> can you share what you did consult on? To me consulting is very mysterious as it's a very generic term but I'm always amazed by people earning 250K-500K due to "consulting"
Totally. I'm a generalist software engineer with a specialty in early stage startup tech. In addition to actually writing the code, setting up infrastructure (AWS and all that), and anything explicitly code or "DevOps" related, I also helped clients understand the development process, advised them on product, worked with designers, etc.
I agree that consulting is kind of a nebulous term, but if you ask me, it's essentially shorthand for "solving problems that people have that they can't (or don't want to) solve themselves". The problems that clients came to me with were all related to getting a startup off the ground from the technical side.
How did you end up on consulting? Did you have prior experience bootstrapping previous startups where you were a full-time employee? Then you leveraged that experience? Devops is pretty recent so I'm assuming you have <10 years experience?
I graduated college in 2009, and right afterwards I worked at a startup. Then I joined an agency doing web work for the entertainment industry. That got boring pretty quickly, so after a year of that, I left and started an "incubator" with some friends. At that company, we built out MVPs and convinced friends working corporate jobs to quit and become operators. It was a cool business model but not great for cashflow, so I split off.
Slowly but surely, I found a niche in working with smart, non-technical founders who want to start startups. Turns out that most good programmers willfully ignore that market (for good reason, it's really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff).
I've been programming in some way or another since the mid-90s, not old hat by any measure, but AWS and the "cloud" was hardly present when I really started getting my hands dirty with web programming during the early/mid-2000s.
Totally. I'm a generalist software engineer with a specialty in early stage startup tech. In addition to actually writing the code, setting up infrastructure (AWS and all that), and anything explicitly code or "DevOps" related, I also helped clients understand the development process, advised them on product, worked with designers, etc.
I agree that consulting is kind of a nebulous term, but if you ask me, it's essentially shorthand for "solving problems that people have that they can't (or don't want to) solve themselves". The problems that clients came to me with were all related to getting a startup off the ground from the technical side.