Comment by raw_anon_1111

For me, I saw it happening around 2014. I was six years out of the long fog of my “expert beginner” phase and trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I was considered a “senior” [1] full stack developer and no matter what I did - mobile, actually learn front end better, I was still going to top out at around $150K (and sadly enough, that is still what I’m seeing in Atlanta when I lurk on LinkedIn).

I knew I had to get into BigTech or adjacent after my son graduated as a software engineer.

Around 2016 I belatedly discovered cloud consulting where consultants would come in and “transform” organizations. I learned in hindsight that they were a bunch of old school net ops folks who only knew how to do bad lift and shifts that costs the company more money and treated AWS like a Colo.

I wanted to do the same but focus on what I learned the term for years later was “modernization”. Bringing in a software developers mindset on cloud consulting. By 2020, I was no longer thinking about BigTech and was focused on getting into consulting. I had never heard of AWS’s Professional Services department until a recruiter told me about it. Even then I didn’t know it was full time working for AWS directly until that was also explained to me.

[1] yes in hindsight I know that a title of “senior” to someone who pulls well defined tickets off a Jira board is laughable.