Could you provide a few examples of roles and companies where this could be applicable please?

Currently, I like doing many things, finding the bottlenecks, and overcoming them. Today it's demand generation, tomorrow it's product and tech, and ultimately it's me being inadequate in some capacity. Which means lots of growth as a person, which feels very real, like you can be shy of being in front of another person and therefore avoid doing sales calls. This is big and feels much more real than 'growing' in an organisation where you're told to do XYZ to impress your manager so that they can beg their managers to get you into the raise quota, or even worse, simply bang your head against the 'we don't have money now' wall at a typical smaller company.

Being in control, jumping on interesting things to constantly learn something new and stuff like that are a good bonus as well.

Re this: >I'm currently working part-time on retainer, which allows me to work less than full-time and still make enough money to live (definitely less than a full-time job, but enough to live comfortably)

That's quite a good position to be honest.

> Then start working on taking part-time work on top of your full-time job.

This is what I've been doing for the past 3 months but only to save some extra money as our main income is 90-100% spent on necessities every month. I charge per hour probably within the 50-70 percentile bracket in my location. But I can't see how I could charge more without being much more specific than just doing regular software engineering.

As a qualified engineer and owner (in terms of responsibility), I quite often get compliments on how well I handle things - with attention to detail, without oversight, pushing things to the completion, etc. This made me think that probably I'm lowballing myself with this (shitty) startup job.

But on the other hand, I don't know where else I could 'remain myself' in the way of not becoming a professional SLOC cruncher or, God forbid, the ultimate PSC-driven developer.

I've been pursuing my own projects for the past 5 years and dreaming about being an entrepreneur (aka the capitalist era Hercules) for the past 15.

I haven't succeeded, at least big time, yet. We also live in a very high cost of living location (mostly for the family/kid's sake if you wonder) so I can't really quit my job forever and continue my entrepreneurial journey full-time (I did a 1,5 year break previously and burnt through all savings though).

The question is, where do people like myself fit well in terms of full-time jobs and/or other ways of making money?

I am software engineer by training, but I've acquired business/marketing knowledge and skills over years, learnt accountability and people management, UI/UX and user interviews, bits of product thinking, analytics and decision making.

I feel like an entrepeneur, my skillset is very broad and, probably, quite shallow in some areas too. Perhaps it'd make a good CPO/CTO, in an early-stage company, but this comes with a tradeoff of being paid sometimes 2x less than a senior/staff at big tech and not much more than an engineer in a startup.

The reason I ask of course, is because while I'm experimenting, having fun and feeling good about myself, I feel like I am missing on lots of opportunities and probably being too risky about not buying a house while the clock is ticking.

Please share your experiences and thoughts, thanks!

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