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IT Consulting/programming

Anything considered a "hustle" and not necessarily a CENTS-based Fastlane

kanunay

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Anybody here doing IT consulting, or did it in the past and got out? Is there still good money in this kind of work, or is everyone outsourcing to India or having college students do this kind of stuff on the cheap?
 
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DisLife

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Anybody here doing IT consulting, or did it in the past and got out? Is there still good money in this kind of work, or is everyone outsourcing to India or having college students do this kind of stuff on the cheap?

Depends on the niche. IT is a pretty broad range of things. I know/partner with companies that do hands-on work like filling a rack or pulling cable. That's pretty tough to outsource to India. Of course they hire the college students to do the manual labor, but the companies charge around a 75% markup on that labor. The fastlane proposition is not to be the consultant doing the labor, but the agency owner selling the consultant's time.

If all you know how to do is put a computer together and troubleshoot the network connection to the router, my 7 year old daughter could do that and your value is meaningless and should be outsourced to India. However, if you know how to provision a new server into the VMWare cluster or can configure the disaster recovery site, those are more valuable to existing companies.

When you start getting into the specialized IT knowledge, your value should go up. Most businesses aren't going to chase after the hot technology until they're forced to do so. I've consulted at dozens of manufacturers/importers. The resistance to change is huge and gets bigger as the companies get bigger. I know a manufacturer that supplies pool furniture to 5 diamond hotels around the world and they're running 15 year old ERP software on 32-bit servers that they can't/won't upgrade.

Your task as the consultant is to show you're more knowledgeable (valuable) about something than anyone the company currently has access to. Just like any other business, you just need to demonstrate why you're worth the $200 an hour you charge.
 

kanunay

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My area of expertise has been continuation of legacy systems (that 15 year old ERP software haha), databases and data analysis, and application development. I no longer utilize these skills at my job (they have me tinkering with windows stuff on PCs), it's time to move on but I'd rather not get just another job somewhere.
 
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Deleted50669

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My area of expertise has been continuation of legacy systems (that 15 year old ERP software haha), databases and data analysis, and application development. I no longer utilize these skills at my job (they have me tinkering with windows stuff on PCs), it's time to move on but I'd rather not get just another job somewhere.

Cloud will be in extremely high demand for the next decade as it catches more steam. With Azure and AWS going at it a good place to be is a SME for either one. Knowing AWS lambda functions, for example, is going to be essential in high-volume tech companies.
 
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