31–40 of 82 posts
> One of the best pieces of advice I’ve acted on is deciding to specialize.
How do you choose what to specialize in? I have experience with quite a few things, but I don't know if it feels the same once I'd be specialized in it.
The author himself seems to be an expert in React + React Native + GraphQL.
> Flat Rate Pricing > This also applies to software development. If an e-commerce application you are building will bring in $500,000.00 in sales in the next year, then charging 10% to 20% of this amount is acceptable. The same goes with feature implementation. If your feature will save them $200,000.00 in the next year, price with that in mind vs the hourly rate. And how do you know what amount of money they'll make…
Maybe some case studies of how to do this specifically with the kinds of info a software consultant (or, indeed, a low-ranked development employee—all are advised to attach a dollar value to their work for later bragging/self-promotion purposes, after all) may readily access, then, would be enlightening.
I concur with a lot of what Nader has laid out here. Specialization + Content are keys to unlocking much higher pricing power. Getting started is tricky, but my most profitable side work has been workshops and lunch-and-learns, which is beneficial as I can re-use a lot of the same content between engagements.
Of course it has to be a specialization that enough people need to be willing to pay for.
You also have to keep a clear lookup for a new area or areas if your specialty is in decline. You don't want to be the Y2K mitigation expert in 2001. Or the top performance expert for some legacy or discontinued computer architecture.
> Flat Rate Pricing > This also applies to software development. If an e-commerce application you are building will bring in $500,000.00 in sales in the next year, then charging 10% to 20% of this amount is acceptable. The same goes with feature implementation. If your feature will save them $200,000.00 in the next year, price with that in mind vs the hourly rate. And how do you know what amount of money they'll make…
I was about to write that a guide to estimating savings or income from partial information would be really useful, then it occurred to me that, since businesses & management do that a lot , this is probably exhaustively covered in business & management literature. Maybe some case studies of how to do this specifically with the kinds of info a software consultant (or, indeed, a low-ranked development employee—all are…
Why does medium break text selection?
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Large corporations sometimes come up with user personas, which I've always thought are fun to work with. Like alternating pronouns, they're a very reasonable, noncontroversial way to remind people their users might not look like them (busy parents, someone performing the same repetitive tasks all day with your application who would appreciation automation, etc)
I find user personas in your example to be quite "out of the way" and in fact reasonable unlike mere gender "substitution" which I (being a non-native speaker) tend to perceive as some unnecessary (and even off-putting at times) piece of information. Calling that an "alteration" rather than a "substitution" gave me a different perspective, though. I'd often find Alice/Bob examples in (programming-related) books, but…
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I'm one of them. Grew up with "they" as strictly plural. Had enough red ink on school essays that the lesson sank in. Every time I see "they" in a singular context it's like mentally stubbing my toe on a tree root. I have to stop, go back and re-read to be sure I didn't miss something that set up the plural context. If you insist on being gender-neutral, you have to write "he or she" which quicky gets tiresome. Or re…
"They" has been an acceptable third-person non-determinate singular pronoun since at least the Canterbury Tales: "And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, They wol come up..." That your English teachers were misinformed prescriptivists isn't the language's fault, and shouldn't be used as a ruler by which you measure the writing of others.
First: $210k/yr is not necessarily really good money for a US software consultant. When consulting full time, please try to keep two things in mind:
(1) Your cost basis is higher than it was when you were a W2 FTE. If you're making $100k/yr in salary, your employer is paying substantially more than $100k/yr to keep you on staff; you have a "fully loaded" cost that includes not only infrastructure stuff like computers and office space and Google accounts and training and vacation and sick days, but also your benefits and a pretty substantial chunk of taxes, and a bunch of tax planning stuff that your W2 hides from you. You're now on the hook for all of that.
(2) More importantly: employers are on the hook for the fully loaded costs of their employees indefinitely. Well-run companies hire developers with the expectation of keeping them on staff with no fixed end date (run don't walk from any that don't). Which means that the decision to hire a freelancer versus a full-time employee is not simply based on rate; it's also based on the fact that the freelancer comes with a guarantee that the relationship can be severed the moment it's no longer valuable. That guarantee has a lot of value; "double your FTE rate" isn't even stretching it. If you're giving that up for free, by working at a rate comparable to what you'd be making in a good job, you're doing it wrong.
I don't think it ever makes sense to work hourly. I've written a ton of posts here about why that is; here's a link to the one people seem to like the most: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103417
What I can say with almost 10 years remove from that post is that I was if anything underselling my position on this. When I was beating the drum on not doing hourly work, I was at Matasano, and we had a day rate (you couldn't buy work for us at increments less than a day). After that, we started another consultancy, where our minimum billable increment went up... uh... substantially from that. You can do week rates, and not sell in less than 1-week increments; you can do month rates; you can do more than that.
The classic dumb argument about hourly versus not tends to devolve to debates about the pitfalls of fixed-rate work. I don't advocate for project rates (I'd do a project rate, I guess, if it made sense; I'm not religious about them). Rather: I think you should provide your customers with a proposal for a total cost for the project based on an estimate of the number of days (weeks, months) you think it'll take, and a SOW for a T&M project with available prorated overages if it takes longer. Then do your best to deliver according to your estimate; if you blow the estimate because you screwed up, eat the overage; if you blow the estimate because your customer didn't get you access to the systems you needed to work on until 3 weeks after the kickoff, they eat the overage. Nobody has ever pushed back on me for this.
When I spelled this out on HN back in like 2010, people responded as if it was black magic. I think what's really happening is that people who run serious consulting firms just don't write a lot of HN comments, because I know of lots of big firms that work this way.
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I find user personas in your example to be quite "out of the way" and in fact reasonable unlike mere gender "substitution" which I (being a non-native speaker) tend to perceive as some unnecessary (and even off-putting at times) piece of information. Calling that an "alteration" rather than a "substitution" gave me a different perspective, though. I'd often find Alice/Bob examples in (programming-related) books, but…
Native speaker here, and it took me most of a decade of seeing the use of the feminine for the non-specific or neuter pronoun before it stopped being very annoying (it was uncommon outside certain circles, until fairly recently). I still have to catch myself when I encounter it to avoid glancing back over the text to figure out which specific person is being referenced, whom I must have missed in my first reading—IOW…
That's funny. Saying "off-putting" I had exactly that in mind.
What? She? I must've zoned out.