Comment by Roark66
16 days ago
My path was opposite...
Started in early 200x sysadmining Linux boxes. Moved to an MS gold partner that started with 6 employees and ended up with 45 by the time I left. So you can imagine the kind of work and solutions we did, started with mom and pop, ended up doing email systems for a 20k user system, also picked up vmware/sphere, perl scripting a big monitoring system for over a year and hacking old binary only legacy software to extract data, lots of extremely varied short term projects.
Then got onto the "Solutions Architect" career path. Did that for 6 years ending up in a big telco. I ended up being bored out of my mind just doing designs/tech sales/delegating all the "real work".
I decided to go into Devops and switch to contracting at the same time. I now realise that was over 10 years ago now.
I couldn't be happier with my job since then. It's 100% remote, It's hands on troubleshooting when things go horribly wrong, it's solving hard problems with automation and in last 2 years lots of AI when the clients decide to rip out a huge amount of integration and switch clouds/other software and so on every 2 years :-)
It pays a little less and definitely has less prestige than "Solutions" for a huge telco (and I no longer wear a suit at work), but I can definitely see myself being happy doing that for next 10 years (if the role still exists then).
How can I pay you to tell me your secret path to consulting in DevOps?
I'd love to do this or SRE type consulting. However, every organization I've worked with (including finance and government) use big name big business consulting shops, supposedly for liability reasons, and it would be impossible to get a small consulting contract unless you had family members in the C suite.
Moreover, what stops that remote devops from taking place with highly qualified Hungarian or Polish or Portuguese engineers for 40 percent of the rate?
To a first approximation, no big company wants to deal with independent contractors.
My two anecdotes:
About a decade ago, I was leading a project and the director wished he could have “another me”. I told him about a guy who I had worked with who would be good. He wanted $80/hour. My director liked him. He wouldn’t pay my friend $80/hour as an independent contractor. But he would pay a consulting company $110/hour to hire him and then he work for us and he would still get his $80/hour.
Second anecdote: when I was between jobs for a month, a former CTO wanted me to do a side project for him - same situation, he wouldn’t pay me directly because of liability reasons what I wanted. But I reached out to the same consulting company and made the same deal. That went through immediately.
> Moreover, what stops that remote devops from taking place with highly qualified Hungarian or Polish or Portuguese engineers for 40 percent of the rate?
If your value add is only tactics and not strategy, you’re going to have a hard time getting decent rates consulting or even working for consulting companies.
I work in consulting now. I get paid - decently - while I do hands on work, I can also lead projects and do more strategy type projects.