Comment by wooUK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wooUK | Hacker News Reader

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I was also in a similar position as you as a valued lead dev with 15 years of experience working in a company that didn’t want to embrace newer technologies (stuck on WebForms, not moving to MVC, etc). I was not interested in progressing into middle management and had hit the ceiling with regards pay so I became a contractor. I taught myself MVC got an initial bum-on-a-seat noddy contract which was doing MVC CRUD screens for 3 months. Then for the next contract I combined my wealth of experience with my new found proven MVC credentials and got a lovely MVC contract at a senior level earning much more than I have ever earned before. Contracting is not for everyone but I’ve been doing it for 5 years now and still consider it one of my better career moves.

That sounds like a good path as well. Thanks for sharing your personal story; sounds like it would be worth it to take a temporary paycut to gain some experience.

I don't think you need to consider a pay cut. It's easy to look at HN and think that all of the good jobs are in new technologies and your experience is worthless. That's not the case.

Take a week or two to build a handful of sites in ASP.Net MVC with Entity Framework, so you're familiar with the basics. At that point you'd be marketable for a lot of current senior .Net positions. Experience with .Net is more relevant to most companies than MVC-specific experience. Add in your SQL Server skills for when Entity Framework doesn't cover exactly what you need and you can almost write your own ticket.

How are you finding your contracts?

Good old fashioned foot work. Cold email the places you know that use your tech stack.

Introduce yourself and what you have to offer. Show that you understand their business and some of the technical problems they may experience.

Ask for referrals after contracts complete.

Open source contributions and presenting at industry conferences go a long way to establishing an air of expertise; carry yourself like an expert and you almost always will get a second look from a potential client.

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