I wrote this article based on my last 3 years as a contractor with increasingly interesting clients (I'm currently doing open source Rust work for ISRG, the makers of Let's Encrypt). I've found lots of inspiration here on HN throughout my journey, so I'm hoping my article continues the chain and inspires some more people! I'll be hanging around here for the coming hours in case anyone has questions ;) (btw free to write to me directly if you prefer; contact details are in my profile)
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Super interesting to find out that you're a fellow Catholic! It's sometimes hard to bring up faith in IT spaces, I feel like most of my colleagues are athiest or agnostic. I always feel good when I see people mention God, as it reminds me that being God fearing and in IT is not mutually exclusive.
Aside from that, awesome article and it was great to read your story. I am, like you, uncomfortable with unemployment, but I'm happy to see it can be done!
Yeah, I'm making an effort to avoid being preachy, but since God does play a genuine role in the story, people might as well hear about it (otherwise I'd be hiding crucial information to understand my decisions!)
Your belief or faith in God played a genuine role in the story.
If you had evidence of a god playing a role in anything you could start your own religion :-)
I'm not going to engage in the eternal atheists vs believers debate, but I'm trusting here that my experience is based upon reality (i.e. I've found convincing evidence). I don't expect what convinces me will convince everyone else, but you and I will die some day and then we'll know (or if it turns out we no longer exist, at least we won't care :P)
Using a word like "evidence" freely without rigour is a big part of the problem we are in relating to misinformation and mistrust in institutions.
I ask without expectations that you refrain from using such words when talking about opinions, experiences or beliefs, so that we may protect our languages from further erosion.
Your comment left me thinking, so I went to double-check the meaning of the word evidence in a dictionary (after all, I'm not a native English speaker). I found this one as the first entry: "the facts, signs or objects that make you believe that something is true" (source: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...). This is exactly the sense in which I'm using the word. What do you mean by saying it erodes language? Or do you use the word evidence in another sense than this dictionary?
PS: not meaning to start a flamewar or engage in endless discussion, I just want to understand your point ;)
Just because you don’t find a particular set of evidence convincing doesn’t mean it fails to meet the criteria for evidence.
Many an atheist has found God after honestly and earnestly investigating the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. However, most people don’t have the emotional fortitude to actually investigate the facts with rigor and end up hiding behind the “implausibility” of the resurrection and/or just end up perpetuating pop-atheism with unfounded critiques of the Bible because they’ve never done a proper study of their own.
If you’ve got specific critiques, feel free to field those, but otherwise your comment reads as a rather arrogant write-off of one of the oldest, and most logically-consistent systems of human belief.
Curious, have you engaged in a similar depth of study of all the world religions? Just wondering if maybe the others also have adherents who believe that the only thing keeping many others such as yourself from finding them is their own lack of emotional fortitude?
TLDR: feel free to skip
When I was little, my mother tried to teach me how to tie my shoelaces, but she had shown me a method I did not understand and did not like, so I invented my own way. I was proud of it for 20 years or so. A friend I trusted more than anyone, tried to tell me in a kind way, that many people tie their shoelaces in a bad knot. When one knows, it's easy to see even from a glance and such a knots gets untied, but I wouldn't listen. Thought of not knowing how to tie shoelaces seemed absurd.
I was the only one I know that would stop randomly to re-tie his shoelaces, occasionally with people piling up behind me. It may be considered incontrovertible evidence in truth, yet at the time, it didn't bare much relevance to me. It was obvious that bad shoelaces were always at fault, or I didn't apply enough force. In my mind it would be too humiliating to even consider bad technique a possibility.
It wasn't until I had the grace to look at a knot-tying website alone, try it, accept I was tying a granny knot, learn how to tie a standard knot, in a recommended fast way, then proceed to one-up it in my own point of view. I didn't get much humbler, but at 23 years old, at least I knew how to tie my shoelaces and they didn't get untied anymore.
If it wasn't for the love of the one who had grace and has given up his grace so we would have his grace, acting through those who follow him, Himself and His Spirit, I would not have seen and felt the loving self-sacrifice, which paled my self-righteousness in an humbling and emotionally painful experience of the pain I've caused, setting me off in a search to do better, so that after nearly a decade I would once and then many times again in humility accept what I cannot deny, that Lord is better than anything I could imagine and Jesus Christ is our (our = all those who accept Him) Lord and Savior.
This is enough evidence (for me, for others it's just word of mouth) to love and worship Jesus. I've seen much more, and for that I accept what is written. It seems I may understand and see more than many, yet still, easily and often, I forget what I know, ignore and blank my mind, to doubt and void the uncomfortable. Only hours ago I've yet again given in to what I know to be bad, to lull and dull the mind, close my eyes and ears so I would not see what I had a longing to avoid.
I write this as an admission and hoping it will be useful to someone. To perhaps understand, that one cannot just see and one cannot just be explained, if it affects him dearly and he does not wish to know.
Speaking of others, but showing the principle:
“Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. ...<<specific judgement of specific people>>... Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’...”
Matthew 13:13-15
I am a Sr. Dev at FAANG in America, but I yearn to go back to my home country in Europe. However doing so would result in a massive paycut, even with prospective high paging jobs. One possibility is to transfer internally with my current employer, but in this economic setting it's unlikely they will approve my request, much less allow me to work full remote, which is a deal breaker.
I have been contemplating freelancing for a while as a way to work remotely from home with a competitive salary (not US level, but better than EU market rate). I have decent experience as a Big Tech Sr. Dev. on ML/MLOps (e.g. I designed and implemented a real time inference service serving millions of RPS with single digit millisecond latency), so I believe my skills should be in demand.
Do you believe this is attainable or I am deluding myself?
You can always try this out first by searching for contract work as if you were in your home country. Just set up a website (perhaps not using your real name, in case your employer gets suspicious) and see if you can actually seek out the work. You can even try to purchase advertising on Google to see if you get any clicks / contacts. Overall it's a pretty cheap way to check.
I get that this may not be possible, but these sorts of trial balloons are much easier to float first to get an idea instead of taking a leap of faith.
Unfortunately my L1 visa doesn't allow me to have any other source of income than my current employer. But definitely this is something to look into once I get a Green Card.
Sorry for being unclear, I meant to just go through the process of seeing what you could get in terms of contracts as if you had already made the move, not to actually follow through and start any contract.
Some of the "expat threads" I've seen on Reddit where people yeet themselves to the other side of the world and hope it works out only to fall flat on their face are pretty eye opening. By testing the waters with "proto-contracting" like this, you can at least give yourself some idea of what you could get were you to move.
edit: grammar
Have you factored in the possibility you can go bankrupt in America anytime out of healthcare bills?
You can also go bankrupt anytime if you don't bring in enough money to cover all your other expenses, both in the US and in many other places. Yes, healthcare in the US is expensive if a company isn't picking up a big chunk of the insurance tab but it's hardly the only large expense people have to cover somehow.
Thank you for the write up! Very enlightening to see how things went for you. I was on the fence recently whether to go for contractor work but ended up just switching companies in the end. In part because I didn’t know what to expect. Articles like these hwould have helped!
If you want to explore what consulting looks like without the risk of going it alone, consider joining a company that does consulting. It's a good opportunity to learn about the sales cycle as well as get a taste for what sort of challenges consulting provides while still being a FTE with benefits.
This is useful infotmation to learn, but I can tell you from having done all three that consulting for a shop is as different from freelancing as it is from an in-house job.
I guess it depends on how close you are to the sales process. I have had a chance to get a lot of experience working on proposals from a tech point of view and am involved in the pitch and negotiation. There is definitely carryover from those activities. But if you are consulting as a heads down IC and leave other aspects of projects and bids to the “business people” I can see where you may not learn as much that will be helpful as a freelancer.
I'm happy you liked it!
Just wanted to give props for volunteer work.
It's been my raison d'etre for decades.
I know it's a cliché, but it's true that you receive more than you give ;)