I yada yada yada’d over a lot. I was first exposed to consultants when I was the newly hired lead at a company in 2016 brought in to design an on prem project. At the last minute, they decided to “move to the cloud”.

They brought in two sets of consultants. One set that was suppose to know about AWS. But they ended up just treating AWS like an overpriced Colo and I didn’t know any better at the time and the other set who in hindsight were just following a cookie cutter script who were “helping” the business manage integrating a bunch of recent acquisitions.

Once I started belated learning about all the services that AWS had to offer developers and for “DevOps”, I knew I wanted to specialize in consulting in that area and set myself apart from the old school network folks who got one certification and called themselves “cloud architects”.

I figured I could bring more to the table from a software engineering standpoint.

I changed jobs in 2018 where the then new CTO wanted to be “cloud native”. He was trying to build out an internal engineering department. He knew I had no hands on experience with AWS. But he liked my proposals.

Two years and a lot of projects later, I had the technical side down pat. It took me a couple of years at AWS to get good enough at the soft skills/customer interaction side.

My original plan was to get a job at one of the big consulting agencies to hone my craft. I got lucky to skip over that part.