Comment by mancerayder
17 days ago
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.