Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jasonkester 2325 days ago
Vacation Time.

I spent several years in my late twenties and early thirties working to increase my bill rate and shorten the length of contracts that I took. The plan was to eventually be that guy from the engineering joke who rocks up for an afternoon at your plant, draws a red X on the side of your boiler, and delivers a $30,000 bill. [1]

I got to the point where I was travelling the world for most of the year every year and doing the occasional 3 month contracting gig, before figuring out that SaaS is a better long term way to get where I wanted to be.

I’ve written a bit about it here:

https://expatsoftware.com/articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-l...

Edit to add: [1] I actually met that guy once, on a beach in Nicaragua. His “job” was to remain within a few hours of an international airport. Because he was a pipe fitter qualified to fix the fiddly bits oin a nuclear power plant, so if they ever needed a guy to do The Thing they’d better have one on call.

2 comments

I find myself exactly where you were in your early thirties, hoping to get where you are now.
what laptop is that in the pics?
X60, the last of the 4:3 12" Thinkpads, complete with a real Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn block.

They're cheap as cheap on eBay, accept 2TB SSD and (sadly only) 4GB memory, and run crazy fast as a Windows 7 dev machine for the road.

I've had 3 of them, and will likely buy a couple more before they become too scarce.

It looks like one used in hacking related movies.