This is the hard part for me because they do anything from hosting private clouds to buying a digital signage solution and re-selling it as their own.
My business is just consulting and developing. So far my job has been to develop a digital signage solution. Which would be in direct competition with them but I'm not left many options.
They even have a developer department. So the very nature of my employer makes it almost impossible for me to start anything in IT.
> I write the internal systems and occasionally work on the customer-facing websites and applications at a small local manufacturing company.
How did you find this gig? I think I’d enjoy working in this way with complete control over the dev process while making a very tangible difference in reducing employee toil. Just don’t know how to find that. And also how’s money?
> Conversely, as a web developer, I have stopped working with this segment completely. Non-tech organizations of 1-2 people are way more hassle to deal with than larger organizations.
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I'm seriously considering doing the same. What keeps me working with the 'small guys' is that on some level it's more enjoyable to me. I like making people happy, and when things go right these small clients are very happy, and they care, whereas no single individual in the typical company I work for really gives a shit in isolation.
With the small clients, I get to advise them about every step of the project, and they care about the result because it affects them directly in some way. As a contractor for a bigger company, however, easily half the decisions come from up the hierarchy and lead to work that I truly consider unnecessary. Usually this doesn't matter and they don't mind paying and nobody ultimately really cares about any of it. It's just work.
With the small clients I hate 1) often working fixed-price, 2) haggling over tiny budgets and taking risks, 3) incessant micro-managing in my area of expertise, 4) managing the personal psychological make-up of the client because there is no organization to temper it (or being a manager, I guess). But these same things mean that what I do is cared about, and money I receive is worth something more than just a higher number on my bank account...
Of course, as far as 'just work' goes I'm pretty happy with my situation. The actual work is still challenging and the output can still be somewhat rewarding. But in the back of my head there's this constant little voice asking me if this 'convenience' is actually worth energy and creativity (at least programming-wise) that I end up losing just to pay for my lifestyle.
I mean, if I have so many options as a programmer, would it not be silly to 'just be thankful for how good things are right now' when I'm one part of a small group of people who can actually choose to do other things that make me happier?
Any suggestions for a next step or alternative?
(this is from the perspective of a web developer, although I've reached a point where I'm looking into other programming fields)
>- You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production.
>- You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production.
>- You realise that you will need a business model and you are just a developer/designer and have no idea about those.
>- Then comes the tax issues, and realisation that you need a company.
>- You don't know how to licence your idea/project
As someone who isn't a very good designer/developer this seems like the easiest part to figure out. Coding the project is the single greatest struggle for me as I just don't have the experience/expertise but it's something I enjoy doing and want to do.
>- Do you specialize in any domain further to the above (e-commerce only, for example)?
Not a domain. I like working on problems that are challenging in an algorithmical/mathematical sense. Where the solution is not necessarily "obvious". If you want to consider that a domain, then yes.
> - Do you work alone, ever outsource anything to freelancers, or maybe are more like an agency?
For now, its just me. I certainly have the dealflow and could expand it to generate work for me than just me, but the problem is quality control. Even if I had an engineer who I'd be willing to funnel contracts to, how do I make sure that he stays on top of his game/doesn't get complacent? I'm not comfortable with the idea yet and feel like maintaining reputation is more important.
I occasionally contract out some UI stuff if it has to be done, but since I bill hourly, I can't really make this work in my favor. Its at best a bit better than breaking even.
The reason I do hourly work is because people are really uneasy with project based contracts, probably because they've been burned by this kind of business too many times already. Selling hours seems to be way easier.
> - Were you ever in a situation where client was unhappy with what you have delivered? How did you handle that?
No. Part of the reason is that I'm good at what I do. A potentially bigger reason is that you have to manage expectations. Underpromise, overdeliver all the time. Customers, in general, even though they are "engineering managers" have no fucking clue how long something takes. They think building a very basic rest api takes 9 months when it takes 2 weeks. The next one thinks you can knock out a google clone in a week. Just need to educate them on what is going to happen.
If someone is truly unreasonably unreasonable or wants to pull shenanigans, I'd probably just cancel the contract and go on vacation or something. My contracts are tight and I have cash in the bank. And I can always pick up a small contract to do something fun for a little less cash. Like a startup MVP.
> - How do you find leads or how do leads find you? Do you have mostly repeat or new business?
Keep in mind that this is mostly middle management somewhere inside big corps that existed for way longer than the internet does. These folks arent necessarily tech savvy and some of them became engineering managers because they were the guy in the office who knew how to operate the company printer. They have equally well qualified engineers working for them.
These guys talk to each other. In restaurants, like normal human beings. They have friends who hold similar jobs with similar issues. Most of my business comes from such conversations. Manager A who has worked with me and everything went well talks to Manager B who has very similar issues, in that nothing works, and Manager A tells them that they know this one guy who makes things work. That's how I get leads. Weird, huh.
Keep in mind that I don't need many leads. If I do 3x4 months of work in a year, that requires probably no more than 6 qualified inbound leads in a year, excluding repeat business.
I'd say that nowadays, every 3rd contract is with a truly new customer. Repeat business is super easy because once someone hired me and suddenly software magically works, and then the contract ends and I disappear into the shadows and suddenly things slowly wither away and they tell me about it and I tell them its because reasons and then they bring me back in to solve another issue and it just works, that's like magic for them.
And you have to keep in mind that this is for usually really simple stuff like "I have this data and we have 6 guys whose entire job it is to sit in front of excel all day and maybe cant we have a computer do it?" and internally im like "that probably takes 3 hours to implement tops" and theyre like "we've got budget for 12 weeks do you think that thats possible?". At that point you have a real problem because the idea that this is going to take half an afternoon is completely outside their reality, so you have to find other things they need done. Once you've explained to them all the things they can do with 12 weeks of budget, they are mega sold. Suddenly they have a web app to which they can upload files and all their data appears as visualizations on their conference room TV or whatever and it completely blows their mind.
> - How did you get your first leads?
Basically luck. I started a company with a guy and it went somewhat well but we pulled the classic mistake of premature founding team marriage and it fell apart due to personal reasons, so the guy bought me out.
I did then bum around on upwork to look for a short-ish thing to do because I was going to have surgery 8 weeks down the line anyway. I found something in the mountains of shit that is upwork and took it from there. I guess my first contract was some kind of automated bid adjustment tool for adwords.
Most of my leads is past customers talking to new customers. You really have to accept that you are selling high literature to the illiterate, though. Lots of hand holding and management of expectations.
> I would like to interject here that many companies are specifically looking or requiring software devs to work or to have worked on „open source“ projects.
Are you sure there are many companies like that? Not just that it is not my experience, but it also mean their ability to hire is limited to miniscule amount of developer.
Context: I'm senior mostly-solo IC for a mid-sized SaaS that does DevOps and IT-related tasks.
This role is similar to others I've had in the past. It's great because there's lots of flexibility and not much micromanagement.
It's challenging because:
- I often need to learn and evaluate new products (e.g some SaaS we might want to use). On a related note it's often difficult to get good (sometimes any) support for products we're paying for, so I waste time debugging obscure issues or reading through confusing documentation
- I don't really have anyone to delegate to. I could coordinate with managers to negotiate for engineers' time, but this would take almost as long as just doing some of the tasks myself, so I don't do this
- Verification is difficult. Infrastructure doesn't have as good testing facilities as "regular" software does, and even when it does that still takes some setup, which must be balanced against everything else I'm supposed to be doing and the new things that come up.
- I often am asking for review for people not on my (mostly solo) team, which can take time and extra reminders
- I mostly get requests from everywhere, manage my own backlog, and people are busy enough that they really only see what they need to remind me to do (because there's a lot to do), rather than all the little things I get done
This is better than previous similar roles I've had, as the teams are nicer and I don't own everything I touch, but I feel I'm falling behind and will not get recognition unless I "sell" my accomplishments (which of course I don't have time to do anyway).
I don't really feel I can turn work down, and don't really care to, but I'm finding it difficult to get it all done and still work a regular amount of hours.
It's also difficult to ask for help, as in the past when I've asked for training I've been told things like "ohh that's not too hard", which is generally true for most products once you've got the hang of them, but never getting training on anything is a recipe for lots of half-baked solutions, or lots of time off the clock reading and experimenting.
I worry trying to define my role will lead to micromanagement. I worry not doing so will lead to burnout or me missing things. I worry discussing these issues with management or fellow engineers will make me look incompetent or unwilling to do my job. I also worry it's going to get increasingly difficult to advance in this role, as the more I do the more I'll be asked to look into, and with things being difficult to test/verify, the small tasks will continue to pile up as I try to work on the large tasks.
How have you handled this situation in the past, other DevOps/IT folks?
I added in IT because I'm also given administrative tasks as needed (migrating some accounts/debugging issues that aren't strictly software related).
> My company (at the time) ended up hiring a fulltime person to manage the complexity (ie an Atlassian admin) plus a few consultants to get the workflow stuff down
Offtopic - I have recently been trying to break into full-time consulting / contracting. May I know how you went about hiring the consultants for the migration ?
> I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you come across this sort of a job? I don't suppose there's a job board for non-tech companies looking to hire a solo full stack dev? :)
> Aren't at this point you doing the job of two people? ... our company is worth X Billions of dollars, they can afford to hire a Business Analyst/ Better Product Manager.
Yes, definitely. The difference is that in my situation we are a software contractor, not a software development company that owns its products. If we don't work with the customer to discover and build what they want, then it doesn't get built, which means we've lost potential work.
> We want to grow our team but hiring developers in the U.S is not an option, given the high wage demands
- You can hire a remote contractor. E.g. in the Philippines or India. When your company grows you can setup a satellite office there. I think the important part is the long-term commitment because it would be costly to hire new contractor every 6-12 months to train and on-boarding process. Also make sure your working time has overlap for better communication.
> What are some of the hot areas that we should build our expertise in besides mobile and web app development to expand our business?
- I suggest you find a niche business and make it your own product. You can find ideas on your clients. In the long-term it is really exhausting and costly developing green field project every year.
> If you consider building software a creative pursuit you want to be connected to personally
You mean you think this isn't possible while contracting?
> my boss gave me zero credit for the work
> being seen, by nearly everyone, more as an expensive machine that writes code than a team mate.
It really depends where you work and who your client/boss is I think, the same as if you're an employee. I've had contracts where they want you to be part of the team and others where you're kept outside too.
> This presents a good opportunity for other companies that adhere to legal standards to consider hiring these developers.
Kraken is my favorite exchange. They appear to put a lot of effort into abiding by local regulations in all countries they operate.
> I had consistently communicated my limited interest in the product, and both the technology and hiring manager appeared to be accepting of that fact
This sentence is so weird for me. Why would you want to work for a company if you seemingly don’t care about their product. And conversely, why would anyone ever hire someone for a role if the person looking to get hired doesn’t care about the product?
> The company I work for is in the middle of "modernizing" our backend tech stack. As part of this, a few years ago I was assigned a task that could not be completed with anything we had or could find in the marketplace. I designed and implemented a tool that allowed us to move forward (I'm intentionally not describing it); it has now been part of our production process for 6+ months;
The company had a problem (which was probably some idiosyncratic self-inflicted thing), and they hired you to solve it for them. They could have hired any one of thousands of other people to solve it, but it happened to be you. You solved it, and now it's done, which is great (mainly for them).
> Somewhere between $15-20 million ARR depends on it and yes, it has been rock solid and dependable.
Does any of that ARR in any way depend on other things too? Like a brand, marketing, sales people, some product, etc?
Not trying to be too snarky, and you don't provide too many details, but generally there isn't actually much value in tooling/optimizing backend or operational things. These things are only valuable in the context of the rest of the company, which they own, not you, so they can just keep on doing what they're doing and hire people to solve the rest for them when they need to.
This is the hard part for me because they do anything from hosting private clouds to buying a digital signage solution and re-selling it as their own.
My business is just consulting and developing. So far my job has been to develop a digital signage solution. Which would be in direct competition with them but I'm not left many options.
They even have a developer department. So the very nature of my employer makes it almost impossible for me to start anything in IT.
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