Ask HN: Help, I want to be a consultant | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Help, I want to be a consultant

6 pointsthrowzvon17 comments

All,

After 20+ years in the business, I can't take it anymore in the corporate setting. I work for a successful startup that became large (1000+ people), and I have been there over 5 years. I ran the infrastructure, which is all cloud-based. I became less hands-on over time, focusing on building teams and standards and leading architecturally at a high-level.

Now I hate my life. HR, bureaucracy, meetings, lying upper-management, and the fact that I am already fully vested, make it a chore to get up to get to work. I am in my 40's in a very big city in the northeast U.S.

Before I quit everything and hide out in a third world country avoiding ever working again, can anyone tell me if my idea to try to strike out on my own as an Cloud Infrastructure Consultant is a stupid idea?

I have a year or two of savings, I'm renting with no kids. My expenses are very high but minus rent and soon possibly COBRA, I can reduce it.

I don't think I can be an FTE anymore, it's utter misery. Having lost autonomy (with a new corporate culture of intense micromanagement from the senior level), meetings (60-70% of the week), losing work from home to take the crowded subway just to come to a loud-ass office where someone always has a cold, having pay remain static after inflation (it didn't matter before stock all vested), and believing that the people above me are buffoons... means that it seems the ONLY option is to do consulting.

LinkedIn is pretty dry - I seem to be sent only low-paying IC roles, or extremely senior executive roles, whereas I am a middle manager.

Sincerely,

Desperately Seeking An Echo Chamber

> I became less hands-on over time, focusing on building teams and standards and leading architecturally at a high-level.

In 2020, during peak pandemic, we had to organize clases for a team of 500 profesores and teacher assistants. One day, I expend a whole morning replaying emails about a moodel server and an email server that we didn't control. It was useful, but after a whole morning of "bureaucracy" I really had to stop and do some "real" work, Whatever, write a midterm or think about a research item that has no hope of success. I remember the pain.

Back to your problem ...

Sorry that I can't help, but my general recommendation is to read whateverpatio11 wrote about that https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ Perhaps https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/17/ramit-sethi-and-patrick... and https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick...

This would have worked very well 2014 to 2020 or so when many F500s were migrating workloads to the cloud, and the expertise was still considered a niche.

Now everyone working in tech has cloud experience. AWS offers a support contract to all accounts at sign up time, it also has a consulting business that will integrate with clients teams, and the LLMs are not great but getting there.

If you’re single go to Europe and get a masters degree in mechatronics instead.

can anyone tell me if my idea to try to strike out on my own as an Cloud Infrastructure Consultant is a stupid idea?

If posting to HN represents the level of effort you are willing to expend, you have nothing but slimmest luck between you and failure.

Building a business is more work than working for someone else, not less.

Building a business is almost entirely about sales and customer development and doing the thing the business sells is pretty much rounding error...you can hire people to do "the thing," you have to sell "the thing yourself."

culture of intense micromanagement from the senior level

Senior executives are more constrained in regard to micromanagement than clients...with the added problem of clients ability to not pay you.

believing that the people above me are buffoons

If you can't navigate people, you will struggle with sales because sales is a people business.

To put it another way, assume the market for what you want to do is efficient. Good clients have working relationships with consultants and those consultants are working hard to retain their good clients and are better capitalized socially through established relationships and possibly better capitalized financially because they have good clients. So nobody is likely to beat down your door just because you hang a shingle.

meetings (60-70% of the week)

Starting out, sales will be 100% of the week and the mental space of the week will be close to 24/7/365. Good luck.

Thank you for the honesty.

There is no problem per se with 100% meetings, or even mental space 'starting out'

The issue is one of agency. Working for a place where you are not an independent agent, but where the corporate politics dictate what time you do what, when, who you can hire and fire, what your team versus another team does, who gets called when something breaks, and what priorities are what. 'Striking out on one's own' is an attempt to retrieve agency. Without agency you're working for a biweekly paycheck and pats on the back, but you're disconnected from your labor.

What priorities are what. If you disagree as a senior leader what priorities are set by management, and the fallout falls on your staff, it can be demotivating. Want an example? New tech management comes along, and now there are two giant platforms, each with their own tech debt and CI/CD automations. Management decides that rather than address frailties that cause outages in production (poorly architected Kubernetes setup, lack of monitoring, etc), that the priority is to take 30% of the DevOps staff and dedicate them for 6 months to converge on one CI/CD system. By the end of the 6 months, the number of outages has drastically increased, and the convergence has not been complete (still two separate CI/CD systems). Upper management cracks down harder on everyone. Another example. Tech management changes priorities every few weeks for everyone in DevOps, meaning projects remain half-done, people get context-switches from one tactical thing to the other, and people outside of the team complain that the DevOps team never delivers anything.

These are the types of 'if I were in charge' type of events that would not occur, as they were entirely predicted but overruled.

At some point, you become too old to put up with this anymore. And the mental space of the above frustrations is already 24/7/365.

The difference is that someone else gets to charge the clients.

you are not an independent agent, but where the corporate politics dictate what time you do what, when, who you can hire and fire, what your team versus another team does, who gets called when something breaks, and what priorities are what

Having clients is doubling down on all that, not an escape from it.

With the added stress of irregular income and a real possibility for not being paid at all.

And probably for less money because you don’t have good clients.

The biggest red flag is you are here on HN playing house instead of getting rejected by cold calling…everything is easier to stomach than rejection — including failure of the business.

If you can’t see why things are the way they are at your employer, how are you going to understand why things are the way they are at a client business?

This is a bit confusing.

Are you challenging me to re-think the concept of striking out as a consultant because you believe I don't understand the business I am in as an FTE, including the management decisions?

Because I underestimate the work, and all along I expect to work less?

Why haven't I started already, and why I am posting on HN? That answer is easy - because I work enough hours as an FTE that there's no time left for that. Posting on HN is easy (and fun). And it's 'decision-time' - which is the point here.

I am hunting for some advice or positive suggestion beneath the veneer of warning and negativity. So far the messaging I am getting is, Try to Understand the Business Better, and Don't Expect to Work Less. Is that right?

Why would I encourage you?

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