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How I went from programming to consulting (2012)
- putnam 9y agoI have an Internet buddy in Chicago named Thomas Ptacek. [...] I decided to invite Thomas out to coffee. At the end of the conversation, Thomas said something which, no exaggeration, changed my life. Thomas: Some food for thought: If this hadn't been a coffee date, but rather a consulting engagement, I'd be writing you a check right now. Me: Three hours at $100 an hour or whatever an intermediate programmer is worth would only be $300. Why worry about that? Thomas: I got at least $15,000 of value out of this conversation. Does this really happen in real life?
- sneilan 9y agoIt could work in the 90s & early 2000s but now that people are beginning to understand how to price software, it's harder. Just like how cars in the 50's-60's could be wildly overpriced but today cars are mostly sold in volume. People back then didn't know what cars were worth yet. A fool and his money are soon parted and people that pay $15k consistently for things they could get for $100 eventually go broke or out of business. This blog post repeatedly pops up on ycombinator from time to time but doesn't really provide historical context.
- friendly_chap 9y agoWhile it definitely sounds a bit forced to me too, but we are talking about nerds talking (ha!) here. Have you ever heard yourself and your tech colleagues talk? :P
- Xc43 9y agoWell it seems straightforward to me. Efficient.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- matte_black 9y agoNo. The market is too efficient now, the information too commoditized. In order to charge that much as a consultant you would have to have a very particular set of skills, skills that you acquired over a very long career.
- maxxxxx 9y agoDo you know this from first hand experience? I used to know a guy who made around $5000 a day. His main skill seemed to be that he had the ability to talk to CEOs in their own language. Once you are on that level a $50000 consulting engagement is not much money.
- putnam 9y agoWas he a programmer?
- maxxxxx 9y agoHe used to be but then he advised on enterprise software like SAP and Salesforce.
- milofeynman 9y agoI know a guy like this. He ended up a VP at a big company like Salesforce a few years ago, got laid off spent a year and a half blowing money on drugs and women. Came back and fudged his LinkedIn / resume to make it look like he was a consultant those years (no months only years on his LinkedIn) some company is back to paying him 300-500k salary. It mostly seems to be about selling yourself hard and interviewing a lot until you find the sucker who is desperate enough to hire you. Another thing he did when he was originally getting hired was to start a MBA class in a small town and never finish it so that while he was applying he could say he was getting his MBA. He does SAP and such. Not a route a lot of people will want to take.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Xc43 9y agoAs a budding freelancer, I will try to have a talk about the value I bring instead of rate per hour. My point is while it might not happen that a business owner tells you how much value he got out of you, you now know that's what he thinks and charge accordingly.
- putnam 9y agoIs it working for you?
- Xc43 9y agoI found a client in one week. I have no portfolio but have worked at a local online ERP company for one year. And before that finished university in CS. Headhunters was not the way for me. Nor the big websites for freelancers. I found a website for freelancers in my region and applied to two projects. Got one. But went in with a hourly rate.
- mgkimsal 9y agoYou have to be able to size up their market, their company, some idea of sales/volume/revenue/etc. Sometimes it's easy to ballpark, perhaps based on headcount (even assuming part time workers, you could probably ballpark $50k per person - a 50 person company would be grossing ~$3m/year just to stay open in the US, I'd think, but in most cases it would probably be 50-100% more than that, depending on industry, location and type of workforce). Looking at a small company that's pulling in $500k, there's almost no way anything you do for them service-wise would be worth $300k to them (short of you taking over operations or similar). For a company pulling in $50m, there's almost certainly $300k of value you could bring to some department, doing probably the exact same work you might do for the $500k company.
- Xc43 9y agoCool thanks. My first client told me their sales is mid hundred millions CAD. And they are expanding into other industries that require my skills. So in all likelihood their revenue will go up. I guess I was lucky by finding them without screening them. I will keep an eye for that in the future, thanks.
- mgkimsal 9y agoFor those saying this doesn't happen any more... it still can, and does. However, the bigger issue most people face is finding those people who can actually get that sort of value from our knowledge/skills/etc. I can give the same info to 2 companies, and one can make several hundred thousand dollars (in savings, new sales, etc). The other may not even be operating at a scale where they'll see $10k in increased value, even doing the 'same' thing the other company did. Determining who those companies are, then connecting with the appropriate people, that is still the hard part. Meeting someone for coffee, giving them $15k in 'value' from a conversation... probably does happen now and then. I don't think many 'consulting engagements' actually happen at a coffee shop for an hour or two ending with a $15k check being handed over, however. (but maybe I'm too cynical and it does happen a lot)
- ethbro 9y agoThe 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. When if all of this had been ready, I could have delivered much more value by the end date. And then same problem with actually using any work produced. I'd estimate the effective-ineffective customer split is somewhere around 30-70.
- putnam 9y agoWhy do you think this happens?
- Ascetik 9y agoThis has happened to me as well. It's because whoever hired the consultant hadn't forced anyone to do those tasks. It's their own fault really. I recently did some consulting for a Veeam configuration and it took a good 12 hours to get them to set me up a VPN and get access to all the servers I needed to review their setup. Should have been ready from the get-go.
- mathattack 9y agoYes. I've had friendly conversations turn into paid consulting work because, "Then we will pay more attention."
- putnam 9y agoWhat do you think new freelancers and consultants get stuck on that limits their success?
- mathattack 9y agoThe key is to have people you've worked with who can bring you in to their org and vouch for you.
- putnam 9y agoYou have never converted a cold client? Has anyone done this before?
- mathattack 9y agoI haven’t needed to yet. Much harder if your reputation doesn’t precede you. Think about applying for a full time job. How much does it help having someone internal who can vouch for you to HR and the hiring manager? Consulting is no different.
- zwdfoo 9y agoNo, it has already been debunked several times on HN. The $X0.000 salary has also been debunked several times. The two are promoting and namedropping each other.
- shanemhansen 9y agoPeople on my linkedin talk to each other that way. It's bizarre how wannabe "coaches" talk.
- speby 9y agoValue received (perceived or real) does not necessarily equate to the amount of real dollars a customer would have been otherwise willing to pay.
- k__ 9y agoYes. But there are different levels. You don't have to be good enough to convince the CEO of Microsoft to make good money. There are many many more small companies that still can give you good money and are more easily convinced.
- projektir 9y agoTo some people, probably. I'd wager most people don't have someone like tptacek as an internet buddy or knowledge that would interest them, though. They literally mentioned HN karma rank titles... so much for fake internet points? Does this sound odd to anyone else or just me? There's likely some small percentage of people who can go on to do consulting and charge lots of money. That this applies to a greater amount of people remains to be seen and is not proven by this post.
- saryant 9y ago"Internet buddy" can be as simple as emailing someone with a question. Someone once emailed me with a question about a talk I gave at a conference. A few years later we ran into each other—he was working for a major client of my employer and I was asked to give them a technical presentation, neither of us knowing that we were about to run into each other. Most people are too afraid to cold-intro themselves. Just send an email, worst someone can do is ignore it. FWIW, I emailed Patrick, author of TFA, a couple years ago with a question and he helped me out. Then last month I emailed him again and we met up for coffee in Tokyo. Just email someone you'd like to meet and ask.
- tptacek 9y agoI don't know what this even means. I think Patrick and I might have exchanged a total of one (1) super secret Internet friends secret messages before we met for coffee and me and Cory kidnapped him for the day. If you're in Chicago and you haven't made a hobby out of calling me an NSA shill (or if you can credibly claim that you've done so only out of irony), we're "internet friends" enough that I'll grab coffee if you have something you want to talk about.
- projektir 9y agoI guess I had higher expectation for the term "internet buddy" than what is used here. I generally figured it's a term implying some familiarity, and that getting emails from randoms is unwelcome. But perhaps the other commenter makes a good point regarding cold-introing. I always read various people say "I get thousands of emails..." and assume there's no reason for them to read mine. I don't think I ever called you an NSA shill, although I did commit the grave offense of suggesting that Firefox is a secure browser, which I imagine is even worse. :P Sadly, I'm pretty far away from Chicago and likely will be in the foreseeable future.
- wglb 9y agoYes, it did. I know both of them and have heard the story from both.
- kevmo314 9y agoThis 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.
- stablemap 9y agoA couple hundred comments, some from patio11 himself, in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805091
- kirubakaran 9y agoA relevant side note: If you're getting into consulting, here are my suggestions for writing a good Statement of Work https://kirubakaran.com/blog/consulting-sow/ https://kirubakaran.com/blog/consulting-sow/
- putnam 9y agoHow did you get into consulting? What do you do?
- kirubakaran 9y agoThanks for asking. To be reductive: I mostly build webapps for my clients, but of course it's a lot more than just that. I got into it quite intentionally because I wanted to trade lower variance for higher pay and flexible lifestyle. That is, I'd rather make $3x one month and $0x the next (where I work on my personal projects or read a good scifi novel in the sun), rather than $x one month and $x the next. When I started consulting, I was living in Seattle and I had a single long term client. Now that I live in San Francisco, there is high paying work everywhere.
- putnam 9y agoWhat is the most painful aspect of consulting for you?
- kirubakaran 9y agoThe trouble with working for yourself is, your boss can be an asshole. It's hard to take that vacation when there is billable work available. You can burn yourself out quite fast. After having done this for a long time, I've learned to be zen about the intrinsic variance in income. But it is still hard psychologically. While rationally I know that I make more per year as a consultant and have more interesting work as a result etc, it's still painful to see the numbers in the spreadsheet go down when I'm not working for a few months, even if it was a deliberate decision that I made.
- 9y ago
- zdw 9y agoStep 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name. Step 2: Be good/accurate enough at opining in ways that make sense. Most people won't have either 1 or 2 going for them. There's one more thing - charging a lot is how to signal value, which is a a huge thing. I know a guy who used to manage an A-list rock band (everyone knows their songs) who went into consulting, and started out lowballing people, for $1k/week or something. People didn't take him or his advice seriously. After increasing his rate to $20k/week, people were hanging on his every word. The advice didn't change, only the perception of value.
- frozenport 9y ago$20k a week to get the opinion of a Bingo game/app developer.
- Delmania 9y ago> Most people won't have either 1 or 2 going for them. Not at first, no, but even Patrick had to start at zero, right? It's true that there's a lot more personal branding and content marketing going on, but that doesn't mean a person can't execute a similar strategy and find success. It may not be as profitable as it once was, but it can be enough to relieve some financial stress.
- emodendroket 9y agoSome actors grew up poor but I wouldn't go around telling poor people they can all become world-famous actors.
- putnam 9y agoYou think being a consultant is as rare as becoming an actor?
- CyberDildonics 9y agoHe used an exaggerated metaphor to illustrate that pragmatically, not everyone can market themselves to become well known, no matter how good they are at writing software. You then turned that into an irrelevant comparison of the difficulty of becoming an actor vs a consultant.
- scrimpton 9y agoThis is by a wide margin the most bourgeois shit I've heard on here apart from the constant cryptocurrency posts. "Make disgusting amounts of money by doing nothing instead of your actual job!"
- learc83 9y agoThis post is just about how to actually extract a percentage of the value you actually provide to a company. You actually have to provide that value in the first place. At no point does he mention "doing nothing".
- fiatpandas 9y agoYou’ll probably find your comment downvoted because you expressed yourself using language which isn’t kosher in the HN community, and you aren’t praising the writing of HNs most well known and well liked member, but I generally agree with your sentiment. I felt gross and kind of disappointed while reading the article. I need more time to think deeply about why that is and communicate it in an effective way.
- putnam 9y agoLet us know when you arrive at your conclusion
- Xc43 9y ago... Welcome to life? If you want to be sheltered, work for someone who will value your work and reward you accordingly. Otherwise, prepare to deal with the cold truth that many businesses are out there for themselves exclusively.
- valuearb 9y agoYou feel the worker should give more of their value to the employer for free?
- walshemj 9y agoThis is the sort of naivety that Robert Tressell exposed in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. You need to be a bit more woke mate
- quakenul 9y agoCan someone explain to me why when paying weekly people would not turn the discussion on slashing the rate in contrast to paying hourly? I don't see the disconnect between the two and why it shouldn't be possible to also go "My rate is 100$, we need 40 hours, you can only pay 30, okay, what do we slash?" In fact, that is what I am doing right now.
- douglaswlance 9y agoWhen you charge $100, and the client wants to negotiate, psychologically, $10 seems like a little change, but is actually 10% of your revenue. If you charge $10,000 / week, and the client wants to negotiate, they'd have to argue to remove $1000 / week for an equivalent change in revenue, which is much different psychologically.
- putnam 9y agoWhat do you do?
- mathattack 9y agoSome of it is perception. At one of the spectrum is junior offshore testers billing by the hour. On the other is McKinsey, who bills by the study. The former gets more rate pressure than the latter. Charging weekly or monthly appears more professional than hourly. (Lawyers are the exception)
- JamesBarney 9y agoPeople will compare hourly rates to people's salaries in a way that don't really compare weekly rates. $200/hr seems rediculously expensive to pay a dev. but a $8k/week will intuitively be compared to the value they get from the project, and 16k to increase wbesite traffic 30% seems like a steal.
- putnam 9y agoWhat if it's not website traffic or ecom sales you are increasing? What if the payoff is 6 months down the road?
- mgkimsal 9y ago> 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 myself in some situations, but often when coming in to new consulting projects (solo or with someone else), I'll say something technical, then answer some questions, and I usually get "you don't look like a programmer" or "you don't sound like a programmer", in a 'disbelief' sort of tone. As trivial as it sounds (and it's not, it took years of fighting the 'jump to tech' habit/comfortzone), talking to people about 'the project' at a business/operations/value level is where to start out. "How does it work now? What are you trying to do? Where are the pain points?" etc. Being able to jump down in to the technical weeds when appropriate is a huge bonus - you can talk to their technical staff as well as the rest of the staff and be a bridge. Was doing some work for a company with a main office and mobile workers (mobile folks are out in trucks doing outdoors work - delivering, planting, landscaping, etc). Each dept head knows their stuff, but I was actually a bit surprised that one of the core office staff - been there more than 10 years, and is the main point of contact for the field workers - had never been to their loading dock to see how they worked. (the dock was, for years, about 1000 feet from her office). As I'm asking questions and trying to determine best approaches for some rework, there was almost no one outside of the owners and one other person who'd actually been to all parts of the company. I went out in the truck with one of the field guys for a few hours... but I'm also a "programmer"... this was revolutionary for them (no one who'd pitched solutions to them had ever been in the field before). If you want to be treated like a programmer, call yourself a programmer and behave like one. If you want to be able to give more value to a company/client, do more than a programmer would. But... it's hard to do that in most companies as an insider - you're tasked with XYZ, and your intruding on others' territories when you poke around too much (that was my trouble when working at traditional companies). I want/need to know how the whole thing works, but info sharing is sometimes the only way some people can exert control over their areas.
- fenier 9y agoAgreed. It's hard to make that jump.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoConsulting fees certainly make the work more attractive than it would otherwise be, and I have been tempted to go down this path before. That aside, part of me thinks that the culture around consulting is masking bigger problems. I've seen consultants being brought onto projects where the main development staff would've been better placed to do the work (more knowledge about the intricacies of a business, better awareness of the pitfalls of the current systems). However, due to being snowed under maintaining legacy systems, in-house teams may not have the spare capacity to take on more work. For consultants this is a good situation as they can come in, do some greenfield development and leave the maintenance to someone else, but you've got to wonder what goes through the head of business owners who would rather pay high consultant fees than invest in extra staff and training for their in-house team, which is frequently better for the long term health of a company.
- valuearb 9y agoIn my case my company has a terrible product development process, and it’s a big reason why our app sucks, it doesn’t deliver the key value customers and the company need. I have said as much to everyone up to the VP level, and provided detailed recommendations (I am a Sr Dev, but in prior jobs I successfully managed dev groups of 40+ people). The response I’ve gotten has been coaching on delivery (stop being so blunt) and crickets on any actual changes. If a $30K a week consultant came in and made the same recommendations at VP level, they’d be prized for their directness, and people would be having fires lit under them to implement most of the changes. And the actual staff would benefit as much as the company.
- kleiba 9y agoTo this day, I'm still not quite clear about what a consultant actually does. I mean, beyond some vague idea ("goes to some company, talks with people, gives some recommendation"). I'd really love for someone to give some example or describe in a tangible way what the work of a consultant entails, what skills one typically needs and actually employs, what a typical gig looks like from beginning to end and so on. If anyone here on HN could share some insights, I would highly appreciate it.
- dleslie 9y agoHaving been in a position where a consultant was foisted upon me by management, at several different companies, near as I can tell they are paid huge sums to restate what the team already knows and has been saying needs to be done. Only they provide it with an approach and language which management can understand.
- taway20171214 9y agothat's a management consultant, and the reason they're hired is to provide cover and credibility for both management and your technology team. i.e., "the expensive consultant said it was okay, so don't fire anyone in management, or our technology team, if it goes sideways." in other words, they're actually helping you do your job because they can compare your recommendation to other companies and teams in the industry and make sure everyone is doing things sanely. in your case, you were smart, and made the right recommendation, so they agreed with you. good job, you're competent, and aren't putting an established company into a risky situation like you would at a startup, which generally does not hire consultants, because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. you probably didn't see it that way, i'm guessing.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoThe issue you're overlooking is that these management consultants are being paid large fees for information that a company can get for free just by listening to their existing employees. However, that's not a slight on the management consultants themselves (nice work if you can get it), but is a slight on companies that don't trust that their employees can give them sound advice. Problems at the ground level are going to become apparent earliest to those working at that level, if you ignore that feedback you're potentially throwing away valuable information.
- iends 9y agoOne of the problems I've always had with patio11's advice is that the skills he brought to a job was something that could easily be measured, e.g. he mainly did sales funnel optimization so it was easy to see the before and after of the direct impact on the bottom line. As somebody who is a skilled backend developer the value I provide is not as measurable. How can I justify charging a large weekly rate, when almost nobody can provide an objective number of the value I provide?
- putnam 9y agoAre you a consultant or freelancer currently? Have you tried doing this justification in the past and how has it gone? EDIT: length
- iends 9y agoI am a full time employee currently, but have done consulting on the side for $50-$100/hr several times. I've never tried to negotiate weekly rates because I've only been able to do ~10 hours of work a week on top of my full time job.
- putnam 9y agoWould you want to do more consulting?
- confiscate 9y agothose are 2 separate issues (# of hrs you can dedicate per week, vs, whether you are in position to negotiate for a weekly instead of hourly rate) if anything, knowing how much you can do (10 hrs of work) per week, makes it easier for you to propose how much value you can provide each week, no?
- hashkb 9y agoI used to be a "skilled backend programmer" but now I "help entrepreneurs start their businesses." See the difference?
- hh3k0 9y agoIf I'd have stumbled upon that shady-looking website (https://training.kalzumeus.com https://training.kalzumeus.com) anywhere other than HN, I wouldn't have spent a minute on there.
- ThomPete 9y agoI charge between $2-3K a day. But i have 20 years experience and worked for large clients and at big companies. My best advice is the find an industry which have a lot of consultants working (so you know clients have the money) and then offer yourself as a consultant with a design, tecnical, financial etc approach. I.e be a niche player in a large industry and never grow bigger than 10 people and instead start charging for things that are scaleable and which clients can use even after they move on.
- putnam 9y agoYour agency has 10 people? Was you the first person in your agency?
- ThomPete 9y agoNo we are two looking to hire 4 more. Have freelancers do some of the work until we find the right people. My first agency was 80 in its peak, but its just too much people handling imo.
- putnam 9y agoDid you start the first agency? What was its niche?
- ThomPete 9y agoI started both yes and in its time it was niche (but expanded into much more traditional type company). We were focused on web-app and product design (started in 2005) when everyone was focusing on web design. Did a ton of projects for Adobe and their Lighthouse division who were pushing their flex platform back then. This time we are focusing on something quite different but again in an area with few people who can offer what we do but who still are used to paying for consultants. We get great clients but they get someone who is very experienced and know a lot of the typical pitfalls.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- blhack 9y agoA 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?
- tw04 9y agoBecause, generally speaking, those people make enough per-gig to support an agent making a living taking a small cut. Furthermore the amount of time required for the comedian/actor/musician to complete the work is pretty small. If you can start charging 6 figures for projects you can complete in a couple days, I'm sure an agent would be happy to work for you. If not...
- hullsean 9y agoyes. they are head shops. but one key detail. you are working for them. not the reverse. the relationship with the customer is very valuable
- gist 9y ago> in the same way comedians/actors/musicians have agents? Many reasons for this. One reason though is simple logistics in terms of how the world has changed since that system was in place. And for what reasons. In the 'olden' days there was no internet. So if you were a performer you needed an agent for one thing you probably had little business or negotiation skills and no source of information to figure it out (nor the knack or desire). And also there was no easy way for 'customers' to get in contact with you. (Now it's trivial to go direct to a developer by email). Also with performing the product is pretty much always the same. If you are going to book a comedian for a certain night at a certain rate you know the product. With programming it's all over the map in terms of length and deliverables. Above just a few reasons. That said it's not a bad idea not to mention it is almost certainly being done but maybe not on a major known scale.
- CyanLite2 9y agoActors, musicians, athletes, etc... are all making so much money that an agent taking a 2% cut can still be very wealthy. There are firms out there, like recruiting firms, but they will take much more than 2%. Probably close to 25% and you work for them.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- smelltest 9y agoPatrick is a charismatic and compelling writer, and he writes in such an earnestly nerdy way that you think what he's saying must be true. Similar to the guy who wrote The Gervais Principle posts. It sounds great and you feel like you're hit with a series of epiphanies. But it doesn't pass the smell test. The author isn't a wealthy consultant. He's a full-time salaried employee at a YC startup (where he assuredly makes less than $x0,000 per week).
- uiri 9y agoI think the post is at least 4-5 years old given the references to Matasano which was acquired before the startup that patio11 and tptacek did before Patrick became an employee at Stripe, I would guess that the post is a bit dated - probably circa 2012 give or take a year or two.
- gist 9y agoI have found that the 'charge by value not by time' is true based on my use of it for a longer period of time than I want to mention (for fear of giving away my age). I actually discovered this when in my first business which I started right out of college (before the Internet for sure). I think one of the problems with being a young person starting out now is that there is so much info out there that you can read (or watch) that you perhaps don't do as much "doing" as we did in the past. As well as learning and figuring out on your own. By thinking and reading the signals and making mistakes. In the end I think the issue is reading does not make you clever and we used to call this 'book knowledge' back when I was growing up.
- gk1 9y agoIt has "2012" right in the title, so I don't see what the author's position _today_ has anything to do with it. And that "YC startup" has raised $440M and has 500+ employees... You're intentionally making the author sound less credible. Besides the ad hominem, what other "smell test" does he fail to pass?
- didibus 9y agoI'd like to know how does he make his clients millions? I feel like consultants are pretty worthless (no offense, never really saw one at work), and thus I'd feel worthless as a consultant. What could I bring in a few weeks to a company that would bring them millions in benefits? Is this true? Or is that also part of marketing yourself as a consultant, to give the impression you bring millions in value, and change the business in ways it wouldn't have had they never consulted you?
- blunte 9y agoIt's about impact, and impact (in a short time) is about influencing big decisions made by upper management. Consultants are specifically hired to guide upper management to theoretically better decisions. 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...
- weerd 9y agoIs this possible if your tech skills are not in marketing/ecommerce? What about graphics, audio, embedded systems, networking?
- TaylorGood 9y agoOf course. I still take on clients for branding and marketing. And, thanks to pation11 I'm able to negotiate higher project rates using a weekly rate rather than hourly.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chiefalchemist 9y ago> "This is stunningly not the case for programming, due to how competitive the market for talent is right now, and it is even more acutely untrue for folks who can program but instead choose to offer the much-more-lucrative service "I solve business problems -- occasionally a computer is involved." Very true. But also easier said than done. I'd add that problem identification is problem even more valuable than problem solving. That is, get the problem wrong and even the greatest solution is irrelevant.
- maehwasu 9y agoI made a bet with myself that the top comment on here would be a very intelligent person using said intelligence to argue all of the reasons why none of the (excellent) advice in the article was applicable to him/her. I won the bet.
- kelvin0 9y agoYer mom must be so proud of you.
- calimac 9y agoI love the hacker news community toy for posts like this.
- expertentipp 9y agoThis gig economy propaganda results in a race to the bottom. Instead of $4,000 a week one is more likely to end up without income and working full time on take home assignments. It's a trap.
- aurelianito 9y agoIf you charge by week, how do you keep your consulting pipeline full? Do you engage in contract negotiations while working for someone else?
- harry8 9y agoBy the week of work performed, not by the calendar. This is 3 weeks work. It starts Tuesday and will conclude mid February. or yes, take an hour out of your work day for non-client stuff, and work an hour longer so it is not at your client's expense.
- Steeeve 9y agoAddressing 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 that they want in a language they understand to solve the problems that they deem important. The vertical market is just as important as the horizontal one. In other words, a CRM expert is generally valuable. A CRM expert that can provide technical, management, and executive strategy solutions in the healthcare space is extraordinarily valuable. The very strong technical guy can be worth $2-300 an hour if he knows the right software and knows enough to put himself in the right position. The vendor that has brand recognition and a consulting team built around their product is worth more. The consultant who knows the ins and outs of the vendor relationships and how they fit into the big picture of solving the customer relationship problem and can throw together a comprehensive multi-year strategy that differentiates the client from their competition and will have a positive effect on the stock and market position is the consultant that makes good money. You don't get to be that guy by being the best developer or by having a history at one of the big three. You work your way up the ladder, make a difference, and then offer that difference to someone in a parallel position. You build out a team, a strategy, and a marketing plan that puts you in a position to drive.
- amazingman 9y agoI’m sure you meant nothing by it, but I just want to point out that using the word “guy” here is needlessly exclusionary. I’m personally working to grow beyond similar habits in my own speech.
- corporateguy5 9y agoGet a grip on reality
- walshemj 9y agoI am in a similar but but now in UK and US vernacular in think "guy" or "guys" is becoming less gendered especially amongst younger workers.
- aerovistae 9y agoThe problem with patio11's blogs is that he seems to exist in a different world from most programmers, I feel. > So $100 per hour, even though it is not a market rate for e.g. intermediate Ruby on Rails programmers Uh, $100 an hour is $208,000 annually full-time. Unless Patrick is referring exclusively to the Bay Area upper crust, I don't know how he reaches the conclusion that $100 an hour is "not even market rate for intermediate programmers."
- petermonsson 9y ago$100 per hour for an 75% loaded contractor is $53 assuming a 1.5x overhead for payroll tax, healthcare, office, etc.
- cornellwright 9y ago$100/hr is only that much if you bill 40 hrs per week, every week. It does not account for non-billable time, vacation, sick time, etc. You are also taxed higher and have to provide your own benefits. You are taking on higher risk due to the temporary nature of most engagements. If you're billing $100/hr you're not making bad money, but it's nowhere near equivalent to a $200K W-2 job.
- walshemj 9y agoconsultant that wanted to aim for the same as a 200k pa job would be charging around the $500 an hour rate to allow for down time holidays etc
- kelvin0 9y agoNobody ever shows up at your door and says "Welcome to the Illuminati. You can now charge $20,000 a week. Here's a list of clients." Back to the drawing board for me. :)
- qdoop 9y agoPersonally i would not spent a cent on the services of the poster. IMO he just earns his living by making NOISE lots of NOISE P.S. Why to advertise the way you earn your living especially if it is so profitable?
- mercwear 9y agoI have heard " If this hadn't been a coffee date, but rather a consulting engagement, I'd be writing you a check right now." before.. Cannot remember where but your buddy read that in a book I think =)
- segah 9y agoPeople still charge only $100/hour? standard Professional Services tech consulting rate is $250
- siliconc0w 9y agoI think an important note is that this sort of work is a lot of sales and not a lot of programming. You have to hustle and know how to sell a narrative and have the credentials/data to back it up. You make money through scaling, which means selling a lot of clients the same solutions which might be easy for marketing but for other niches it can be difficult because it can take non-trivial effort to adapt an arbitrary software product to a given strategy/solution or require certain organizational culture shifts for meaningful success. Also clients don't want to share and generally want 100% of your time so work/life balance and 'scaling' to many clients can be difficult.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Asdfbla 9y agoThe way it reads it sounds reasonable, but ultimately it seems more targeted at aspiring consultants who were already pretty entrepreneurial minded than at the general programmer crowd. Apart from doing things 'right' (proper rates, selling yourself, networking and so on, we've all read that on HN), I think it surely requires a much different mindset towards work than what your average developer might have. I can't imagine getting into the grandstanding mindset (not meant in a negative way) required to sell myself as a consultant really, and I'd also first have to adjust to quantifying everything I do in terms of money. But definitely good for all the people who can do it and use the corporate structure of the world for their benefit. Pretty cool. I could see myself get the required competence to consult some time in the future (though not yet), but I doubt I'd ever get the character for it.
- rdiddly 9y agoThe answer always involves being interested in marketing, which I find incredibly tedious and dull. Which kind of makes the person writing it seem dull. Until you realize that's not the content or the purpose of the writing at all. The whole thing is actually, itself, marketing, i.e. somebody's sales pitch for himself. Well no wonder it's a bore.
- z3t4 9y agoThe money someone is willing to pay you, is roughly what it would cost to get the job done by someone else. If you have a good relationship of always on time, etc, that's worth some extra, but they wont pay you $1000 if they know someone else will do it for $100. But if everyone charges $1000 and you only charge $100 they will think there's a catch, even if you do a much better job. So the real trick is to find a market niche that people pay a lot for. Then go do that, and charge market prices. When reading success stories, like in Indie Hackers, the best info is how much they pay for different services. If you see something that is outrageous expensive, that you could do for 100 times less, then that is probably a good market for you. For example $500 for a single balloon ...
- md224 9y agoReading 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 fields are getting screwed while we prosper. I wish there was a way that we could apply our skills toward fixing this injustice.
- qdoop 9y agoEnjoy 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 http://worrydream.com/#!/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg
- striking 9y agoThis 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.)
- qdoop 9y agoOnce there were coal miners. Today they are SW programmers. The INDUSTRY needs you!!!
- md224 9y agoUgh, this is definitely a fear of mine. I'm 33, and the other day I realized that I'm one of the oldest employees of the startup I work at... older than my boss and possibly older than the founders themselves. It was a strange and slightly disconcerting feeling, realizing I was now the "old" guy. I know about the ageism in the industry, and I do worry that in 5-10 years I'll be struggling to find work. I hope I'm wrong.
- qdoop 9y agoWell lets make more NOISE That was the original title we commented on How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting Refers to 2012 and certainly the dust has settled since then.
- senatorobama 9y agoThis guy's greatest achievement is Bingo Card Creator... huh?
- blunte 9y agoWell, if he can market that into the success he has now, then his information is probably pretty valuable!
- kelvin0 9y agoUsing 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.
- blunte 9y agoI think comparing his situation to lottery is reaching a lot; so no, I'll take a pass on interviewing those folks. What I would do is interview tech employees who figured out how to take their ideas and build entire businesses out of them. Actually this is already provided somewhat in indiehackers.com. Unfortunately, it doesn't always provide useful guidance as much as highlight that right place/right time is still a big factor in success.
- borplk 9y agoDon't be nasty.
- qdoop 9y agoLets mix some Popcorn NOISE patio11 should certainly consult putnam on how to improve his business. about: schedule your 15 minute strategy session for growing your 6 figure consulting business to 7 with sam putnam samputnam.com
- blunte 9y agoPerhaps 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, 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.
- kelvin0 9y agoThanks 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.
- putnam 9y agoDo you think that there are not engineering consultants making five figures a week?
- blunte 9y agoI'm sure there are. But I doubt there are as many, because of the inclination of marketing people to be willing to pay for outside help vs engineering that tends to enjoy problem solving so much that they only ask for help when things are really bad. Also it's a numbers game - there are more marketing departments than engineering departments (across all business sectors).
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- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- RyanShook 9y agoSo, 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.
- shostack 9y agoPatrick, How do you view and approach "productization" of consulting services that are primarily information/education-based (vs. coding something)? Specifically with a mind towards scaling beyond the limits of your available time?