My batman origin story

After having done the independent software contractor gig for the last few years, I suspect I've learned enough about the process to give a good primer for those interested but that have not taken the plunge yet. The best reason to become a contractor is simple. Because it's the best way to make a direct impact for people and businesses. If you want to make serious money, helping wealthy people become wealthier via the outsized impact of your skill is how that happens.

The option to escape: How hired guns are made

Before I started out on the course of being a hired gun with a specific and time-limited goal in mind, I had achieved about everything you could as a developer short of entering management at a decently large software firm. Like most "Staff Engineers" I knew where most issues with the codebase were lurking, or could find out within an hour due to intimate familiarity. I'd also accumulated a number of critical systems under my belt that were nearly 100% written by myself. Similarly, I had multiple apprentices and was frequently one of the few who could answer questions cropping up in developer chat, or debugging thorny customer issues with senior support personnel. Practically anyone who will actually succeed as a hired gun needs the sort of drive to have achieved such things already. I've heard them called "glue stick" people, as they are what holds organizations together by and large.

Anyone who gets here will inevitably make management nervous both because their invisible influence is often more powerful than management's. Also, people like this are pretty systematically underpaid for the sort of effort they actually put in. It was doubly so in my case, as I've long been debt free, unencumbered by family and had been developing successful non-programming business on the side. In short, they recognized quickly that I was both essential to the organization and trivially capable of leaving. Corporate is uncomfortable around people who aren't over a barrel and can afford to rock the boat. Ever known a manager without a family and that isn't in debt up to their eyballs? me neither. It takes a lot of desperation to win the single-elimination ass-kissing tournament.

To be fair, I had ruthlessly leveraged this to secure far higher pay than they admitted to paying people with their "transparency" report on salaries they released to us hapless minions. It was at this point I began to notice signs that a case was being built against me. When I was inevitably pushed out, I was ready.

At the initial signs I started planning how to continue doing the sort of essential, well-paid work I enjoy doing but without this expectation of being handcuffed to one firm or another. This is because my financial plan required a bit more capital to do what I actually want to; start a software firm myself. I have managed to do this quite a bit ahead of schedule thanks to this actually getting paid for the maniacal amount of hours I actually work. I'm currently wrapping up a number of these. All so I can endure being paid nothing to work harder at starting up my own business for some time. Perhaps being a deranged masochist is the actual mechanism at work here.

Welcome to the Kayfabe

When you finally take the plunge a number of illusions will quickly fall away as you start speedrunning through organizations and individuals needing help. Invariably, a brand's reputation generally has an inverse relationship to its actual quality. You find that the companies with the most fanatically loyal customers power this all with the most atrocious pile of shit you can imagine. If you didn't yet believe that "worse is better" you will quickly be disabused of this notion. Every successful organization is somewhere on the journey of "prototype in production" to actually good software.

Keeping up appearances and managing customer expectations such that they remain sated necessarily steals time from the sort of ruthless quality control and brutal honesty necessary for good software. If you've ever wondered why LKML and P5P have been rivers of flame and reliable drama-generators over the years, this would be why. Appearing competent necessarily removes the mechanisms that force participants to actually become competent, and these tensions will always be present. I've seen this slowly corrupting software organizations subject to regulation such as Sarbanes-Oxley. If you ever wonder why a developer chat is dead as a doornail, there's probably a great deal of concern with "face" involved.

In this new Army, no one could afford to tell the truth, make an error, or admit ignorance. David Hackworth "About Face"

To succeed as a contractor, you will actually have to embrace this for good and ill. The best paying customers are always the large orgs with huge problems, and they almost never want to hear the unvarnished truth save as a last resort. The niche for you to fill in order to be well paid is the guy who steps in precisely at that last resort. Being an outsider, you don't care about your ability to advance in the firm. You will naturally be able to see the problem clearly due to not being awash in the control fraud they've been feeding themselves. Similarly, you will be able to take risks that people concerned with remaining employed are not capable of taking. This will allow you to make (and implement!) the actual solutions to their problems in a prompt manner. You'll look like a master despite being at a severe knowledge disadvantage versus their regulars.

That said, you can only lead a horse to water. Sometimes they will still fail to drink even when to do so will save their life. As such you can't get too attached to the outcome of your projects. Many of your projects will in fact fail due to these organizational reasons. I've been on projects that dropped us in favor of incompetents that were happy to lie all day.

You should neglect to mention this if you value your ability to secure new contracts in the future. Focus instead on the improvements you can and do make when describing the impact you have made for customers. You just sound like a whiner if you focus on this stuff, because every large organization has a case of this disease, and is blissfully ignorant. They also don't want to hear about how they might go about curing themselves of this, despite it being a fairly well understood subject. Happy customers is largely a matter of expectations management; e.g. Don't "Break the spell". Every job, to some degree, is acting.

Aside from these sorts of jobs which have big impacts, firms will want people to implement things they percieve as not worth building permanent expertise in. These are usually trouble free, fast work. Great when you can get it.

Working with individuals and marketing yourself

If you don't like dealing with corporate buffoonery all day, you can still make it by helping individuals and small organizations out so long as you juggle many of them at a time. These inevitably come from referrals, job boards and cold reach-outs from people reading your marketing and sales materials.

Speaking of marketing, CPAN and github are my best marketing, believe it or not. Your portfolio of Open source software is usually a strong indicator of where your actual strengths as a programmer lie. I've picked up a few clients already that reached out to me cold because of this. There are a number of simple things you can do to make sure this is more effective.

You can create a repository with the same name as your github account, and the Readme.md therein will be presented instead of your normal github user page. Example: https://github.com/teodesian Try and emphasize the specific kind of projects you have taken on and how big a win they were for your prior clients and employers. You need to remember that programming is just a superpower that makes you far more efficient at a job than your manual alternative. This, or something like it, is ultimately going to be the "bottom of the funnel", and you know you got a conversion when an email appears in your inbox.

Speaking of funnels, you need to understand how online marketing works in general. For those unfamiliar, generally you have a series of sites and steps a random yahoo goes thru before they convert into a client. The top of the funnel is always going to be a search engine or content aggregator (but I repeat myself). Example: Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook To be seen at this layer, you have to be regularly producing content so that the engines consider you "relevant".

Don't post your longer form content directly on the aggregators, but link instead to your site or substack, as that further boosts you in search engines. As long as it properly presents the social meta information with an appealing picture you will be set. (if you roll your own in perl, use HTML::SocialMeta). Be sure to end your content with some sort of call to action of the form "like this? Want to hire me? etc...". Remember that your potential clients aren't mind readers.

In general you should produce an article monthly, a short video or podcast weekly, and microblog about something at least daily. The idea is to produce both generally helpful and informative content which coincidentally makes obvious your expertise and links to your marketing pages. Don't use some of the more sleazy engagement hacks that insult the readers' intelligence. You want smart customers because unlike dumb customers, they actually have money. Repeat until you have more clients than you can handle.

If you are doing this right, (I by no means am perfect at this) you should get enough clients to fill your needs within 6 months or so. If not, you can consider using ads (which is a talk in and of itself) or use a gig board, which I'll let Brett fill you in on.

How much is enough?

The most common question I get from peers thinking about hoisting the black flag and saying "arr its a contractors life for me" is "what should I charge". The short answer is pick a number for monthly income that you reasonably expect will cover your expenses even during a dry spell. For me this was $10k, because it means even if all I get is 2 months worth of solid work my yearly expenses are covered; I'm a pretty frugal guy. As you might imagine this is extremely conservative; I've beat this goal for two years running by a fair margin. Do what's right for you.

So, how does your monthly income goal translate into an hourly rate? Depends on how steady you expect the work to be. Somewhere between $100 and $200 an hour works for me to reliably achieve my goal. That said, don't be afraid to charge more than usual for work you know upside and down, or which you can tell will be especially tricky. It's far from unheard of to do "lawyer rates" of $300 to $500 an hour for things which are specifically your specialty, and it's worth every penny for the client. They ultimately pay less by hiring an expert who can get it done in a fraction of the time, and you get away with your monthly goal in a week.

Similarly don't be afraid to offer introductory rates for people who are on the fence about the subject. If it looks like they'll have plenty of work for you it's worth doing until you have proven merit. If they don't want to pay full rate past the introductory period, let them know that you can't guarantee when it gets done because you have better paying work (or looking for that) jumping in front of them. They'll either straighten up, find someone else, or...it gets done when it gets done.

Long term your goal ought to be to either a) maximize your free time to invest in building a business of your own or b) maximize your income and minimize expenses so as to accelerate savings to then plow into capital. You'll likely do b) in pursuit of a), which is really just so you can further increase your free time via exponentially increasing your income per hour of time invested. Like with any other business you start, contracting pays even more poorly than salary when you are still fishing. All that up-front investment pays off though. It helps a lot if you get a head start while still employed, but practically nobody does this and even when you think you are ready, you aren't. That said, you just have to keep at it. You will eventually build enough clients and connections to be living your best life. A good site/resource about this is called "stacking the bricks". Keep making those small wins every single day and they truly do add up to something greater than the sum of its parts. As to the books you should actually read about sales and keeping customers, I would recommend Harry Browne's "The secret of selling anything" and Carl Sewell's "Customers for Life".