Comment by billy99k
6 hours ago
"Consulting/contractor becomes default - Full-time employment becomes rare; most devs work project-to-project like other creative industries"
I'm in the tech industry and have been doing this for 12+ years now. In the beginning, it was because I wanted to live overseas for a few years, without a break in my career.
Now, it's about survival. I buy my own health insurance (me and my family) in the marketplace every year (so I'm not tied to an employer), work with multiple clients (I never really have to worry about getting laid off), and make much more than a FTE.
While all my friends in tech are getting laid off or constantly in fear of getting laid off, I don't have to worry.
I also find that because I touch so many different technologies, I have to turn down work. I turned down a company last year, that wanted me in-house and one this year that would have been too demanding on my schedule.
It's also flexible and always remote.
I was consulting like this too, but my wife also had a full time corporate job. It all kind of ended with her team having layoffs around the same time that most of my clients figured out that they could use AI to do most of my work at a tiny fraction of my rate. I had built up a lot of experience working with oil and gas software, and I thought that was pretty solid, but it's hard to compete with $20 a month. Anyway, after all that, I found a stable job with good health insurance.
Have been doing this for ~3 years as a way to bring into the industry. Has more or less worked (to that end), but the art of finding + maintaining a pipeline of potential clients while working contracts full-time to sustain a family is.. difficult. (And now that I'm qualified to get a real job in the industry, many raise eyebrows at the plethora of short-term contracts).
I'm happy to hear it's been working out for you, though. How do you manage/succeed?
How did you get into this? How would you recommend transitioning from FTE to this life?
Are you a one-person shop? How do you find clients?
Almost always they start by having connections that hire them (old colleagues, former friends, etc.), building out those connections (conference talks, doing really good work, writing high quality blogs), and then if you're lucky, some word of mouth.
Good points - admittedly, I didn’t put enough effort into building connections through different pipelines back when I was contracting. Upwork and a few personal connections were my sole sources.
It just felt really difficult to do both the engineering work while trying to do customer development at the same time.
The fact that OP has been able to do this for so long, while supporting a family, piqued my interest.
Can confirm.