What the difference between Consulting and Contracting
In regards to programming, what is the difference between being a contractor, and a consultant? ...
consulting
How do you get new clients for freelance / contracting / consulting work?
I'm curious as to how many of you Flowers work for yourself or for a tiny independent web development shop. Other than the obvious network, network, network and cold calls/emails what other inventive ways are there to get new clients? Anybody ever get clients from attending conferences and handing your card out to everybody? ...
Best way to license Microsoft software as an independent developer
I've recently switched from being an employee of a small consulting company to being an independent consultant and as time goes on I will need to upgrade Windows and Visual Studio. So what is the most affordable way to go about this for a small time developer? My previous boss suggested I get a TechNet Plus subscription for OS licenses,...
What are the ethics of time management while working for pay?
This is a daily question, for me, and I think one that is applicable to any professional programmer, especially those who, like myself, work for consulting firms and may have insane amounts of money billed for each hour they work. How do you deal with the fact that if I get a call from my wife and talk for 10 minutes, that's $30 of my c...
How do I name a consulting company?
At some point, I'd like to follow some of the advice on SOFlow and start my own small consulting / software shop. (Consulting because it's easy to get work, software because it scales much better.) I understand the naming behind "Less Everything" - they make minimalist products. But where does "37 Signals" come from? And "Fog Creek"?...
Billing for phone calls
I have an arrangement with a couple of my regular clients whereby there's a regularly scheduled conference call to chat about various work being done and also new stuff coming down the pipe. At first I never billed for this time, since some of it was spent on sales-y stuff like discussing potential new projects, etc. It also just seemed...
How has the economy affected consultants and freelancers?
I was wondering if people across the country are seeing similarly steep drops in consulting business as we have seen in Los Angeles over the summer. Maybe I shouldn't have watched the CNN reports on the DOW dropping almost 1000 points in two days. How is your pipeline looking? Do you have big customers putting projects on hold? ...
What tools do you use for small, distributed teams?
I started distributed team work with Basecamp, moved over to Unfuddle to integrate issue management and SVN repositories with basic project management, and now I'm hearing a lot about assembla with support for Git, Mercurial, and Scrum reporting. What is your preferred platform for working in a small distributed team? It seems that the...
Is it better to be paid by the project or hourly?
I've recently gotten offers from several clients who are throwing consulting/contract work at me. (this is what we call a high quality problem). The problem is the most interesting ones will take an unknown amount of time and typically clients get upset when stuff doesn't get done FAST. This goes into the fact that consulting/contract ...
How do you deal with clients who have no processes, have no methodology and ask for things to be done for yesterday?
As a consultant you are sometimes thrown into difficult situations. How do you deal with clients who have no processes, have no methodology and ask for things to be done for yesterday even though they do not fully know what they want? How can such a situation be identified before you get committed to a project? ...
When is it better to hire a specialist or consultant instead of learning on the fly?
Our agency recently had the opportunity to bid on a project where the client's in-house programmers were dead set on using Sharepoint. According to our communications they had already installed it, and wanted to port old PHP code piece-by-piece over to this platform. This was primarily to take advantage of the CMS capabilities, but I am ...
"Firefighter" consulting, getting a project released
I am about to start working for a new customer who asked for a "firefighter" to help his only developer finish a product due at the end of the month. While I am confident I will do fine from a technical point of view, I could use some advice regarding the best way to "educate" this developer without sounding too pedantic. Have you ever...
price of a web site
I am looking into starting a project on the side building web pages for people and businesses. This will not be my primary job (unless demand far exceeds my expectations) I am wondering what type of pricing model I should adopt that will be fair. Is a flat price by site or by page better or should I charge by the hour? ...
Full-time programmer or software development consultant?
In your opinion and experience, what's best - working full-time and long-term for one company, or part-time short-term on many smaller projects or parts of projects? What do you think are the pros and cons of both? I heard that being a consultant is more profitable and one would pick up more experience. Does that beat an 8 hours by 5 da...
Should I create a business for the side work / consultancy work I am getting?
I'm getting some rather serious consulting work on the side of my main job. Serious in that I'm filling out NDAs and service agreements for the small-ish company I'm being contracted by. The guy I'm getting the work from wanted to know if I had a business to associate the work/payments/contract with, and when I said no he somewhat recom...
How should I decide rates and negotiate as a contractor?
I am planning on starting out doing consulting in the bay area. I would like to know how do you guys decide on consulting rates for a project and how do you go about negotiating them with a client? ...
Working on site for a client?
Is mobilizing the implementation team to the client site to do the full cycle of implementation recommended? In other words, what are the pros and cons of working on client site other than in our own offices? If it is recommended, what are the proper environment requirements I may ask the client to provide for my team? ...
How do I make my customers not like me too much?
In 2004 I went to work for a consulting firm because I like variety, challenges, working with new technologies, etc. However, I've been a developer for 25 years - and spent the majority of my career as a direct-hire (12 years) then as an independent consultant for another 3 years (ah the DotCom bubble!) for one firm. So my instincts ar...
How to convince a client that "expensive" is "cheaper"?
Many clients see only the "per hour" price and go "eek" and choose a "cheaper" coder to do the job. Very often these clients ends up with a complete MESS because they wanted to save a couple of bucks per hour. Just because one consultant charges $100 - $200 per hour does not mean he is more expensive for the client. One coder might do t...
What strategies can a layman use to measure the development process?
Hi, I'm consulting at a traditional business that has almost zero understanding of software development. They are justifiably concerned about how to measure our progress, & productivity and are currently looking for way to measure this. Obviously, I'm concerned they will adopt some easy to measure, but bogus strategy. (ie: Lines of C...