Interview with John Cook: mathematical consultant
I was excited to read this as someone with a mathematical background and is now an engineer and software developer. However, I think this just calls out all the open questions about this style of consulting and doesn&#x27;t answer them. How does one get clients, how does one keep a steady income, how to invest for retirement, how does one convince clients you have the right skills, how do you know you have the rights skills, etc.?<p>Also, there are conflicting answers in that he wanted better control over income than traditional employees but then later says income can be infrequent, saving is hard, and payments come late. I have none of those issues as a salaried employee and also have retirement benefits. He also mentions that finding work is no harder than finding employment but then later said that finding work is harder than doing the work.<p>&gt; Clients often need to have a conversation with someone who thinks like a mathematician. This means carefully defining terms and focusing on the largest ones, making implicit assumptions explicit, knowing when an approximation is or is not good enough, and so forth.<p>I love to see this mentioned, but in my personal experience, this has not been valued at all. I have tried it and discussed it, but nobody has appreciated it. This is really what domain-specific design tries to get at in software engineering, but almost no one practices it.