How do I become a consultant? Do I need to master some programming languages and programming patterns and get "know-how" beyond of the general population of software engineers?

No you don’t. You just a shit ton of experience and even larger amount of professional connections

You sign up with a company that gives you shit benefits (Robert half, Accenture, apex, epam, any of the indiacos) and they drop you on site somewhere, billing you at $200/hr and paying you maybe 40% of that.

Be aware, consulting is a trap. Companies don't like to hire consultants full time.

🤷🏼‍♂️

@SortOfTested Those companies exist purely so that other companies can reduce personnel fast and easy when they need to. Consultants are the first to go.

@electrineer
Yep. The way I usually put it is they exist to allow shitty business people to treat engineering as contract labor and avoid spreading the wealth.

Please don’t go this way but if you do:

Depends on what consulting company you’re aiming.
For some big 5 I think you can just go and work there.
For some prestigious you need to know something.
For solo you need to know lots of people or know development trends and mainstream or since 1-2 years have at least one cloud certificate but the best would be to have everything above.

It’s 90% time hard piece of bread. If you’re lucky you get nice stack to work on for couple of years if not you’ve gonna be pushed back and forth trough biggest shit piles you can’t even imagine that can exist in publicity recognized “great quality companies”.

@M1sf3t probably there were couple of them around 100 years ago when automobiles were only couple decades old.

and... what about being a independent consultant?

This comes immediately to mind when I think of someone who aspires to be a consultant.

FITYMI
...
Profit?