About 10 years ago and ten years into my career, I had been working and stayed at the same job way too long and both my salary and career stagnated.
I had two part time money making side projects. I was a part time fitness instructor and had some rental real estate.
Teaching fitness classes was fun, I made a lot of friends, and it gave me a release valve from working at a computer all day. Real estate was a headache.
Around 2008 -2011, a few things happened. The real estate market crashed and I did a few “strategic defaults”, I realized I could make a lot more by getting better at software engineering and job hopping, and I got married and gained a wife and two (step) children.
I gave up all of my side projects, concentrated on my career, started building a network of recruiters, former coworkers, and former managers and doubled my income over the next 8 years (not bragging, I still make about the average of principal engineer/architect/team lead in my area).
Even looking over the next two to five years, I should be able to increase my income by 50% (working for local companies) to well over 100% (if I can get into Amazon) as some type of cloud consultant, “digital transformation consultant”, or “Architect”. The only thing stopping me now is the travel requirements. I want to wait until my youngest completes high school.
But, that means I can’t juggle my job, family commitments, working out, filling in some technical gaps and a side job/business.
If I worked on a side business now that wasn’t purely passive income, it would be doing side software gigs involving technology I was already good at. I’m not sacrificing my job (main source of income), my time working out, or my family. The only thing I could realistically give up would be filling in skills gap and learning more.
So instead of in two years being able to command 50% to 100% more as a cloud consultant/architect, I would still only be able to make what I’m making now. I will be spending a lot of time building instead of sharpening my axe.
Even worse, I risk being further behind technically in two or three years and not even being able to find a job in development in the then hot technology.
It’s like the difference between deciding to go to work right out of high school and postponing starting your career and going to college.
to;dr -- Never devalue your personal time. If you can, monetize your hobbies that you'd be doing anyway.
I don't have a side-hustle yet, but I'm working on one. As you pointed out, there's an opportunity cost to a side-business. I'm working on a scheme to monetize a hobby; make money off something I'd be doing anyway. I'm just over 10 years into my career, recently married with a teenage step-child. My family-time or my "down-time" is very precious to me. During our wedding, we got some beautiful wedding save-the-dates off Etsy. They were water-color paintings. But then we needed additional stationary: invitations, menus, seating charts, table signs, a gobo (wtf is a gobo??), etc.... I ended up using photoshop to make all of the other stationary and graphics myself based off the initial Etsy save-the-dates (it was important to me that the fonts & colors matched on everything). My wife loves to paint water-colors, and I'm into photography & graphic-design. I'm working on a side hustle to do wedding invites and similar stationary on Etsy based off her paintings and my photography & graphic-design skills. These are (mostly) activities we'll do anyway. So... make some stationary templates once, throw them up on Etsy, and if people buy them GREAT, if not then no loss.
For me, monetizing a hobby is a quick way to start hating it. Unless you really want as much money as you can get, you probably shouldn't monetize all of your hobbies.
Can you tell me more about your cloud consultant, “digital transformation consultant”, or “Architect” as in what area are you looking to go (or already are in)?
I'm guessing you are helping companies move to Azure or Amazon?
Most AWS consultants that I’ve encountered are old school net ops folks who took one or two classes, became certified and all they know how to do is a “lift and shift” and apply on prem designs and processes to cloud. That always ends up costing the clients more without many real benefits.
Coming from a development background, with some Devops experience, I want to take companies to the next step - actually taking advantage of what cloud providers offer and interface with the developers and Devops.
As far as “digital transformation consultants”, some recruiting companies offer both staff augmentation services where they hire contractors temporarily on a W2 basis to work for clients and offer complete project management. Companies pay them to actually build a project and/or build up a software development department.
The consultants work for the recruiting agency permanently. A team is built up under them consisting of temporary workers either locally, “rural sourced” by hiring developers in lower cost of living areas domestically, or outsourced.
I don’t like the politics and red tape of large companies and have avoided them for most of my career. Being a consultant I hope gives me the best of both worlds. The total comp that only a large company can offer and the ability to just work on projects without worrying about the politics.
If I were to work for Amazon instead of one of their partners, I wouldn’t have to move - just travel a lot.
Right now, I work as a developer at a small company and the de facto “AWS guy” but I am also filling in some non AWS technology gaps.
LinuxAcademy. If you sign up right now it’s $300 for a year. What makes LA different is that they have a “hands on training portion”. When you start the hands on lab for AWS, they create a live temporary AWS account for you where you can follow along. I’m working on the Big Data cert now. For that, they give you a preconfigured AWS account for the lesson they are teaching and a login to a website with a Jupyter notebook where you can follow along with the video and make changes to the Python scripts just to play around with it.
The next time they will probably offer this deal is Thanksgiving week. They have courses and hands on training for a AWS, Azure, GCP, Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, etc.
I worked for a company that managed fitness classes for corporations, churches, and apartment complexes that had gyms. Later on, I just worked at the local Y.
I had two part time money making side projects. I was a part time fitness instructor and had some rental real estate.
Teaching fitness classes was fun, I made a lot of friends, and it gave me a release valve from working at a computer all day. Real estate was a headache.
Around 2008 -2011, a few things happened. The real estate market crashed and I did a few “strategic defaults”, I realized I could make a lot more by getting better at software engineering and job hopping, and I got married and gained a wife and two (step) children.
I gave up all of my side projects, concentrated on my career, started building a network of recruiters, former coworkers, and former managers and doubled my income over the next 8 years (not bragging, I still make about the average of principal engineer/architect/team lead in my area).
Even looking over the next two to five years, I should be able to increase my income by 50% (working for local companies) to well over 100% (if I can get into Amazon) as some type of cloud consultant, “digital transformation consultant”, or “Architect”. The only thing stopping me now is the travel requirements. I want to wait until my youngest completes high school.
But, that means I can’t juggle my job, family commitments, working out, filling in some technical gaps and a side job/business.
So no side business.