I'm at a crossroads in my tech career and could use your collective wisdom. My goal is to strike a balance between time, income, and location freedom. Given the diverse expertise here, I believe this community can offer invaluable insights.
Background: Having accumulated experience in computer science and data, I'm now eager to explore avenues that provide more flexibility aligning with my lifestyle goals.
Seeking Your Expertise: I'm reaching out to those who've successfully achieved a similar balance. How can one ensure a steady income while enjoying ample personal time and the flexibility to work from anywhere? The objective is to have the freedom to take extended breaks without compromising financial stability.
Specific Questions: 1. Optimizing Work-Life: What strategies have worked for you in maintaining a healthy work-life balance? 2. Stable Income:*How do you secure a consistent income, especially during reduced working hours or time off? 3. Remote Work Opportunities:Any tips on finding roles that offer remote work options or flexibility in location? 4. Recommended Resources:Are there specific courses, books, or platforms that have guided you on this path?
If you've successfully navigated a similar journey or have valuable insights, please share your experiences, tips, or recommended resources. Thank you all for your time and expertise.
Optimizing work-life: When you can decide what kind of work you want to do, whom you work for, how much time you spend working, and how much you charge you can make whatever balance you want. You probably can't optimize all of those but you can optimize a lot better than when under the constraints of a regular job, or the stress of trying to launch a startup.
Stable income: Freelancing can provide a solid stable income if you cultivate long-term relationships, establish trust, negotiate retainer agreements, and charge enough so you don't have to work all the time.
Remote work: Free of the legal/cultural issues and expectations of regular employment you can contract with customers, then focus on solving their business problems. Customers usually don't care where you do that from as long as you communicate and deliver.
Recommended resources: I don't have any, sorry. The successful freelancers I know got out of the f/t job grind after years of experience in traditional jobs. You need marketable skills, good communication, domain expertise, and enough business sense to find your niche and negotiate fairly. You also need the instincts to avoid time-wasting, cheap, and toxic customers. I don't know of any shortcuts.
Key skills for freelancers: Really listen to the customer so you're solving their problems, not incidental technical problems. Reputation and referrals should become your main way to get work over time. Cultivate relationships, not just LinkedIn-style networking. You don't have to know everything or become the top expert, just more effective than average. Customers (and employers) very often aren't looking for the 10x person, they just want a 1X person because so many employees and contractors deliver close to 0x.
I think the main path is to become an expert in a niche, then go consulting/freelancing, then move to a low cost country (e.g Thailand) and pick & choose the work you take on.
Good luck