Speaking as a former client of Patrick's familiar with his rate card, and as a consultant: those are, in fact, facts.
This is the second thread in which you've called Patrick a liar. In the next thread you find to do it in, you'll be calling me one as well.
I don't know why you find it so difficult to believe that people can be as successful consulting as Patrick has, because, in the grand scheme of consulting, Patrick isn't anomalously successful. Regardless, you're wrong, and you should stop writing comments like this.
I'm not sure I understand your argument. It seems like you are saying "Patio11 clearly is lying about his consulting rates and the sale of BCC proves it."
What I don't understand is how you make that leap. BCC is the single most documented thing Patrick has done. The finances are there for review. You'd need to assume that the whole thing was an elaborate multi-year lie to think that he is embellishing the BCC numbers. This sale fits the numbers (though I don't know if we know the sale price) and therefore I view it as evidence that Patrick wasn't lying, at least about BCC. Am I reading that wrong in your view?
Or am I to assume that Patrick, whose writings on BCC are reasonable and backed up, then pivoted when it came to writing about consulting and started making things up? I guess I can see that happening, but how would a piece of data (the sale of BCC) that backs up many of his claims both about the financials and his own motivations help me discern that?
It seems like you are saying "Patio11 clearly is lying about his consulting rates and the sale of BCC proves it."
The root of this thread is someone who is a little surprised at how small of a transaction the sale of BCC was. Despite all of the transparency, a lot of people had a much greater sense of success, and it is a little like finding out that the stock guru had a yearly return of 2%. That is neither here nor there, and I have no comment or interest in BCC and related ventures, and was only tangentially commenting on the notion of inflated success, and with that reputation for wisdom/knowledge.
On the consulting side, I'm not saying that he's lying, however many people defensively jump to that conclusion. More generally I am saying that history has shown that a lot of people do lie (embellish, exaggerate, etc) to get attention, which leads to a situation where the onus of proof is on the speaker, increasingly so when there are extraordinary claims. I found the post about consulting simply extraordinary, and I have no reason to give anyone a pass just because.
> The root of this thread is someone who is a little surprised at how small of a transaction the sale of BCC was.
I think the sale numbers line up very well with what I would expect given the numbers actually posted (if anything I'm surprised the sale price is as high as it is). Is your thesis that people should lower their expectations about how much recurring revenue businesses are worth? If so, I agree.
> I'm not saying that he's lying.
You'd be better off if you were. Instead you are employing classic and cowardly character assassination techniques. There is literally nothing Patrick or his defenders can do to refute your claim (mostly because you refuse to make one). Even if they did, you could fall back to the safety of saying "I wasn't saying Patrick specifically is a liar, I was posting about people generally."
Instead you are employing classic and cowardly character assassination techniques.
This is the "untouchable" argument that attempts to short circuit any critical discussion. If skepticism is a character assassination, then hopefully we're all assassins.
There is literally nothing Patrick or his defenders can do to refute your claim (mostly because you refuse to make one).
Nor is there any specific thing I can do to disprove their claims. A bit of a catch-22, isn't it? As incredibly uncommon as their claims of success in the consulting world may be -- and I'm not saying this out of the blue -- it is possible that somehow they lucked into a series of incredibly generous clients who saw BCC as such a success that they gave a blank check. I have never seen an individual consultant without an incredible reputation (and being famous on HN != being famous) make anything near what they claimed, but it remains possible.
Pretty much anything is possible. If someone claimed to have achieved alchemy (theoretically possible via fusion), I similarly couldn't possibly say "no, they're lying!".
It's possible. I think it's incredibly improbable, but it is simply impossible for me to say that it's a lie.
There is no double standard. If patio11 were insinuating that you were a liar, I'd ask him to come right out and say it as well. Skepticism/critical discussion is no cover for rhetorical techniques that amount to trolling.
So 1) stop insinuating he is a liar or 2) make it more concrete. Do you think he is a liar and if so what do you think he is lying about and why? What would it take to make you stop spreading said accusation?
That would be a skeptical argument that could be critically discussed. As it stands, your position is "in the face of lots of evidence that patio11 has produced that indicates he usually writes the truth, I refuse believe him about this specific thing for reasons I will not outline."
I for one believe him because of his long track record of writing things that are verifiable and my own experience as a consumer of consultant products.
>Do you think he is a liar and if so what do you think he is lying about and why?
I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish. While I don't agree with user=irrigation's comments, I think he's been pretty clear: the claims don't jibe with his experience as a consultant and he's skeptical about the self-promotional aspects. It's hardly ambiguous.
So why are you demanding he come out and call patio11 a liar? That would be an asshole move. Instead he's saying "I don't believe it", and there isn't anything inherently wrong with that. We're all just "some guy" on the internet, who cares?
He hasn't come out and said I don't believe it (or hadn't as I wrote these comments). He's insinuated that it isn't believable, or that patio11 is lying, but he hasn't just made the claim.
That's what I'm hoping he will say instead of insinuation about a specific person. 1) make a claim. 2) put some counter claims along with it ("I've been doing consulting for X years and never seen a charge rate greater than Y") 3) and if necessary point out what it would take to change the position.
You are right though, I probably shouldn't care, but I really dislike the behavior in this case. It seems like simple trolling trying to hide behind dissent. Which is a disservice to all of us.
I've met him once, at a hacker news meetup. I've exchanged 7 emails with him, regarding a phone call he wanted to have with me, about something that is in one of my areas of expertise. We had said phone call that lasted around 1 hour. He asked me questions, I answered them. No money was exchanged (nor expected) and no quid pro quo's expected. Originally, it was meant to be lunch, but that didn't fit in our schedules.
This happened in the last month. Prior to that I had no interactions with him outside of his blog and hacker news. I've been following his blog for a very long time (in fact his blog introduced me to hacker news, not vice versa). I still read his blog via RSS but do not listen to his podcast or subscribe to his newsletter as the topics covered are largely outside of my interests.
I believe Patrick, not because I've met him in the last month, but because his writing is compelling, the things I can verify are truthful, and the things I cannot match my other experiences.
If I had any complaint about his post about money its that he is assuming that his readership understand implicitly concepts such as fully-loaded employee costs, bill rate vs utilization rate and bill rate in comparison to costs of delivery. I think that is largely untrue and he would have been better served with a summary paragraph describing appropriate ways to compare bill rate to employee take home pay.
None of that has anything to do with this particular post, which as I've mentioned, only adds to Patrick's credibility as it is an outside entity stating that the numbers, at least with regard to BCC, are truthful.
Funny how so many people with verifiable backgrounds, who are clearly not related to Patrick except through HN, vouch for him, yet we are apparently "shills".
Not sure what needs to happen for us to not be taken that way.
Dividing the world into "shills" and "skeptics" doesn't seem like a pleasant way to live. At any rate, it's no way to participate in a community, and you should (again) stop doing it.
>> patio11 gave advice on consulting which, as a long time consultant -- rather successfully (but still not enough to start doling wisdom) -- I found completely at odds with the reality I've endured, but it's a big world so maybe I just fly in different circles.
Just a thought, informed only by your comments here: your attitude is probably limiting your success. Nobody likes negativity, or working with negative people.
More concretely, successful consultants sell possibility: an organization can be stronger, faster, better, more successful than their goals if only they hire me as a consultant. Your attitude screams the opposite.
Just my unbiased feedback (I've never met Patrick and don't have a dog in this fight).
I just wanted to chime in quickly. I've found much of the advice given by patio11 to be plain wrong in my experience.
These conversations quickly fill up with Latin phrases barely copied out of wikipedia and I don't have the time or patience to discuss this with people I know nothing about.
Take this as you wish, most of the stuff he says is exactly what a person looking in would THINK, but it is not the truth.
And maybe thats the difference between your experience and patio11's?
He did take the time (and lots of it) to write up his advice (though if you read his earlier stuff it was much less advice and much more "here is this thing I'm doing, lets see if it works").
He also has near endless patience when discussing this stuff with others. It doesn't hurt that he is a persuasive writer, and it is a skill he has obviously and publicly worked at.
I for one would love to hear an opposing viewpoint, especially if it could be as well written and the author allowed as much access as patio11 does.
Yes I am. I make analytics applications for sales&marketing departments. Forecasting/Simulation, Segmentation, Text analytics, etc. Typical client - establishment with 500-1000 employees. Projects are delivered to the clients as a SaaS solution, because they need maintenance. Quarterly invoices, 1 year minimum contract.
Awesome. That sounds like a lucrative space to be in: presumably, everything you get asked to do is directly in the service of making companies more money, and so you can anchor your prices to the value you're providing.
What part of Patrick's consulting advice doesn't ring true to you?
(I spent a little over 10 years as a software engineering consultant, ending just last year when I started this new company; when the consultancy I cofounded sold, we had around 30 people on the team).
Penetration testing is not really software engineering consulting, and security spending is about as far as you can get from anchoring pricing to value. It's closer to selling insurance, but the value is even more dubious.
The exception might be in cases where a company is already spending a lot on security by doing it poorly, and you show them how to do it better. But, that is pretty much none of the market that I've seen.
Our modal project was part of the software engineering budget of a software product company.
I think you may think Matasano was more of an IT shop than it actually was. The term "penetration testing" doesn't do anyone any favors, since it means everything from "running Metasploit" (the kind of work we did not do) to "evaluating firmware".
This is really neither here nor there, right; the more specialized you want to say our work does, the stronger my consulting advice gets.
There are too many little things to sit down and make an argument. That's why I didn't want to get into a debate. You either see this or you don't. It's not easy to show it, but I will make just 1 example not to be completely without foundation.
The context is making (high touch) enterprise sales. In a blog post he reveals "the secret" that departments/teams have a credit card and purchaes below certain threshold are made with it and without allocating budget. He advices the reader to price his product/service to fall bellow that threshold so people in the department can purchase on their own discretion. It sounds logical and $6,000/year is a nice sum if you don't do a lot of custom stuff for clients.
On the other hand, you want your invoice's line to be as high on their books as possible. If your service is on some low manager's sheet, you are nobody there. He gets moved, quits, the company decides to cut costs or a thousand other things - you lose the client. You don't want a nobody pushing the needle for you on their side. You want it sponsored by a Director at the very least, but VP and above are more desirable. You want to be vetted. You want to be on the Approved Vendor List. You don't want payments every month, you want them on lumpier sums.
When reading something, it is a good exercise to think about the opposing situation for a second.
