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/
- 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.
It isn't. For reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20170927012427/https://kirubakar...
"desgin assets such as color palette and images to be used".
Under 1.3. Also in your reference.
Consultant does mean something. Means you temporarily hire experience in a field you are not familiar with to bring competency to your company, train/knowledge transfer to employees, and have a quick up ramping of a project which can continue when the consultant leaves because now you have a proper architecture and your employees are trained to use it, work with and extend it.
In other cases, I'm doing more of that other work - actually 'consulting' - meeting with people, helping determine strategy/direction, etc - then sometimes managing the project and/or doing some code (if code is needed, and usually is).
I quess Perelman was also just "typing a proof".
The amount of clueless people here is astonishing.
The real world is a matter of location and experience I guess. Silicon valley would not be my example of the real world. My experience is more companies see consultants as not another developer. They already have their architects and engineers to do just that. People typing code as their first commitment, stating they will commit code to archive in their core statement of work, do not scale. I'd rather have a consultant using his experience to teach my 100 developers what to make and commit to the archive. Have his experience, mind and vision executed by 100 people. That scales. That is worth the 5 (6,7) figures I pay him. If he can only work as hard as at most 2, or heck 5 of my developers I'd rather hire that at a fraction of the price.
Note that this thread was on consultants that ask 5 figures a week. I took that as upper half end of the 5 figures. Entry level consultants coming at 85-150€ an hour (in EU) are a different story. They would be seen as an architect with experience outside the company and as of such would most likely code and design like a regular architect.
Not all are clueless I guess. Just people from all over the world and from all sorts of companies.
P.s. Only have experience with enterprise consultancy. After writing I realize this may be entirely different from consultancy in/for a small sized firm.
Curious if you have any recommendations.
That's probably not a very useful answer, but that's how I got most of my clients, who then referred me to their friends etc.
If I were new in a city, I'd find a way to accelerate that by going out more and meeting new people doing activities I enjoy. One of my friends made a lot of connections at the climbing gym, for example, and he got a few consulting contracts that way. The conversations for him were as simple as "What do you do?" "I'm a software consultant" "Oh, we need someone to do x at our startup. Do you know about that?" "Sure, let's talk more".
I'm sure there are other ways to jump start your connections... make something shareworthy and posting it on HN, for example.
When I started consulting, I was living in Seattle and I had a single long term client. Now that I live in San Francisco, there is high paying work everywhere.
After having done this for a long time, I've learned to be zen about the intrinsic variance in income. But it is still hard psychologically. While rationally I know that I make more per year as a consultant and have more interesting work as a result etc, it's still painful to see the numbers in the spreadsheet go down when I'm not working for a few months, even if it was a deliberate decision that I made.