alt Hacker NewsI did not look for a consulting contract for 18 years. Through my old network more quality opportunities found me than I could take on.
That collapsed during the covid lockdowns. My financial services client cut loose all consultants and killed all 'non-essential' projects, even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year, they did not care! Top down the word came to cut everyone -- so they did.
This trend is very much a top down push. Inorganic. People with skills and experience are viewed by HR and their AI software as risky to leave and unlikely to respond to whatever pressures they like to apply.
Since then it's been more of the same as far as consulting.
I've come to the conclusion I'm better served by working on smaller projects I want to build and not chasing big consulting dollars. I'm happier (now) but it took a while.
An unexpected benefit of all the pain was I like making things again... but I am using claude code and gemini. Amazing tools if you have experience already and you know what you want out of them -- otherwise they mainly produce crap in the hands of the masses.
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>Through my old network more quality opportunities found me than I could take on.
This is something that never ever happened to me.
Every single thing I got in life I had to do the diligence to get and that includes "opportunities". Zero freebies for me.
What I find interesting these days is that I increasingly find people in situations like this one (no job, don't know what do, etc...), whereas for me it keeps getting easier and easier to get the things I want and my rate goes higher and higher.
I'm not for/or against a particular style, it must be real nice if life just solves everything for you while you just chill or whatever. But, a nice upside of being made of talent instead of luck is that when luck starts to run out, well, ... you'll be fine anyway :).
They also produce crap once you leave the realm of basic CRUD web apps... Try using it with Microsofts Business Central bullshit, does not work well.
>> even when mine (that they had already approved) would save them 400K a year
You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers, not cost centers. Aside from the fixed math (i.e. limit on savings vs. unlimited revenue growth) there's the psychological component of teams and management. I saw this in the energy sector where our company had two products: selling to the drilling side was focused on helping get more oil & gas; selling to the remediation side was fulfill their obligations as cheaply as possible. IT / dev at a non-software company is almost always a cost center.