How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

Protip: don't ever reply to ads that ask for a "ninja" or "rockstar." Look for the more boring sounding jobs; they will have fewer people competing for the job, so you can probably make relatively better rates.

Also, why do you only do remote work? Is there no one near you who needs a sysadmin? Could you travel? People value face-to-face interaction a lot more than online; if you only do remote work, then some guy in Bangalore can undercut your rates (hence the $20 an hour offers), and you're not really offering much over him.

And as the original article says, don't charge per hour. Charge per week, or per incident. And charge rates that make sense for that kind of time frame. Read the original article; it has good advice. Once you charge per week (or per incident, based on a standard weekly rate), you can start talking about "OK, you want to spend less, which things should I not do", not "Well, I think I'm worth $50 an hour, but since I need the money, I'll take the job for $20"

Yes, for systems administration it can work that way. Here where I work we don't really have any sysadmins (or everyone's a sysadmin, which is even worse). We have developers, and we have tech support who support customer systems, and we all kind of chip in on the system administration, but we don't have anyone who's job it is to maintain our own network. It finally got so bad that we've brought someone in to straighten it out. I don't know the details of how he's being paid, but I could easily imagine it as "it will cost $5000 for me to track down your problems, reconfigure your core router, set it up in a way that will be more maintainable in the future, and write the documentation for running that."

I have freelanced for almost 15 years in Europe and a bit of Middle East. I have done pretty well, charging easily 1K Euro a day, less in the last couple of years.

Last year, with a colleague and friend, we started our consulting company. The main reason for that being "let's scale!". We contacted a bunch of freelance colleagues we trusted and respected and asked them to join us as hired guns, whenever we needed more workforce.

Another reason for starting a company was that the developer profession is not rewarded as the experience increases. At least in Europe, a 3-4 years experience Java developer can make almost as much as a 10 years experience Java expert. And there are rate roofs which are hardly crossable, so even if you are really really good and have plenty of war stories, still the 1K/day roof is pretty hard to cross.

So far, it didn't go exactly as expected. We are doing ok, we have some clients (we are in the Java space, so mostly enterprise stuff) but nothing spectacular. We are having an hard time acquiring new clients and the long running European crisis doesn't help.

I'm working considerably more than in the past (weekends are a rare commodity, very long days, in short my work/life balance is critically crappy), so sometime I wonder if it's worth the hassle.

The scalability part is very tough: we hired one guy (who was a disappointment) and we use our trusted hired guns, who are often busy with their own consulting gig. Therefore, we are crazy busy.

Another problem is that the clients are really interested in our specific experience: that means they want to work with me or my partner, not with the company. This bit is hard to crack.

In short we are still figuring out how to go from here.

We will invest more in the web site and technical blog (we are also co-authoring a book) and we will hire one or two permanent devs (did I mention that hiring someone in Europe is bloody expensive, so that the 70% billable time mentioned in the article is too low?).

Working solo is easy, scaling is not. As a developer, you are faced with plenty of new challenges (finance, marketing, pr, negotiations, contracts, cashflow) - which is fascinating but damn consuming.

No, dear god. We need less self-promoting manipulators here and more substantive, authentic posters.

Point taken; I was saying (unclearly, maybe) that not liking conferences/speaking/whatever is a pretty weak reason for avoiding them. Lots of people don't like them, but go because it's what the job requires (and, just to preempt replies, act pleasant and engaged while there).