How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

Oh, I wasn't chronically underpaid. I got paid 95-100% of market rate, but you were basically held in contempt for getting it, even if you proceeded to vastly outperform all expectations after starting. A lot of places would offer 70% of market rate and not budge (was their budget), and I swiftly killed negotiations in response.

These places that tried to get more for less were great to remember though. Years later, several have become clients, and I can confirm they definitely got what they paid for after having done a lot of cleanup. They are a solid leads, because eventually their hiring strategy catches up with them, and they need a pro to bail them out.

>The skills that you polished -- to the point of being "one of the best people someone could hire" -- seem heavily reliant on experiential learning. For example, I can't see how someone could get to be really good at "cleaning up disasters" without cleaning up a lot of disasters first

This is easier than you think.

Cleaning up disasters is mostly two things. A) Knowing how to make a simple solution that does a task exceptionally well (objectively) and B) Knowing how to read and profile code to know what's worth replacing with A. The only other thing I would say is C) Constantly tell yourself that everything you write can be better, so you constantly improve A.

This isn't high-falutin' bleeding edge architecture astronaut stuff. Most of what I deal with are basic things done badly. I've walked into shops in the past few years where people couldn't reliably load text files into tables. In one investment firm about 4 years ago, they had a 24-core server backed by tons of solid state LUNs, and the effective throughput of the ETL process was less than 10KB/sec because instead of write once, they decided to write once and then update the same data thirty eight times (no exaggeration -- actual number). As basic an application you can think of, I've seen some very memorable disaster versions of them. I've seen things, man! Including identical disasters in the latest NoSQL database, with an application glued together using the language du jour.

If you genuinely know what you're doing, and are willing to always convince yourself that you still don't know enough (and keep learning), age 30 can easily be the time to give it a shot.

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, I think it's fair to say that amongst departments in companies, marketing is much more likely to pay (and pay a lot) for a consultant, whereas IT is only likely to pay a lot for outside help when things are really, really desperate.

Marketing is seen as revenue generating, and at many places, IT and (ironically) product development are seen as cost centers.

This might as well have been an article about how to 100x your income by moving from your current job into a similar job in a fintech company. That's a bit like moving from serving tables at Denny's to Del Frisco's steakhouse. Most Denny's waiters are not prepared nor capable of making that transition.

Here's an example from a data analytics company I worked at. (I was crunching data and analyzing it, and my company was delivering "simple", actionable guidance).

Our deliverable would be a tidy presentation showing that telco X was running all these different marketing campaigns, but that a few of them were generating lots of billing errors but few increases in sales. Cutting some of the messy, under-performing campaigns would save money (which was a lot of money at the scale these companies were operating).

The company would pay us 20-50k for that advice, and I would personally earn a typical hourly wage...