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Comment by justanother | Hacker News Reader

After watching several of my friends become managers, directors, and VPs, I got FOMO and finally said yes to the management track about 25 years of software development. After about 3 years of engineering management, I was absolutely miserable, almost not programming at all, and spending 6 or more hours per day making sure I was camera-ready for the next Zoom meeting. Fortunately I had an S-Corporation that lived in a binder on a shelf (and so can you for about $125 and a few mouse clicks), and it came to the rescue. I branded myself as an independent consultant, got super lucky and landed a few retainers, and here I am, making more money and largely sticking to programming at the Tech Lead level. Yeah there's a bit of extra effort that goes into invoicing, running payroll, and paying taxes, but it's nowhere near as bad as management.

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What percentage of your time is spent on the sales/marketing side of pitching your consultancy services? RFPs/proposals/pitches/inbound/outbound? Where have you found the sweet spot with respect to the length of an engagement?

The reason I ask - most of what you hear out there are stories of people being "freelancers" where the work is somewhat of a commodity (wordpress, webapps, etc) and they have to differentiate themselves by quality of work/communication. But it sounds like you are more on the specialized/niche side, with retainers and being a "consultant".

So far I've been tackling the "builder vs manager" problem with: joining small startups or starting my own. The good news is that the last 2 startups I've joined have hit rapid growth, but the (bad) news it that I keep getting pulled into management. I know that I can/should hold a stronger line and say "No, I want to be an IC", but it's hard when my boss pushes back that it'd be better for the company if I manage. None of this is complaining/whining per-se, but your solution is potentially a win-win where I can avoid the mis-aligned incentives (ie: holding the line on IC vs management).

My wife spends some time keeping my Linkedin account active, and I spend about 15 minutes a day maintaining a 'pipeline' spreadsheet and replying to inquiries about opportunities. If something gets to the introductory-call stage, I'll try and space them out so that there's no more than one per day. Generally I find that it takes about 30 days from introduction to closing a deal (sometimes longer). At the moment, I have multiple retainers and my plate is full, so I only do the minimum effort necessary to ensure that there's 4-6 opportunities somewhere in the pipeline, regardless of whether they close or not. Obviously if I weren't eating quite as well, I'd probably put at least double the effort into it.

As far as engagement length, my longest engagement is currently 6 months. Generally I don't have an issue with getting promoted into management as an independent contractor, as my loyalty is ultimately understood to be to my own company, and I make it very clear that I do not wish to become a manager. If those terms aren't acceptable, hey, I'm a contractor, everyone's welcome to terminate the relationship with zero hard feelings whatsoever, which is both an advantage in the current economic environment as well as the reason I need to maintain a pipeline of opportunities no matter how well things are going.

Do you do mostly staff augmentation or do you have a true speciality/niche which you get brought in to do?

I'm something of a generalist, but I prefer to do Typescript stuff with node.js and AWS Lambda, as well as React frontend stuff. I can do lots of other things and will even deliver C-Sharp and PHP components, but the thing about contracting is that you can usually end up doing only stuff that you want to do.

It's hilarious how you phrased "Fortunately I had an S-Corporation that lived in a binder on a shelf (and so can you for about $125 and a few mouse clicks)".

It's the weirdest thing to me this is how it can be but it's so real.

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