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Ask HN: Am I good enough to do consulting?

7 points by aerovistae ↗ HN
Context: I'm a JavaScript developer working a nice day job, and I just keep hearing (in stories and comments on HN and elsewhere) about engineers who moved into freelance consulting and make hundreds of dollars an hour, and I feel like a chump getting <$60/hour at this day job.

But I'm only 23, I've only been programming for 5 years, and while I'm decent at what I do, I'm not a whiz and most importantly I'm rather slow to grok new code bases and infer the relationships between arbitrarily designed system components. I understand the technologies I work with pretty well, but I have a hard time understanding what people are trying to accomplish a lot of the time.

Ye of HN with more experience, could I consult anyway? Do I have to be really, really good? If you've done it, what was your experience with consulting? What skills served you the best?

22 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 54.7 ms ] thread
dopeboy
I've talked about consulting here on HN in the past [0].

>> ... but I have a hard time understanding what people are trying to accomplish a lot of the time.

This will be a problem. If you have non-technical clients, this will really be a problem. Work on this first.

Given how the market is, you don't need to be really good. I've found communication to be more important than technical skills.

[0] - http://dopeboy.github.io/consulting/

MichaelCrawford
It is unlikely that you'll make hundreds of dollars an hour.

It is also likely that you'll spend most of your time trying to find new clients.

The book "You Can Negotiate Anything" would be helpful. You also need to learn some basics of contract law. While you may need a lawyer at times, sometimes it is better to know when to just walk away from a bad contract, or negotiate a small change so that a contract you shouldn't sign becomes a good one.

Where people want a consultant, is when they can't find the staff they need in-house. For me that has commonly been to provide Mac ports to companies that otherwise publish Windows software. What could you offer, that your potential clients don't already have?

tptacek
It is unlikely that you'll make hundreds of dollars an hour... because...
MichaelCrawford
The people who make that kind of money offer services that no one else can supply. Or at least the client has that perception.

Contract programmers generally make more per hour than perm staff, but there isn't generally even the perception that contract programmers do what no one else can.

I can see how marketing consultants could earn that much money.

I've been wanting to get out of contract programming and into "real" consulting. I've done a little bit of that but don't know how to find clients on a regular basis.

wglb
It is unlikely that you'll make hundreds of dollars an hour.

I will post a strong disagreement to this.

MichaelCrawford
The most I have ever made as a consultant was $120.00/hour.

More common is $65.00. I typically earn more per hour while I am working than do full-time employees, however they don't have to be constantly rustling up new clients.

wglb
Certainly this is your experience, but to say that someone else is not likely to earn much higher is perhaps a limiting viewpoint.
BorisMelnik
Remeber that a lot of these consultants get hundreds per hour, but sometimes only get 10-20 hours per week (other times 100 hours per week, just saying.)

I've been consulting for going on 10 years now. haven't had a boss in god knows how long. Do it! There is more than enough work to go around. You can probably link up with a larger consultancy and get some work outsourced to get you going.

JamesReeves1988
I went into consulting at 24 and had around 3 years of commercial experience.

Fast forward a year later and I have numerous clients and am working on some exciting projects. I currently charge £35p/h (Based in the UK). The hardest part I found was that some clients do not trust you due to your age (Might be a UK thing) but this is where your sales pitch will come in handy.

The most important skill I found was to be able to communicate effectively with clients, to be able to break problems down and explain them in layman terms for them. This builds up their trust with you and then the sale gets easier.

Get out there and start networking, meeting business owners, your parents contacts, your own contacts. One of the best contracts I had come from an university friend I went for a coffee with.

Build up a few months of funds and work on some freelance work on the side and then go full time into it.

You can always get another job, but the older you get the more responsibilities you get and the less likely you are to risk it.

hackerboos
It's easy to become seduced over the articles on HN, Double Your Freelancing, Patrick McKenzie earning $30k/week and guys commenting they charge $180.

The reality is very different.

Most consultants are much older than 23. They usually know a few technologies inside-out.

For example we had to hire someone recently - he was a guy in his mid-40s who knew this particular thing we needed doing, this is a real email:

----------

My rate would be £1350/day + expenses.

If the customer wishes to go ahead, I would suggest spending a day on site when all the relevant [company name] staff will be available, and possibly [third party company] who I presume is a supplier or partner associated with the X.25 links or the function which runs over them? This would be split into a meeting where I can discover more about their requirements and constraints, and then some time investigating the systems to see what they're running on the systems, what can be found of any development/build/testing environment, etc. I can then return home and write this up for them, so they can decide what they want to go. This is a minimum of 2 days work for the visit and initial write-up, but it would be wise to allow for more because it's going to depend on what I find when I get there which is a big unknown at the moment, as they know so little about the system themselves -- it might take longer than a day on site to work out what their current setup is.”

----------

Note £1350/day is about $250/hour, however, he was worth every penny because nobody in our company knows how to do this.

He was on site roughly 2 days though to gather requirements and around 2 weeks to do the work. 12 days at that rate is $24,000.

zhte415
The tone and details of this email oozes a person with experience, has seen problems before but heads-up this might be worse than you think, and despite being worded quite formally seems a pretty modest (assertive, not aggressive nor submissive). Given the technology that is X.25 they also seem to be aware they can charge an eminently reasonable market rate to get approved yet put their foot down on working conditions (their quote is their quote, hours and 'productivity' agreed in advance).

I'd imagine they get a lot of recommendations, just from extrapolating that email.

ereckers
I just want to say thanks for posting this piece of correspondence. I love seeing real world interactions like this. It's real. It's something that really happened during day to day business. This is straight up stuff from a person that knows what they are doing and I don't see 1 word of self promotion in it at all. I need to take a cold shower.
tptacek
Thanks for posting this. Just a note: if this was me (or the practice I left last year) and the client was local, that on-site meeting where we scoped out what the project was would have been non-billable. We'd have done it gratis.
rufusjones
No, you aren't "good enough to do consulting."

Skills are important, but attitude matters. If you charge $200 an hour, you have to BELIEVE that you can add $400,000 in value if they keep you around for a year.

Note that "Attitude" <> "Arrogance". You don't go in thinking "I rule and you suck; I know better than all of you." People skills are EXTREMELY important. Clients have to give you the information and the guidance you need to do a job well-- if they dislike you, they'll sabotage you in 100 small ways.

But if you don't believe, deep down, "I can walk in the door of anyone who hires me and contribute to the company on some level", then don't consult.

brudgers
The key to consulting is not technical skill. You can hire that.

  technical skill != business value
The necessary element is knowing people who are willing to pay your rate and convincing them to do so. If you're not in the orbit of people who are in the habit of dropping $10,000 per person per week on consultants, such work is inaccessible. Getting into those orbits is usually a matter of "paying dues". It takes a deep rollodex to sustain a backlog.

Good luck.

cafard
What can you do in a day or two that would take some business weeks, or that the business could not do at all? If you can identify that, you're ready to start consulting.

I'd recommend a look at Gerald Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting and Becoming a Technical Leader. See http://www.dorsethouse.com/authors/weinberg_gerald.html

charleshmorse
I am 24 and have been consulting for close to a year now, with no real end in site. However, each assignment includes problems and skills on a spectrum between pure dev and pure business. So your comment about not understanding what people are trying to accomplish worries me. However from my perspective, there is a lot of value from my confidence and being able to map out what my client SHOULD do (not necessarily what he wants or is trying to accomplish) and directing him down that path. You can't always get them there, but you really need to be able to read people well to bridge the gap from a potentially idiotic or doomed decision they are about to make and a much much better one.

Also, I recommend reading Alan Weiss's The Consulting Bible: http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Consulting_Bible.htm...

tptacek
There's a right answer to this question: take a job at a consultancy.
aerovistae
I appreciate this straightforward response, but (from where I'm standing) it seems much easier to say this as a top cybersecurity expert than as a mid-level front end developer who is often bewildered by the fractal-like complexity hiding behind simple applications. I just cannot really grasp how anyone could show up and contribute to a large foreign codebase in a meaningful way in a matter of days or weeks.
kasey_junk
He meant go to work for n someone n elses consultancy. Not jump immediately into running your own.
Mz
could I consult anyway?

Would it be possible to do it on the side while still working a regular job? That might allow you to learn whether or not you can make it and/or learn what you NEED to learn to make it work.