Becoming A Software Consultant: My Backstory

You&#x27;ll notice the lack of &quot;And then I was bitten by a radioactive spider and anointed the designated iOS consultant by Steve Jobs.&quot;<p>I only mention this because so many geeks think consultants are a special breed apart, and in the main, they&#x27;re geeks <i>just like you</i> who a) got good at something and b) started charging appropriate amounts of money for it.

&quot;I now believe the only way to have a secure career is to make one for yourself. You could be let go at any time, for any reason.&quot;<p>This is absolutely nuts. Do American workers have zero rights to redundancy pay, notice, warnings etc? I realise this may seem ignorant, but it blows my mind that you can just be fired from one day to the next without compensation or any kind of due process. It reminds me of the working conditions for stevedores in the 19th century.

I became a consultant because I got fed up with all the random reconstructions that big companies go through when there&#x27;s a &quot;new boss in town&quot;. If you&#x27;re smart enough to see that through it just drives you nuts to see the company flip back and forth between two equally valid organizational structures every x years.<p>I&#x27;m feeling happy I&#x27;m above things every time I see how the companies who hire me are messing with their employees.<p>And I have my team mates at our consultant agency, who are all really good coders, ambitious and fun to talk with. We go on trips together and have lots of fun. I believe that I have much better job security here. People know who I am. I&#x27;m appreciated. And the money is good too. Why work for a corp again? I won&#x27;t set my foot there ever again.<p>Meanwhile I&#x27;m collecting ideas for startup #2, this time it will be about something I&#x27;m passionate about and with a viable business model.

After my current job, I&#x27;m considering freelancing by pairing up with a good recruiter (an individual, not a firm). I plan to offer a commission to the recruiter for finding me good clients; in effect, using their client base to build my own. Any warnings or red flags to this approach?

I don&#x27;t work at quite the same level--I&#x27;m quite dirts (as they say here), but I have done a bit of consulting even though, I&#x27;m swinging back through freelancing and considering going back to being an employee.<p>What I found most useful was the picture of a person working for an existing business who has knowledge of the entire pipeline from the sales process through development:<p>&quot;Armed with the knowledge of the entire software pipeline-from sales, to development, to maintenance-I hit the ground running the very next day in search of my first contract.&quot;<p>I think that is a key among most of the really good consultants that I have met.

Thanks for sharing, I also found your previous post thought-provoking and motivating. How sales-oriented is independent consulting? Do you look for new technologies to branch out into and if so, how?

How much of a role did the fact that there was hardly any other public information on iOS programming out there play?<p>Could you start an iOS blog today and realistically hope for a similar outcome, or are there so many iOS blogs that it would it get lost in the noise, and it would be better to pick some newer, less-published technology?

&gt; I recently published a post about my first year of being an independent iPhone development consultant.<p>I admit I briefly skimmed so maybe I missed it, but where is that article? I&#x27;d like to read it first.

Became a consultant a year ago, and the only thing I regretted was why I didn&#x27;t do it earlier.

A bit off-topic, but I thought here would be a good place to ask: What are the economics like for a consultancy (say 50 people)? What are the major challenges that make scaling difficult?

awesome backstory ... you remind me of Mel Gibson in Braveheart.