How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1

by putnam • 9 years ago

780 472 9 years ago

training.kalzumeus.com

putnam51• 9 years ago

I 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?

friendly_chap• 9 years ago

While 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

Xc439• 9 years ago

Well it seems straightforward to me. Efficient.

matte_black4• 9 years ago

No. 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.

maxxxxx6• 9 years ago

Do 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.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Do you have those skills?

cirgue• 9 years ago

Would that all of us could be Liam Neeson.

Xc439• 9 years ago

As 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.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Is it working for you?

mgkimsal17• 9 years ago

You 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.

mgkimsal17• 9 years ago

For 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)

ethbro5• 9 years ago

The 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.

mathattack4• 9 years ago

Yes. I've had friendly conversations turn into paid consulting work because, "Then we will pay more attention."

putnam51• 9 years ago

What do you think new freelancers and consultants get stuck on that limits their success?

shanemhansen3• 9 years ago

People on my linkedin talk to each other that way. It's bizarre how wannabe "coaches" talk.

speby• 9 years ago

Value received (perceived or real) does not necessarily equate to the amount of real dollars a customer would have been otherwise willing to pay.

k__3• 9 years ago

Yes.

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.

projektir2• 9 years ago

To 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.

saryant2• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

I 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.

kasey_junk• 9 years ago

If you want tptacek as an internet friend my advice is to email him.

If you are physically proximate to him he’ll buy you a coffee. Pretty cheap price to pay for a new internet friend.

I’ll also suggest to you that Patrick (nor any of Thomas’ successful friends) is successful cause he figured out how to turn HN karma into gold (I’d bet Patrick would say HN karma all represents wasted opportunities for your own content).

wglb• 9 years ago

Yes, it did. I know both of them and have heard the story from both.

kevmo314• 9 years ago

This 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.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Assuming it is a real situation, would you rather do per week billing or per hour?

mml• 9 years ago

I switched to weekly billing about 5 years ago. Life changer really.

putnam51• 9 years ago

How did you do it?

achompas2• 9 years ago

Can you describe why? Curious for a second opinion.

stablemap• 9 years ago

A couple hundred comments, some from patio11 himself, in 2012:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805091

kirubakaran9• 9 years ago

A 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/

putnam51• 9 years ago

How did you get into consulting? What do you do?

kirubakaran9• 9 years ago

Thanks 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.

Xc439• 9 years ago

Thank you! I am getting into consulting and while I found a client, I know this is just the start for me. So I estimate a probability of 70% I will read everything about consulting on your blog.

kirubakaran9• 9 years ago

Wishing you all the best!

dominotw• 9 years ago

How do you go about finding clients? I see an outline here https://kirubakaran.com/blog/consulting-outline/

Curious if you have any recommendations.

kirubakaran9• 9 years ago

In retrospect, I have to say that making friends has been the most significant bit in this regard. I didn't make those friends with the ulterior motive of getting more work of course. Though I used to be painfully introverted, I'm a friendly person and I made friends sort of organically, through my roommates etc. The great thing about loving programming is, when you talk about your mutual interests with your programmer friends, though you're just hanging out and having fun, it is also naturally a "work meeting".

That's probably not a very useful answer, but that's how I got most of my clients, who then referred me to their friends etc.

If I were new in a city, I'd find a way to accelerate that by going out more and meeting new people doing activities I enjoy. One of my friends made a lot of connections at the climbing gym, for example, and he got a few consulting contracts that way. The conversations for him were as simple as "What do you do?" "I'm a software consultant" "Oh, we need someone to do x at our startup. Do you know about that?" "Sure, let's talk more".

I'm sure there are other ways to jump start your connections... make something shareworthy and posting it on HN, for example.

bastijn6• 9 years ago

Your example reads like a programmer wrote it instead of a consultant.

- Would not expect to see a "such as" in statement of work in the locations you used them.

- Would not expect typos in statement of work.

- Consultant will push commits to source control.. I have other employees to code, I would pay an consultant to consult. Define strategy, architecture, coach. Not type code, you are way too expensive for that. Are you taking yourself serious?

What I read is a freelance software engineer.

kirubakaran9• 9 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. Could you point me to the typos please? I'd like to fix them.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Do consultants never code?

mgkimsal17• 9 years ago

For a single person, it's often both. Personally, there are projects where I'm more a 'freelance software engineer' - someone else is managing the project, working with the end client to determine goals, dates, etc. Someone else did sales and defined the outcomes, etc. I'm a pair of hands.

In other cases, I'm doing more of that other work - actually 'consulting' - meeting with people, helping determine strategy/direction, etc - then sometimes managing the project and/or doing some code (if code is needed, and usually is).

gvsmith• 9 years ago

Except in the real world (also at Google) the people who "type the code" also do the actual design work.

I quess Perelman was also just "typing a proof".

The amount of clueless people here is astonishing.

zdw• 9 years ago

Step 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.

Delmania• 9 years 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.

emodendroket15• 9 years ago

Some actors grew up poor but I wouldn't go around telling poor people they can all become world-famous actors.

kamaal2• 9 years ago

>Not at first, no, but even Patrick had to start at zero, right?

More or less everybody starts at 0. I don't exactly mean 0 as absolute nothingness, but some a low enough value of opportunity possible. That's the seed available to you, and from there you have to bootstrap.

Of course not every one will make it big in this game. But a sure shot way of going failing, is to not try.

maxxxxx6• 9 years ago

I had the same as freelance programmer. The higher the rate, the more respect I got and work actually became easier.

an_account• 9 years ago

How did you get your start freelancing?

putnam51• 9 years ago

Are you a consultant? Do you have 1 and 2 going for you?

tomcam• 9 years ago

So he became instantly popular with no previous effort? Or is it remotely possible that he actually spent time blogging on topics that his audience found compelling?

mcguire5• 9 years ago

http://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/

Scroll down to the start. See what you think.

ivanhoe2• 9 years ago

IMO it's a mistake to focus on his particular fees, that's what he managed to make for himself. You need to find your own realistic path. For instance I, living outside of US, will probably never be able to charge $100+ hour my clients, I'm fully aware of that. But no matter who you are, you probably still can push for a little bit more, and that's where Patrick's advices are solid. Often, it's just a matter of asking for more, as simple as that.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Where do you live?

bajsejohannes• 9 years ago

There are plenty of places outside of the US where you can charge that rate.

fnbr3• 9 years ago

It's very doable to find remote consulting/freelance work. I'm in a region of Canada where the goal freelance/consulting rates for software engineers are well below $100/hour, and I could regularly find remote consulting work in the US around the $100/hour mark .

roel_v• 9 years ago

If you're in Europe and a programming consultant, you can (and should) charge usd100 and more. Like, double, or triple.

Edit: actually, first thing you need to do is stop charging by the hour, and charge by the day, or better, by the week.

csa• 9 years ago

It depends on the kind of consulting you do, but this likely either selling yourself short or not framing your skills the correct way.

Generally speaking, most CEOs will respond positively to an offer that they put $1 in and get ~$3 out (with a range of possible outcomes around that ~$3). In fact, most smart ones will ask how many $1 bills they can throw at you before this proposition becomes untrue.

People who have the kind of combined skill set that 'patio11 has are relatively rare, but they need not be as rare as they are. For many people, all it takes is adopting an appropriate mindset for their work.

Location simply doesn't matter unless you are in a place where CEOs don't like money.

patio115• 9 years ago

Since this is something of a hobbyhorse of mine: You know all my invoices had “Ogaki, Gifu, Japan” on them, right? The only thing you have to do to charge $100 an hour is successfully pitch any firm in the world on paying you that. They exist, in quantity, and substantially all of them are on the same Internet we are.

mcguire5• 9 years ago

Step Somewhere-between-1.5-and-infinity: Market the holy shit out of everything you do.

putnam51• 9 years ago

What does that mean?

saryant2• 9 years ago

Yes. I literally got a job paying 3x my previous compensation just based on my StackOverflow reputation.

IMO, best way to start, as a programmer? Regional conferences. Start speaking. My first talk was just a presentation about how we used Akka at a small Scala conference in Portland. Last year I presented our use of Kafka at a much larger conference in Austin and now I'm prepping a submission for ScalaDays 2018, the largest conference in the field.

The point isn't even making it to the larger conferences, just keep getting your name out there. Learning to speak in venues like these doesn't just market yourself, you'll learn how to effectively present your ideas to an audience—a critical skill itself.

Then link it all on yourname.com or whatever and off you go. I'm at http://ryantanner.xyz.

The result? When I left a job a few years ago I just tweeted out that I was looking for some short-term consulting work and people I'd never met came out of the woodwork looking to hire me.

dsacco4• 9 years ago

Step 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name.

Step 2: Be good/accurate enough at opining in ways that make sense.

Neither of these are prerequisites for being extremely successful at consulting. My consulting rates are now approximately $10,000/week with a 70% annual utilization rate. I'm not industry famous at all. I also do not maintain a blog or do "content marketing." For a while I had no website, and even now my website isn’t exactly great, it’s what I’d call “minimally good enough” (but then I’m not a web developer :). I started consulting several years ago, and I have literally never gone onsite to a client's location. A significant number of Y Combinator companies have been clients of mine, and virtually all work comes to me via referrals from past clients.

I don't typically brag about this, but I'd like to say it because patio11 is an easy target for the "he got there by being industry famous" critique, and I think that would be the wrong thing to take away from his writings. I got to this rate by following his consulting advice as sprinkled throughout his blog and his comments here on Hacker News. I started my rates at approximately $5,000/week, which if I recall correctly tptacek once told me was "criminally low" for the industry :). Here are the two steps I would suggest, in place of yours:

1. Be demonstrably technically competent and capable of presenting your expertise coherently to various audiences,

2. Be willing to raise your rates and willing to ask clients for referrals at the end of every engagement.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that the very first time I raised my rates was spontaneously, on the phone with a client. I was asked my rates and thought to myself, “fuck it, let’s see what happens if I ask for 20% more than usual.” I did, there was a moment of silence, then an “okay.” That exchange is the substantive content of essentially every instance I’ve ever raised my rates. There’s not much magic to it aside from being willing to do it.

I personally used to be in the same position you're in now, in about 2012, reading patio11's blog and being cynical about it. But I find that framing to be defeatist after having accomplished it myself without either of your steps as a prerequisite. I firmly believe just about anyone who isn't socially tonedeaf and who has a real technical competency can achieve the same if they are determined to do so.

As a side note, I personally feel that I owe a lot of my success to patio11, and I’ve told him as much before. His response was essentially to pay it forward, and I hope I can do that a bit with this comment.

jeffwass• 9 years ago

That's a nice rate.

Mind sharing how many weeks you work a year? Ie, is there enough demand you can work in the upper 40's, leaving enough vacation time?

derefr• 9 years ago

You are industry-famous (or at least have the potential to be), to exactly the degree that "virtually all work comes to me via referrals from past clients."

To put it in more technical terms, your work seemingly has a positive viral coefficient, such that when you do work, it gets you exponentially (if only with a very slightly-above-1.0 exponent) more work. If you just exist in that state for long enough, you eventually get to be a well-known name.

This is what people mean when they say that you "need" to be industry-famous: it's not that you need to be already-well-known, but rather that you need to have the things going for you that cause people to pass your name around, such that you will inevitably become well-known. You need to be "in the process" of being famous; you need to be successfully executing on personal-brand-building. And some people just don't have what it takes to do that.

kbuchanan• 9 years ago

Loved this. It raised a question, though: how do your clients hold you accountable to your rates? How do you demonstrate $10K in a week was worth their while?

rev_bird3• 9 years ago

I recognize your username from various threads, but I'm unfamiliar with your work. What is it that you consult on? And, if you don't mind me asking, how did you get "demonstrably technically competent" in it? Were you an employee in whatever field it was, and then struck out on your own? I'm fascinated by consulting but have a hard time envisioning what these consultants do that employees don't, at least in the more technical fields.

bdcravens• 9 years ago

"popular/famous" seems to imply these are those unfair forces of the universe that bless others but not me. Rather, #1 comes out of #2 and being proactive in your career. Patrick was active here, knew what he was talking about, and that developed into a reputation where he'd be in a position to have conversations like the story suggested.

pwaai• 9 years ago

Step 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name.

This is what irks me about articles like this being posted on HN and indie hackers--You too can have a six digit MRR if you've spent the past X years building a community or mailing list around the topic...which is not a bad advice but not many people are able to do this.

So while not without merit and valuable bits, I feel like you've highlighted a very harsh reality that people like to forget....

This is the new entrepreneur porn disguised as content.

jasonkester• 9 years ago

I know, right? Like you, I prefer the articles telling me how to charge $20k/week as a junior developer fresh out of school with no experience.

Sadly, it seems that the world we live in requires us to work for the things we want.

You can spend your energy coming up with reasons why the guy who worked his way up from nothing shouldn't go around giving you step by step instructions on how to do the same. Or you can get started toward doing something similar.

csallen• 9 years ago

Not to be too defensive here, but one of my goals with Indie Hackers is to collect enough knowledge and stories that you can easily filter through to find examples of the type of approach that best works for you. Because you're right — not everyone is suited to spending 5 years building up an audience, etc. There are other ways.

Always happy to take suggestions on how I can improve the site to help with this, and also suggestions for different founders I should reach out to to come do an interview.

A big initiative of mine for 2018 is to vastly expand the number of interviews on the site (currently at ~250), and to add a better tagging system to help you find what's relevant.

scrimpton• 9 years ago

This 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• 9 years ago

This 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• 9 years ago

You’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.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Let us know when you arrive at your conclusion

Xc439• 9 years 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.

valuearb4• 9 years ago

You feel the worker should give more of their value to the employer for free?

walshemj9• 9 years ago

This is the sort of naivety that Robert Tressell exposed in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. You need to be a bit more woke mate

infinity03• 9 years ago

I think there's lots of useful things to learn from the article, though I do agree that this:

A necessary collorary to this: the principals of a technical consultancy do very well for themselves. I don't know if that is a secret but it certainly isn't well appreciated: nobody says Occupy Boutique Rails Consultancies, but the principals of them do end up in the 1%.

is not great for society and I'm highly skeptical that it's necessary. However I can see that it would be hard to do things differently -

This type of high-level admin stuff is a simple way to make an organisation efficient, and it's unclear how best to achieve the same level of efficiency whilst simultaneously not allowing the principals the power to centralise reward to themselves as well.

putnam51• 9 years ago

What would be the solution you would propose?

opencl2• 9 years ago

unclear how best to achieve the same level of efficiency whilst simultaneously not allowing the principals the power to centralise reward to themselves as well

Everyone does literally the exact same thing but you add profit sharing to the consultancy. As the article said "Clients Pay For Value, Not For Time." Unless the principals are somehow actually providing the overwhelming share of the value rather than the people doing the work.

walshemj9• 9 years ago

At thnakee kindly Master Frodo - I know I just saved the world but once we get to bag end ill get right back on digging the potato beds it would not do for me to get above my betters *tugs forlock" :-)

mikeokner• 9 years ago

Thomas: I got at least $15,000 of value out of this conversation.

How is literally providing tens of thousands of dollars of value "doing nothing?" That's far more productive than your average web developer quibbling over how many pixels wide to make a button.

Xc439• 9 years ago

What is negative about bourgeois?

quakenul• 9 years ago

Can 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• 9 years ago

When 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.

putnam51• 9 years ago

What do you do?

mathattack4• 9 years ago

Some 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)

JamesBarney4• 9 years ago

People 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.

putnam51• 9 years ago

What if it's not website traffic or ecom sales you are increasing? What if the payoff is 6 months down the road?

mgkimsal17• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

Agreed. It's hard to make that jump.

achompas2• 9 years ago

Dumb question — you bill for this “non-programming value-added” work, right? Even jumping into a truck for a few hours?

I fully understand the value in “doing more” but still occasionally have to fight the feeling that I need to be coding as much as possible.

mgkimsal17• 9 years ago

This gets back to "hourly" vs other type of billing. In some cases, that sort of "learning" work (riding in a truck, visiting a site) may be part of a sales process, and not directly billed for. In some cases, it might be part of a paid review/analysis prior to any formal work being done.

occasionally have to fight the feeling that I need to be coding as much as possible.

Fight that as much as possible. The more you learn about the entire project/deliverables/system/needs, the more you'll find there's less code to write, or the initial code can be built for more optimal reuse, etc.

That doesn't necessarily contradict writing initial code up front, but very much prototype stuff early on. I always wish I'd done more prototyping - faked UI screens with some action buttons, etc. - just to get something in peoples' hands. Almost everyone reacts better to stuff they can touch and use (even with fake data) vs abstract data and/or stuff that's far removed from the end product.

ZenoArrow10• 9 years ago

Consulting 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.

valuearb4• 9 years ago

In 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.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Would this be a software consultant or a management consultant?

borplk6• 9 years ago

A huge huge part of it is just persona, profile, reputation and perception.

A fancy consultant with a laundry list of "credentials" will be automatically trusted.

When Joe Schmoe developer says the same thing it will be dismissed.

You can see a variation of this happen with books, particularly self-help books.

A nobody author writes lots of valuable stuff and people flick through it and go mehhh.

A famous self-help personality writes a pretentious 50 page book rehashing cliches (probably actually written by someone else) and give it a title like "the pink monkey that was red" and it will "blow up" because everyone talks about it.

Nothing wrong with that. That's the game, I get it.

The point is if you ignore this or don't understand it you are going to be disappointed.

blunte9• 9 years ago

This is exactly right. This is how many companies operate, and it's why there is so little satisfaction working at most companies.

One can try to become that consultant, or one can try to go off and start their own project/product/company.

mgkimsal17• 9 years ago

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

For large companies, division managers are more concerned about short term goals, because that's usually what metrics are in place, but also potentially competitive landscape, etc.

Bringing in someone today who can get something done in, say, 4 months, vs going through a hiring process, or fighting to reprioritize existing projects/staff... that's a big headache. Throw a bit more money - often from a different budget than "payroll" - and 'solve' the problem.

I get your point, and am largely sympathetic to it. However, often, the people with the required skills don't want to work 24/7 for one singular employer. You lose a lot of freedom/flexibility, for starters. Often a pay cut vs 'consulting' rates. I've been out of traditional employment for so long, I'd probably not make a good employee anymore, and would have a hard time getting hired.

As an external consultant/expert on some things, you're also being paid for explicitly not being part of the 'problem'. You can ignore some of the politics that may have led to the situation you're trying to fix. The person cutting the check may be able to cut through some of the red tape and get stuff done quickly.

I've been an employee at places where it's taken a couple days just to get myself on a network and credentialed up. That's a pretty significant waste, but... amortized over the total employee cost, it doesn't seem to be seen as that big a deal.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Have you done consulting jobs where you never set foot in the office?

ZenoArrow10• 9 years ago

"However, often, the people with the required skills don't want to work 24/7 for one singular employer."

That's why I suggested training (which would be part of a long term solution, I agree with you that consultants have a role to play for meeting short term goals). Companies seem to undervalue training, probably because it's not business critical and there's no guarantee that a employee won't just get trained and then leave. What I think companies overlook is that an environment that gives enough resources (time and otherwise) to foster personal growth is the type of environment that breeds loyalty. Where I'm working right now, I have to fight against the grain to pick up new skills (even skills that have an almost immediate payback). Doesn't sound like a healthy work environment, does it? On the other hand, I've worked at another company where training was encouraged, which was definitely a key part of what made it a better place to work, with an added bonus of getting to work with happier, more productive colleagues. Interestingly, what formed part of the downfall of the latter was some senior management types trying to outsource as much as possible to consultants, and not for sound business reasons... let's just say that, for some people getting gigs, it's not about what they know but who they know.

taude2• 9 years ago

I feel like you just described my office perfectly.

ZenoArrow10• 9 years ago

I wonder how common our shared situation is.

kleiba• 9 years ago

To 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.

dleslie2• 9 years ago

Having 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• 9 years ago

that'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.

jghn4• 9 years ago

Beyond what taway20171214 said, don't discount the value of "language which management can understand". As I've moved up the ladder I've learned how extremely valuable this skill is and how woefully bad I am at it.

raldu• 9 years ago

In the case you mentioned, that's basically "credibility."

Although a lame story, Let's say you are responsible for initiating and managing a new software project in your company with complex bureaucracy and management. You have found that it is highly feasible to work with Agile methodology instead of Waterfall.

But Waterfall has been how the things had always been done, yet you know that the team is ready for Agile and project is an exact type of work that would benefit from some "lean" approaches. Worse still, management won't listen, also because "The Board" won't listen.

What you do is that you go to that well-known, highly-paid consultant, discuss the situation and he basically says, "OK, You are right. Also this and that."

Then in your presentation to the board while pitching Agile, you say, "Agile is the way to go. I asked Patrick Kalzumeus, and he said it was a good idea."

And that's it.

That "credibility" is one of many ways how a business consultant may "add value" to a highly organized company.

mathgeek5• 9 years ago

Consulting is a bit too broad of a concept to provide a "what does a consultant actually do" definition. Anything that people will pay you to tell them or do for them without making you their direct employee is, technically speaking, consulting them.

For example: reviewing someone's database configuration and providing general recommendations for improvement is consultation, but so is directly modifying those settings for them and not actually telling them what changed. The expectations and deliverables are set by agreement between the consultant and the consultee.

lbotos• 9 years ago

Depends on what they are consulting on.

I know that places I've worked have had management consultants, who came in, worked with our teams for a few sessions, and wrote us up some recommendations as to how we could better work together.

We also hired DB Performance consultants, who came in and helped us optimize some gnarly queries and do a DB "Double check" to verify that the path we were on was good.

Another time we hired a pricing consultant, who helped us come up with a strategy to change our pricing and avoid pitfalls.

Basically, They are subject matter experts who may come in and actually be on-demand teachers in my experience.

miketery• 9 years ago

The two things I found (can be positive or negative), is that the consultant isn't tied to the familial expectation of employees at a company giving them more freedom, and they typically don't have much stake (except fees). This means that given the right consultant and party seeking services, the consultant may provide contrarian point of views that don't hold as much baggage.

Probably most important is the the company externalizes the decision so there is less internal responsibility.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Were you the consultant in this case?

user59944619• 9 years ago

Consultants don't provide contrarian point of views, they provide the point of view that the client wants to hear.

If a client is uncertain about something and feels risks, you could be contrarian but otherwise no.

mbrameld• 9 years ago

I think a consultant in this context means a programmer with valuable experience in a particular domain. In Patrick's case it's sales funnel optimization. I do a lot of fisheries data work. The work done is usually based around a deliverable, and that can be anything from a written recommendation to a turn-key, green field system. You're a contractor with some specialized experience that somebody values more highly than software development alone.

putnam51• 9 years ago

What is the value of the deliverable? Can you easily leverage your value?

epicide4• 9 years ago

This exactly describes my position as a software consultant.

can be anything from a written recommendation to a turn-key, green field system.

Sometimes, we are there:

- to propose a set of tools or architecture.

- to migrate legacy systems.

- as staff aug (AKA "butts in seats").

- to do green field development.

Usually, it's some combination.

contractor with some specialized experience that somebody values more highly than software development alone.

At least in our group, we definitely distinguish ourselves as different from contractors. At our core, we can do the contract work (and often do), but we also help out with the business side of things. Basically, we are contractors who know how to interface the technical side of things with the core business.

Oftentimes, we end up at a client who knows they want to build a system to help them do a thing, but that's step 10. They might know steps 1-3, but need our help figuring out and accomplishing steps 4-7 (e.g. defining actual requirements, organizing a good dev team, etc.).

EDIT: formatting.

user59944619• 9 years ago

A consultant do the exact same work that you do, except he's paid a multiple of you and doesn't get company benefits.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Can a consultant do any kind/type of work?

pjmlp2• 9 years ago

Depends, there are many ways of doing consultancy.

I do enterprise software consultancy, which means that those big companies that don't think twice about buying Oracle or Visual Studio Ultimate, hire companies like my employer to come in and develop software for them, instead of having an internal R&D department.

Usually because for those companies software is a by product, something that they need for their real business, the one that they earn money with.

Then you have business consultants, than come in, evaluate the current set of working processes and provide optimization guidelines based on a specific set of targets.

There are other variations.

putnam51• 9 years ago

What's preventing a software developer from doing enterprise software consulting?

sixdimensional• 9 years ago

Limiting what we think a consultant is to technology is too narrow. There is a long history of consultative practice in organizational development and the best consultants are invaluable.

For some further research, read up on "process consulting"[1], for example.

True consulting is almost like being a psychologist for an organization. Technology consulting varies, but true technology consultants are not technology specific, they are more like experts in knowing how organizations use systems and technology and assisting organizations with technology selection, architecture, hiring, training, organizational development, change, politics, psychology and/or complex situations that require additional outside expertise or brainpower.

I think a good example where technology and business consulting intersect is data warehouse consulting. If you have or want an enterprise data warehouse, you need likely need dimensional modeling. Dimensional modeling is a technique not a specific technology, many organizations don't have specialists with that knowledge. The best data warehousing consultants I have seen will come in when requested, determine the organizational situation through observation, propose a conceptual solution in concert with the organization, designed to fit the way the organization works, help with training staff on necessary techniques (such as dimensional modeling, if the organization chose to adapt it), and act as an expert for tough questions during implementation and after. Assist the organization with identifying data warehouse technology solution options that fit the need and budget, staff and skills, data migration, etc. as needed and desired by the org.

I think one key difference between a consultant and a contractor is, a consultant is more like an architect/engineer advisor "thinker and recommender", but a contractor is often more like the engineer/builder "thinker and do-er". Both are external experience for hire. Of course you get blends/crossover people who are both.

I also think consulting is more prevalent when there are a smaller pool of people with knowledge and experience that needs to be shared. Scarcity of skill creates demand that requires compensation due to competition for that limited resource.

Skills wise, I think you need a mix of soft skills and specialized knowledge in such an area, combined with the ability to communicate, market, network and run a business. Education -wise, I have a degree in information systems and one in organizational studies. I think combining organizational studies plus any specialty area is a great combination. You can also achieve this through an MBA+specialty area.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_consultant

ericabiz• 9 years ago

I'm pretty well-qualified to answer this question :) I've done several marketing consulting gigs, including working with Patrick 6 years ago at WP Engine, where we were both consultants!

I am in the middle of another marketing consulting gig right now with a SaaS company. I was hired to help them drastically reduce their sales cycle. They sell to enterprise companies and the sales cycle takes forever.

I'm working on a new front-end website for them, with better copy, more testimonials, white papers/case studies, and a live demo of their product. (Today, potential customers have to request a demo--having people be able to see the product for themselves should shave at least a week off the sales cycle.)

I have both a technical background and a marketing background, so I can write both copy and code, though I'm stronger on the marketing side these days.

When I worked with Patrick at WP Engine, I was also lead on deploying a new front-end website, with a better tagline. My most important contribution there, though, was that I came up with the "10 sites for $99" pricing structure, which is a huge component of what made them so successful.

I am also working on a better pricing structure with my current consulting gig.

I spoke more about what I do for SaaS companies in this talk at Microconf: https://vimeo.com/72456666 (Notably, I did this talk, and it was posted here on HN, several months before pg wrote his "Do things that don't scale" blog post.)

bagacrap• 9 years ago

You tell whoever hired you whatever they want to hear, and if their/your plan goes wrong they get to blame the consultant. If things go well, they take the credit. It's a win win because the consultant gets paid either way.

dejv2• 9 years ago

Back at university I had a chance to attend a guest lecture given by chairman of huge public telco company and he stated something like "you are not paying consultants to bring new ideas, but to let them sign your ideas so in case something went wrong you have somebody to blame".

Of course, this was different type of consulting than what Patio11 did, but there are a lot of different kind of consultants.

SonicSoul• 9 years ago

my friend just transitioned and his way was actually quite ingenious. He worked with someone who went to a different company, and that person tried to bring him on as full time role. He interviewed and got the offer but instead of taking it, he proposed that he will develop this whole thing on his own time for $x. Since he had enough good reputation for delivering he got the contract and the company even worked with him on setting up the payment via intermediary consulting firm until he had his own system setup for that (this will vary from company to company depending on their list of approved vendors etc). They initially let him work out of their space but he eventually rented a co-working office. It's been over a year and the relationship is working out, and he's hired a team in Argentina that he manages and keeps taking on more work. The pre-requisite here was that he had good reputation in his old co, but I would guess that having people like/respect your work is a good indicator of if you should start consulting in the first place.

patio115• 9 years ago

My modal engagement was with a SaaS company with $20 million a year sales, a few dozen employees, and 1~3 very strapped people wearing the marketing hat.

“How much email do you send?” “We have a newsletter.” “What else?” “Welcome to free trial email. “What else?” “Nothing.”

I write proposal.

You should:

1) Have a pre-sales drip campaign positioned as a “free course about X delivered over email” w/ 8 emails arriving over the course of a month. This will push people at purchasing the product in 2 of the emails.

2) You should email people 4 times during the trial depending on their level of engagement with it. Here’s a decision tree.

3) You should email people within 80% of their monthly quota offering a discount to move to the next higher plan.

4) You should email your entire userbase and upgrade as many as possible to annual billing for a 10% discount to the cost of their current plan.

You can tell your engineering team to do this for you, but there is 0% chance they schedule this because it is boring scutwork and they’d rather do those features you have scheduled this quarter. Or you can have me just do it. I need a commit bit and probably two weeks. It will cost you $30k per week.

Probabalistically this makes you $2 million in next 12 months but your results are your results; you keep all the upside and my invoice is due regardless.

andrethegiant• 9 years ago

That's a good example of a marketing consultant, but what about an engineering consultant? Would talking tech stack pros/cons pull in a similar rate?

rawnlq• 9 years ago

Making the company money is the not the only factor is it? Any engineer at google/facebook/etc are probabilistically making the company multiple millions per year too (terrible estimate from revenue divided by headcount). But probably only a handful of them would ever be able to demand the rate you charge because they are replaceable.

How do you make sure the company won't just take your advice and hire a guy to do this for 90k/yr instead of letting you work on it for three weeks?

pacomerh• 9 years ago

If this is what a consultant is I don't want to be one, or maybe this example is very particular to sales/marketing. Or maybe this same example can be applied to several domains meaning that as a consultant you can solve companies problems depending on your already established expertise.

stevoski• 9 years ago

Thanks Patrick, for just planning out for me my workload for the next month or so!

You should email people 4 times during the trial depending on their level of engagement with it. Here’s a decision tree.

Do you have a link to an example decision tree for a typical SaaS app?

kristianc• 9 years ago

For most enterprise software sales, who tend to deal in a few large customers rather than lots of small ones, almost all of this would be enormously counterproductive.

monkpit• 9 years ago

I am curious how you even get into this type of work - how do you find the consulting opportunities in the first place? Do you seek out work somehow, or do you market and let the leads come to you?

Is it easier to work for a consulting company as an “employee” before venturing out alone?

mcrad• 9 years ago

Obviously it varies, but usually there is an element of papering over management problems, under the guise of actually fixing anything. Watch House of Lies on Showtime...

fnl3• 9 years ago

Consulting refers to advising the executive branch of a company. So one key ingredient it requires is experience (that the client company lacks), and the ability to communicate (in business/cash-flow terms) why the advice you are giving is superior to the company's current strategy. Obviously, it is necessary that you then can "make it happen", too. The "advice giving" typically happens before you are hired to get the "foot in the door", while the implementation is what you get paid for. I think the German term is more precise: "Unternehmensberater", that is, "company advisor". Anything lesser is just work-for-hire, with a cute title.

barry-cotter2• 9 years ago

English has a word for Unternehmensberater, it’s strategy consulting. The very highly paid temporary experts are operational consultants. The ones in the middle are management consultants.

The top global management consultancy firms are McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group.

bmitch3020• 9 years ago

The simplest answer I like is:

Employee: Does what the boss says, and works when the boss wants them to work.

Contractor: Does what the client asks them to do, but has the flexibility to do it on their own schedule and according to their own way. In the US, the IRS may want to reclassify you as an employee if you dictate too much of how the work is done.

Consultant: They review what the client is doing and recommends what they should be doing, often performing that work too. The key difference to me is the client accepts they may not be the most knowledgeable in what change they want to make.

To give examples for programmers:

Employee: works on a app in the office from 9-5 adding the features requested.

Contractor: adds requested features to the app.

Consultant: reviews the app and proposes some features to add.

osrec• 9 years ago

In my experience, the answer is pretty much anything they can get paid for. For example, we hired a big 4 consulting firm to help us do some software testing. They were not great, but did something (I'm not sure what exactly, but they did produce some reports). We hired the same big 4 firm to come up with an algorithm for reducing financial risk weighted assets, and guess what, some guys from the testing team turned up! I was surprised, as there was no obvious crossover (and the lack of knowledge showed)! Anyway, the partner convinced us they'd do a good job so we played along for a bit. During this exercise, the guys did everything from manually typing in data to making a few spreadsheets to providing some opinion on financial rules and methodology. In the end, it was obvious they'd do almost anything (short of cleaning the toilets) to increase their billable hours. So you right to be confused, as the definition is flaky at best! Also, most consultants add very little value (especially big 4 firms), but every so often you do meet a superstar that's worth every penny.

notyourday• 9 years ago

Provide cover for the executives to do things that may not be liked by employees be that because employees suggested ( but were not convincing enough) those changes early on and the leadership wants to save face, be that because the existing processes used do not work for the next stage of the company but cannot be changed due to how those changes would affect existing business lines or be that because the employees aren't really qualified to perform those changes.

The most important part to realize is that a consultant is a vendor and as such certain policies that the company has may not apply.

baby• 9 years ago

I'm a cryptography/security consultant, here's the kind of things I do. Hope that helps :)

* I get on calls with potential clients to see if we can solve one of their needs. Their needs can be broad: auditing code or specific implementations; reading and vetting pages of protocol design; advising on third party products or libraries; documenting the risk of the latest X attack... Sometimes I can do it, sometimes someone else should do it, sometimes no-one can do it.

* If nobody can do it but it's an interesting problem and it's relatively reasonable to tackle I (or someone else) will spend X weeks researching the subject so that we can provide the service in the future. We've done this with ethereum smart contracts recently for example (it's been pretty fruitful and I'll be giving a talk at Black Hat Asia in a few months on the subject).

* When the job starts, I'll be talking to the client to make sure we're on the same page, see what kind of claims they want to make, what they're more scared of, etc... This helps a lot, but of course the client is not always right or not always aware of what might go wrong. Most often companies do not even have a threat model and have no idea what they should really defend against.

* Most of my engagement are remote, but depending on the field you might have to go on-site. In any case, you always try to be close to the client so that you can get responses relatively fast (consulting is expensive, you don't want to lose your time trying to find answers they can provide). (Unfortunately it is not always possible as some of them are really busy or just do not want to spend the time answering questions.)

* Whatever the type of job is, you always spend a few days internalizing everything you're reading or hearing (I call that drowning). You try to get an idea of what the product/protocol/solution/app is (if it's your first time working on it), you read papers or articles about it if you're rusty/missing some pieces, you go through the codebase and ask questions to see what is what and what is where.

* Then you dig in, you do what you're best at. In security/cryptography we try to break things, find gotchas, discover flaws :)

* Eventually, you need to provide some product to the client. It is often some document or a presentation (or both) of your findings. You want your client to understand what you did, like really, this is after all the product they're paying for. You also want to give out recommendations on how they can fix things, sometimes you will want to fix things yourself as well. It all depends on what you can do or what the client wants you to do (if you agree).

Anyway, these are my 2 cents. It's a field that mingles expertise with client satisfaction. You need to know something that can help one or several of their problems, and then you need to do your best to convey your explanations.

(I just wrote this huge comment because I felt inspired after reading a large 2000 day-old tptacek comment.)

iends3• 9 years ago

One 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?

putnam51• 9 years ago

Are you a consultant or freelancer currently? Have you tried doing this justification in the past and how has it gone? EDIT: length

iends3• 9 years ago

I 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.

hashkb• 9 years ago

I used to be a "skilled backend programmer" but now I "help entrepreneurs start their businesses." See the difference?

iends3• 9 years ago

Are entrepreneurs that are starting their business really a niche that pays well? Seems like it wouldn't be. Seems like you get either "build me the next facebook for $500" or a lot of small business with a total budget of $5000.

noahc2• 9 years ago

Is this typically 5k to 20k engagements over a period of 2 to six weeks?

mgkimsal17• 9 years ago

As somebody who is a skilled backend developer the value I provide is not as measurable

Learn to do something which is more measurable, or figure out ways to measure some particular aspect of value you can bring. In back-end software, it will most likely be around performance or security. Doing a security audit then proposing remediation... if the company has already been hacked, they (should) understand the value rather quickly. If not... it would be a harder sell.

Performance? Would be hard, I think, without being a brand and people seeking you out. Speeding up an ecommerce site can definitely have measurable impact on bottom line but... if a company is big enough where that would have meaningful impact, they probably already have a team of people to navigate through to convince them of your value/skill/ability.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Do you think there are 1-5 person companies doing millions annually with an ecom site?

shanemhansen3• 9 years ago

It's not hard in my experience. Not as easy as convincing CEO to do two redesigns per year, but not hard.

I work with companies operating at a large scale. Downtime costs $xxx,000/minute.

Developers cost lots of money, improving their productivity by a little bit pays huge dividends.

If the company has big events like Black Friday or Superbowl commercials, keeping the site up during those events is worth paying for.

Many not so big companies spend 6 figures per month in AWS bills.

Lots of work for a backend consultant.

petermonsson2• 9 years ago

Can you affect the number and size of AWS instances that a company needs? As Patrick said on twitter the other day. If you can optimize the use of AWS for a company that has 3k instances, you can make the company boatloads of money in reduced server cost.

hh3k0• 9 years ago

If I'd have stumbled upon that shady-looking website (https://training.kalzumeus.com) anywhere other than HN, I wouldn't have spent a minute on there.

ThomPete3• 9 years ago

I 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.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Your agency has 10 people? Was you the first person in your agency?

ThomPete3• 9 years ago

No 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.

blhack2• 9 years ago

A 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• 9 years ago

Because, 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...

hullsean2• 9 years ago

yes. they are head shops. but one key detail. you are working for them. not the reverse. the relationship with the customer is very valuable

gist2• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

Actors, 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.

mgkimsal17• 9 years ago

Besides the other reply here (good info), there's also complexity. Determining if you've "completed" the work - they want specified results, which you probably want to negotiate on - that's far more nuanced than "I showed up at this club and did my 2 hour set".

There are tech recruiters that will do short term contract/placements, which may be close, but they're not an 'agent' in the same way as a music/actor/sports agent might be, who may know you for years and understand your career/strengths/skills/etc. The tech recruiter will still more be a body-shop sort of thing.

dboreham4• 9 years ago

Does this exist? How do I hire somebody to do this sort of thing for me?

It does exist, but they hire _you_ not the other way around, because you would be their employee.

sn9• 9 years ago

Does this exist?

Yup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616952

smelltest• 9 years ago

Patrick 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• 9 years ago

I 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.

gist2• 9 years ago

I 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.

gk14• 9 years ago

It 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• 9 years ago

I'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?

blunte9• 9 years ago

It'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• 9 years ago

Is this possible if your tech skills are not in marketing/ecommerce?

What about graphics, audio, embedded systems, networking?

TaylorGood• 9 years ago

Of 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.

chiefalchemist• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

I 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.

kelvin04• 9 years ago

Yer mom must be so proud of you.

expertentipp• 9 years ago

This 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• 9 years ago

If you charge by week, how do you keep your consulting pipeline full? Do you engage in contract negotiations while working for someone else?

harry8• 9 years ago

By 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.

Steeeve2• 9 years ago

Addressing 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• 9 years ago

I’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.

walshemj9• 9 years ago

I 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.

magicbuzz• 9 years ago

Writing software that is half the quality is a recipe for disaster. I’m managing a team of remote offshore developers who assured me they had lots of ‘corporate development’ experience. In the early days we rejected about 80% of the code they wrote. One guy added 100 lines to a React reducer that we ended up doing in two lines of code.

Steeeve2• 9 years ago

Sure it is. I don't disagree for a second. But there is no shortage of sales people that will promise things they can't deliver very effectively to decision makers.

CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs are not stupid. More often than not when they throw big money at organizational priorities, they know those projects will come up short in one way or another. But if they spend all their time focusing on getting those things perfect, they will be standing in the way of progress in other areas. And when they are focused on getting one of those priorities right, they aren't looking at spending five figures a week on a single person for a consulting engagement focused primarily on software development. Maybe occasionally, but not usually.

aerovistae• 9 years ago

The 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."

petermonsson2• 9 years ago

$100 per hour for an 75% loaded contractor is $53 assuming a 1.5x overhead for payroll tax, healthcare, office, etc.

cornellwright• 9 years 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.

walshemj9• 9 years ago

consultant 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

kelvin04• 9 years ago

Nobody 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. :)

qdoop6• 9 years ago

Personally 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• 9 years ago

I 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• 9 years ago

People still charge only $100/hour? standard Professional Services tech consulting rate is $250

siliconc0w• 9 years ago

I 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.

Asdfbla• 9 years ago

The 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• 9 years ago

The 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• 9 years ago

The 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 ...

md2243• 9 years ago

Reading 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.

qdoop6• 9 years ago

Enjoy 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

striking• 9 years ago

This 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.)

md2243• 9 years ago

Ugh, 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.

nicolashahn• 9 years ago

I'm assuming you're some sort of programmer.

There's a lot of people who can write/edit good copy, and a lot of people who want a job writing/editing copy, but a limited amount of jobs, and I doubt the market is expanding as fast as tech. Think of some problem that can be solved with software and you've just created X programming jobs, X = # of people required for that company's engineering department, whereas the value to society of adding another news site diminishes quickly.

So there ratio of people who can write good code to programming jobs is lower. Also, and this is a huge assumption on my part, the # of hours you need to put in to be a competent programmer (at the level of money I'm also assuming you make) is greater than the hours to be skilled enough to produce decent copy (for the average person). So it's more difficult for the # of programmers to catch up to the # of programming jobs. Thus, the demand for programmers drives salary.

This is all without talking about the subjective amount of value to society a programmer can bring compared to a copy editor.

To fix this (I hesitate to call it injustice) we could raise taxes+implement UBI or increase funding to some other social welfare programs and raise the maximum income required to take advantage of them. But I think essentially, what careers people choose should be somewhat influenced by what society needs, and salaries can reflect that.

Not saying that the demand for programmers isn't all fucked up because of startup speculation and other factors, but I think in general the tech industry provides a lot of value for the world.

open_bear• 9 years ago

I wish there was a way that we could apply our skills toward fixing this injustice.

Educate yourself on why does that happen. Main purpose of every company is to make money. As long as IT is making a lot of money programmers will be paid a lot. As soon as industry starts to cool down - our salaries will drop as well.

qdoop6• 9 years ago

Well 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• 9 years ago

This guy's greatest achievement is Bingo Card Creator... huh?

blunte9• 9 years ago

Well, if he can market that into the success he has now, then his information is probably pretty valuable!

kelvin04• 9 years ago

Using 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.

borplk6• 9 years ago

Don't be nasty.

qdoop6• 9 years ago

Lets 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

blunte9• 9 years ago

Perhaps 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.

kelvin04• 9 years ago

Thanks 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.

putnam51• 9 years ago

Do you think that there are not engineering consultants making five figures a week?

putnam51• 9 years ago

Are you prepared or capable of making that transition?

blunte9• 9 years ago

I'm definitely not capable of doing what he does. Interacting with people is something I can do very, very well. But it costs me a huge amount of energy (introvert). And working with marketing/sales people takes more out of me than with any other segment of the population!

Regarding the Denny's -> Del Frisco's, that I could actually do well :). But that's because I have a special fondness for hospitality and providing people great experiences. I'd probably be foolish enough to open a restaurant someday, and I'd probably regret it later.

sethev2• 9 years ago

How about if you invert it. If somebody came to you and asked for a system that can send emails when certain conditions are met in a database and track the results, would you assume that to write the program you would have to hang out with sales people? The actual work (in the two weeks to implement it) is development.

bananaboy3• 9 years ago

It's still fundamentally development for the marketing side of a business though, rather than development for the product side. I think the problem that people are struggling with is that they can't see how this information relates to them if they are software developers looking to do consulting work on software. Patrick's article really is from a marketing angle, even though there is a software development component to it.

That said, I think people are missing the key takeaway from the article. I think the most important thing in the article is right there in the heading "Clients Pay For Value, Not For Time". This is saying that you should frame your services in terms of a value proposition for the client. That is, how much money will you save them if they hire you to do X. Maybe X is "rewrite the backend to process transactions quicker" which will save them Y hours of compute time and reduce their AWS bill by Z a month.

JamesBarney4• 9 years ago

The actual work of being a lawyer is writing and talking, but just because you can write and talk doesn't mean you can be a lawyer.

Every client I've ever had has asked "how many hours?" And "how much per hour?"

If a restaurant wants to increase business by building a patio and they get a bid based with pricing based on increased business and not hours. They're gonna throw it away.

Patio11 was in a unique position to know more about how to increase the business's revenue better than the business. This is a very unique position and advice based on that position is not really relevant to the rest of us who aren't experts in internet marketing.

bananaboy3• 9 years ago

If IT is really desperate, then even better! You need to frame it to the client in terms of what you are going to save them if they hire you. If they are up the creek without a paddle and everything is falling apart, then you can go to them and say "Fixing this will save you $X. I can do this for you, I've done this sort of thing before, here is a proposal, this will cost $Y".

RyanShook• 9 years ago

So, 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• 9 years ago

Patrick,

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?

How I went from programming to consulting (2012)

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