Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

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I am considering launching as a freelancer and I'm trying to figure out how to finance it in the context of my bidirectionally extreme (high magnitude; both directions) reputation (which is somewhat an exaggeration of my actual personality; when I write, I'm trying to communicate and sometimes I drive hard.)

I'd prefer to spend most of my time on actual work. I'm getting back into Clojure and rediscovering the joy of coding (which disappeared, with fleeting breaks in it, when I went to Google and had to answer to a middle manager, which just sucks all the life out of what we do). That said, if someone is willing to give me $40,000 to tell him what he's doing wrong, I'll do so.

(In person, I'm much less abrasive, though. If I actually respect someone, and I respect most people, I'm nice.)

Burned Bridges Consulting would work because it's structured to produce the only employment relationship in which telling the truth is possible: one where there is no possibility of continuance.

I don't know if you've ever been in management, but if not I think that would be the wall you'd run into.

Imagine if a manager had tons of advice for programmers, ie; 'listen to what management says, build what we want not what you think we want, pay attention when we interrupt your coding!'

If you've already done the whole management thing also and it worked out well then good luck to you.

I'm actually a believer in removing management, at least of the traditional do-as-I-say variety.

The only credibility that has any place in anything is the credibility that comes from making others' lives easier-- solving their problems, teaching them, building things they want.

Are you able to actually solve problems (with leadership) instead of just pointing them out? You have no track record of that.... in fact, just the opposite. But if you managed to change things around you could become an easy hire and own a new niche. Maybe even start a nice big company around it. Work pro bono on two major things, show measured improvements on dimensions you promised to improve, and then ask for your contract rate.

To be honest, I'd rather solve problems with real work and lead by doing. I enjoy work a lot more than I enjoy yelling at people.

I think I'm poisoned by corporate environments (a startup being the worst) where you have to yell at people for days to get the permissions necessary to do a few hours of real work. I fucking hate that shit. Eventually, people stop yelling at each other about work (because they forget how to work) and are just yelling about the yelling. That's what Corporate America really is: recursive wankery with almost no one really working.

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