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"... I spend most of my time on maintenance, and I offer retainers to companies that benefit from my work and from access to my planning and my expertise. I now

"... I spend most of my time on maintenance, and I offer retainers to companies that benefit from my work and from access to my planning and my expertise. I now have six amazing clients, and I’m making an amount of money equivalent to my Google total compensation package" Well done and keep it up! I highly recommend that you find say two other individuals like yourself and form a triumvirate. An individual can have trouble taking time off, dealing with life's inevitable adversity etc. That can work well for a fledgling org because two can out vote the one who gets it "wrong". This model does require a certain amount of trust and the ability to accept being wrong. Then you take on staff ...

flippinburgers 4y ago
I'm so isolated. I never got a degree in this field and I don't socialize much. So I feel permanently trapped working for a company. It sucks, but not enough apparently to get me to change.
the-rc 4y ago
Yeah, I was wondering how his kind of arrangement could work if one needed or wanted to take weeks/months off at a time. The traditional model based on features or projects might be a better fit, unless one partners with others as you describe.
gerdesj 4y ago
A few people seem to agree with me, so to flesh this out a bit: Not all of us are going to fly a unicorn to a glorious multi billionaire finish. Most of us would like to be able to sleep at night, have a reasonably comfortable income and basically "get by". As this is HN, I will require a certain amount of "get up and go" but not too much! I fell into the triumvirate thing 23 years ago. I became an IT contractor at a helicopter factory in the UK around 1996. Helpdesk n that. I learned quite a lot quite quickly and by 1999 ("party like it's") I was in the NETS team - sysadmin land. 2000 - we were Facility Managed off to ... ourselves and our company was started. I was recruited by two other NETS chaps to be the MD of their idea. It wasn't my idea. So we have three blokes with equal shares of a nascent company. It works really well out of the box. Two can always gang up on one. We would have screaming arguments about direction or whatever but in the end there was always resolution. 23 years later, it still works. The three of us are quite different but we do completely trust each other. The trust thing is where my advice might become unhinged but the model is still very decent 8)
- Avshalom 4y ago
  >triumvirate thing There's a saying, I don't know if its actually old or not, along the lines of: go to sea with one watch or three the point being that with one watch you just accept whatever it says, with three you pick the closest two, but if you have two... fuck it man who knows: coin flip
  - dmreedy 4y ago
    I like this one. The variant I'm familiar with is a little more open-ended, but I think about a lot. "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never quite sure"
  - totetsu 4y ago
    If it's old, could it be about watches in the sense of a period of time that one person keeps watch on the ship. So the meaning is go by yourself or as three people. Not about teling the time.
    - Avshalom 4y ago
      It's about using clocks to compare local noon to Greenwich noon in order to calculate longitude. Thing is that about 50% of all English expressions relate to the British navy and the other 50% are falsely attributed to the British navy so it's hard to say if 1-or-3 was actually real advice.
      - killjoywashere 4y ago
        Navy sailor here. Trained in celestial navigation. The 3 clocks thing is for real. On my first ship we still had mechanical clocks, on the theory that an EMP wouldn't bother them.
        cperciva 4y ago
        Is there any point knowing exactly where you are if the ship is dead in the water because all the electronics are fried?

flippinburgers 4y ago

I'm so isolated. I never got a degree in this field and I don't socialize much. So I feel permanently trapped working for a company. It sucks, but not enough apparently to get me to change.

the-rc 4y ago

Yeah, I was wondering how his kind of arrangement could work if one needed or wanted to take weeks/months off at a time. The traditional model based on features or projects might be a better fit, unless one partners with others as you describe.

gerdesj 4y ago

A few people seem to agree with me, so to flesh this out a bit: Not all of us are going to fly a unicorn to a glorious multi billionaire finish. Most of us would like to be able to sleep at night, have a reasonably comfortable income and basically "get by". As this is HN, I will require a certain amount of "get up and go" but not too much! I fell into the triumvirate thing 23 years ago. I became an IT contractor at a helicopter factory in the UK around 1996. Helpdesk n that. I learned quite a lot quite quickly and by 1999 ("party like it's") I was in the NETS team - sysadmin land. 2000 - we were Facility Managed off to ... ourselves and our company was started. I was recruited by two other NETS chaps to be the MD of their idea. It wasn't my idea. So we have three blokes with equal shares of a nascent company. It works really well out of the box. Two can always gang up on one. We would have screaming arguments about direction or whatever but in the end there was always resolution. 23 years later, it still works. The three of us are quite different but we do completely trust each other. The trust thing is where my advice might become unhinged but the model is still very decent 8)

Avshalom 4y ago
>triumvirate thing There's a saying, I don't know if its actually old or not, along the lines of: go to sea with one watch or three the point being that with one watch you just accept whatever it says, with three you pick the closest two, but if you have two... fuck it man who knows: coin flip
- dmreedy 4y ago
  I like this one. The variant I'm familiar with is a little more open-ended, but I think about a lot. "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never quite sure"
- totetsu 4y ago
  If it's old, could it be about watches in the sense of a period of time that one person keeps watch on the ship. So the meaning is go by yourself or as three people. Not about teling the time.
  - Avshalom 4y ago
    It's about using clocks to compare local noon to Greenwich noon in order to calculate longitude. Thing is that about 50% of all English expressions relate to the British navy and the other 50% are falsely attributed to the British navy so it's hard to say if 1-or-3 was actually real advice.
    - killjoywashere 4y ago
      Navy sailor here. Trained in celestial navigation. The 3 clocks thing is for real. On my first ship we still had mechanical clocks, on the theory that an EMP wouldn't bother them.
      - cperciva 4y ago
        Is there any point knowing exactly where you are if the ship is dead in the water because all the electronics are fried?