6 ms·
My experiences: 1) programmer in IT department of major newspaper: disregarded as IT geek. very small salary. the worst office spaces. 2) senior engineer in s
by hackernoteng 3y ago
My experiences:
1) programmer in IT department of major newspaper: disregarded as IT geek. very small salary. the worst office spaces.
2) senior engineer in software startup: rockstar treatment, stock options, all the things you would expect as office culture
3) senior consultant at IT consulting company: must basically be a sales guy who writes good PowerPoints. Maximize billable hours. What ever you do dont complete a project quickly or with minimum amount of code.
you can probably guess where I am now.
- hackernoteng 3y agoThe consulting company gig paid alright. and all the guys who stayed got really rich due to IPO. I left the second my options vested. Literally when the transaction went through... no regrets because it SUCKED
- granshaw 3y agoHow often do consulting companies ipo nowadays tho… heck ipos in general have dwindled to a tiny number
- jwineinger 3y agoAgree with these. I was a dev at a retailer that did catalog/phone sales and was starting to use web. Small salary, small PTO, no benefits. Pay increased when the business had an existential crisis and came to rely much more heavily on tech. Next was software consulting company churning out sites designed by marketing agencies, billed to the 15 min. Small salary, small PTO, some benefits. Then I went into SaaS (startup, then a public company). Nice salary + stock, great PTO, great benefits. Aside from the comp/PTO/benefits, I learned that consulting isn't for me. The client interactions felt... adversarial, where they were trying to get more work for less money, while we were doing the opposite. I did not like that constant tension in conversations.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoThe point you made about consulting interactions resonates with why I also ended up not liking consulting. It feels like incentives are not aligned when doing software consulting a lot of the time.
- jncfhnb 3y agoFlat fees. Problem solved.
- tessierashpool 3y agoflat fees fail for dev. as soon as you encounter an unexpected problem, your margin suffers. since unexpected problems can radically alter dev time, your margin can be obliterated.
- jncfhnb 3y agoMake bigger margins
- JasonSage 3y agoNot sure why you’re getting down-voted. If unexpected costs are shrinking your margin, you’re failing either: 1. …to negotiate the terms of your agreement correctly (what constitutes additional scope and therefore additional charges?). I will never take another client project without first agreeing on an SRS for this reason. 2. …to negotiate a fee with a margin proportional to the likelihood of unexpected situations arising. This is a function of the accuracy of requirements by simple/complicated/complex problem domains. I think this is what parent is suggesting. If clients don’t like (2) they will work with you more on (1) by providing more accurate requirements, which lets you bucket some problems into more readily estimable domains.
- jncfhnb 3y agoYeah. My answers are short but they’re genuine. What you’re saying is a much clearer answer. And what you’re saying is frankly pretty tough. But being a consultant is more than just asking someone to shut up and and pay you to code.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago> Maximize billable hours. What ever you do dont complete a project quickly or with minimum amount of code. OOF
- antod 3y ago> Maximize billable hours. What ever you do dont complete a project quickly or with minimum amount of code. There's a real continuum of engagement budget here - at the other end of the scale you have the opposite problem where the fees are barely adequate, and your success is based on systemitizing shortcuts to crash out cookie cutter minimum viable products, and being able to get clients to actually cough up.
- throwaway2037 3y agoWas #3 the highest pay and least amount of work? If yes, I select #3.