Ask HN: Self-employed devs, how do you plan/think about your career?
I take for granted that we won't be able to keep up with the last tech stacks and that we will eventually need to find a way out.
What real options do we have?
What real options do we have?
I currently work as a self-employed independent contractor in the cloud-engineering and devops automation sector in the greater Boston area. I have a strong focus on minimizing cost while making sure the customer achieves that they intend to, and that has given me an edge over fellow contractors that like to drop a known pattern in place and call it a day.
Here's an example.
I had a meeting a few days ago where I was asked to optimize a section of a product that made no sense to me (eliminating DNS and SSL tunnel start-up times). I have a firm believe in how I operate that I do not want to waste my customer's time, money, or my time in the work that I do.
I came back with a data-driven response showing other areas of the product with low hanging fruit that got seconds of time back instead of milliseconds on the area they wanted. I implemented one solution as an example, and landed several more months of contract work with them as a result.
I don't want to waste my time to get paid, I want to solve interesting problems and get paid solving them. I also want to stand behind my work, and stand proud.
So for me planning my career is as simple as finding companies that have problems I can address, for me that is low level network protocol analysis, distributed systems, cloud deployments, and java optimization. I hit those hard, and then build up quotes from customers I have worked with to show potential leads what I am capable of. Understanding that anyone you are talking to is a potential lead was huge for me. Just because it's some guy you ran into at a bar, some woman talking about her start-up, whatever - they all are potential customers, and you need to hold yourself as a professional.
Don't be an ass, establish credibility, and show that you actually care. Money follows.
learn real skills. whatever framework someone fancies can be picked up over the weekend. 80/20.
A good team will hire for personality fit first, and ability to learn, a programmers mindset.
Since that time, I never worried about this again. We have the real option of learning whatever tech stack we want.
On the flip side, I've found that sometimes you don't need to panic about these things, and the flavour of the month is just that. I'm still making money from Win32 code in 2017, even though iPads & tablets were meant to replace all desktop & laptop computers by now.