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Jun
9

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Freelance Software Development: Speaking to Your Buyers

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , , | 7 Comments

I believe that at two, you have to call it a streak.  And so I’d like to celebrate my illustrious streak of reader question Fridays successfully delivered.  Today’s topic?  Freelance software development.

This actually follows pretty naturally from last Friday’s post.  Toward the end of that post, I pleaded with software developers to stop worrying about impressing one another.  I did this because software developers are not your buyers — they’re your peers.  Just as you don’t see Target’s CEO calling Walmart’s to show him what great deals Target has this week, you shouldn’t market toward your peers.  Instead, you should direct your marketing efforts (blog included) at your buyers.

Doesn’t This Make You a Hypocrite, Erik?

If you dig through the archives of this blog, you will find an awful lot of posts directed at software developers.  So I’ll just head off the inevitable comment about my hypocrisy with a caveat heading.

First, I treated my blog as half journal, half catharsis for a lot of years.  That is, I didn’t set out to speak to my buyers because I didn’t have any when I started, prospective or otherwise.  I wouldn’t go off on my own until I’d already been blogging for years and, at that point, I had my own pipeline pretty well stocked.  Due to preparation through other means, I never relied on this blog to keep work rolling in.  I do get inquiries and business through the site, but usually about developer training and the assumption that I can teach/setup anything I blog about.

The other thing that I’ll say in defense of me speaking to developers through the blog is that developers now are my buyers.  You can buy my recent book if you don’t believe me, or check out my other developer-oriented offerings.  Over years and years of blogging, I learned that it makes sense to offer your audience things it might value monetarily.  (I encourage you prospective bloggers to be less obtuse than me and have this figured out from day one.)

So, yes, I speak to software developers on this blog and always have.  But I don’t do it in the hopes that someone will notice it and hire me to do custom app dev.

Onto the Reader Question(s)

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s move on to the reader question(s) that pertain to freelance software development.  Usually, I try to do a FIFO scheme, but I actually received more than one variant of the same question after last week’s post.  I figure that bumps it to the top of the list.  So here’s a composite of that question.

Do you have any tips on how to write for buyers, rather than fellow developers?  My interests (and my prospective freelancing) run heavily technical, and that’s what I know how to talk about.  So how do you recommend that I speak to buyers through the blog?

Short answer is, sure, I absolutely have tips for that.  And I’ll get to topic ideas in a bit.  But first, let’s get both a little blunt and a little philosophical, so that you understand what you’re up against.

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Jun
2

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How to Freelance: The Low-Risk Path from Software Developer

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , , | 7 Comments

Ah, the eternal opportunistic question: how to freelance?  You work as a software developer, making $100K per year or something.  This is a great wage, and so you have a great life, sitting pretty high up atop Maslow’s famed hierarchy.  But then you figure out that Steve in your group is actually a contractor, and a little later, you figure out that they pay Steve $70 per hour.  A quick google search for “work hours per year” and fast math tell you that Steve makes $145,600 per year (so you think, anyway).  Suddenly, you feel less like a prosperous citizen and more like a sucker.

How to Freelance like Steve and make big money

How can I get some of that Steve money?

Not far behind that thought comes another.  I should become a contractor!  And then, finally, we get back to the titular concern: how to freelance?

The Reader Question and Some Housekeeping

As regular readers may have deduced, I’m doing a reader question today.  And, as regular readers may have noticed, I haven’t done reader questions (or DaedTech-only posts) in a while.  Please forgive me on that count.  I spent a lot of writing energy on my recent book launch and then even more on starting a tech company blogging business.  With all of that writing, I’ve had trouble mustering spare writing cycles the last few weeks.

But I’m turning a corner on that and launching the first of what will be a series: “reader question Fridays.”  I’m making the vision of this site more and more oriented around the Developer Hegemony vision (software developers becoming the bosses of software development), so please fire away with questions.  I take all comers, but I’ll prioritize questions that speak to the subject of software developer agency.

Anyway, I’ll paraphrase the reader question.

I currently work as a salaried software developer.  I think I’d like to figure out the freelance thing, but I’m not sure.  It’d mean a lot of risk to quit my job and hang out my shingle, so I’m wondering what you advise to make this a less risky transition.

I actually wrote about a related topic recently.  But that question more concerned my personal background and how to become a consultant.  Freelance software development is not, in my opinion, consulting.  I refer to people who do that as software pros.  Firms pay consultants for their opinions and they pay software pros for their labor.  I draw the distinction here because software pros need to worry a lot less about specializing and niching — at least at first.

But forget about the taxonomy and let’s look at how to become a freelance software developer with a low risk playbook.

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May
8

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The Opportunist’s Guide to Start Consulting (Abridged)

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , , | 4 Comments

Given the recent launch of Developer Hegemony, I decided to address a reader question.  This question hits near and dear to my heart and to the subject matter of the book. I’m going to paraphrase for the sake of anonymity.  But, either way, it amounts to a question about how to start consulting.

But First, Some Housekeeping

Before I dive into that, though, I’d like to make offer some links.  If you want to hear and read more from me, I offer you the chance.  Check these out.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled post.

The Reader Question

Without additional preamble, I’ll offer up the (paraphrased) reader question.

I’m currently a developer, and want to transition to freelance consulting. But I’m not quite sure where to start.. Do you have any advice on that? How did you manage to start a consultancy business?

First of all, understand the dichotomy here.  He asks for my advice and he also asks how I did it.  I ask everyone reading to understand that these aren’t necessarily the same thing.  In other words, I can tell you exactly what I did, but that doesn’t mean I think you should do it in exactly that way.

Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t think I made any horrible mistakes or anything like that.  But I kind of wandered my way through the experience, not entirely sure at the time what I wanted.  Unlike the reader asking the question, I never explicitly decided to become a freelance consultant.  In fact, I just had some free time and wanted some extra money.

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Apr
30

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Rethinking Retirement, Efficiencer Style

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , |

Today, I offer post number 7 for Developer Hegemony week.  I had every intention of doing 9 days of posts in a row leading up to launch, but I wound up spending yesterday relaxing and recuperating (not a lot of Sunday traffic anyway).  I just finished up an engagement and had been on the road for weeks straight, finally getting home Friday night.  So I took a day off.

The good news is that even with me taking it easy yesterday, the internet did not.  The Thunderclap campaign reached its goal!  This means that I will now definitely give away 3 free copies of my book.  So signing up now gives you better odds than ever.  

A post about rethinking retirement might seem odd, but I have a method to this madness.  As you contemplate your working career, retirement may not come immediately to mind.  But it certainly looms large over decisions you make during your career, in much the same way that the college admissions process tends to loom large over high school.  You contribute to 401Ks, look at the compound effect of salary negotiations and the like, all with an eye toward retirement.

So let’s dive into the mechanics of normal wage work and retirement a bit today.  But first, I’ll lead in with a quick rationale for what brought this to mind.

Hourly Wage for Book Writing

Because I have some varied business interests, I tend to get politely restrained questions from people with salaried jobs as an exclusive source of income.  People regard direct questions about income quantity as gauche, so they kind of ask how things work in the abstract.  They beat around the bush a bit.

For this reason, I find myself speaking at times to a conceptual hourly wage for, say, writing a book or making a Pluralsight course.  I find this understandable, since wage employees tend to reason about earning income as if all income were wage income.  Understandable, yes.  But it misses the point.  And my explanation for why ties in with retirement and the idea of building what I’ll call “business properties.”

Retirement from Wage Earning, Simply Explained

Okay, so back to retirement.  I’ll start with an oversimplified version of how that works.  Specifically, let’s forget for the moment about any concept of social security, pensions, or investing in markets.  A wage earner spends most of his adult life collecting a paycheck.  He uses some percentage of that paycheck and sets some percentage aside, stuffing it into his mattress.  He continues to do this until he has more stuffed into his mattress than he’ll need before he dies.  At this point, he retires.

For the sake of easy math, let’s assume that this hypothetical person averages $100K per year as a salary throughout his career.  Let’s say that he decides he can live on $50K per year in retirement and that he saves 10% of his salary throughout his life.  If he starts working at 20 and retires at 70, he will have set aside a total of $500K.  This will allow him to live from 70 to 80 before he runs out of money.  So in a strange case of somewhat perverse incentives, he should hope not to live longer than 80 (or he should continue working).

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Apr
28

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The Efficiencer’s Guide: Getting Started

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , , |

You thought Developer Hegemony Week stopped on Friday?  Nah.  Today I give you post 6.  It contains somewhat lighter fare, since it’s the weekend, but the show must go on.  We’re doing really well on the Thunderclap campaign — 83% as of this writing.  But that means I still need 17 more people to do the raffle.  So, please help me out and spend a few seconds signing up!

In the book, I coined this term, Efficiencer.  I also talked about it on the blog this week.  Today, I’d like to offer what I’ll call the efficiencer’s guide (or, at least, the start of it).  I’ve called out a number of idealized behaviors and philosophies, but haven’t given a lot of practical field advice.

For the purposes of the efficiencer’s guide, I’ll assume you work as a salaried software developer in some organization.  This probably describes most of my audience, and it makes for a natural starting point in this journey.  If you’re already a free agent or you don’t write software, don’t worry.  You can still get some info here.  I’m going to include reading materials and links, so I have something for everyone.

Defining Efficiencer

First things first.  I won’t ask you to go do a bunch of homework.  Instead, I’ll define this term again, off the cuff.  I’ve described it in the book, but I invite you all to participate alongside me in kind of an evolutionary definition of the term.

I think of software developers (or engineers or programmers or whatever) as people who collect a salary to write code.  I feel fairly confident that this definition has blown exactly 0 of your minds.  But consider it maybe a bit more literally.  You collect a salary to code… and, that’s it.

Therefore, you don’t worry about business considerations like sales or marketing.  You generally don’t participate in discussions about why you write the code that you do.  Nope, you just show up, get a spec or something, fire up your IDE, and get to work.

The efficiencer, on the other hand, does ask why.  In fact, the efficiencer doesn’t do any work without understanding and approving of the why.  You see, she doesn’t count herself a coder but an automation professional.  She specializes in making you more efficient.  That might mean writing some code, or it might just mean sending you a link to a COTS product that already does what you want.  She doesn’t accept specs or story cards or requirements or anything like that.  She listens to your business goals around cutting cost or increasing revenue, and she decides how that will happen.

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