Past a certain point the +1 isn't something you can do on your own time. If you're looking to shift into more of a management role that's obviously hard to learn on a side project unless that side project is a full company with employees. Even pure technical skills can require certain scale; you aren't going to learn how to use k8s appropriately on the side because whatever you're doing on the side almost certainly shouldn't be using k8s at all.

"Keep doing what you're doing but half the hours and double the salary" is something I would be tempted by, but it would be with the idea that I'm focusing on something other than developing my career.

> "Keep doing what you're doing but half the hours and double the salary" is something I would be tempted by

It would be tempting, even given the stake I just placed in the ground:[1] But 1. astronomically few companies will offer to double my comp at this late point in my career and 2. Nobody in tech offers part time work but with full benefits…I’d have to be a contractor and find clients and fund my own healthcare and retirement (yuck). It’s at best an theoretical exercise.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31193644

This is just fantasy though. No one is offering $800k/yr at 20hr/week.

I suspect there are people who earn this. I doubt any of them are the traditional definition of "employee" though.

Consultant/Contractor might be the closest.

Yes - there are people who win the lottery too. My point is that there isn’t enough for this to really be a thing we should put up as anything but fantasy. If you think you’re gonna get a recruiter who lands this in your inbox - buy lottery tickets instead.

I see and agree.

But it does help to inform people the right way to proceed if 800k in 20hrs a week is their goal :)

As long as you do it whilst handing them a salt shaker.

I've encountered shops billing $300+ per hour for fairly routine types of software work. And yeah, that's still pretty far away from the $800/hr or so that would be 800k for 20hr weeks, but we're not talking super specialists there. And you're not gonna take home all of that if you're just an employee at that shop, but if you go independent or start your own shop... you suddenly have a higher ceiling for basically just "doing the same thing you were already."

It does take a very specific additional skill set to build up a network of clients and have the patience for that to turn into something where you're regularly booked, but if money is the number one thing you want to optimize for, it's something you should investigate.

Bill out rate and pay the employee rate are entirely different things

If you own the shop, what you can pay yourself may be closer to the bill-out rate, at least I think that's the idea.

Senior....

* Accountants doing company liquidations

* Trial lawyers

* Performance artists

Others I cannot think of. Pay rates over $1,000/hr are surprisingly common. Many of the recipients work fewer hours as a result

No one is offering those jobs, but they exist just the same.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-04/jim-si...

> He started at age 40 with no experience:

> It took him a while—he launched his fund in 1978 and it didn’t really click until about 1990—but he absolutely achieved his dream of making money without doing anything.

Jim Simons has about 250 iq points. He may seem like a normal(ish) person, but he ain't. I'm not sure that anyone should ever assume they'll figure anything out the way he did.

And, he had lots of experience with math - he was insanely great at it. And then he took it and applied it.

At one point the ancient Greek philosopher Thales took his (at the time extremely arcane) knowledge of weather patterns and managed to leverage that into great wealth by predicting the olive crops. Allegedly, he did this in response to a heckler who had asked why, if Thales was an intelligent famous philosopher, he had yet to attain wealth.

Thales was an all around great philosopher though, known to be one of the "seven sages" of ancient Athens. Amongst other feats, he managed to measure the height of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh when nobody else at the time could.

More importantly he learned how to manage genius. At his fund it’s not one or two people who are “the man”, each and every one of them are “the man”. This is what makes their outperformance so consistent. It’s incredibly hard to manage one genius in a room full of people across the IQ bell curve, let alone when all the employees (partners?) are in the 98th percentile..

Yup for sure. Nobody likes being managed by a relative fool, so you have about 10 people on planet earth who could have done the job. I'd guess it is waaaaay further out than 98th percentile though...

Are there recruiters out there who pitch based on hours and money? Every pitch I get is all about the vision/team/prospects for success. And, yes, "prospects for success" in some ways means "money" but they're never so explicit about it.

I would guess that doing the +1 and +2 is mentally and emotionally easier and more satisfying if it's during a hellish 60 hour work week than in a relaxed 10 hours you freed up by getting more pay and a 30 hour week to do something easy.

Like doing programming problems is fun for a bit, but doing work that actually does something, even if it's simpler in complexity is more satisfying. IMO of course.

I think the recruiters could be pitching better if they went with, do 'it' here and think about what +1 could be and when you figure what that could be, pitch it to us. This of course assumes the organization sees IT as a value multiplier and not a cost center / plumbing job.

As an expert in a particular area, this is exactly what I want.

Even the same total comp and benefits but half the hours would be good. If I could do one week on and one week off or two weeks on and two weeks off that would be awesome.

It's always to enjoy more with more regularity