Doesn't the US have an active contractor market like the UK? In the UK there are lots of job boards with a contract filter and many recruitment agents deal exclusively in contracts rather than perm roles. Is this different in the US?
Hit me up for tips if you're thinking of going contract. I've been in and out of the game for years and making more than double than I would as a perm.
I haven’t done any significant consulting since moving to FAANG. Occasional due diligence on M&A. Occasionally a Board Advisor. Nothing that creates conflict with the day job.
So, I’m a W-2 employee now in an executive-level role, have been for several years, and this is my second such role (meaning two companies now have hired me in from outside as a senior leader). Right now I’d say FAANG-adjacent, it’s not a company in the acronym, it’s still a huge employer. They’re paying highly competitively and matched the deal offerer by a FAANG when I moved jobs in 2020. I would expect this is probably what I’ll be doing until I “retire”.
Retirement to me doesn’t actually mean entirely ceasing doing work but I’m only going to be pursuing interesting problems with interesting people in a few years.
Overall my point though was you’re doing something today not just to make a paycheck this month, but hopefully to lead up to something next year or the year after, and you should have an endgame. Evaluate whether generalist consulting/contracting really supports that endgame for you, and don’t just focus on how do I get from $50/hr to $200/hr and then have a “Oh, crap, this skillset and my resume now makes it even harder to get to the endgame that I’m seeking”.
I've got several clients that pay over 500k/year to a SaaS ERP vendor. The ERP system is the very definition of enterprise software.
What would you suggest I advise my clients when it comes to their finance, inventory, order management, logistics etc?
I guess they could piece together various SaaS solutions to create some sort of composable microservice based system to meet their needs but that's a massive engineering overhead when they can just get all of the functionality they need on one big fat enterprise ERP system.
The cosmetics manufacturer I work with does not care about what the technologists (people like you and me) care about. They just want to run their manufacturing and wholesale operation and if Oracle are offering one system that does it all, why wouldn't they take that deal?
I worked with a pastor in the Philippines doing charity work a number of years ago, he outright said that his good deeds were all to spread and grow the religion, not because doing good deeds is a good thing to do. I did not like that one bit but it’s hard to argue against given these Filipinos really did need food parcels.
The Japanese mafia also give out charity to get people inside. Putin used to drive around rural regions handing out cash too.
I don't think the pastors admission is as bad as it sounds at first blush. A religious man is likely to believe that the best "food" is the knowledge of God. That is, if the spirit is fed, and the mind looks to higher things, then order is restored in the organism. That being will begin to act rightly somewhat more often. It will use the food packets to add to an ordered life, and eventually become a source of food packets or other good things.
Viewed with the worst glasses, this motivation can be viewed as "growing the religion," as if its a pyramid scheme with no other motivation than its own growth (ie, cancer). I'd just like to add that it is possible to regard the growth of the religion as a truly high aim.
I'm not saying any one thing is true, only that it is possible that the pastors aim is high and heartfelt.
I worked with a pastor in the Philippines doing charity work a number of years ago, he outright said that his good deeds were all to spread and grow the religion, not because doing good deeds is a good thing to do. I did not like that one bit but it’s hard to argue against given these Filipinos really did need food parcels.
The Japanese mafia also give out charity to get people onside. Putin used to drive around rural regions handing out cash too.
In the UK, Jehovas witnesses come round to your house after the death of a loved one and they give you all kinds of nice messages and charity.
Growing a religion (or a movement) through bribery is an ancient practice.
Growing a religion (or a movement) through bribery is an ancient practice.
Of course, and there's always an element of corruption in modern churches that needs to be guarded against. That said, wrt Christianity the early disciples were often broke/homeless, all of them ended up without a dime in their pockets and most were gruesomely executed:
Did you manage to sell Romulus to any gov customers? I built and sold a similar solution on top of SAP Hybris which we sold to several government departments around the world. It’s a very hard sell even with the worlds largest software sales organisation behind you.
The start was in political offices, which need CRMs and are motivated to move or they're fired. Constituent service satisfaction is one of the top indicators of being re-elected.
Moving into permanent government departments is more of a pain but we did see some success there.
Ultimately, though, the trough between early-adopters and getting mainstream is dishearteningly deep and there aren't enough ealry-adopters to build momentum. Not for us anyway.
Probably nothing but most decent French wines use a cork and I use stopper to close it if we're not finishing the bottle. I guess I could buy a fake cork instead but it's pretty much the same at that point.
My point was, it's not hard to seal an opened cork bottle
Really though Baldwin is claiming the gun went off without him pressing the trigger. Which is a flat out lie he either believes or he is getting ahead of a lawsuit. The gun he used is a replica single action revolver, the replica was made in the 1960s and has a trigger bar. You can bash on that cocked hammer with… a hammer… and it won’t go off. That firing pin can not make contact with the primer until the bar is moved by pressing the trigger.
Historical note, if a Colt SAA (Single Action Army) was to be carried anywhere, it had 5 rounds of the 6 shot chamber filled. It was carried on an empty chamber in case you fell off your horse. I saw a western once where the actor knew while talking about “trouble coming” to silently load a 6th round, good detail.
Side note, there are still countries in Asia and South America that have their police carry with an empty chamber, mostly going back to this OLD advice.
I would say Baldwin should have kept his mouth shut, but his arrogance since the shooting has wiped away any sympathy I had for the Actor. Baldwin the Producer, had always been liable in my eyes.
