Reading this just reminded me how lucky we are to work in tech and have the ability to extract so much money out of the companies we serve. My girlfriend works as a copy editor at a major online news site (it's in the US top 100 on Alexa) and her salary is essentially half of mine, even though her job seems more stressful and taxing. I'd love to make more money, but I also think it's ridiculous that people in other f…
Enjoy it while it lasts. In less than a decade you will be replaced for sure for a younger one no matter how good you are.
The weird thing with consulting (in my experience) is that a customer almost never knows how capable they are of effectively using a consultant's time and output. "Okay, we signed a one month consulting engagement, starting Tuesday." Consultant(s) show up on Tuesday, no db's or credentials have been set up, everyone seems surprised they're there. It consistently amazed me how much consultant time companies waste. Whe…
Why do you think this happens?
People, and particularly people in large organizations, are often highly inefficient and disorganized, even when being that way costs their employer $$
In the case you mentioned, that's basically "credibility." Although a lame story, Let's say you are responsible for initiating and managing a new software project in your company with complex bureaucracy and management. You have found that it is highly feasible to work with Agile methodology instead of Waterfall. But Waterfall has been how the things had always been done, yet you know that the team is ready for Agile…
How do employees gain credibility that management and "The Board" will listen to, or is this question a dream?
I think it's more about getting a credible outside second opinion. for the same reasons you get a second opinion in medicine. It's less a judgement about a single source, than the requirement to have multiple sources.
In the case you mentioned, that's basically "credibility." Although a lame story, Let's say you are responsible for initiating and managing a new software project in your company with complex bureaucracy and management. You have found that it is highly feasible to work with Agile methodology instead of Waterfall. But Waterfall has been how the things had always been done, yet you know that the team is ready for Agile…
How do employees gain credibility that management and "The Board" will listen to, or is this question a dream?
Probably by assessing and presenting the cost/benefit analysis to management in a reliable, high quality, easy-to-understand way.
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…
I wish I could upvote your comment several times over, thank you! As a [very] new development manager who has been a software engineer for many years, it is this kind of detail aggregation that I find difficult to really understand automatically (as in, I can do it, but it's hard to translate engineering-level detail on the fly without sounding kind of dumb, IMO).
A question that has bugged me about consulting: Why aren't there (afaik) consulting agents in the same way comedians/actors/musicians have agents? Find me a gig, negotiate the payment, accept the payment, and pay me. Also interface with the client for me. Ultimately the agent works for me doing all of the work I'm bad at. Does this exist? How do I hire somebody to do this sort of thing for me?
>Does this exist? How do I hire somebody to do this sort of thing for me?
It does exist, but they hire _you_ not the other way around, because you would be their employee.
How do the companies know that they can trust their employees?
How do they know they can trust the consultant? (More seriously, being unable to trust your employees to give useful feedback is a sign that your culture is a disaster)
They diff the output of the consultant against that of the employee. Trust, but verify.
Reading this just reminded me how lucky we are to work in tech and have the ability to extract so much money out of the companies we serve. My girlfriend works as a copy editor at a major online news site (it's in the US top 100 on Alexa) and her salary is essentially half of mine, even though her job seems more stressful and taxing. I'd love to make more money, but I also think it's ridiculous that people in other f…
Enjoy it while it lasts. In less than a decade you will be replaced for sure for a younger one no matter how good you are. http://worrydream.com/#!/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg
This seems like an unproductive rephrasing of the comments made in the linked piece, ironically not unlike how people unproductively rephrased Papert's paper. (And even those comments are strawmen of what's posted on code.org, especially considering they're brief snippets of marketing material and not parts of a research paper.)
Your example reads like a programmer wrote it instead of a consultant. - Would not expect to see a "such as" in statement of work in the locations you used them. - Would not expect typos in statement of work. - Consultant will push commits to source control.. I have other employees to code, I would pay an consultant to consult. Define strategy, architecture, coach. Not type code, you are way too expensive for that. A…
Do consultants never code?
They can code. "Consultant" doesn't mean much. May as well say "Dude we hired to do XXX".
It's not hard in my experience. Not as easy as convincing CEO to do two redesigns per year, but not hard. I work with companies operating at a large scale. Downtime costs $xxx,000/minute. Developers cost lots of money, improving their productivity by a little bit pays huge dividends. If the company has big events like Black Friday or Superbowl commercials, keeping the site up during those events is worth paying for.…
If you have the experience and/or brand/name already, it wouldn't be hard. My thinking was not so much the work, but the finding people and convincing that a) you can do the work and b) they need it done. If you're successfully doing this now - props to you! If you have any specifics you can share about how you got through a and b above... would love to read more.
I think you need to go through the same steps that Patrick outlined: