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Do you have any advice for younger developers looking to get into the consulting life? I really hate the 9-5 life, and consulting seems like the best way to br

Do you have any advice for younger developers looking to get into the consulting life? I really hate the 9-5 life, and consulting seems like the best way to break out of it.

overcast 7y ago
Just start doing it, in your free time. You'll be burning the candle at both ends for a while as you build up clients, but you're young, you've got the energy and the time.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  >> Just start doing it, in your free time. You'll be burning the candle at both ends for a while as you build up clients, but you're young, you've got the energy and the time. While you're employed? This is terrible advice. You get consulting money for combining expertise with availability. Younger employees have neither of these. If I found out one of my salaried employees was moonlighting I'd immediately be looking for evidence that it had the slightest impact on their responsibilities & performance. I'd be very surprised not to find any PDQ
  - chownie 7y ago
    This is a shortcut to major employee churn. Don't over-manage people, acknowledge and accept that the instant they clock out you no longer have any right to their time. If they're moonlighting, it means either you or they are missing something in your work contract, that should concern you.
  - overcast 7y ago
    You sound like a terrible employer, and I would immediately be looking for employment elsewhere. MANY people work multiple jobs in this world. If they are doing the work assigned to you during the hours agreed upon, what say do you have otherwise? You don't own people.
  - i_haz_rabies 7y ago
    Booooooooo not cool. If someone is underperforming, do what you will. But why would you go looking for it just because they're doing a second job? What if they had a kid and were getting less sleep, would you put them under the microscope then?
    - PragmaticPulp 7y ago
      > If someone is underperforming, do what you will. But why would you go looking for it just because they're doing a second job? I've done some freelance work while also having a full-time job. It's great at first, when you still think that you can give 100% to your dayjob and fit the freelance work into your free time on evenings and weekends. If you can find relaxed contract work that fits to your schedule without detracting from your dayjob, then by all means go for it. The problem is that contract work is rarely perfectly asynchronous like that. It won't take long until the company has some questions about your work that require a phone call during daytime hours. Or they find a one-liner issue that they need fixed ASAP, not when you have free time. Or they say they would like to continue paying you for contract work, but only if you can start responding faster during the day and turning requests around more quickly. All of these pressures start adding up, tempting you to sandbag your salaried dayjob so you can have more hours to rake in that incremental hourly contracting money. In my case, I chose to give up contracting to avoid any moral, ethical, or legal breaches with my day job. However, I've seen many junior employees sabotage their own career progress by spreading themselves too thin with salaried work and freelancing work. Something has to give. Worse yet, I've seen at least one case where someone used their company laptop and company phone for the contracting work for clients. Per your employment agreement, that puts the ownership of the code into a gray area. You don't want to go there, but when the clients are hammering your e-mail and phone for an answer it's tempting to just give in and interleave that work with your dayjob. Bad idea. Finally, there's a myth that employees have a finite amount of work each week. When we do sprint planning, we calibrate to velocity, based on how much work the employee got done last week. I rely on my employees to help inform me about reasonable estimates and to help judge task complexity. Side hustlers have a misaligned incentive to exaggerate complexity, sandbag on tasks, and otherwise manipulate the system to minimize their dayjob workload. Less dayjob work equals more time for freelance income. Bottom line: Some people can pull it off in rare circumstances, but more often than not a side hustler on your team will drag everyone down.
  - cryoshon 7y ago
    >If I found out one of my salaried employees was moonlighting I'd immediately be looking for evidence that it had the slightest impact on their responsibilities & performance a predictable response, but it's the wrong one which will surely lose your company plenty of money and valuable employees extremely rapidly while generating a tremendous amount of ill-will from the people in your network. really, it's the attitude that's creating the problematic and unprofitable approach here. aside from being disgustingly invasive and utterly reprehensible from a social perspective, you've also put yourself in a position where you're spending your company's time on something that will never generate it any financial returns, only more costs when the employee discovers your snooping and inevitably ditches you and you need you find a replacement on short notice. the correct response here is to re-evaluate how much you're paying the employees that are moonlighting because it clearly isn't enough to keep them appeased, which means that by definition it isn't enough to keep them operating at 100% during the hours you expect to be getting 100% of their energy and potential for productive output. in other words, moonlighting employees need a raise because at the salary you're paying them, they know they can't afford to stop looking for more opportunities to work for pay. when you do find a reason to give that employee a raise proactively, you'll increase their output to the level you thought you were purchasing with the initial salary negotiations. you'll also increase their loyalty to the company, and avoid intruding on their private life, which is explicitly, irrevocably, and unimpeachably beyond your purview, consideration, or examination under any conditions whatsoever. in a nutshell: focus on things you can change, then stay in your lane.
    - PragmaticPulp 7y ago
      > the correct response here is to re-evaluate how much you're paying the employees that are moonlighting because it clearly isn't enough to keep them appeased, Might be true for some people, but it's not the primary motivation for freelancers. Usually it's the highly-skilled, highly-paid people who are in a position to pick up freelance work, not your lowest-paid workers at the bottom of the hierarchy. They do it not because they need the money, but because it's there for the taking and they get to work on something interesting while they do it. With a salaried dayjob, your effective hourly rate goes down with each additional hour you work. With a freelance job, your effective income goes up with each additional hour worked. Someone who has both types of job at the same time has an incentive to minimize their input to their dayjob so they can maximize the incremental income from their freelancing work. Sure, theoretically a perfect employee could keep their dayjob perfectly isolated from freelancing work, but in practice people with an hourly side hustle can't resist the temptation to sandbag at work. The whole crux of the argument for shorter workdays and shorter workweeks is that people only have so many productive hours each week. Past the point of diminishing returns, their work quality and productivity drop. If someone is working 40 hour weeks, commuting, and also freelancing for another 10-30 hours per week, which job gets their best hours? Which job gets their least productive hours? In my experience, side-hustle freelancers always let their dayjob work output slip, whether they expect to or not. This is why you need to watch employees very closely as soon as you get wind that they're freelancing.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    As businesses have slashed-and-burned the concept of job security for salaried workers, they can no longer expect an iota of "all for the company" esprit-de-corporation buy-in, from anyone. The workers all know that they will be dropped like a live grenade the exact millisecond that they become unprofitable, so we're all looking out for ourselves now. Every second you are employed, you should be keeping one eye on whether your current employer is about to screw you, and another eye on your exit strategy for when they inevitably do. Scan the job postings monthly. Never reject a feeler that comes through your network. No loyalty for the disloyal. If I found out that my boss was cracking down on a co-worker for suspected moonlighting, I'd start looking for other work myself.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    > If I found out one of my salaried employees was moonlighting I'd immediately be looking for evidence that it had the slightest impact on their responsibilities & performance. You don't own the lives of those you employ. While it's perfectly reasonable that if you see quality slippage you should react - actively searching for an excuse to fire someone for having a side gig is like a weird possessive and jealous relationship. Additionally, if folks at your company are picking up side gigs then maybe you should review your compensation because there's probably a reason people aren't content with their current working situation.
    - clarry 7y ago
      > Additionally, if folks at your company are picking up side gigs then maybe you should review your compensation because there's probably a reason people aren't content with their current working situation. Not just compensation but other stuff like the ability to take on different types of projects and learn new stuff on the job. If I have a job that has me do the same thing with the same tech stack for whoever knows how long, I'm going to grow stale. I don't want to grow stale, that's both boring and also denying myself future opportunities and generally just putting myself at a disadvantage. Possibly very screwed if/when the company decides I'm no longer needed.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Would you knock them for going out for dinner? Or going to night school? You realize that moonlighting gives them skills they can use to help you.
  - shantly 7y ago
    I notice many C-suite and founder folks have like 10 things with a “-present” date on them on LinkedIn. Seems fine for them. So fine for me too. Or am I actually more important and doing more work for this company than the CEO? Surely not. That would be silly.
jermaustin1 7y ago
Be a contractor a bunch of time, build up your network on linked in, and "Always Be Closing" small projects with your network. Each time a past manager moves to a new department, new company, new something, I reach out after a couple of months to see if they have any gaps in their current team I can temporarily fill. It takes a lot of work to not work that much. I used to spend 20% of my time selling/pitching/quoting/etc for free. Right now I have a semi-stable 30-35hr/week gig, so I'm not having to sell any.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  From my experience these gigs are great but also dangerous. When I was consultant I got lazy and complacent once i had a good gig and stopped selling. when this one customer went away I was back at zero.
  - jermaustin1 7y ago
    I agree with that. I've actually cut my income by a lot just because I don't do as much work. But I'm getting to an age where I don't really want to work more than this anyway. So now I just need to keep upping my rate.
rorykoehler 7y ago
Don't expect consulting to be less demanding. If anything you will work more.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  And expectations are much higher (assuming your an indy contractor).
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    From my experience being a highly paid consular is a good experience. There are high expectations but you also get treated well and usually get what you need quickly, be it information, meetings or something else.

Do you have any advice for younger developers looking to get into the consulting life? I really hate the 9-5 life, and consulting seems like the best way to break out of it.

overcast 7y ago

Just start doing it, in your free time. You'll be burning the candle at both ends for a while as you build up clients, but you're young, you've got the energy and the time.

ticmasta 7y ago
>> Just start doing it, in your free time. You'll be burning the candle at both ends for a while as you build up clients, but you're young, you've got the energy and the time. While you're employed? This is terrible advice. You get consulting money for combining expertise with availability. Younger employees have neither of these. If I found out one of my salaried employees was moonlighting I'd immediately be looking for evidence that it had the slightest impact on their responsibilities & performance. I'd be very surprised not to find any PDQ
- chownie 7y ago
  This is a shortcut to major employee churn. Don't over-manage people, acknowledge and accept that the instant they clock out you no longer have any right to their time. If they're moonlighting, it means either you or they are missing something in your work contract, that should concern you.
- overcast 7y ago
  You sound like a terrible employer, and I would immediately be looking for employment elsewhere. MANY people work multiple jobs in this world. If they are doing the work assigned to you during the hours agreed upon, what say do you have otherwise? You don't own people.
- i_haz_rabies 7y ago
  Booooooooo not cool. If someone is underperforming, do what you will. But why would you go looking for it just because they're doing a second job? What if they had a kid and were getting less sleep, would you put them under the microscope then?
  - PragmaticPulp 7y ago
    > If someone is underperforming, do what you will. But why would you go looking for it just because they're doing a second job? I've done some freelance work while also having a full-time job. It's great at first, when you still think that you can give 100% to your dayjob and fit the freelance work into your free time on evenings and weekends. If you can find relaxed contract work that fits to your schedule without detracting from your dayjob, then by all means go for it. The problem is that contract work is rarely perfectly asynchronous like that. It won't take long until the company has some questions about your work that require a phone call during daytime hours. Or they find a one-liner issue that they need fixed ASAP, not when you have free time. Or they say they would like to continue paying you for contract work, but only if you can start responding faster during the day and turning requests around more quickly. All of these pressures start adding up, tempting you to sandbag your salaried dayjob so you can have more hours to rake in that incremental hourly contracting money. In my case, I chose to give up contracting to avoid any moral, ethical, or legal breaches with my day job. However, I've seen many junior employees sabotage their own career progress by spreading themselves too thin with salaried work and freelancing work. Something has to give. Worse yet, I've seen at least one case where someone used their company laptop and company phone for the contracting work for clients. Per your employment agreement, that puts the ownership of the code into a gray area. You don't want to go there, but when the clients are hammering your e-mail and phone for an answer it's tempting to just give in and interleave that work with your dayjob. Bad idea. Finally, there's a myth that employees have a finite amount of work each week. When we do sprint planning, we calibrate to velocity, based on how much work the employee got done last week. I rely on my employees to help inform me about reasonable estimates and to help judge task complexity. Side hustlers have a misaligned incentive to exaggerate complexity, sandbag on tasks, and otherwise manipulate the system to minimize their dayjob workload. Less dayjob work equals more time for freelance income. Bottom line: Some people can pull it off in rare circumstances, but more often than not a side hustler on your team will drag everyone down.
- cryoshon 7y ago
  >If I found out one of my salaried employees was moonlighting I'd immediately be looking for evidence that it had the slightest impact on their responsibilities & performance a predictable response, but it's the wrong one which will surely lose your company plenty of money and valuable employees extremely rapidly while generating a tremendous amount of ill-will from the people in your network. really, it's the attitude that's creating the problematic and unprofitable approach here. aside from being disgustingly invasive and utterly reprehensible from a social perspective, you've also put yourself in a position where you're spending your company's time on something that will never generate it any financial returns, only more costs when the employee discovers your snooping and inevitably ditches you and you need you find a replacement on short notice. the correct response here is to re-evaluate how much you're paying the employees that are moonlighting because it clearly isn't enough to keep them appeased, which means that by definition it isn't enough to keep them operating at 100% during the hours you expect to be getting 100% of their energy and potential for productive output. in other words, moonlighting employees need a raise because at the salary you're paying them, they know they can't afford to stop looking for more opportunities to work for pay. when you do find a reason to give that employee a raise proactively, you'll increase their output to the level you thought you were purchasing with the initial salary negotiations. you'll also increase their loyalty to the company, and avoid intruding on their private life, which is explicitly, irrevocably, and unimpeachably beyond your purview, consideration, or examination under any conditions whatsoever. in a nutshell: focus on things you can change, then stay in your lane.
  - PragmaticPulp 7y ago
    > the correct response here is to re-evaluate how much you're paying the employees that are moonlighting because it clearly isn't enough to keep them appeased, Might be true for some people, but it's not the primary motivation for freelancers. Usually it's the highly-skilled, highly-paid people who are in a position to pick up freelance work, not your lowest-paid workers at the bottom of the hierarchy. They do it not because they need the money, but because it's there for the taking and they get to work on something interesting while they do it. With a salaried dayjob, your effective hourly rate goes down with each additional hour you work. With a freelance job, your effective income goes up with each additional hour worked. Someone who has both types of job at the same time has an incentive to minimize their input to their dayjob so they can maximize the incremental income from their freelancing work. Sure, theoretically a perfect employee could keep their dayjob perfectly isolated from freelancing work, but in practice people with an hourly side hustle can't resist the temptation to sandbag at work. The whole crux of the argument for shorter workdays and shorter workweeks is that people only have so many productive hours each week. Past the point of diminishing returns, their work quality and productivity drop. If someone is working 40 hour weeks, commuting, and also freelancing for another 10-30 hours per week, which job gets their best hours? Which job gets their least productive hours? In my experience, side-hustle freelancers always let their dayjob work output slip, whether they expect to or not. This is why you need to watch employees very closely as soon as you get wind that they're freelancing.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  As businesses have slashed-and-burned the concept of job security for salaried workers, they can no longer expect an iota of "all for the company" esprit-de-corporation buy-in, from anyone. The workers all know that they will be dropped like a live grenade the exact millisecond that they become unprofitable, so we're all looking out for ourselves now. Every second you are employed, you should be keeping one eye on whether your current employer is about to screw you, and another eye on your exit strategy for when they inevitably do. Scan the job postings monthly. Never reject a feeler that comes through your network. No loyalty for the disloyal. If I found out that my boss was cracking down on a co-worker for suspected moonlighting, I'd start looking for other work myself.
- munk-a 7y ago
  > If I found out one of my salaried employees was moonlighting I'd immediately be looking for evidence that it had the slightest impact on their responsibilities & performance. You don't own the lives of those you employ. While it's perfectly reasonable that if you see quality slippage you should react - actively searching for an excuse to fire someone for having a side gig is like a weird possessive and jealous relationship. Additionally, if folks at your company are picking up side gigs then maybe you should review your compensation because there's probably a reason people aren't content with their current working situation.
  - clarry 7y ago
    > Additionally, if folks at your company are picking up side gigs then maybe you should review your compensation because there's probably a reason people aren't content with their current working situation. Not just compensation but other stuff like the ability to take on different types of projects and learn new stuff on the job. If I have a job that has me do the same thing with the same tech stack for whoever knows how long, I'm going to grow stale. I don't want to grow stale, that's both boring and also denying myself future opportunities and generally just putting myself at a disadvantage. Possibly very screwed if/when the company decides I'm no longer needed.
- wolco 7y ago
  Would you knock them for going out for dinner? Or going to night school? You realize that moonlighting gives them skills they can use to help you.
- shantly 7y ago
  I notice many C-suite and founder folks have like 10 things with a “-present” date on them on LinkedIn. Seems fine for them. So fine for me too. Or am I actually more important and doing more work for this company than the CEO? Surely not. That would be silly.

jermaustin1 7y ago

Be a contractor a bunch of time, build up your network on linked in, and "Always Be Closing" small projects with your network. Each time a past manager moves to a new department, new company, new something, I reach out after a couple of months to see if they have any gaps in their current team I can temporarily fill. It takes a lot of work to not work that much. I used to spend 20% of my time selling/pitching/quoting/etc for free. Right now I have a semi-stable 30-35hr/week gig, so I'm not having to sell any.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
From my experience these gigs are great but also dangerous. When I was consultant I got lazy and complacent once i had a good gig and stopped selling. when this one customer went away I was back at zero.
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  I agree with that. I've actually cut my income by a lot just because I don't do as much work. But I'm getting to an age where I don't really want to work more than this anyway. So now I just need to keep upping my rate.

rorykoehler 7y ago

Don't expect consulting to be less demanding. If anything you will work more.

mywittyname 7y ago
And expectations are much higher (assuming your an indy contractor).
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  From my experience being a highly paid consular is a good experience. There are high expectations but you also get treated well and usually get what you need quickly, be it information, meetings or something else.