I absolutely refuse to be a “contractor” or anything that looks like “staff augmentation”.
Strategic consulting where I am talking to decision makers and people in control of budgets where I’m brought in for expertise is different.
When I was a dev lead and saw the difference between what we were paying “consultants in name only” staff aug C# developers and what we were paying “AWS consultants” who were just old school net ops folks who knew how to duplicate on prem infrastructure and processes and make it more expensive in the cloud, it changed my entire career trajectory.
I knew I could bring more to the table as someone who had a development background, knew some about infrastructure if I knew “cloud”.
I got a full time job at AWS in the Professional Services department where I still work. ;)
And I stay away from any project where it looks like it’s going to be staff augmentation.
I want to have clear objectives and clear definition of done with success criteria not “the customer bought a bucket of hours and they will add you to their team and assign tasks”.
Strategic consulting where I am talking to decision makers and people in control of budgets where I’m brought in for expertise is different.
When I was a dev lead and saw the difference between what we were paying “consultants in name only” staff aug C# developers and what we were paying “AWS consultants” who were just old school net ops folks who knew how to duplicate on prem infrastructure and processes and make it more expensive in the cloud, it changed my entire career trajectory.
I knew I could bring more to the table as someone who had a development background, knew some about infrastructure if I knew “cloud”.
I spent the next two years getting experience.