Viability of short-term contracting positions while working FTE

Contracting, especially in the same domain as your full-time employer can get you into a sticky situation and is honestly very stressful.

There are other side gigs you can consider building that can make you very decent income (extra $500-$1,000 per week), which won't put your full-time job at risk (and without that much stress either). Two things that I've done over the past 7 years while in corporate is teaching at a bootcamp and career coaching.

If you don't want to find your own clients, teaching at either a bootcamp or a university is great. Bootcamps tend to pay more and has less red tape, so that would be my preferred option. The hours usually don't conflict with core work hours since most (part time) bootcamps run their courses on evening / weekends since that's when the students are available as well.

B2B advisory / strategy consulting is possible as well, but harder to do until you've hit around Director level and involve a much longer sales cycle.

Happy to point you in the right direction if you want to pursue either of these paths.

DM if you want to chat.

Very much agree with Casey. freelance/contract programming gigs while you have a full-time job is difficult: lots of work and may conflict with your employer (especially if you're in Big Tech).

However, teaching is a great side gig that can also be lucrative. I was a contractor for Codepath teaching live classes, and I also recorded a course that was published on LinkedIn Learning. Since I was teaching people how to code, there wasn't any issue with doing these after hours from my day job.