Stuck in Corporate IT, want to hack again
Fellow IndieHackers, I'm turning to the community for some fresh pointers on my current situation.
I'm 47, married with 2 kids and living in France. I'm currently the CTO for a semi-public financial institution (4000+ users, 90 locations around the globe).
After 15 years abroad of running my own consultancy and a couple of startups, this old customer learned I was back in Europe and offered me this position.
The last 2 years, I've been 100% involved in the day to day management: doubling the team size, reviewing and setting up new processes, improving our reporting, retooling, starting SecOps.
This is a pure Enterprise IT shop: Excel cancer spreading everywhere, email overdose, manual almost-everything.
I had the opportunity to hire some decent engineers and we're now moving, albeit slowly, to a more modern way of running things (CMDB, CI/CD, Terraform, centralizing logs with ELK, trying to convince upper management that we should move to APIs instead of burning money on the old ESB, you get the picture).
But I'm not happy. I'm an Open Source guy and I long for my startup days. I've been thinking on starting a new project but my schedule is hectic and I don't know where to start. I use to have dozens of ideas a day. I'm thinking of becoming a freelance again but financially that's a big risk and I'm not getting any younger.
So in a nutshell, I lost my mojo and I can't see myself staying there. Anyone had a similar experience?
You should be in a good position to find a CTO position in a newer/smaller company, where you might have both more interesting work and a better opportunity in terms of equity, you can find your own balance for equity/salary/interest, pick the company like you would have been partnering/investing/starting them, interview the c-staff/founders like you would if it was your own startup...
That's kinda a mix position where you might get some pieces of everything
Or actively purse companies that raised some funds and try to find an opportunity there
Otherwise you should consider some savings that your feelings comfortable with burning depending on the aim... You seems to have a lot of good options from a far like consultant->consultancy firm->products..
Thank you for your insights, I was heading towards some of the options you mentioned.
I'm also open to collaborate with the right team/product/idea if someone at a very early stage is looking for a lead dev/infra guy.