anonOver60

I'm sorry - my brain says "recruiter" when I read your message for some reason. I'm not sure what it is pattern matching on. If you can assure me that you're not a recruiter I'd be happy to send you my resume, although a little more information about what your company does would be helpful.

There should be a market for people like us. My personal network is not large enough to build a practice around. Have you had any ideas on this?

I do like the DC area but we have kids living in the Bay Area and my wife doesn't want to move away from them. If there is some way to work with you with that constraint I'd be interested.

The advice I've given to younger generalists like me is to force yourself to become an expert on something. That's what people are used to seeing when they are hiring. Pick something long-lasting like databases or search or machine learning.

The main reason is we have 4 kids living in the Bay Area and my wife doesn't want to move away from them.

OP: Not sure why you are down-voted. The HackerNews Community seems to dislike telling the truth if it is surrounded by even a hint of negativity.

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "engineering services firm"?

Actually, I would appreciate some advice on this. I truly don't know what services to sell. I can set up machines, design databases, write graph algorithms, train machine learning models, design web services, etc. But I'm not a "leading expert" on any of those things. I'm a generalist and usually have an answer for any problem I run into simply because I've run into it before. How do I market myself as a general problem solver?

I have run into this in the past. Usually a Technical Lead or Director of Engineering is grumpy, gives me a very perfunctory 5-minute interview, has clearly already made up their mind. It was just a waste of time for me and their company.

OP. I'm originally from the midwest but we'd like to stay in California for now. I'll keep you in mind, though.

Absolutely not! It's a slippery slope when one starts fudging "just a little".

VP of Engineering at a startup is probably the best fit. Managing small (< 10) software teams is probably next. Anything with lots of novel and/or interesting problems is next. I also seem to have a knack for listening to customers and figuring out what they really need and want.

Well, I'm not very social. My personal network exists but most of them have been at the same job for 10 years or longer. A few are at FANG-CxO level where I'm not sure they'd be helpful.

I've applied to Apple several times over the last 10 years for jobs requiring some very specific and rare skills that I have. They have never responded.

I've gone through the interview process at Google twice and was "close but rejected".

My whole team was laid off two years ago. Last year I did a startup that unfortunately folded when my business partner had a major family tragedy. This year I've been contracting and looking for work. I ran the numbers and I can't retire yet. I'm looking to work another 8-9 years.

These are all very helpful. My next resume is going to be much shorter...

I started out in Math, realized I liked to build things, switched to EE, and took all the CS courses I could for fun. When I was done I had enough credits to get all three degrees.