[consulting] Salaries

[Josh McCormack]

On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 10:19 +0200, Fred Jones wrote:
<snip> 
> Very interesting also. My problem is that I am the type of person who
> can't work in an office--I must work at home (for better or for
> worse). I also can only work 20-30 hours a week, so any of these full
> time contracting jobs I have seen offered aren't for me. Well, perhaps
> I do work more, but I only BILL 20-30 hours a week. I certainly sit in
> front of my PC more than that.
> 
> I tried to create a little programming company once but business is
> not my skill--computers is.
<snip>

Fred raised a couple of great issues here. 
1. work time vs bill time. 
Your 30 hours of billable time might be 60 hours of work. Most people
I've worked with don't feel comfortable billing clients for failed
experiments, setting up their dev environment, training hours, etc. This
doesn't mean that working as an employee somewhere will mean bankers
hours, either. 

2. programming & new biz dev
I was a programmer, then a project manager, now I run my own shop. I
tried running my own thing previously and failed, because I wasn't able
to devote enough time to talk to clients and potential clients - I had
to spend too much time doing actual development. This may not be true
for everyone, but I think for many it's difficult to pull off both and
you're best off working with someone - again not necessarily as an
employee.

-  
Josh McCormack
Owner, InteractiveQA
Social Network Development & QA testing
http://www.interactiveqa.com
917.620.4902