Title: I&#x27;ve been working as a programmer for almost 20 years now. I have experience with the JVM and the Node.js platforms and what&#x27;s necessary to keep them operational: containerization, cloud computing, databases, etc.<p>I think I&#x27;ve reached an upper bound as a grunt programmer. I tried management as a new direction but it didn&#x27;t work out, I just can&#x27;t do it, it makes my life miserable. I noticed however, that I have a unique ability: I really like talking to people (including business folks), wrapping my head around their problems and figuring out robust solutions for them including all the models, documentation and preliminary implementations (POC&#x2F;MVP). I&#x27;m also good at sharing the knowledge (right now I&#x27;m working as a tech trainer).<p>I did this a few times as part of some contract work and everybody was very happy with it but I don&#x27;t know how to scale this into a consulting business. What I want to keep doing is getting projects from 0 to POC&#x2F;MVP state. I can help putting together teams, figuring out the architecture, and concrete solutions &#x2F; algorithms, but if I keep doing the grunt work instead, it won&#x27;t pay that well. So to sum it all up I can apply my skills in an area that has higher returns, but I don&#x27;t really know how to get there.<p>What should I do to achieve this? What makes this harder is that I&#x27;m not living in the USA (I live in Hungary, Europe).<p>Edit: I quit my day job half a year ago. I was thinking about a sabbatical, but people from my network started to appear and now I&#x27;m swamped with work. What my goal is to streamline all this and turn regular grunt programming into a specialized format where the ROI is much better.<p>I also have a business partner who has similar ideas but a different skill set, and I&#x27;m trying to shape this into something that&#x27;s more effective.<p>I already have a blog, a GitHub portfolio, and I&#x27;m regularly talking on meetups, but you are right, I need to focus on this much more, thanks for this tip!
Upvote: