
How I went from programming to consulting (2012) - putnam
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1
======
blunte
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.

~~~
sethev
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.

~~~
bananaboy
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.

~~~
mooreds
If you're interested in value based pricing, Jonathan Stark has a pretty
decent free ecourse on it:
[https://expensiveproblem.com/](https://expensiveproblem.com/)

~~~
bananaboy
That's awesome, thanks! The Freshbooks co-founder wrote something similar once
too: [https://www.freshbooks.com/ebooks/breaking-the-time-
barrier](https://www.freshbooks.com/ebooks/breaking-the-time-barrier)

~~~
mpfundstein
Let's not forget Alan Weiss, who started this whole 'value based' consulting
business. [https://www.alanweiss.com/](https://www.alanweiss.com/)

~~~
mooreds
I loved Value Based Fees!

~~~
VirgilShelton
I second that emotion!

------
kleiba
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.

~~~
patio11
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.

~~~
rawnlq
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?

~~~
astockwell
By far, the majority of consulting engagements I’ve seen or participated in
(Big 4 and freelance) are things that could _easily_ be done if the company
hired a few folks, for much less pay than this. Simple number crunching,
tedious paperwork review, trivial integrations/dev work.. I would hazard a
guess that at least 50% of all enterprise consulting spend goes to these
tasks.

However the indisputable fact is that these companies _are_ willing to shell
out for this stuff, whether because they think it’s temporary work (cheaper to
hire Patrick than an FTE who you then have to keep paying or dispose of) or
they’re paying for the top-of-Hill expertise (eg. paying a Big 4 where you get
10 hours of a partner’s time/expertise at 1k/hour and then 300 hours of 23yo
grunt labor).

~~~
putnam
Who is the 23yo?

~~~
stevenwoo
From the age - a fresh college graduate recruited into the consultancy
employee/meat grinder.

~~~
astockwell
Exactly. And not just one, each partner had a battalion of them.

------
putnam
_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?

~~~
projektir
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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
projektir
I guess I had higher expectation for the term "internet buddy" than what is
used here. I generally figured it's a term implying some familiarity, and that
getting emails from randoms is unwelcome. But perhaps the other commenter
makes a good point regarding cold-introing. I always read various people say
"I get thousands of emails..." and assume there's no reason for them to read
mine.

I don't think I ever called you an NSA shill, although I did commit the grave
offense of suggesting that Firefox is a secure browser, which I imagine is
even worse. :P

Sadly, I'm pretty far away from Chicago and likely will be in the foreseeable
future.

------
Steeeve
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
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.

~~~
walshemj
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.

------
smelltest
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).

~~~
gk1
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?

------
iends
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?

~~~
mgkimsal
> 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.

~~~
shanemhansen
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.

~~~
mgkimsal
If you have the experience and/or brand/name already, it wouldn't be hard. My
thinking was not so much the work, but the finding people and convincing that
a) you can do the work and b) they need it done. If you're successfully doing
this now - props to you! If you have any specifics you can share about how you
got through a and b above... would love to read more.

~~~
shanemhansen
They usually reach out to me or are referred to me via a friend. One time I
had a friend doing some work for Vodafone Australia, and he just asked me to
come out for a month long engagement to help them get ready for the iPhone 5
(which turned out to be the 4s iirc). Another time I co-founded a Meetup group
in a relatively new technology and a startup wanted to leverage that so they
wanted some help getting started and having some good patterns to follow.

So I guess I would counter what you said with experience/network rather than a
brand.

------
md224
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.

~~~
qdoop
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](http://worrydream.com/#!/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg)

~~~
striking
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.)

~~~
qdoop
Once there were coal miners. Today they are SW programmers. The INDUSTRY needs
you!!!

------
blhack
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?

~~~
gist
> 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.

------
ThomPete
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.

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

~~~
ThomPete
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.

~~~
putnam
Did you start the first agency? What was its niche?

~~~
ThomPete
I started both yes and in its time it was niche (but expanded into much more
traditional type company). We were focused on web-app and product design
(started in 2005) when everyone was focusing on web design.

Did a ton of projects for Adobe and their Lighthouse division who were pushing
their flex platform back then.

This time we are focusing on something quite different but again in an area
with few people who can offer what we do but who still are used to paying for
consultants.

We get great clients but they get someone who is very experienced and know a
lot of the typical pitfalls.

------
kirubakaran
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/](https://kirubakaran.com/blog/consulting-sow/)

~~~
bastijn
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.

~~~
gvsmith
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.

~~~
kirubakaran
Hey, just fyi, this comment was flagged to death but I vouched for it to undo
that, as I think you mean well and you make good points. I'm guessing the
flaggers were reacting to the "clueless people" line.

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805091)

------
mgkimsal
> 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.

~~~
achompas
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.

~~~
mgkimsal
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.

------
ZenoArrow
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.

~~~
valuearb
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.

~~~
borplk
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.

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

You can recognise it exists whilst still being disappointed that it exists.

Someone I work with suggested "Perception is the only reality", which seems to
fit here.

~~~
borplk
> You can recognise it exists whilst still being disappointed that it exists.

Yep.

To me an interesting contrast to what I said is Bitcoin.

It has legs of its own to stand on and therefore does not need to borrow
credibility from the author.

Imagine if books and blog posts and movies and art work didn't have the
author/creator next to it. Interesting to think how people's reactions would
change.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "Imagine if books and blog posts and movies and art work didn't have the
> author/creator next to it. Interesting to think how people's reactions would
> change."

I find this interesting too.

Generally speaking, people are drawn to creating narratives about the world
around them. I'd suggest that even if the creators of art become
nameless/faceless, the vacuum would get filled by a cult of personality around
taste makers. For example, in the world of electronic dance music there's a
high volume of music producers without public recognition. However, the DJs
that play this music then become the "face" for this music, and it's their
reputation which is more prominent than many of the artists making the music.

------
Asdfbla
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.

------
expertentipp
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.

------
siliconc0w
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.

------
kevmo314
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.

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

~~~
achompas
Can you describe why? Curious for a second opinion.

------
zdw
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.

~~~
ivanhoe
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.

~~~
roel_v
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.

~~~
perl4ever
When I was an employee, I _knew_ my company's clients were charged $150/hr for
my work. I also knew my company was switching to offshore workers so they
could _pay_ $5/hr.

Based on my past experiences, I'm not sure making lots of money is my goal,
but I have the nagging feeling that it should be possible, just because it was
no secret that people will pay that.

------
hh3k0
If I'd have stumbled upon that shady-looking website
([https://training.kalzumeus.com](https://training.kalzumeus.com)) anywhere
other than HN, I wouldn't have spent a minute on there.

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

What about graphics, audio, embedded systems, networking?

~~~
TaylorGood
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.

------
kelvin0
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. :)

------
maehwasu
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.

~~~
kelvin0
Yer mom must be so proud of you.

------
chiefalchemist
> "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.

------
aerovistae
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."

~~~
cornellwright
$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.

~~~
walshemj
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

------
quakenul
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.

~~~
JamesBarney
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.

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

~~~
user5994461
Up to you to sell the benefits of the projects. 6 months is medium, it's not
difficult to project that far.

------
rdiddly
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
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 ...

------
shostack
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?

------
qdoop
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.

------
didibus
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?

~~~
blunte
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...

------
RyanShook
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.

------
mercwear
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 =)

------
aurelianito
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
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.

------
qdoop
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_

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

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

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

~~~
kelvin0
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.

~~~
blunte
I think comparing his situation to lottery is reaching a lot; so no, I'll take
a pass on interviewing those folks.

What I would do is interview tech employees who figured out how to take their
ideas and build entire businesses out of them. Actually this is already
provided somewhat in indiehackers.com. Unfortunately, it doesn't always
provide useful guidance as much as highlight that right place/right time is
still a big factor in success.

------
qdoop
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?

------
scrimpton
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!"

~~~
fiatpandas
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.

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

