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How to Become an IT Expert Companies Seek Out and Pay Well (Video)
This video is an interview with Matt Heusser, who makes a good living as an independent IT consultant. He says many other people who are currently pounding out code or performing other routine computer-oriented tasks can become independent, too. He's not selling a course or anything here, just passing on some advice to fellow Slashdot readers. He's written up some of this advice in a series of four articles: Getting People to Throw Money At You; How to become IT Talent; That Last Step to Become ‘Talent’ In IT; and The Schwan’s Solution. He also gave a speech last November titled Building your reputation through creative disobedience. (The link is to a 50 minute video of that speech.) Anyway, we figure quite a few Slashdot readers are at least as smart as Matt and may want to take some career steps similar to the ones he has taken. In today's video, he gives you some ideas about how to stop being an IT worker and how to become IT talent instead.
PHD is over kill for most IT jobs and one can be a trun off to HR as you come off as needing a very high pay.
IT needs more hand on learning not years in the class room and more tech schools.
I learned from Wally.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
.... A lot of "I'm so awesome because I've figured out this obvious thing all on my own" and not much "here's how you can be awesome too"...
I did short term 'gigs' as an IT guy back in the early 90's... I was getting $150/hr back then resurrecting SunOS filesystems, setting up backup regimens, installing new disks, NIS, plotters, firewalls, blah blah blah... The problem with it is, while the money is great, it's rarely for a full 40 hour week because someone wants you to come over tuesday at 9:30 to upgrade a disk in some computer... You haven't started bright and early and it should take you a couple hours unless something goes wrong, so you can't book something else until maybe late afternoon the same day... Suddenly you find you've made $300 that day, or maybe $600 if you're lucky... Lots of 1-2hr billable days... Sometimes you score and get a couple of 15 hour weeks... You're still making chump change and you're generating a lot of small invoices... Sure, it's 20 years later so your billable rate has gone up but your cost of living has as well... You're good so you get a lot of word-of-mouth new clients and if you don't piss off any of the existing ones, you should be able to be fairly busy; but there's still a limit to what you can reasonably do in a single day...
Cut forward, and I picked up some 1-3 month 'gigs'... Good money. But suddenly you've lost your big handful of faithful clients because you're stuck servicing one client for 3 months so your other clients have lined up other people to do their small work... Now you've got to line up your next gig after you've finished the present one... It's rare to go from gig to gig so you end up sitting around for a month, maybe picking up a few short day things at $200/hr... You're still not breaking 6 figures... (again, this is now the late 90s early 2000's)...
Now I've got a 5 year contract gig at an embedded linux shop doing board bringups, bsp's, drivers, et'al... This has been super lucrative, super easy, relatively interesting, and I get to go home at the end of the day not thinking about work....
(AC because I don't feel like going through password retrieval)
It's not a job, it's not employment, it's business. I sincerely doubt HR even know he's done work there.
I'm a contractor, I go in to solve their problems, US $90 an hour, when I'm done, I'm done. The Invoice is in the post.
I never have to interface with HR, I'm not looking for Health Insurance, Gym membership or any of that stuff, leave that too the employees.
If I had a PhD then it would probably go quite a way for me, might not get a potential employee too far, but then that's not what PhDs are for!
Repeat until you understand: 'There is no such thing as permanent employment.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This. Why is this even an article? It is just a blatant advertisement.
Semi-successful people hack hardware and software, but very successful people hack other people.
I spent 25 years in IT consultancy before starting my own business. The following are my tips:
Perhaps you have never understood what it is to have secure employment
What are you talking about - tenure? Otherwise, pretty much nobody has secure employment. If you pretend otherwise, you're a fool.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Perhaps you have never understood what it is to have secure employment and to have the ability to plan long-term with more certainty than any consultancy would allow.
"Job Security" means your employer is underpaying you so much he can afford you keep you around no matter what happens. There is no free lunch. Nobody is being nice to you. It just means you earn so little, it's cheaper to keep paying you than to hire and train someone else.
My wife's current job hunt has produced two offers: $73K working for the state, or $240K at a private company. Same job, same applicant pool, same requirements. The non-salary benefits are comparable. The only difference is the state job is practically guaranteed for life, but the private sector job could be 6 months or 15 years.
In financial terms, "job security" is just an insurance policy. The premiums get deducted from your paycheck and you never even see them. How much is it costing you? If you don't know the amount off the top of your head, it's likely to be costing you far more than you would ever imagine.
A PhD means you've been trained to do academic research, and mapping that skill set to non-academic environments can be problematical at best (especially in CS). While you might assume that someone who has earned a PhD is more able to do things like "reasonable design and architecture", many employers will assume the opposite: that you live in a world of abstract algorithmics, and the mundane skills involved in producing real software are beneath you. Both assumptions are equally bogus.
True, but there is a world of difference in what you can plan if the interval is 20 years vs 2 years vs 2 months.
At two months, you are always selling, which is a whole job unto itself (often a hated one) on top of the "real" job.
At two years, you never forget about the selling but you don't have to deal with it all the time. Makes it hard to make long term commitments though.
At 20 years, long term commitments are pretty easy and you can actually forget about selling. This can be a problem when it actually ends.
But there is no such thing as an interval of 20 years, or even 2 years for that matter. At any point in time, even the very next day an employer can say to you "Sorry, your redundant". So to actually believe you have even 2 years of job security is a pure fantasy.
I have been a contractor for 15 years and have planned for 15 years because I know from practical experience that I have more job security doing what I do than any person who has what they call permanent employment. When I move to another contract I bring with me a wealth and bredth of experience, plus a guaranteed track record that practically ensures me a job, plus recent and repeated interview practice.... those with permanent employment are out of touch with interviewing, and only have a stagnant and unchanging level of experience where they have sat there doing the same thing day in and day out for years.
The simple fact is, nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, its the tools and experience you build TODAY which will give you more security than some misguided belief that your permanency equates to anything.
Even take redundancy.... people may argue that if they are made redundant they are given a payout which gives them time to find a new job... sorry to burst your bubble, but I earn 3 times what permanents earn, I have already built up that buffer several times over, so I have already put a contingency in place in the event I am without work (something that has only happened a total of about 8 weeks in 15 years), while those who foolishly believe they are "safe" don't have any contingency in place at all, nor have the funds available to put one in to cover them in the worst case.
I am staggered that people cannot see this? thought meta-thinking about it, I guess for those who ARE permanent, they have to believe that being permanent is the best option, otherwise they would be admitting to themselves they are not achieving their own potential and are purposely undercutting themselves. So it is easier to generate justifications for them staying where they are, than actually admitting they lack the confidence and belief in their own skills that they would be able to maintain a contracting lifestyle.
Don't get me wrong... there is nothing wrong with working a straight 9-to-5 if thats what suits you... but please don't try to convince yourself there is any more safety in it than there is in contract work.... and certanily don't try to convince yourself that you even have an interval of 2 years in which you can plan.... Do you know how many people will be fired tomorrow who thought they had 2 years? EVERYBODY thinks they have time right up until they are put off, and yuo have absolutely no control over how/when/where this will happen. So if you think its better to just cilng to the belief you are safe rather than actually developing your career around overcoming any possible outcome IN ADVANCE.... my hat off to you!
It gives benefits to the old/sick people at the expense of the young/healthy people. That's the whole point of forcing everyone to buy the insurance, whether they want/need it or not.
Yes. It's called the Social Contract. We give up some liberty and treasure to society, so that the society we live in can be enhanced *for all of us*. Those young, healthy people will one day be old and infirm. Or are you unable to grasp the cycle of life?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr