Some industries have realized they want some people who have multiple skills, such as the "full stack engineer" roles, but it seems rather more common to prefer someone who precisely fits into the specialist role they defined.
People flat-out don't believe that the skills enumerated on my resume could be held by a single person, and are.
Apparently, I'm clearly "over the hill", having been at this for nearly 40 years. I should state that I have 20+ years experience instead, as-if having life experience doesn't actually make you better qualified to understand the contexts of any role in an organisation.
My skill-set is "threatening" to others, because, apparently, knowing things about a great many technologies means that I know more than the person hiring me, which somehow means that I'm a threat. As-if surrounding yourself by people who are smarter than you is suddenly undesirable.
I've been told to "dumb down" my resume because there's too much there, even if there's 99% chance that a computer will be the device actually reading it and selecting me. Apparently I'm supposed to "infiltrate" a company at a lower level and then "show" them that I can do more, despite 40 years experience showing that people only see the skills that they want to see.
According to some automated job technologies I have 104 years of experience. Not sure how that works.
Then there are those who want to know which of the experience is "professional" and which isn't. (I've been self-employed for the past 23+ years)
In the end, I liken it to this:
"How much experience do you have in eating food?"
"Do you mean, adding together each of the 15 minute meals, or how long have I been eating food for since I was born?"
"Okay, how much professional experience do you have eating food?"
"..."
The "system" still serves the ones who grow vertically Junior X, X, Senior X, Junior X Manager, X Manager, Senior X Manager, and so on. I remember listening to DOAC chatting with Harley Finkelstein of Shopify that was describing how he appreciates T-shaped skill-set. So you master skill X (as you 'grew up with it') but as time was going by you also developed other skills in parallel.
Modern companies & minds get it and celebrate it. Old-school-ers don't (and probably never will). There is also the thing "I want him/her to do X, so (e.g.) project management skills are not useful". And then I am happy when I hear this on an interview because I most definitely do NOT want to work with that person! :)
I could have come into a job and say "okay, I know back end, let me focus on that" but instead I spent a day installing a shitty data pipeline that more or less took us through the next 4 years of data analytical needs for almost no cost. Etc.
It is just how it is. I even read a post on HN about a decade ago about how a guy was hire #1, was instrumental in the growth of a company, and when it was purchased was pushed out because they didn't need a generalist anymore, they needed a specialist. And so he decided to drop the generalist role and focus entirely on one technical aspect to the benefit of his career.
So while I agree with Tim, I also have to say, as someone in the thick of it, there's no good way out. Unless you want to keep working for Seed / Series A startups, fingers crossed they sell or you won't make that okay payoff.
Just give it some time and start by doing it on a part-time basis. It might take several months before you land your first project, but once you completed some work for some clients, more business will come if you are good.
You will know when you are ready to take your individual contracts full-time.
You can just drop it in casual conversation. "What do you do for a living?" "Oh I'm a software developer at X-Corp, and I also do some work for individual clients" Something like that. People remember that stuff. If you like, you can even tell people you offer a finder's fee. Just don't be pushy. Be willing to build the business part-time until you have enough work to take it full-time.
You probably won't be getting big projects from the get go, but if you are humble, that won't be a problem. My first project was just optimizing and cleaning a slow and messy Python script. I charged $35 an hour an threw 10 hours into it.