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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)

#361

Post by walshemj »

MrFoof wrote: post #222
putnam wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a consultant?

I actually am, and I'm a Hacker News nobody that is 100% solo, including all of my sales. I started in mid-2012 after being fed up with every employer out there, but was well aware that I was one of the best people someone could hire for things that are necessary, but not glamorous -- database performance tuning, data warehousing, ETL process development, and cleaning up disasters. Yet getting market rate for salary…

That's interesting I have a lot of experience sorting out large scale web businesses screw-ups maybe I have been approaching marketing myself wrong as a technical expert rather than a consultant - time to by some hugo boss suits and up my day rate to £1200.

I wont mention the UK jobsites name but I found a bug (a trivial cockup with canonical tags) that had cost them > £500,000 is lost traffic and that was in less than a week.

BTW I am looking so if anyones interested hit me up

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

#362

Post by jghn »

twobyfour wrote: post #286
ZenoArrow wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly.

The other piece I've seen is being able to handle "I want Foo by X". It's easy to take on the engineer mindset and say "Sorry, that's not possible. The whizbangs alone would take more than that time!", but what do you do when they simply repeat "I want Foo by X"?. Picture the various Star Trek series where the engineer would say it'd take 5 hours to fix something and the captain retorts "you have 2". It's real.

The skill which really makes me jealous are the folks who are able to read between the lines and get at why they want Foo and why they need it by X. Instead of saying "Sorry, no can do!" they're able to offer Bar instead, and because they understand the deeper motivations of why Foo is being requested they understand why the manager is likely to accept Bar instead of Baz.

This is pretty similar to your C-suite descriptions, now that I reread it. But it's a different spin on it.

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

#363

Post by stephenboyd »

andrethegiant wrote: post #300
patio11 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My modal engagement was with a SaaS company with $20 million a year sales, a few dozen employees, and 1~3 very strapped people wearing the marketing hat. “How much email do you send?” “We have a newsletter.” “What else?” “Welcome to free trial email. “What else?” “Nothing.” I write proposal. You should: 1) Have a pre-sales drip campaign positioned as a “free course about X delivered over email” w/ 8 emails arriving o…

That's a good example of a marketing consultant, but what about an engineering consultant? Would talking tech stack pros/cons pull in a similar rate?

I've worked as a software engineering consultant. Sometimes I would do engagements that were just analysis and advice, but for most of them I would actually design or develop some software.

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

#364

Post by chrishacken »

perl4ever wrote: post #317
chrishacken wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personalities are built; you're not born an introvert. Anyone can be built into a leader; go join the Marine Corps if you don't believe me.

You can't teach any arbitrary thing (nor temperament) to any arbitrary person. For a specific example, consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teichm%C3%BCller_space I can say that not only would I never get anywhere with math at that level, but some of the related mathematical pages on Wikipedia surpass my ability to even tell if they are real or the work of cranks. For any random person, there are things they can't…

Given enough time and training, anyone who puts their all into learning it, is capable of understanding that.

It may take them 20 years to learn math from the ground up, but they can do it. Saying someone can't do something is bullshit. That's sheep mentality.

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

#365

Post by walshemj »

fiatpandas wrote: post #63
scrimpton wrote: post #26

This is by a wide margin the most bourgeois shit I've heard on here apart from the constant cryptocurrency posts. "Make disgusting amounts of money by doing nothing instead of your actual job!"

You’ll probably find your comment downvoted because you expressed yourself using language which isn’t kosher in the HN community, and you aren’t praising the writing of HNs most well known and well liked member, but I generally agree with your sentiment. I felt gross and kind of disappointed while reading the article. I need more time to think deeply about why that is and communicate it in an effective way.

This is the sort of naivety that Robert Tressell exposed in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. You need to be a bit more woke mate

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

#366

Post by BeetleB »

mgkimsal wrote: post #308
BeetleB wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know plenty of skilled developers, but only a handful have a combination of business savvy and enough social skills and graces to be able to talk to a variety of people in business settings without ... hosing it up somehow. Of course most are like that: How much effort did they put in to become skilled developers, and how much on the business savvy? I'm guessing years on the former, and perhaps hours on the latter…

> It's not that people can't develop those skills. It's that few want to, or realize that they have to I sort of agree, but ... we all know the people who try to get in to programming/development, but just never get it. They can try, and maybe even land a jr role some place, but it never really clicks, regardless of how long they work at it. I think the non-tech skills are like that in some measure as well. Also, whi…

>I think the non-tech skills are like that in some measure as well.

The difference is that to do very well in tech/programming, you have to be well above the average.

For a lot of non-tech skills, merely being a bit above the average will get you far. In the context of this discussion, the primary skill the consultant has is still his technical skills. He merely upped his non-tech skills enough to prevent it from being a barrier.

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

#367

Post by walshemj »

infinity0 wrote: post #71
scrimpton wrote: post #26

This is by a wide margin the most bourgeois shit I've heard on here apart from the constant cryptocurrency posts. "Make disgusting amounts of money by doing nothing instead of your actual job!"

I think there's lots of useful things to learn from the article, though I do agree that this: > A necessary collorary to this: the principals of a technical consultancy do very well for themselves. I don't know if that is a secret but it certainly isn't well appreciated: nobody says Occupy Boutique Rails Consultancies, but the principals of them do end up in the 1%. is not great for society and I'm highly skeptical t…

At thnakee kindly Master Frodo - I know I just saved the world but once we get to bag end ill get right back on digging the potato beds it would not do for me to get above my betters *tugs forlock" :-)

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

#368

Post by bastijn »

dboreham wrote: post #339
putnam wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do consultants never code?

They can code. "Consultant" doesn't mean much. May as well say "Dude we hired to do XXX".

That would be a contractor or contingency worker for me. They are hired to do X. When they leave their work stops, a critical difference with a consultant.

Consultant does mean something. Means you temporarily hire experience in a field you are not familiar with to bring competency to your company, train/knowledge transfer to employees, and have a quick up ramping of a project which can continue when the consultant leaves because now you have a proper architecture and your employees are trained to use it, work with and extend it.

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

#369

Post by edraferi »

pacomerh wrote: post #355
patio11 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My modal engagement was with a SaaS company with $20 million a year sales, a few dozen employees, and 1~3 very strapped people wearing the marketing hat. “How much email do you send?” “We have a newsletter.” “What else?” “Welcome to free trial email. “What else?” “Nothing.” I write proposal. You should: 1) Have a pre-sales drip campaign positioned as a “free course about X delivered over email” w/ 8 emails arriving o…

If this is what a consultant is I don't want to be one, or maybe this example is very particular to sales/marketing. Or maybe this same example can be applied to several domains meaning that as a consultant you can solve companies problems depending on your already established expertise.

It’s the second one. If you have some expertise/ mastery of best practices in your area, then you can make a good living by implementing those things for organizations that would benefit from them, but don’t want to invest in staffing up that area permanently.

That’s consulting.

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

#370

Post by emodendroket »

njarboe wrote: post #279
emodendroket wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's pro sports players are, as a rule, far better than pro sports players in the past. Why isn't this happening already? People only have so much time and attention. Also, many leagues operate with salary caps. You also mentioned movies, but a lack of competent actors is far from the biggest reason there aren't more movies being produced.

Are you saying there is not an upward trend in sports salaries? They have been skyrocketing for decades and decades.

No, the discussion is about whether if you had a thousand Tom Bradys they could all play quarterback in the NFL.
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