What Do You Know That People Would Pay You For?

I actually started this post last week, in what was shaping up to be a long one.  Instead, I decided to spin the lead-in off into its own post about staff augmentation.

In that post, I covered a decent amount of ground, but I’d like to focus in on two main points about the software industry.

1. We have a curious habit of calling ourselves “consultants” when we’re not.  In other words, our industry is perhaps the lone industry where we refer to labor as “consulting.”
2. The main determining factor in what we call software development engagements is who manages the software developers.

This lead up, expounded upon mainly in the previous post, leads to an interesting question.

If Software Development is Knowledge Work, Why Do We Act Like It’s Labor?

I talk frequently on this blog about knowledge work and surrounding concerns.  Here’s a good working definition of knowledge work.

The term “knowledge worker” was first coined by Peter Drucker in his book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959). Drucker defined knowledge workers as high-level workers who apply theoretical and analytical knowledge, acquired through formal training, to develop products and services.

…

They include professionals in information technology fields, such as programmers, web designers, system analysts, technical writers, and researchers. Knowledge workers are also comprised of pharmacists, public accountants, engineers, architects, lawyers, physicians, scientists, financial analysts, and design thinkers.

Software development certainly seems to fit the bill.  I mean, it’s literally mentioned repeatedly in this definition.  And yet, perhaps uniquely among all of these vocations (except maybe technical writing), software developers are paid for what we do with our hands, rather than what we know in our heads.

Don’t believe me that this is a curious diversion?

Then why does it find its way past even how people bill for our work and into our job titles: “architects” to do the “big picture thinking” and software developers (laborers) to bang out code?  Or into our self-selected metaphors, such as the strained guild concept, where we’re not experts offering diagnoses, but “craftsmen” building digital cathedrals or horseshoes or whatever?

Read More

You Should Change the Reason People Pay You

Quick — what’s the reason people pay you?  Don’t ponder.  Just freeze the first thing that comes into your mind.

It’s probably something like this, especially if you’re a salaried programmer.

I have a valuable skill that’s in high demand: programming.

On a surface level, I can’t really argue with that.  Recruiters pester you constantly, and companies regale you with the superficial perks that can be yours if you just jump ship and come work for them.

But your skill and the demand for it aren’t the whole story.  In fact, I’d argue, they’re not even precisely the right story.

Why Do People Give Programmers Money?

Let’s tweak your prognosis slightly, without changing the economics around it.  You think of yourself as a knowledge worker that has a skill in high demand.  But your employer views you as a commodity in short supply.

What’s the difference?  Isn’t this semantic quibbling?

Not at all.  Inadequate supply can create excessive demand (or vice versa).  But they are not the same thing.  To understand what I mean, think of runs on grocery stores for canned goods before major storms come through.  Cans of baked beans are budget, commodity goods that nobody would generally call “valuable.”

But that all changes when a hurricane appears on the horizon and people hoard canned goods for the aftermath.  Gougers can charge way more for canned baked beans because it’s a commodity in short supply.

As a salaried programmer, you’re a can of baked beans.  Don’t confuse short supply with intrinsic value.  The world is starving for efficiency, and it anticipates even more starving later.  Employing you is a hedge.

Read More

How to Become a Management Consultant

Last week, fate (via Hacker News) sent a lot of people to this post, about becoming a software consultant.  This actually resulted in a lot of new readers and followers.  So, first of all, hi to all of the new readers and followers.  But secondly, I’m about due for another consulting post.  So let’s talk today about how to become a management consultant.

This is going to be a guide to charting a course for yourself from working as an individual contributor to a management consultant.  And it doesn’t involve dues-paying or working your way through any degrees or even any other jobs.  It’s a lot more direct than that.

First of All, What Is Management Consulting?  It’s Not as Pretentious as it Sounds

First things first, let’s get to definitions.  I’ve often referred to myself as a management consultant.  (If you want a more detailed history of my consulting, you can find that here.)  Sometimes I call myself a strategy consultant or perhaps an executive consultant.  In a sense, this is all kinda the same thing.

So let’s define that thing.  What is a management consultant?

You could probably find all sorts of definitions out there of varying complexity.  Let’s go with a simple one, though.  First of all, as I’ve explained before consulting is when people pay for your expertise and opinions.  (Not your labor.)  Management consulting is thus a narrower variant of general consulting, with the following two caveats.

1. You are specifically offering advice to organizational leadership (i.e. “management”).
2. The advice you offer is related to leadership’s main charter: making organizational decisions and running the business.

That’s really it.  You give advice to organizational management about how best to execute their leadership duties and oversee their organizations.  Naturally, there are a lot of different kinds of advice that you could give, but I’ll get to that a little later.

Should You Become a Management Consultant?

If you’re reading my blog, you’re probably a software developer or at least software-developer-adjacent.  So given the post title and introductory section, you might be looking behind you and wondering if I’m not talking to someone else.  You might just want to write code, either for a company or as a freelancer.

Is this advice really for you?

Yes, it is.  I’ve previously advocated that every software developer become a consultant.  So it’s not much of a reach that I think, if you’re going to become a consultant, you might as well become a management consultant.  Developer Hegemony, aside from being a book, is the crazy idea that software developers should be in charge of software development.  And if we’re going to be in charge of our own industry, it stands to reason that we should know how to run it well enough to offer advice about the same.

So yes, you should become a management consultant.  It’s an excellent way to establish a practice, credibility, industry contacts, and authority.  And the pay isn’t bad, either.

You don’t have to live out of hotels or wear slacks everywhere, or adopt an insufferable vocabulary, either.  Heck, you might not even need to leave fulltime employment, if you get creative.  You just need to establish yourself as an expert in some facet of leadership in the software world.

Read More

Being Good at Your Job is Overrated

Let me be clear about something.  This title isn’t clickbait.  I mean it.  But I mean it literally.  Being good at your job is overrated.  We value it too highly.

If you’re a long-time follower of this blog, you might think this is a curious sentiment against a backdrop of advocating for practices like test driven development.  And if you’ve wandered here from somewhere else, you might think this vacuously contrarian.

In either case, relax.

Being good at your job has value.  It’s certainly better than being terrible at it.  But it’s not nearly as important as we think it is, in the grand scheme of things.  The world weaponizes our love of mastery against us at times, causing us to lose sight of other considerations.

I’ll back this claim up with more explicit reasoning a little later.  But first, because I’m back to amusing myself with the blog, indulge me.  I’m going to tell some stories.

Read More

Value Proposition Guidance for Recovering Programming Generalists

I saw something awesome earlier this week.  Because I’m in the content business, I was trying to explain the concept of “pain, dream, fix” to a client.  It’s a way to write landing pages that focuses on customers and their pain points rather than on product features.  Anyway, in looking for a good explanatory link, I found this gem from Anton Sten.  It’s great advice for landing pages, full stop.  But I’m going to build on it to offer you advice about your value proposition.

Getting a value proposition right is hard enough.  But when you’re used to being a software developer, it’s almost impossible because of how badly everyone teaches us to get this wrong.  So let’s look at the bad advice we get so that we can then start with first principles.

Here’s the picture from the gem of a post I found.  Let’s start there.

The Basics of Pain Dream Fix and the Value Proposition

About a year ago, I wrote about how to start freelancing/consulting as a software developer.  In that post, I emphasized the idea of a “who and do what” statement.  This is a mad lib that takes the form of “I help {who} do {what}.”  This is a value proposition — a way to convince prospective buyers to buy from you.

In the software world, we constantly get this wrong.  And this image illustrates perfectly how we get it wrong.

We tend to talk about our products in giant lists of features.  Or we sell ourselves as an alphabet soup of skills and tech stacks.  And, in doing this, we completely neglect to mention who should care and why.

“Pain, dream, fix” (and this picture of Mario) is a way to jolt ourselves out of our professional solipsism and to start thinking of others.

1. Pain: Poor Mario is too small and weak to survive in a world of Goombas and Koopas.
2. Dream: But he could be twice the size he currently is and able to slay his enemies with flamethrower arms.
3. Fix: All he has to do is eat this flower.

Flower provider value proposition:  We help undersized plumbers kill their foes by giving them super powers.

Seems simple.  But we really manage to get this comically wrong.

Read More