Becoming a Public Engineer
After 3 years of employment, I've once again resigned with no job to move to. My plan for the short term is to become something that I'm calling a “public engineer” in order to rebuild the value creation machinery I had at Opengear as a solopreneur.
Finding success at Opengear
I increased my leverage at Opengear by working through these stages:
- When I started I was assigned tasks that were not specific to my skills or abilities, and I completed them. Leverage was low because any of the other engineers could have done the same tasks. I believe you can get up to about 100% faster doing those tasks than other engineers through increasing your skill.
- Then I started to spot more opportunities to provide value that were unique to me. I know a lot about AWS infrastructure so the first of these was finding a $10k/yr saving by cleaning up unused artifacts in a massive EFS volume. I became an administrator of that AWS environment and found security and cost efficiency problems and solved them as well.
- People started bringing me problems that were specific to my skills. This dramatically increased the leverage I had in solving them because my skill set became more and more specialized. I now had more optionality in choosing tasks, if the task wasn't impactful or I wasn't specifically well suited to solve it I could generally refuse.
Now that I'm outside of the company, a lot of my specific knowledge that allowed me to find important problems and my reputation that caused problems to be brought to me are no longer effective. Here's my plan to get those things back:
- Start finding problems that are visible to the public and solving them. This will consist of creating or improving tools, educational content and open source software.
- Build a professional network (by going to meetups, engaging with my existing network) and post content online. This will cause more people to be aware of who I am and the value I can provide, which will eventually lead to people coming to me with problems I am well equipped to solve.
Concerns
The thing that worries me about this approach is that it's still very comfortable for me, I get to spend a lot of my time sitting in my bedroom solving problems and writing/talking about it. I don't need to go through the financial risk of hiring anyone or paying to run advertising. It's not that it's bad in and of itself to not have those things, it just worries me that I could be allowing myself to take an easier path and delaying my growth.