The straightforward process for turning free time into money as an engineer who doesn't want to worry about sales/marketing/customer management (i.e. a substant

The straightforward process for turning free time into money as an engineer who doesn't want to worry about sales/marketing/customer management (i.e. a substantial amount of the work involved in consulting) is "go do technical interviews for an interview platform". Karat and interviewing.io are the two I'm most familiar with but I'm sure there are others. They won't match your "hourly rate" if you're bringing in 500k/yr at the day job; they might be competitive in the 150-200k/yr range. I personally find interviewing to be a pretty demanding type of work since you need to be more or less "100% on" the entire time while doing something pretty repetitive, but ymmv. Edit: I haven't personally done this; I'm speaking from the position of someone who conducts a fair number of interviews at the day job and wouldn't relish the thought of doing more after clocking out. My spare capacity does in fact go to side projects.