I think this must be an engineers wet dream? I'm not a SWE but over the years many engineers have told me that is their dream job.

It's also what all technical consultants do.

I would guess the root of this problem is that they aren't willing to pay.

Indeed. If they did they would just pay their old employees on a contract basis, not this new person who's never seen the code before

That sounds like a fun company idea tbh

That would be pretty fun. Joe Grand has made a career of it, I'm sure there are others.

Yeah form an LLC and pretend there are a bunch of people involved to land that contract

They wont typically pay an individual a rate equivalent to that, but an LLC can get a contract

This is exactly the same advice as you give an IC that is going after b2b work. It has nothing to do with who they will or won’t work with and everything to do with limiting your liability when playing in the big leagues.

I’ve been that guy. It’s fun but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

The kinds of people who call you are some of the human beings you would least like to work with, generally. They are almost definitionally over-funded and under-prepared.

That is true; that's why we keep jacking up the hourlies; most of us become more flexible when paid a lot.

That's why I have the "eat everything I kill" bit. When I leave they will be much less funded and much better prepared.

Ditto.

Company of a friend of a friend had an intractable problem with an impossible deadline, like, literally, less than a day.

Don’t remember the details, but I fixed it. Deadline next morning, problem solved, saved the day.

It’s midnight, on a status call, wife is sleeping in the next room. The IT guy, his Russian contractor, and “Management” (folks who called me in) are on the call.

The IT guy is SCREAMING at me because I hadn’t checked the code into his convoluted VCS. That thing was a mess. I told them early on that doing that kind of bookkeeping was not a priority. We could deal with it after the crisis had passed.

He was having none of it. At high volume. In the middle of the night.

I simply told them “You know, I don’t have to be here.”

This ][ close to just saying “ok” and hanging up the phone.

Good times.

My company has been doing exactly that for decades. We don't work like you suggest; we charge by the hour and the price is based on the tech, difficulty and urgency. For cases like this it would be €1000/human/hr probably. We also ask intake money. We generally don't work on-site but we can and have been flown in, as far as Australia (we are in the eu); those add a lot of costs. We usually have a handover to the existing or new team, so projects are usually a few weeks to max 3 months (we refuse longer; we specify this in the contract; if it runs over, it's their problem, we are out; it helps getting large companies to cooperate and cut red tape as they tend to find it enough we are there and paying the fees for years if it keeps it all running; I hate that so not doing it).

The reason why my idea is just an idea and yours is a business is yours is a lot more realistic, but I'm happy to hear that something like it exists. I had lost hope that I could find real challenges in my work but now I see that I must look harder.

It is not even hard to find these things, especially if you have some contacts; we definitely cannot handle the work and it's visibly accelerating. There are so many systems where the original team is no longer there and everything 'runs'; especially with VPSs, ec2, docker, kubernetes etc, things are just running blackboxes and when there are changes that don't automatically work and break things, no-one has a clue what to do. A lot of bitrot as well; we had a client who use codeigniter ancient version in 500+ internal and external applications running on ancient php (not supported) etc and with IT demanding updates to the infra, things started failing fast ; a lot of these systems were manually installed on servers that are basically forgotten until something goes down. There are 100s of 1000s of companies in the world that have situations like this and I cannot even attempt to estimate the costs of downtime, hacks, 'must rewrite' new consultants coming in, 'must rewrite' resume driven new employees etc.

Sooo ... are you guys looking to hire? I know an DevOps person (me) who's been knee deep in AWS for 10+ years who might be interested. :grin:

We are looking yes, but you have to like screwing around with a lot of tech; from Clipper to C# and from Cobol to k. We are overloaded but we try to get full utility for all people on what we like.

I can email you if I can find your email.

Any chance I could be contacted too please? username at gmail.

I used to find my niche in contracting for banks always actively seeking the opposite of “greenfield” projects (usually to the utter surprise of recruitment agents) but this market has not been the same in the UK recently.

How would I find such a company?