How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting
This post is great advice if you want to work doing consulting for large companies run by MBAs/business people that view technology as "IT": a tool for solving business problems. I'd guess 90% of programmers earn their living this way, so I agree with it, to a first approximation.What Patrick doesn't acknowledge is the huge role of culture/norms in business, and how these differ based on geographic region, and the backgrounds of the founders.Revenue and profit attribution are human processes that involve a lot of bias. If a salesperson sells twice as much product, should he earn twice as much compensation? How does marketing's work on improving the company's positioning/messaging, engineering's product work, and/or the overall state of the economy factor into this calculation? Who really "created business value" here?The other problem is bigness: as companies get bigger, it's way harder to measure whose contribution is helping the company succeed, whereas it's a lot more obvious when only a handful of people are involved.I'm an engineer, but I work at a product company. If the product is better, it sells more, and we get compensated more, along with sales, marketing, and the whole team. People in Chicago (where I grew up) still bring this dumb 19th century management model to their companies, and it's exactly why (1) all the best innovators and engineers head to the west coat, and (2) why I personally got the hell out of there. I wanted to be a professional programmer, someone who made peoples' lives better by shipping a superior product, and get compensated accordingly, not some IT lackey selling some nebulous concept of 'business value' to some feet-on-the-desk small-business-owning ex-investment banker who wouldn't know the difference between Objective-C and HTML.