Thank you for the write up! Very enlightening to see how things went for you. I was on the fence recently whether to go for contractor work but ended up just switching companies in the end. In part because I didn’t know what to expect. Articles like these hwould have helped!

If you want to explore what consulting looks like without the risk of going it alone, consider joining a company that does consulting. It's a good opportunity to learn about the sales cycle as well as get a taste for what sort of challenges consulting provides while still being a FTE with benefits.

This is useful infotmation to learn, but I can tell you from having done all three that consulting for a shop is as different from freelancing as it is from an in-house job.

I guess it depends on how close you are to the sales process. I have had a chance to get a lot of experience working on proposals from a tech point of view and am involved in the pitch and negotiation. There is definitely carryover from those activities. But if you are consulting as a heads down IC and leave other aspects of projects and bids to the “business people” I can see where you may not learn as much that will be helpful as a freelancer.

I'm happy you liked it!

Super interesting to find out that you're a fellow Catholic! It's sometimes hard to bring up faith in IT spaces, I feel like most of my colleagues are athiest or agnostic. I always feel good when I see people mention God, as it reminds me that being God fearing and in IT is not mutually exclusive.

Aside from that, awesome article and it was great to read your story. I am, like you, uncomfortable with unemployment, but I'm happy to see it can be done!

Yeah, I'm making an effort to avoid being preachy, but since God does play a genuine role in the story, people might as well hear about it (otherwise I'd be hiding crucial information to understand my decisions!)

Your belief or faith in God played a genuine role in the story.

If you had evidence of a god playing a role in anything you could start your own religion :-)

I'm not going to engage in the eternal atheists vs believers debate, but I'm trusting here that my experience is based upon reality (i.e. I've found convincing evidence). I don't expect what convinces me will convince everyone else, but you and I will die some day and then we'll know (or if it turns out we no longer exist, at least we won't care :P)

Using a word like "evidence" freely without rigour is a big part of the problem we are in relating to misinformation and mistrust in institutions.

I ask without expectations that you refrain from using such words when talking about opinions, experiences or beliefs, so that we may protect our languages from further erosion.

Just because you don’t find a particular set of evidence convincing doesn’t mean it fails to meet the criteria for evidence.

Many an atheist has found God after honestly and earnestly investigating the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. However, most people don’t have the emotional fortitude to actually investigate the facts with rigor and end up hiding behind the “implausibility” of the resurrection and/or just end up perpetuating pop-atheism with unfounded critiques of the Bible because they’ve never done a proper study of their own.

If you’ve got specific critiques, feel free to field those, but otherwise your comment reads as a rather arrogant write-off of one of the oldest, and most logically-consistent systems of human belief.

Curious, have you engaged in a similar depth of study of all the world religions? Just wondering if maybe the others also have adherents who believe that the only thing keeping many others such as yourself from finding them is their own lack of emotional fortitude?

I have not engaged in a similar depth of study of other world religions.

If you prove a correct mathematical formula, you need not spend time figuring out every other incorrect way to solve the problem.

Likewise, once you find the truth it doesn’t require falsifying every other claim to truth for it to remain true. Jesus was the only person whose words and deeds claim deity and with which there is zero evidence to contradict his claims, unlike the likes of Mohammad, Buddha, and countless other claims of godhood—Jesus of Nazareth’s are the only ones that hold up under scrutiny.

Other religions can believe they’ve got a claim to truth if they wish, but truth doesn’t waver due to one’s personal preferences or convictions.

Do you have a link that would be a good starting point for "evidence for the resurrection of Jesus"? I am an atheist, but only because I haven't seen any reliable evidence (and I did look for it previously). I'm not looking to argue, just want to give what you have a fair shot.

Oops—sorry for the delayed response here!

Yeah I think "Evidence That Demands a Verdict" by Josh McDowell is a great one. He was agnostic and set out to disprove Christianity and found its evidence was impossible to refute.

Others I'd highly recommend would be: - More than a Carpenter, by Josh McDowell - The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel - Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis

I find all of these books fascinating because they're all written by men who were atheists and set out to disprove the "foolishness" of Jesus. In the end, they all came to the same conclusion which is that the evidence that points to Jesus being the Son of God is very heavy. I'm not sure there's any reasonable evidence to the contrary. In fact, most atheists I've known and talked to were atheists not due to reason, but due to emotion. Christianity has a lot of emotional baggage that comes with it. We're all flawed people and unfortunately most people associate Christianity with abuse, rules, and condemnation. That's why I prefer talking about the person of Jesus. I've never met someone who could level a reasonable accusation at the person of Jesus, and after all—He's the entire reason any of us talk about any of this.

If you read all 4 of those books and come away unconvinced I'd love to have a conversation! I was not able to retain my disbelief :)

It's been a while since I've done this, and I realise this is fruitless.

> Likewise, once you find the truth it doesn’t require falsifying every other claim to truth for it to remain true.

The world is not like maths.

A scientific approach to the world doesn't really work like this. It deals not with truth but with hypotheses and (un)certainties. Claiming truth is fundamentally flawed, and really only reserved for fanatics, religious or not. A "truth" is only ever temporary, waiting to be rejected by evidence and replaced by the new "truth". This is why we never speak of truths but only of hypotheses, theories, etc. Falsification is at the core of science, and at the margins of religion, in both cases by design. This is why science has evolved over the centuries: theories held as truth once have been rejected and replaced by better theories. Meanwhile religion has not evolved in the slightest, except in a moral sense where original scripture is rightfully rejected as being archaic. However, it should be clear that this is not religious progress but moral progress, and is still challenged for religious reasons, by religious people.

Its easy to see when somebody is uninterested in reasoning in general, they use words like truth. It's a word you can use and build on without challenge, because its perfectly in the middle between reality and personal experience: the truth, my truth. It's flexible, can be used to your advantage to mean what you please, to imply what you desire it to imply (the truth), and most importantly to evade what you must evade to make a coherent point when challenged (my truth).

It is overwhelmingly unlikely that a human conceived description of a deity is correct.

> Jesus was the only person whose words and deeds claim deity and with which there is zero evidence to contradict his claims

One does not need evidence to contradict claims, one needs evidence to prove claims. This is how things work. If you disagree, I posit you the following claim without proof and challenge you to accept it and thereby follow your own logic: I claim that Jesus was lying about being the son of god but wants you to feel that he wasn't to manipulate you into following his personal views on ethics.

Apologies for the delayed response! I urge you to take a look at a few of the books I listed in a sibling comment. While I have neither the time nor desire to expound at length the copious amount of evidence for the deity of Jesus of Nazareth, there are several men who have done so for me! In addition, these guys were not your devout raised-from-birth Christians who believe simply because they were told. Rather, they believed because they could not disprove the evidence for Jesus. In fact, I believe all 4 men were atheists who set out to disprove Jesus, but came to the conclusion that the evidence supporting his claims to deity are monumental!

- Evidence That Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell

- More than a Carpenter, by Josh McDowell

- The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel

- Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis

Finally, this is addressed in probably each of these books, but as for your last comment. It's not unthinkable to imagine Jesus was so insane he was willing to die for his "personal views on ethics" (Although there's precious little evidence to support this, see the "Lord, Liar, Lunatic" argument). Nor is it outside the realm of possibility to think that perhaps his closest 12 followers were willing to die for a charade (Although again, there's no logical reason to support this idea)—I imagine stranger situations have occurred.

But consider the vast history of Christianity, littered with martyrs whose only mandate to escape death was simply, "Deny Christ" and were yet unwilling to do so. It begins to become disingenuous to suggest that across 2,000 years people have been willing to die for one man's "personal views on ethics" when all that would be required to avoid said death is to simply say, "Jesus is not God", unless of course you were utterly convinced it was true.

> there are several men who have done so for me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

> I believe all 4 men were atheists who set out to disprove Jesus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_anecdote

> It begins to become disingenuous to suggest that...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

Indeed fruitless.

TLDR: feel free to skip

When I was little, my mother tried to teach me how to tie my shoelaces, but she had shown me a method I did not understand and did not like, so I invented my own way. I was proud of it for 20 years or so. A friend I trusted more than anyone, tried to tell me in a kind way, that many people tie their shoelaces in a bad knot. When one knows, it's easy to see even from a glance and such a knots gets untied, but I wouldn't listen. Thought of not knowing how to tie shoelaces seemed absurd.

I was the only one I know that would stop randomly to re-tie his shoelaces, occasionally with people piling up behind me. It may be considered incontrovertible evidence in truth, yet at the time, it didn't bare much relevance to me. It was obvious that bad shoelaces were always at fault, or I didn't apply enough force. In my mind it would be too humiliating to even consider bad technique a possibility.

It wasn't until I had the grace to look at a knot-tying website alone, try it, accept I was tying a granny knot, learn how to tie a standard knot, in a recommended fast way, then proceed to one-up it in my own point of view. I didn't get much humbler, but at 23 years old, at least I knew how to tie my shoelaces and they didn't get untied anymore.

If it wasn't for the love of the one who had grace and has given up his grace so we would have his grace, acting through those who follow him, Himself and His Spirit, I would not have seen and felt the loving self-sacrifice, which paled my self-righteousness in an humbling and emotionally painful experience of the pain I've caused, setting me off in a search to do better, so that after nearly a decade I would once and then many times again in humility accept what I cannot deny, that Lord is better than anything I could imagine and Jesus Christ is our (our = all those who accept Him) Lord and Savior.

This is enough evidence (for me, for others it's just word of mouth) to love and worship Jesus. I've seen much more, and for that I accept what is written. It seems I may understand and see more than many, yet still, easily and often, I forget what I know, ignore and blank my mind, to doubt and void the uncomfortable. Only hours ago I've yet again given in to what I know to be bad, to lull and dull the mind, close my eyes and ears so I would not see what I had a longing to avoid.

I write this as an admission and hoping it will be useful to someone. To perhaps understand, that one cannot just see and one cannot just be explained, if it affects him dearly and he does not wish to know.

Speaking of others, but showing the principle: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. ...<<specific judgement of specific people>>... Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’...” Matthew 13:13-15

Your comment left me thinking, so I went to double-check the meaning of the word evidence in a dictionary (after all, I'm not a native English speaker). I found this one as the first entry: "the facts, signs or objects that make you believe that something is true" (source: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...). This is exactly the sense in which I'm using the word. What do you mean by saying it erodes language? Or do you use the word evidence in another sense than this dictionary?

PS: not meaning to start a flamewar or engage in endless discussion, I just want to understand your point ;)

Just wanted to give props for volunteer work.

It's been my raison d'etre for decades.

I know it's a cliché, but it's true that you receive more than you give ;)

I am a Sr. Dev at FAANG in America, but I yearn to go back to my home country in Europe. However doing so would result in a massive paycut, even with prospective high paging jobs. One possibility is to transfer internally with my current employer, but in this economic setting it's unlikely they will approve my request, much less allow me to work full remote, which is a deal breaker.

I have been contemplating freelancing for a while as a way to work remotely from home with a competitive salary (not US level, but better than EU market rate). I have decent experience as a Big Tech Sr. Dev. on ML/MLOps (e.g. I designed and implemented a real time inference service serving millions of RPS with single digit millisecond latency), so I believe my skills should be in demand.

Do you believe this is attainable or I am deluding myself?

You can always try this out first by searching for contract work as if you were in your home country. Just set up a website (perhaps not using your real name, in case your employer gets suspicious) and see if you can actually seek out the work. You can even try to purchase advertising on Google to see if you get any clicks / contacts. Overall it's a pretty cheap way to check.

I get that this may not be possible, but these sorts of trial balloons are much easier to float first to get an idea instead of taking a leap of faith.

Unfortunately my L1 visa doesn't allow me to have any other source of income than my current employer. But definitely this is something to look into once I get a Green Card.

Sorry for being unclear, I meant to just go through the process of seeing what you could get in terms of contracts as if you had already made the move, not to actually follow through and start any contract.

Some of the "expat threads" I've seen on Reddit where people yeet themselves to the other side of the world and hope it works out only to fall flat on their face are pretty eye opening. By testing the waters with "proto-contracting" like this, you can at least give yourself some idea of what you could get were you to move.

edit: grammar

Have you factored in the possibility you can go bankrupt in America anytime out of healthcare bills?

You can also go bankrupt anytime if you don't bring in enough money to cover all your other expenses, both in the US and in many other places. Yes, healthcare in the US is expensive if a company isn't picking up a big chunk of the insurance tab but it's hardly the only large expense people have to cover somehow.