IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Noodlemod_sl said:

I wanted to get into consulting on the side, I just have no idea when I'd do it.

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When I was doing it before I quit my full-time, I'd go to work all day then come home and immediately work on side projects until 11pm-midnight and on weekends 5-6 hours each day. This was 2002-2005 or so. In 2005 I quit my fulltime and worked perhaps 35-45 hours a week all on contract and for my own company. I only did both jobs for so long at first because I was afraid to quit my fulltime, in retrospect I could have quit fulltime within 6 months of building contacts for side work.

ShakyJake_sl said:

What's the typical software development type of contract work? I mean, is it usually simple, stupid crap or pretty complex stuff?

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It varied but most of my small projects were data interfaces for small companies, they collected data from one system in format X, they needed to interface with a system that used format Y, and they needed something better than excel macros to get them there and had no software people on staff. It was usually stuff thats not difficult in terms of implementation but you remember that you're not giving this to a developer so it needs to be bulletproof, simple, and work the first time and every time and help the guy out if he's a moron.

I also did a fair bit of "we have all this shit in access or excel and we'd like to put it in an RDBMS and have these visibility tools run on it" so you'd transform their data, build a database in MySQL or Oracle or whatever they wanted to use, build a back-end to talk to their front end business intelligence software, and off you go. I did a shit ton of 80-100 hour projects that paid $8k-12k and they were really pretty stupid and easy.

The main thing is, there's not going to be anyone to ask when you run into trouble, you won't be sitting in any meetings except those with the client 100% of your time is productive, you will be building new things all the time, so your sense of architecture and design will improve greatly because you'll constantly be building new things. Oh, and 99% of the time these jobs you do from home and in off-hours or whenever the fuck you want and you get paid double/triple to do it. It's gravy.

I'd also take full-time consulting contracts here in Dallas that were 3-6 month deals and then do side-work also. The "big" projects got you much larger scale exposure (I worked with Accenture, AT&T, KPMG, IBM) on big-budget projects, then you can do the mom & pop shit for startups or literal mom & pop shops and bank easy cash.

Celestein_sl said:

wut? SS/med/unemp are 15%~ by themselves, not 7-8.

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You do realize you pay half of this on W2 jobs also, right? So by going 1099 you only increase by 7-8%.

Celestein_sl said:

Also part of 1099 pricing is risk mitigation, over time you're making 1/2 of less of your rate not just cause of increased taxes, but increased risk exposure. Unless you're abnormally lucky you will get clients who don't pay, or who you have to excessively chase, and that ends up eating unbillable time that converts to lost opportunities. You also can't bill for every hour you work as a 1099, you eat the cost of managing your own business.

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This is true but I never really had trouble getting paid.

Celestein_sl said:

I know you know it, but for TJT, in the long-term, 1099 income's take-home is usually 1/2 or less of billable. As a loose rule, take your W2 hourly rate and triple it for the "optimal" contractor rate(1/3 pay, 1/3 taxes/expenses, 1/3 risk mitigation). If you're lucky, you get to keep a lot of the risk mitigation fund. Over time, as you get better at weeding out bad clients your risk tends to lower, but never goes away, sometime it just comes in larger chunks. Ex: I had a good run of a few years, and then finally got stiffed by a "big name" for 300k, that I had to sue for.

Anyways, whether Cad agrees or not, I think we can all agree that if people aren't blinking, raise your rates XD

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I'd slowly increase your rates with each job until you stop getting bites, then back it down a little until you're getting bites but you're not doing "trash" work and you're getting paid what will seem like an obscene amount.

The thing you gotta realize is these guys will pay contracting companies or consulting companies $200/hr to send them *complete retards.* So when you come in at $100/hr and start knocking shit out and know what you're doing and don't even blink at their requests, they will be like. Holy shit. Their expectations are low, because people are goddamn idiots.