You just described my current position. I'm reading as many books as I can. I want to contribute to the linux kernel.
What books have you found so far? Willing to share a link to them (free or otherwise)? :)
Can I ask if you contract for multiple companies or just one? What vertical banking, government? That seems like a pretty solid income. Cheers.
Those figures are in AUD. If I worked a full working year, I would essentially earn AUD$850 * 242 (number of estimated working days in the year), or $205,700 pre-tax. That's about USD$154,000 based on xe.com and just rounding a bit.
I work in any fields that need me, excluding gambling or anything immoral or unethical.
EDIT: forgot to say that I work for multiple companies, yeah. I love around once every 3-6 months, essentially.
Recently I've been getting more and more eager to move into development, however. Now perhaps it's just a personality thing, but I'm very keen to learn CS basics and get a good grasp of maths whilst I make this transition. I think this is important for me simply because I want to be able to utilise CS level maths to solve certain CS problems. As I never went to university, I'm losing out on some efficient solutions.
All this being said, I could stumble around without this knowledge and do just fine ($200k a year, in fact) as a contractor. I just personally feel the CS level knowledge is important to become good at what I want to do.