Yes. And I loved the second job. I left my permanent position for the contract to perm position (got health benefits through my wife’s job) . Billed them an average of 60-70 hours a week, paid off some debt the first six months, negotiated a decent market pay and a title bump to put on my resume and by the time I was made perm, I had a large enough team in place and processes so I was down to a manageable 45 hours a week.

But, I made it clear at the interview that my first steps would be to build up the department, develop processes and training. They already had a barely working 20 year old PowerBuilder implementation where the various offices were forced to use Citrix terminals to access the system. They needed some tighter web and mobile integrations they couldn’t currently do.

I found out the real money was in cloud consulting. They hired a few consultants to “move us to the cloud” (a bunch of no nothing “lift and shifters”). I found out that’s where the real money was.

Left there after a year and half with a better resume, self demoted (responsibility not pay) to my current job and I’m getting a chance to fill in some resume gaps to become a more well rounded (and paid) consultant in a couple of years.