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How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
401–410 of 495 posts
Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
#402This guy's greatest achievement is Bingo Card Creator... huh?
Well, if he can market that into the success he has now, then his information is probably pretty valuable!
Using that logic you should interview all lottery winners and try to get their expert advice on winning the lotto. Not saying the OP did nothing, but sometimes time and chance cometh to all men.
Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
#403Addressing several of the threads here: If you're doing contract development that can be done half as well for a quarter of the cost by an offshore team, you are not doing consulting. You are competing in an arena that you will never be able to win. If you want to consult for good money, you have to create your market and you have to have the confidence of that market. You have to be able to give C-level execs advice…
Writing software that is half the quality is a recipe for disaster. I’m managing a team of remote offshore developers who assured me they had lots of ‘corporate development’ experience. In the early days we rejected about 80% of the code they wrote. One guy added 100 lines to a React reducer that we ended up doing in two lines of code.
Sure it is. I don't disagree for a second. But there is no shortage of sales people that will promise things they can't deliver very effectively to decision makers.
CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs are not stupid. More often than not when they throw big money at organizational priorities, they know those projects will come up short in one way or another. But if they spend all their time focusing on getting those things perfect, they will be standing in the way of progress in other areas. And when they are focused on getting one of those priorities right, they aren't looking at spending five figures a week on a single person for a consulting engagement focused primarily on software development. Maybe occasionally, but not usually.
Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
#404Earlier 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…
> "Depends on how high up the ladder the management is you're talking to."
Depends on the individual, not on the job title. In my experience, managers of any level value information as simply put as possible. If they ask questions, then you answer them, but otherwise just tell them what they need to know.
Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
#405Perhaps other people here shared the same assumption that I did - that this essay was about moving from tech development as a contractor/employee to tech (development) consulting. It's not. It's about moving from developing to marketing. There's nothing wrong with that, but it was a let-down to me to discover that the path to riches meant mingling with the group of people I tend to like the least in a company. Also,…
Are you prepared or capable of making that transition?
Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
#406So, are you a developer who’s good at sales or a sales guy who’s good at programming? Nothing wrong with either but one has to take priority.
Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
#407> Long story short: programmers can do things which meaningfully affect marketing outcomes And... while much of it's been said before... if you call yourself a programmer, very likely you won't be at the table when decisions about marketing are made in the first place. Might even be on the page linked above, but one of patio11's big suggestions is not to call yourself a programmer. I probably still use the label for…
Dumb question — you bill for this “non-programming value-added” work, right? Even jumping into a truck for a few hours?
I fully understand the value in “doing more” but still occasionally have to fight the feeling that I need to be coding as much as possible.
Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
#408This post seems to discount his experience over eight years. $X0,000 seems to suggest it's on the lower end, so that's like a 3x salary bump. I would hope over eight years of work you'd get better at your job... So, what's the real impact of switching to per week billing? My guess is that this post is overselling it.
I switched to weekly billing about 5 years ago. Life changer really.
Can you describe why? Curious for a second opinion.
Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
#409Perhaps other people here shared the same assumption that I did - that this essay was about moving from tech development as a contractor/employee to tech (development) consulting. It's not. It's about moving from developing to marketing. There's nothing wrong with that, but it was a let-down to me to discover that the path to riches meant mingling with the group of people I tend to like the least in a company. Also,…
Thanks for the clarification, really this article had me confused. I was trying to 'extract' the bits that would bridge the technical side of things to the consulting side, but could not find it. Obviously now I realize he is talking about marketing. Nice read but unfortunately did not help/apply to me much.
Do you think that there are not engineering consultants making five figures a week?
Re: How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What was it like making the transition from software engineer to software engineering consultant?