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What was it like making the transition from software engineer to software engineering consultant?

• fnbr 9y ago
  I'll give you my perspective: it's tough. I tried to go from ML Engineer -> ML Consultant, and while I was able to find work at a reasonable rate, it was difficult, because most businesses don't have technical problems, they have business problems. For instance, even though the root cause might be high latency, the actual problem is that the high latency is killing your retention. If the business is sophisticated enough to value technical expertise, often they value it so much that they are willing to hire experts full-time, or they're so small that they can't afford to. So as a technical expert, you end up caught in a weird uncanny valley (in my experience). I think that patio11's advice is, as always, spot on here; the skills needed to become a technical consultant that charges $N/week are way higher than the technical skills needed to become a business consultant at $N/week, for any value of N. That isn't to say that technical skills aren't value, just that it's a tough sell to make, for a number of reasons that patio11, and others, have written at length about.