In article , Shiver Me Timbers wrote:
I currently work as a software engineer

First as everyone will tell you, I'm sure - DON"T give up your day job.

I'd agree with that; the day job can pay for the flying.

In your shoes I would start approaching the small, tiny, out of the
way, miniscule mom and pop operators and have a serious talk about your
abilities as a software engineer and how you could seriously help them
improve, promote, and maintain their computer systems particularily on
the web.

The trouble is - on a small mom and pop shop, they simply won't have
enough work to keep a software person busy for more than an hour or two
a week at most. It just won't pay the bills. Added to that, the job
market is oversaturated with 'web designers'. If finding work in
software engineering is hard, finding work in web design related things
is much harder - probably as hard as getting an airline job.

If the software job's work hours is preventing flying, freelancing can
provide more time flexibility, so helicopter training can be fit in
between (and as a freelancer, you can also 'network' a bit more easily,
especially if you hang out at the airport and do freelance work for
business owners who happen to be pilots. You'd never guess how I've got
100% of my freelance work.). The best line of work is things that CANNOT
be outsourced - that require physical presence. Many small/medium
businesses have appalingly bad (worm/virus-ridden) LANs, no backups, and
no sysadmin to sort out the mess and make a network that works well.
They can't hire a full time sysadmin because they maybe only have an
hour a week of sysadminning that needs doing.

So do like the jets - become a fractionally-owned sysadmin :-) You can
provide general network/computer health services to a number of
companies, and if there's a few of them owned by pilots, then usually, a
bit of flight time comes with it ;-)


--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"