im_busy

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

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

All my clients come from my network, not through my 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.

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.

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.

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.