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How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

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Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

#281

Post by csallen »

pwaai wrote: post #259
zdw wrote: post #17

Step 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name. Step 2: Be good/accurate enough at opining in ways that make sense. Most people won't have either 1 or 2 going for them. There's one more thing - charging a lot is how to signal value, which is a a huge thing. I know a guy who used to manage an A-list rock band (everyone knows their songs) who went into consulting, and started out lowballing people, for $1k…

> Step 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name. This is what irks me about articles like this being posted on HN and indie hackers--You too can have a six digit MRR if you've spent the past X years building a community or mailing list around the topic...which is not a bad advice but not many people are able to do this. So while not without merit and valuable bits, I feel like you've highlighted a very…

Not to be too defensive here, but one of my goals with Indie Hackers is to collect enough knowledge and stories that you can easily filter through to find examples of the type of approach that best works for you. Because you're right — not everyone is suited to spending 5 years building up an audience, etc. There are other ways.

Always happy to take suggestions on how I can improve the site to help with this, and also suggestions for different founders I should reach out to to come do an interview.

A big initiative of mine for 2018 is to vastly expand the number of interviews on the site (currently at ~250), and to add a better tagging system to help you find what's relevant.

Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

#283

Post by kbuchanan »

dsacco wrote: post #198
zdw wrote: post #17

Step 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name. Step 2: Be good/accurate enough at opining in ways that make sense. Most people won't have either 1 or 2 going for them. There's one more thing - charging a lot is how to signal value, which is a a huge thing. I know a guy who used to manage an A-list rock band (everyone knows their songs) who went into consulting, and started out lowballing people, for $1k…

> Step 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name. Step 2: Be good/accurate enough at opining in ways that make sense. Neither of these are prerequisites for being extremely successful at consulting. My consulting rates are now approximately $10,000/week with a 70% annual utilization rate. I'm not industry famous at all. I also do not maintain a blog or do "content marketing." For a while I had no website…

Loved this. It raised a question, though: how do your clients hold you accountable to your rates? How do you demonstrate $10K in a week was worth their while?

Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

#284

Post by bastijn »

kirubakaran wrote: post #276
bastijn wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noticed the word "design" was written as "degsin".

> Noticed the word "design" was written as "degsin". It isn't. For reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20170927012427/https://kirubakar...

It is, though it was desgin not degsin.

"desgin assets such as color palette and images to be used".

Under 1.3. Also in your reference.

Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

#285

Post by patio11 »

AFNobody wrote: post #137
putnam wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think being a consultant is as rare as becoming an actor?

A consultant making 5 figures a week, in practical terms, is a unicorn that is not reliably repeatable. Most people cannot maintain that level of marketing while maintaining an income (as a consultant) effectively. If they could, every programmer would try to transition into making 5 figures a week as a consultant instead of making $100-200k with a stable job. The $4k/week thing isn't since pretty much any decent con…

There are plenty of reasons to take a steady job over running a business, even a very lucrative business. I’ve done both; no stressing over Christmas on whether a check will arrive soon enough in January or February to pay for my tax assessment in March has non-zero value to it. Paternity leave was pretty nice. I get to devote a supermajority of my professional efforts to work rather than devoting 10% to business administration and 20% to sales/marketing.

Consultants with relatively high rates are not unicorns, any more than lawyers or doctors with high rates are. This is not just repeatable, this is a fairly reasonable career path, much like “work at AppAmaGooBookSoft” is a lucrative but well-trod career path. (Which, btw, have in-the-door offers for mid-career professionals which are reasonably competitive with running a full-time consultancy at $30k/week.)

Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

#286

Post by twobyfour »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #209
jghn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond what taway20171214 said, don't discount the value of "language which management can understand". As I've moved up the ladder I've learned how extremely valuable this skill is and how woefully bad I am at it.

In my experience, "language that management can understand" just means focusing on answering the following questions: 1. What's the proposed issue/improvement? 2. What are the recommended options? 3. How much time will it take to get done? In other words, all you really need to communicate is why we're doing it, and when it will be done. In my experience, they're not interested in challenges faced in implementation.…

Depends on how high up the ladder the management is you're talking to.

Your line manager may be interested in a technical issue / improvement and understand its value without further explanation -- for instance, we're using a brute force algorithm that takes exponential time to foo the bar in the Baz module. It's got test coverage and the problem has a known logarithmic solution, so we could rewrite that in a week to be more efficient, and still be confident it's accurate.

Your department head may be willing to consider fixing a problem that affects efficiency or security or expected timelines -- we've identified the likely cause of at least one class of those outage events you've raised concerns about. If you want to fix it immediately, we would have to push back delivery of the Quux feature by a week while we rewrite a portion of the Baz application, but other risks are minimal.

The C-suite is mostly interested in problems/solutions framed as "how does this save us money" or "how does this make us money" -- we intend to invest a week in technical maintenance work that will allow us to save 25% of our monthly hosting costs by scaling back hardware requirements, and reduce the frequency of outage events that we have to pay out for on under our SLAs by 75%. That would cost $10,000 in developer time and delay our product schedule by a small though measurable amount, but I estimate it would save us an average of $48,000/year in costs.

Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

#287

Post by siliconc0w »

I think an important note is that this sort of work is a lot of sales and not a lot of programming. You have to hustle and know how to sell a narrative and have the credentials/data to back it up. You make money through scaling, which means selling a lot of clients the same solutions which might be easy for marketing but for other niches it can be difficult because it can take non-trivial effort to adapt an arbitrary software product to a given strategy/solution or require certain organizational culture shifts for meaningful success. Also clients don't want to share and generally want 100% of your time so work/life balance and 'scaling' to many clients can be difficult.

Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

#289

Post by user5994461 »

borplk wrote: post #253
user5994461 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big market around security audits and certifications. They don't pay by value provided, there is hardly anything measurable, but they pay good rates for professional specialized work that has to be done.

Yes but it tends to be around bigger companies. Lots of smaller businesses just don't care. They also don't have "chief somethings" to tell them it's important, or to do it to save their own asses just in case. They just fly blind and in many cases they get lucky which further solidifies their beliefs. And in the odd case when they get screwed they just bury it and move on. Or post a "we are very sorry! security is o…

Small companies rarely take consultants of any sort at any decent rate.

Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

#290

Post by Asdfbla »

The way it reads it sounds reasonable, but ultimately it seems more targeted at aspiring consultants who were already pretty entrepreneurial minded than at the general programmer crowd. Apart from doing things 'right' (proper rates, selling yourself, networking and so on, we've all read that on HN), I think it surely requires a much different mindset towards work than what your average developer might have. I can't imagine getting into the grandstanding mindset (not meant in a negative way) required to sell myself as a consultant really, and I'd also first have to adjust to quantifying everything I do in terms of money.

But definitely good for all the people who can do it and use the corporate structure of the world for their benefit. Pretty cool. I could see myself get the required competence to consult some time in the future (though not yet), but I doubt I'd ever get the character for it.

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