[deedub]

The one year stints hurt a little, but have you thought about consulting? After 4 startups with one of my own fails in the middle, I was burnt out. I ended up getting a consulting / little bit of managed services gig at a large company. The consulting gig was on the tech one of the startups I was at 6 years prior... Large enterprises were starting to adopt. They sold my hours in 12 month contracts, all my clients renewed year over year until one just bought up all of my hours. They loved me and it was pretty much 20 hours a week of effort. I could have sat there for another 5 years easy without any discomfort, I assume.

I took a 4 year time out there and now I'm back at a startup. I think what I'm learning now is if I can survive a couple of years and pack my brain with a bunch of new shit I'll be able to get a very nice and chill consulting gig until I retire, if I want that. People want your beautiful and experienced brain and a lot of the shit you potentially have worked on or thought about is more relevant in the current and the future than in your past. A lot of the world is slow AF, you might be ahead.

[cdelsolar]

how did you find consulting gigs?

[deedub]

To be clear I did not say start my own consultancy. That job was actually completely out of network and was me reaching out and applying. Start looking at big companies that have professional services orgs and find where the tech aligns.

[mertleee]

Curious what you mean by "professional services" orgs? seems like you need a referral to get into these?

[deedub]

You can go look directly at some of the bigger consulting & services firms - Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Accenture, Slalom etc. They all hire a huge spectrum of tech experiences and skill sets. Easiest to start there to learn what to look for.

You can find similar types of roles that those folks I listed above are hiring for within other large companies, sometimes. Some of those large orgs have a small army of consultants and managed services to keep relationships intact when a client decides to try out a different vendor for part of their stack. I spent my time helping clients figure out how to be successful with a competitor to help us keep the existing business we had. It gets weird, but it's out there and I admit I kind of fell into it, but it was because I blindly applied and they were very excited about my past experiences.

[ggernov]

Yeah, I feel like you need an abnormally strong network to just wing it in consulting?