[Silhouette]

To be clear, I'm not asking because I'm concerned about my rates. I don't work full-time on contract projects as I have other business interests as well, but even when I do, I seem to be somewhere around what Patrick considered the sweet spot in terms of size of client, who I'm dealing with, etc.

I just wish that if people who have been consulting for a relatively short time themselves want to share their advice with others who might be thinking of going down that path, they would give some sort of meaningful context to guide those other people about what to expect in practice. Otherwise, we're going to have a whole load of people who were actually on perfectly respectable if not exceptional rates, who were happy doing the work they were doing, whose clients were happy with the work they were doing, and who can't conveniently tie their personal contribution to an X% increase in the total profits of their clients, yet who then think they should be charging 10x as much and start going after new clients with unrealistic expectations. In most places, the software development industry is still quite a small world, and I'm genuinely concerned that such an approach is going to damage young developers' careers.

To be frank, I'm deeply skeptical about the current round of Tim Ferriss-style "Make More Money Than God In Five Minutes" discussions on HN. There are some interesting perspectives, and I'm certainly not criticising Patrick or any of the other guys for volunteering their points of view. But I do think quite a lot of that advice is going to be hard for many people to apply in practice, because the context won't be the same, and I do think it's borderline irresponsible to push the advice in as general and unqualified a form as sometimes happens, even if it happens with the best of intentions.

[mgkimsal]

This is slightly a plug for my conference, but is also the motivation behind it.

I've been in software dev for 18 years or so. I set up a small shop 12 years ago, went bust after 4 years, then went solo again in 2007. I've not expanded beyond myself (so far), but have been hopefully getting better at what I do, both in terms of software but also business skills.

A couple of years ago I started seeing an uptick in questions from people in the area: "How much do you charge? How do you decide what to charge? How do you write a contract? How do you get clients? How should I do XYZ? What tools do you use?", etc.

People who know me know I love to talk, so I'd happily answer. I started to realize though, that I was only giving one perspective. Even when I'd qualify that perspective as "this is just my experience", it didn't help them very much. I started getting other people I knew involved in the discussions, getting their perspectives, which were sometimes vastly different than mine, and they'd arrive at different conclusions. Eye-opening to say the least.

At the point, the idea of the conference (http://indieconf.com) was born - an event to bring people together to foster the learning, Q&A and networking which helps those questions get answered with far more perspectives than I could offer on my own.

Reading a book is not necessarily bad, but being able to ask questions about those books' ideas face to face, get answers, and have discussions about those topics has worked out decently for the conference over the past couple years.