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Comment by im_busy | Hacker News Reader

I currently have 1 full time job, 1 full time contracting, and 4 clients that pay me a retainer for a set amount of hours they can use week to week.

It's going fine; I measure that based on my performance reviews all being excellent, my clients all paying the bills on time, and all work is done in a timely fashion. I do individual contributor infrastructure engineering at the senior+ level.

Managing the calendar is the toughest part, making sure things don't overlap is difficult. My full time calendar is relatively light, the contracting gig on the other hand is starting to get on my nerves with the amount of meetings they're pushing me to attend.

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Couple of other important points:

* the full time and contracting gigs are in separate time zones, which helps time management.

* I only actually work ~45-50 hours a week total, but all work is complete.

* I only take on work that aligns. I use several extremely standard tools and ALL gigs are all the same, which lowers my cognitive overhead a lot.

Thanks for sharing. If you don't mind a couple of questions:

- is the compensation worth it? - do you think this is going to be a long term thing for you (burning the candle at both ends)?

Cash comp is around 800K pre tax, to me it's worth it; I'm able to push tons of cash into my retirement accounts and do things like purchase a vacation home.

I've been doing it for the past few years, and it hasn't had a negative effect on my mental well being or family relationships. I work extra here and there, sure, but so does everyone, and it has more to do with "we need to do this at this specific time" than any actual extra work needing to be done.

Not the person who asked the question but thanks again for sharing this.

I'm in a similar situation but without the full time job -- I can understand the retainer, but with the contracting do you charge per hour? I'd imagine you charge per day/week but that also feels a bit hard to balance evenly with a full time job.

I charge a flat retainer every 2 weeks that gives a client the ability to give me work if they need stuff done, and the ability to call me in the middle of the night if things go down.

I've never had an issue balancing it; after the initial work of bringing a client on board the infrastructure handles itself. I've put a lot of work into automation and tooling, so the engineering teams I work for are able to self service on 90% of the things they need, and only need things directly from me rarely.

This isn't software engineering, it's infrastructure, which means I'm not on the hook to work on new product features sprint to sprint. There are times when I only have to do an hour or so worth of work for a client.

Thanks for sharing -- this has been eye opening for me. I do a lot of infrastructure for myself and others. Great to know that rewards for competence and skill like this is out there for ICs.

You've inspired me -- I'll be looking to try and make some more contracts like this in the future.

> This isn't software engineering, it's infrastructure, which means I'm not on the hook to work on new product features sprint to sprint. There are times when I only have to do an hour or so worth of work for a client.

Great, and I think it's honestly a very high ROI improvement as well, enabling a team of 5 developers to commit, deploy and generate value faster is absolutely worth it.

The only things I've considered in that space that could be as lucrative as you're doing now has been reducing cloud costs (and taking % of cost saved over 6mo).

Thanks for sharing. Do you find the clients and contract work through your network or from your full time job?

I'm at a startup that has some customers which need extra work that I can do but the optics of it might look bad if coworkers find out.

All my clients come from my network, not through my full time job.

That is impressive. Do you have an email address or a contact method?

I made a new email if you're interested in chatting imbusyonhackernews at gmail

Do you use any drugs other than caffeine ?

Nah, though I should exercise more, but that's mostly just me being lazy.

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