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by jrowley 2668 days ago
I have a few questions to ask you, which will hopefully help you find a more satisfying answer to your conundrum.

1) What is motivating this change? Are you currently unemployed, looking for new work or rather concerned about ensuring your employability over time? Are you looking to earn a higher salary?

2) In an ideal world, would you want to learn this new technology or would you rather stick with building your existing skills / working with tools you are familiar with? Are you willing / interested in learning these tools outside of work, or would do you have other engagements that take precedence (family, non tech hobbies, etc).

3) How much risk are you willing tolerate? Do you have a big enough safety net if the independent contractor thing doesn't work? Maybe plan out this scenario on paper, and do some rough math if possible.

4) You are well within your right to avoid management roles (or anything that doesn't serve you). What are your goals with work, pay the bills even if the work is tedious, emotionally challenging?

My apologies if these questions aren't helpful for you. I'm just yet another obnoxious 20 something in tech.

1 comments

Makes sense!

1 - Contract is ending soon and I'm scouring for a new one or FTE role while wading through strange interviews and lots of recruiters. This sort of gives me a sense.

2 - Outside of work is fine! I already spend 3-4 hours a week on personal tech reading. The issue is, you can read Docker all you want - companies want to see it in production. What do they ask?

"How many years of experience do you have in production with AWS/Docker/Kubernetes"

3 - A fair amount of risk

4 - Pay the bills! For the next 5-10 years.

No, it's helpful. Thank you.

"in production" can mean different things to different people and it's about marketing yourself. Build a side project, find the cheapest method to running kunbernetes, run it there for a while. Try to itterate. Do the CI/CD thing. If it's publicly accessible, it's in production. Check out k3s for a minimal experience.