P.S. I know about Upwork and other such gig sites. I have been scanning them for many years and not accepted any gigs through them yet, due to my experience wit

P.S. I know about Upwork and other such gig sites. I have been scanning them for many years and not accepted any gigs through them yet, due to my experience with gigs acquired locally through my own organic networks. What I've learned in short gigs is that I've been a slow starter, except when I was very well-rested (e.g. after 5.5 years of rest) and doing a task whose plausibility was unknown. The way I graduated from my temp status in 2008 was by being as proactive as if I owned the company: Bringing my own computer (the company's IT department was slow), finding a disassembler on my own (management / purchasing were slow), and reverse engineering code whose source the boss was waiting for another division to provide (other division was slow). I was rewarded for being a new set of eyes living up to my own strong work ethic, rather than besting or even keeping up with peers in an organization. But when I did all this, it was new to me, so I'd not have been competitive against anyone who specializes in such work. Conversely, in a permanent role in a software engineering organization, most of my value came, not through raw technical prowess, but through ownership of and immersion in my work product and what it touches, and building a network of respect and trust among peers, over years. I'm a generalist (perhaps a "scanner"[0]) and probably never have been the best at any one task. Going in fresh, at my age (48) and suboptimal health, it's much harder to contribute value in a hurry. I'd fit well long-term into an organization that can use a generalist like me after qualifying me on a challenge that's well-defined and yet for which there may not be any well-defined type of specialist. [0] https://www.getmotivation.com/motivationblog/2017/04/barbara-sher-scanner/ https://www.getmotivation.com/motivationblog/2017/04/barbara...