- 2008 - 2016 - changed jobs three times and became a competent enterprise developer. Regardless of title, I was pulling well defined tickets off the board. I was a “mid level developer”. I stuck mostly in the .Net ecosystem.
- 2016 - led my first major initiative at my sixth job as the first technical hire by a then new CTO and led the integration of various acquisitions as the PE firm was trying to do the whole rollup small businesses and IPO. I belated discovered AWS. My first job with what I would consider “senior level responsibility” and dealing with strategy
- 2018 - I was the second technical hire of a then new CTO of a startup. Two non technical brothers founded the company and used an external consulting company. They found PMF and wanted to bring development in house and be “cloud native”. I became the de facto cloud architect + development and got all of my practical experience with AWS.
2020 - hired at AWS Professional Services - their consulting arm (full time) and pivoted to specializing in “cloud native development” consulting half strategy/half hands on in a mid level (L5) role.
2024 - staff consultant working at a third party cloud consulting firm (full time). Some pre-sales support, some doing everything myself from leading the project and doing the work (small projects), to leading larger projects and a little managing style consulting.