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Fixing problems and adding value to the business can pay very well. Much of my freelancing work amounts to unglamorous but essential debugging of code and infra

Fixing problems and adding value to the business can pay very well. Much of my freelancing work amounts to unglamorous but essential debugging of code and infrastructure. The sweet spot for freelancing comes down to providing expertise companies don’t have in-house and can’t easily hire for. That can describe a lot of things. In my case it describes cloud infrastructure and difficult software bugs. In my experience most programmers working full-time jobs have poor debugging skills and limited expertise outside of their domain. Someone who has specialized in mastering, for example, Ruby on Rails likely can’t figure out a SQL database performance problem or how to set up a secure hosting infrastructure. You just have to figure things out quickly and solve problems. You can’t look at it in terms of cost per hour. The correct way to value yourself its to determine cost or value to the business. That’s summed up in the old joke about the consultant who fixes a broken machine in a few minutes and bills $10,001 dollars — one dollar for pushing a button and $10,000 for knowing which button to push.

euroderf 4y ago
> bills $10,001 dollars — one dollar for pushing a button and $10,000 for knowing which button to push. IIRC not a joke - was IRL.
- gregjor 4y ago
  The story has many variations. Likely apocryphal. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/
  - MaxPengwing 4y ago
    I saw a variation on this. Mostly with old legacy systems. At a well known grocery store chain (GSC) in Sweden they decided to outsource their IT department. Then realised that noone understood the AS/400 systems, so the outsourcing company hired the old GSC IT employees back at a much higher salary. One I spoke with basically tripled her salary as she was not interested to come back and wanted to scare off the recruiter and gave what she though was a fantasy number as monthly salary, and the recruiter accepted it within the hour. An other guy I've spoken to, who is a retired sales person, and this is way back, he's dead now. He still got sales consultancy work from his old employer in the 1990s and early 2000's because he was the only person a very large Japanese company would deal with and refused to have their account managed by anyone else but in return they would not shopp around for cheaper prices. Apparently the guy had managed to impress during Nomenkai during the 1980s, and I think he managed to save the customers CEO's face in an unrelated matter without realising it until later.
    - user_named 4y ago
      Nomikai
- gregjor 4y ago
  I had a customer for years, was on retainer for a few thousand dollars a month. I knew their systems inside and out, managed their hosting infrastructure. They couldn't hire anyone to take over -- not a glamorous business, didn't offer competitive salary, not a great workplace (I worked remote). I reported to the COO and all was good, I would deal with whatever problems came up and implement whatever upgrades or enhancements they needed. The COO left and the CEO/founder took over. I didn't have much day-to-day interaction with him before that. He called a meeting and told me I had to start submitting detailed invoices and charging hourly. I said no, I preferred the retainer arrangement and they got guaranteed priority response from me in return, and no unpredictable monthly bills. He then asked "What exactly are we paying you for?" I said they were paying me not to quit. He didn't exactly like hearing that, but after he talked to his managers he dropped the issue, and I kept the gig on retainer for two more years, until I fired them for asking me to do something legally questionable and definitely unethical.
  - sixtram 4y ago
    >> "What exactly are we paying you for?" I said they were paying me not to quit. Respect for that, I'm gonna steal that line :)
    - gregjor 4y ago
      Go ahead! Lots of people keep their jobs because the employer can't afford to lose them. That goes for freelancers too. I have freelanced long enough to know that a lot of people in my industry lack basic competence, or don't care about their customers over the long term. I have customers now worried about what they will do when I retire in a few years. That's not because I have so many special talents but because the smaller companies I work for find it very hard to find good people, and they don't have the expertise to judge whether someone actually knows what they are talking about or not.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  It's an ancient joke, I read a version of it in a jokebook from the 1940s where the protagonist was a mechanical engineer who knew just the right place to whack a broken machine to make it start again. All those stories about a priest, a minister, and a rabbi, however, are 100% true. I know because I was the rabbi involved.
intelVISA 4y ago
That's why the cloud is sometimes A Good Thing - it creates its own Byzantine problems to long-solved issues that you can resell fixes for at $3k/hr as an "expert". What a time!
- gregjor 4y ago
  No doubt. All of my customers moved to the cloud a long time ago. Without exception they either paid some outside company to do it and now can’t get support, or they had one of their own people who doesn’t know enough about it set it up. Cloud infrastructure generates problems faster than npm.

euroderf 4y ago

> bills $10,001 dollars — one dollar for pushing a button and $10,000 for knowing which button to push. IIRC not a joke - was IRL.

gregjor 4y ago
The story has many variations. Likely apocryphal. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/
- MaxPengwing 4y ago
  I saw a variation on this. Mostly with old legacy systems. At a well known grocery store chain (GSC) in Sweden they decided to outsource their IT department. Then realised that noone understood the AS/400 systems, so the outsourcing company hired the old GSC IT employees back at a much higher salary. One I spoke with basically tripled her salary as she was not interested to come back and wanted to scare off the recruiter and gave what she though was a fantasy number as monthly salary, and the recruiter accepted it within the hour. An other guy I've spoken to, who is a retired sales person, and this is way back, he's dead now. He still got sales consultancy work from his old employer in the 1990s and early 2000's because he was the only person a very large Japanese company would deal with and refused to have their account managed by anyone else but in return they would not shopp around for cheaper prices. Apparently the guy had managed to impress during Nomenkai during the 1980s, and I think he managed to save the customers CEO's face in an unrelated matter without realising it until later.
  - user_named 4y ago
    Nomikai
gregjor 4y ago
I had a customer for years, was on retainer for a few thousand dollars a month. I knew their systems inside and out, managed their hosting infrastructure. They couldn't hire anyone to take over -- not a glamorous business, didn't offer competitive salary, not a great workplace (I worked remote). I reported to the COO and all was good, I would deal with whatever problems came up and implement whatever upgrades or enhancements they needed. The COO left and the CEO/founder took over. I didn't have much day-to-day interaction with him before that. He called a meeting and told me I had to start submitting detailed invoices and charging hourly. I said no, I preferred the retainer arrangement and they got guaranteed priority response from me in return, and no unpredictable monthly bills. He then asked "What exactly are we paying you for?" I said they were paying me not to quit. He didn't exactly like hearing that, but after he talked to his managers he dropped the issue, and I kept the gig on retainer for two more years, until I fired them for asking me to do something legally questionable and definitely unethical.
- sixtram 4y ago
  >> "What exactly are we paying you for?" I said they were paying me not to quit. Respect for that, I'm gonna steal that line :)
  - gregjor 4y ago
    Go ahead! Lots of people keep their jobs because the employer can't afford to lose them. That goes for freelancers too. I have freelanced long enough to know that a lot of people in my industry lack basic competence, or don't care about their customers over the long term. I have customers now worried about what they will do when I retire in a few years. That's not because I have so many special talents but because the smaller companies I work for find it very hard to find good people, and they don't have the expertise to judge whether someone actually knows what they are talking about or not.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
It's an ancient joke, I read a version of it in a jokebook from the 1940s where the protagonist was a mechanical engineer who knew just the right place to whack a broken machine to make it start again. All those stories about a priest, a minister, and a rabbi, however, are 100% true. I know because I was the rabbi involved.

intelVISA 4y ago

That's why the cloud is sometimes A Good Thing - it creates its own Byzantine problems to long-solved issues that you can resell fixes for at $3k/hr as an "expert". What a time!

gregjor 4y ago
No doubt. All of my customers moved to the cloud a long time ago. Without exception they either paid some outside company to do it and now can’t get support, or they had one of their own people who doesn’t know enough about it set it up. Cloud infrastructure generates problems faster than npm.