I am happy to announce our January meeting of the Boston .NET Architecture Group will feature Jason Haley (Twitter - HaleyJason) speaking on Life as an Independent Consultant/Contractor this Wednesday, January 21, 2015, at the Magenic offices in Waltham, MA. Here is an abstract for his talk:
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Since this is an experienced group of individuals who know what a career in software is like, I want to lead a discussion on what it’s like when you are a consultant or contractor.
Topics to discuss:
- Getting started (either full-time or part-time)
- How to find work
- Networking and building your expertise
- Finances (I'll share my income and rate experience)
- Other things like:
+ When do you leave your full-time job to do be a consultant/contractor full-time?
+ When do you leave your consulting/contracting to take a full-time job?
+ What are the possibilities of just having a consulting side gig?
+ How to do you keep making your career better?
I have my experiences to share from my 5 years as an independent, please bring yours too share too.
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Jason is an independent consultant in the Boston area and a co-leader of the Microsoft DevBoston group in Cambridge, MA. Also, Jason is one of the original founding members of the Boston .NET Architecture Group (originally Boston CodeBrew). Recently, Jason was also featured on a podcast Life as a Consultant with Bryan Hogan.
We will also have a drawing at the end of the meeting for several copies of a related book I think every developer should read: Soft Skills: The Software Developers Life Manual by John Sonmez. I plan to post a review of the book in an another post soon.
