Ask HN: How to find remote, part-time DevOps consulting positions?

[viertaxa]

[wizzerking]

Start with UpWork.com I use this to get side jobs that last ususaly 1 - 6 months other sites that i have come across either here or elsewhere https://30hourjobs.com/

Other links from HAcker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081900

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17987421

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17569294

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563

Best Wishes to y9ou and your loved ones

[SwEEpCollidE]

These websites might be useful. https://remoteok.io/remote-devops-jobs https://weworkremotely.com/categories/remote-devops-sysadmin... And UpWork.com .

Hope that helps!

[doopy1]

I have four months of devops experience 5 years ago that I have listed on my LinkedIn profile. I went on to do other things. DevOps recruiters will not leave me alone, and many positions appear to be 6 month contracts. My advice is to place the keyword "devops" into your linkedin profile...

[mraza007 → doopy1]

This clearly shows DevOps engineers are in high demand.

If you don’t mind may I ask how was your experience as a DevOps Engineer. I would love to know as myself I’m exploring more about this field

[doopy1 → mraza007]

Sorry for the late response. I think it very much depends on the team that you're on and if you have good technical mentorship or not. For me it was very challenging - I had to pick up a brand new set of skills, and the on call hours were brutal because the infrastructure would have issues in the middle of the night.

This diminishes and matures over time if you have good leadership, though.

If you're interested in DevOps, you really need to have a solid linux foundation, and the rest is learning how to automate cloud infrastructure.

It helps to have experience with software engineering, but not necessarily required. The work flow will be similar if you follow typical Agile development processes at the place you work.

[simplestman]

I am doing some part-time consulting, dev work only. Would love to network with other part-time consultants. DevOps is my weak spot and would love to send that work to someone who is better at it than me. Maybe, we need a forum targeted towards part-timers.

[sagespidy → simplestman]

Hey, I also do part time devops consulting.wiling to partner up. if interested lets get in touch.

[rradish → simplestman]

Hey there, maybe we can help each other out :) shoot me an email: roumen at rpavlov dot com

[eganist]

Are you doing implementation work hands-on and willing to sub? I'm in VA.

[viertaxa]

Also, if anyone has any good advice on pricing your service, please drop that here too!

[Irongirl1]

https://contra.com/?ref=producthunt

[Jugurtha]

>I'm also definitely open to working with larger orgs, but in my experience, they are less likely to be open to the part-time consulting option.

We're a tiny, boutique, consultancy specialized in machine learning. We pretty much exclusively work with large organizations in diverse sectors and industries and for a variety of functions. We work on projects, and we build custom products for them, and that requires deep dives into the domains in question. It's doable.

>My question is: where do I look? Most job boards are FTE only, and the consulting business seems to rely a lot on "I know a guy who could help with this." type references.

Yes. I doubt anything we have worked on was posted anywhere. It mostly was meeting executives at an organization, and then working with them and their people. I think one additional reason is that they didn't really want to advertise the direction they were taking. Even with certain entities in some countries that are required to go through a public tender process to select a partner, they can do a restricted tender and get you on a shortlist so it doesn't take forever to happen. Therefore, you are right. Networking, connections, referrals. It never hurts to consistently deliver, and have recommendation letters from organizations you've worked with.

>I'm located in VA, USA, so I'm a long ways away from the typical Silicon Valley startup scene, although we do have a nice little niche here where I am.

Team in Algiers, Algeria. We have a couple of people in Paris, France for business purposes (lead generation and customer development). Our clients are mostly in Europe, none in Algeria, because there are no companies of a size we are used to deal with.

Back to your question: "How to find remote, part-time DevOps consulting positions?". One very effective way is what I call meta-consulting, or "consulswing", or a "gravitational slingshot" [oh, these consultants and their douchey names]: your consulting company "A" does DevOps for consulting company "B" in another field. They like you so much that they'll get you to do DevOps for their clients "C", "D", "E", etc.

It is not required that you do DevOps for "B" to begin with, but in my experience, people tend to be more enthusiastic talking about you when you've done good work for them.

I replied[0] to a similar thread a few days ago. As per my answer, we have gone through quite the experience curve and refined our processes doing ML projects over the years, then we built our machine learning platform[1] to be able to do ML work more effectively and consistently. Why does this matter? It matters because if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have been in a position to even accept more clients unless we scaled by adding more people, and then that would be our fixed cost that would oblige us to keep doing projects to pay them, or let them go.

As someone who has been a turnaround person[2], the first thing we did when the dust settled was to build our platform so we wouldn't live through the Christian Bale's weight yo-yo/swing equivalent.

All the best,

- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179224

- [1]: https://iko.ai

- [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26182988