And before that, weren't you a contractor shilling overpriced and possibly unneeded medical equipment to government funded hospitals? And before that, weren't you a semi-unemployed professional gambler?
I was, most recently, a consultant for a healthcare company. I was primarily a systems integration architect, taking them through a very large merger with another company. That was, in theory, going to be a 1 year gig, but they continued to acquire things and let me bill them at my daily rate for most of another 2 years.
Mostly that meant project management, but I also developed a probabilistic record linkage algorithm that I sold the patent rights for (which may or may not turn out to be valueless going forward because of some recent breakthroughs in that area, but hey, I got paid!) . I did some work for them on automated pattern recognition of digital imaging, along the lines of computationally highlighting likely masses on mammograms, but not actually exactly that. There is a fair amount of overlap in the math. I also wrote a lot of PL/SQL, a few custom APIs in C, and the occasional COBOL routine.
Prior to that, I was a fully unemployed poker player who played for a living, but it's probably important to note that I easily made more money doing that than consulting, but the hours aren't great if you have a family and don't hate them, so I went to a 9-5ish job instead. The combination of those two things made it possible for me to hang out with my kids and do dishes and stuff now while Nexa saves the world. I doubt I'll ever work again.
Edited, Feb 10th 2015 7:38pm by Smasharoo
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