
Ask HN: Consulting options for technologists? - JeremyYinNY
As an engineer-turned-manager, with a decent amount of experience on both sides, once in a while I like to daydream about the &quot;next thing&quot; on my career path. I&#x27;m not especially excited about doing management at yet another company, on the other hand going back to 100% hands-on programming is not it either. I&#x27;m not afraid to get my hands dirty, but it&#x27;s been years since I&#x27;ve had that role and I&#x27;d like to utilize my management experience somehow.<p>What are some of the &quot;off the beaten path&quot; opportunities out there for folks like me? I&#x27;m guessing there&#x27;s more action in consulting, but am open to pretty much anything. Technical due diligence consulting strikes me as potentially interesting. Anything else along similar lines?
======
BjoernKW
Just writing off the cuff here:

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about potential consulting niches in the
software industry at large. With many of my clients there seem to be recurring
patterns and challenges regarding software development processes and software
products:

\- dealing with complexity

\- improving code quality

\- writing reusable code vs. writing disposable code (i.e. code that can be
adapted and replaced quickly)

\- communication and knowledge transfer

\- having to write huge amounts of boilerplate / 'plumbing' code over and over
again

Overall, managing complexity, improving communication, doing away with
repetitive processes are huge problems. It's not like nobody is addressing
them (IDEs, agile processes focussing on communication alleviate those issues
to some extent) but these issues probably are still the most prevalent
impediments to efficiently developing software that fits the requirements.

So, I think there's an opportunity for consulting companies in terms of
reducing the complexity of their software and processes. I'm just not sure
exactly how to package this as a productised service. Then again, consulting
firms like McKinsey have been doing similar work in the general context of
business management for decades - with varying degrees of success.

------
mooreds
Training might be a good fit for you too. That can open up consulting
opportunities as well.

Writing a book (leanpub is a good place to start) can provide you with some
credentials.

I've met a few fractional CTOs who work with startups/smaller groups within a
company to provide technical leadership.

Join a startup as a CTO (I've seen 2-3 startups looking for CTOs/founding
engineers, and I haven't looked that hard). Of course, the issue here is your
risk, and I don't know your risk profile at all.

~~~
brutus1213
Err .. what is a fractional CTO? Also, curious what area you're in? I looked
on indeed for such roles in the GTA and it wasn't very promising.

------
autotune
Have you considered looking for "architect" positions? Cloud Academy has a
pretty in-depth blog post about it:

[http://cloudacademy.com/blog/how-to-become-an-aws-cloud-
arch...](http://cloudacademy.com/blog/how-to-become-an-aws-cloud-architect/)

------
tedmiston
I'm an experienced developer from startups and recently as an independent
contractor, and would also like to better understand what kind of tangential
consulting opportunities are out there. My hunch is that most are really
really niche, i.e., "we need someone who can tune a massive Postgres cluster
to run at peak performance next week". I'm really good at doing code audits
and helping improve their style but I haven't found a way to package that into
a consulting service.

