Photo: Tony

Because I do the mercenary geek-for-hire thing doing wholesale consulting, I've got lots of formulas for how many billable hours to plan for, how many I need in order to cover the bills, etc. For instance, I typically project an average of 156 billable hours per month.

That comes from:

(52 weeks x 40 hours) - (8 holidays x 8 hours) - (18 days of sick/vacation/personal days x 8 hours)

Tack on a few hours for doing paperwork and the like as well as the overhead time of unbillable travel to the client site, etc. and it ends up being a pretty busy schedule. However, take a month like June and the billable hours got out of hand. In order to keep all of my client projects moving forward, I racked up 215 billable hours for June.

While on vacation, I decided that this just plain has to stop. Sure, I made really good money for that month, but at what cost? I was too busy to do much of anything else but work. I was stressed out, constantly tired, missing days at the gym, etc.

Fortunately, in order to get their IT budget back on track for the rest of the year, my main client was also wanting me to cut back on hours, asking for a cap (rather than average) of 148 a month for the rest of the year.

That sounded great to me. The only trick was to figure out how exactly to make it work. See, I've *tried* to show up, put in 8 hours and leave. It just doesn't work. Stuff comes up and needs to be dealt with, people schedule meetings at the end of the day, etc. Combine that with the fact that Shelly and I are carpooling and she often works 9+ hours a day herself and a 9 hour day becomes the standard pretty quickly.

I had a couple of options. First, I could just take longer lunches to turn the day into only 8 of the hours being billable. I don't like that approach because I've never liked taking a long lunch. It breaks up my rhythm.

Second, I could just "punch out" at 4:00 and not work on their stuff. Unfortunately, because I'd still be on site, I know from watching it happen that if I'm busy just reading feeds, or writing for this site, even if I'm not billing the client, someone who doesn't know that (and won't bother asking) will complain to the higher-ups at the client that "one of the consultants is just browsing the web". That leads to questions of why they're paying me, etc. Best just to avoid it.

Third was to just embrace my "natural" 9 hour day and switch to a 4 day week. With a half hour tweak here and there, it'd come in right at 148 every month. And, I'd get an entire day every week to work on my own stuff. Believe me, I've got a LONG list of stuff to work on with that time.

When I suggested the 4 day week, everyone seemed OK with it and figured I'd just do Friday. However, I've never really minded coming into the office on Fridays. People are generally in a much better mood than any other day of the work week. Plus there's free donuts and bagels. If I'm going to be onsite 4 days a week, I didn't want to skip out on Fridays.

Mondays, on the other hand, I could do without. People constantly complain about Mondays. They're still "attached" to the weekend, which can let you keep going on something you started on Sunday afternoon and the week always seems shorter when you don't have to work on Monday.

So, for the rest of 2008, I'll be in my home office on Monday's, working on my personal projects. With no commute, I'll effectively have from the time I get up at 5:00am until about 6:00pm or so to charge through things.

Given that several of the things on my list will result in non-consulting cash flow if they are successful, I'm hoping to bootstrap this whole thing into a permanent cut in consulting hours. We'll see.

photo credit: Liel Bomberg

I often push people who work as employees to view themselves as actually being self-employed. When you take a job, your little business just sold some of your time to a company for an agreed-upon amount of money per year. It's a business arrangement, so treating it like one makes sense.

When people make that shift, they often start to see their resume's more like potential "customers" of their services (employers) do. The resume and anything that accompany it are your marketing materials to land an interview. In that interview, you need to push the "deal" forward, but if your resume ends up in a stack with dozens or hundreds of others only to be tossed en masse, you don't even get that chance.

Sure, lots of places are pushing resumes into giant keyword databases. And, for that, you should make sure the text itself is optimized. However, there are still PLENTY of places where your carefully formatted resume gets viewed by a real person.

In those cases, having a resume that catches the eye makes a big difference in getting someone to actually read it and call you in for an interview.

If your resume is based on one of the 3-4 that come with Microsoft Word, consider something a little more unique. This great sample of really nice-looking resumes came through the feed reader this morning really shows what can be done to wake up a tired resume.

Some are more feasible than others if you aren't a graphic designer, but the ideas should certainly spark some changes in yours.

Every once in a while, someone asks me about the numbers behind doing contract/wholesale consulting. They usually aren't asking about specific figures, but are curious about how the numbers fit together. Because there's so much information out there about how to figure out pricing on retail consulting, I figured I'd share a bit on wholesale.

First, to make the numbers easier to work with (and keep the focus on the principles instead of the actual dollar figures), let's invent a currency where you could live comfortably on 2000 of it per month. And, since this is my little invented world, we'll use the "J" as the symbol. Apply whatever exchange rate you want to it to get dollars.

So, let's say you've got a nice, comfortable job making 2000J a year and are thinking of going into contract work.

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Photo: Stian Martinsen

In several conversations recently with other software developers (yep, those are just as exciting as your wildest dreams) and their frustrations with the process, as implemented in modern corporate America, the same analogy kept popping into my head.

More and more, I feel like the things that businesses are after in their software development are similar to medieval alchemy. For 2500 years, the entire field that eventually became chemistry was obsessed with 3 basic questions:

1. How can we change lead (or other metals) into gold?
2. How can we create an elixir that will cure all diseases and prolong life indefinitely?
3. Can we discover a universal solvent?

All of these strike us as goals that weren't even attainable. Yet, the underlying desires often did get met when the focus shifted to what eventually became modern chemistry. By dropping the focus on the single, universal solution and just figuring out how to treat individual diseases or how to dissolve individual compounds or just fundamentally understand chemistry, many advances did happen.

Many/most of the diseases that the alchemists sought to cure or treat are under control today. There's very little in the world of chemistry that we can't tear apart and we can do things like convert coal or corn into one of the most sought after substances on earth: liquid fuel for transportation.

One of the consulting firms I worked with had a project manager that was constantly pushing the developers to find and use "automagical" tools to build our solutions. What he was after was the kind of IDE or tool that, with a few clicks, would just spit out a nearly complete solution.

That would, of course, result in the sales force being able to sell expensive solutions that could be fulfilled in minutes instead of days and weeks. It didn't matter how often I pointed out that, as a consulting company, if our clients' solutions were so simple that a few clicks and config options could solve them, they wouldn't bother coming to us: they'd just buy the software themselves.

This same person wasn't very excited about things like loosely-coupled systems and/or Service Oriented Architecture unless they also came with wizards that let you choose 4 or 5 options and they'd just spit out a fully-realized application. Yet, those approaches keep working for me as a way of looking for patterns in companies' problems and solving them quickly and completely.

Instead of looking for the tool that spits out C#, PHP, ColdFusion and Ruby, I'm looking for repeating problems like managing queues of objects to be processed. Once you have an approach to that general problem, a good developer can probably implement it in whatever language they're most comfortable with.

That's due, in large part, to the fact that the bulk of the work as a software developer is NOT in typing in the text of the programming language in question. Douglas Crockford said in one of his Yahoo video lectures something along the lines of: a developer could probably type up all of their code for an entire year in a day or 2.

Yet, many of these automagical tools really only seem to automate the stuff related to typing code, not for solving problems. And, like I said a couple of days ago, if you're in the consulting game or just looking to stay employed as a developer, the money and jobs are where the problems are.

That's why, when I hear someone looking for that quick and easy tool that will "just" take care of it this afternoon, I tend to interpret it as, "Can't we just change this lead into gold instead of getting real gold?"

Photo: Hippie Dude

When I was growing up and working on a turkey farm, and we kids would complain that the barn smelled particularly ripe, my dad would take a deep breath of that foul air and exclaim, "Smells like money to me."  And, growing up in an extended family of farmers and in rural Minnesota, I actually heard that particular statement several times a week.

Then, this week, I read a great essay on the same principle by Joel Spolsky: Where There's Muck, There's Brass, which introduced me to that great phrase. Both point to a truth in life that often, the best money is to be made doing things that people really need or want to have done, but find the task distasteful in some way. If there's a nasty, dirty, boring job, there's probably some good money in it.

It's a principle that a lot of people don't seem to grasp, particularly in its mirror view. That's where people find it hard to understand why it's so hard to make a living doing things that everyone loves to do. When a task is the kind of thing that people will do on their own and desperately PAY someone to let them do it, making a living at that task is going to be very difficult.

There's a long line of people doing exactly that for things like: stand-up comedy (dragging their friends to 3-drink minimum shows for no pay), writers submitting collections of literary short stories to publishers, rooms full of aspiring actors paying agents to get them auditions along with hundreds of others for a commercial advertising herpes medication, etc.

That's also why, like Joel says, most of the stable, paying jobs in software development aren't building fluffy social applications. Rather, they're building down-n-dirty business applications. That's where I've focused my consulting.

Instead of chasing after startup promises and thrills, I am tackling tough, gritty, messy problems for businesses and enjoying solving them.

That doesn't mean I'm not messing with the other stuff in my "spare" time. I've got several perpetual projects that I'm working on software-wise as well as puttering a bit on a novel, a podcast that I really want to get back into doing, etc.

The thing is, that I focus my business and income earning on tackling the problems that the market is clearly looking to pay for as my "day job" and do the stuff like podcasting on my own funding and own time rather than trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

There's absolutely no likelihood that I would make anywhere close to my software developer salary as an author of fiction with anything other than the Next Great American Novel. The odds are pretty close to lottery odds, in fact.

Basically, if you're out to make a good living and enjoy doing it, find the kind of work that has a bit of muck in it that you don't consider muck and you'll find a nice shiny pile of brass.