Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 32: Why Would You Do Contracting?

Episode Date: October 26, 2016

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer this question: Why would a developer leave a full time job to do consulting or contracting? It just so happens that Jamison did this a few months ago, and he shares his experience in making the transition.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering Episode 32. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I am your host, Jameson Dance. It's great to be with you, Jameson. It is great to be with you. Dave, this is your first day of non-employment in years. How does it feel? I'm actually surprisingly busy. Okay. That was my experience too. I was way busier after I quit my job i have so much to do just so everyone knows i do have a job lined up but i gave myself one week between jobs to get a bunch of stuff done cool should we dive into our first question yeah let's do it why don't you go ahead before actually you know what before we do that we

haven't talked about what this podcast is in a while i think we just assume everyone knows if you're listening for the first time this is a podcast where we uh take questions from listeners about soft skills related to programming or software development so anything non-technical yep we answer a couple each week and we are going to answer two right now and i'll say that i thought this was going to be a small subject that we would exhaust in about three or four weeks and we're now on week 32 and there's really no end in sight like the questions just keep pouring in on new and interesting subjects i've been amazed someday we'll solve soft skills though and that's a wrap then we'll move on to javascript frameworks and it will never end all right all right here is the

first question so this is uh from listener arturo i believe this is the second question we've had answered from arturo if i remember i didn't look it up but the name rings a bell he says what are the reasons an engineer would leave a job they love to do contract work so we picked this question because this is basically what i did about five months ago has it been five months i think so what's the date it's october of 2016 it hasn't been five months okay i don't know time flies when you're contracting though sure does uh time flies when you can't do dates in your head it's been a few months time flies when you have daylight savings time bugs in your code uh i would say the main reason for me was freedom william wallace style

screaming at the top of your lungs freedom is william wallace the the scottish braveheart guy is that irish scottish i'm so uncultured it's braveheart okay braveheartish yeah he's from the country of Braveheart okay actually it was interesting when I quit like right when I quit I still didn't quite understand why I didn't work there anymore I just knew I wasn't happy and wanted to quit and so I would try out all these different explanations when people would ask me why I quit and and basically all of them kind of fell away and didn't feel right and the one that was left behind was I just wanted to do my own thing uh and that's okay yeah that's been the main the main motivator for me basically basically saying you can't control me not even

in that kind of way it's not like i was being micromanaged or anything i just there there are a lot of things to learn by doing everything yourself and i want to learn those things by doing sales and by doing keeping clients happy and by uh doing some marketing stuff by doing like project management type of stuff with the clients. And I don't know, there are just all these new problems to explore. And I think it's fun to work with them all. Interesting. Would you say that your soft skills are being exercised more or less now that you're on your own? Way more. Although this is because I wasn't in a management role when I left. So maybe if you were in a management role, that wouldn't be the case. But just going from a

developer to uh i don't know i guess i get to say entrepreneur they're they're used way more all of them like time management productivity stuff uh people skills everything and it's all stuff i enjoy doing another thing is i've i've wanted to dabble in entrepreneurship but often a common path to that is you'll save up a bunch of money quit and then work on your product idea while living off your savings or or you'll take like a giant income hit and those are not things that i want to do right now so freelancing is a pretty comfortable path to doing your own thing without taking an income hit or even going the other direction i usually i usually call those kinds of projects your first big failure what what do you mean well you know

those like what is it like some statistic like only one in a hundred of those ideas actually come out successful right oh yeah but like freelancing it works out like a lot it's like seems like it the coward's way to entrepreneurship the coward's entrepreneur yeah there needs to be a word for that like cowardpreneur i'm an entre coward i mean other benefits like i haven't worn pants in weeks i i basically wear gym shorts all day it's so comfy and then and then i'll have to go somewhere and put on pants and be like man this really this sucks why do these exist so when was the last time you left the house jameson oh i left yesterday that's pretty good for it i have not left for coward i fear failure and also the blinding light of the sun of the day star

so james and what were some of the reasons that you thought you were leaving for that you tried out on people but that fell away well stupid ones were like oh there were a couple issues with the company and and those very quickly uh i mean even while i was there i knew okay everywhere has issues these are relatively minor in in the grand scheme of things uh those definitely fell away i gave like a big shoulder shrug to a few people and that fell away oh i don't know oh like you're like i don't know why i'm doing this yeah i don't i don't know introspection is not my strong point um i all i know is i woke up one day and i didn't work there anymore introspection is not my strong point i like that that that sentence that's like that's like a

paradox you're like i've been paying attention to myself a long time and i've realized that i'm no good at introspection the sentence is a lie yeah uh what was another one i think it was like wanting to do a different kind of work or work in a different technology that was when i briefly thought was the reason and it totally wasn't uh interestingly the technology actually matters way less now that i'm doing my own thing like i'm working in stuff that if i could choose at a job it was like pick your pick your tool this would be um pretty far down really interesting yeah but because it's got a bunch of different interesting things it's it's worth it that's interesting because a lot of companies advertise when they're trying to recruit developers by stating the new

hot technology that you'll get to use if you come join us and you're saying that as an entrecoward it's just not as interesting not so far it's it's it's more like there are other incredibly interesting things about this particular client okay okay make that tool fall away from okay from importance and i mean if i could snap my fingers and do it in a different thing i would but it's it's worth it because of other uh other fun things that that happen there so talk to us a little bit about money so i'm i'm completely i'm just a coward not even an untra coward i've never i've never really done freelancing aside from a few like nights and weekends here and there over the last 15 years talk to us about a little bit about the money

situation like have are you making more money now uh yeah i think so so i think with taxes and benefits and everything this period of a few months it will kind of be about the same but the path to making more is is super clear one thing that i did that i would not recommend is uh i quit and then i took like two months of basically doing nothing well it wasn't nothing i was running a conference and i was doing a bunch of other stuff but i wasn't looking for consulting work incredibly seriously and so it was a long time between when i quit and when i got my first paycheck of like client work uh and that was a little stressful it ended up being stressful most people when they quit they have a first contract lined up in retrospect if i knew my

plan that's what i would do um but now that now that money is flowing it's it's fine and it's i think it'd be pretty easy to make more than i made even counting all the extra taxes and all the benefits that your employer pays and all that stuff i was gonna say why don't you let us know how that goes after about april 15th 2017 yeah yeah well i can i mean i can talk about boring stuff like i talked to my accountant he said set aside conservatively 30 you might pay a little less than that but that's a pretty decent for for the tax bracket you look like you'll be in that's a pretty decent amount to set aside for taxes um and then in addition to that there's health insurance although if you're in america this is all american specific united states specific stuff

you can deduct your health insurance costs from your taxes but there's other stuff like um 401k that kind of thing that i don't know you just do so it ends up being less of a hit than i thought it would be but it still is a hit compared to employment did you set aside a sizable sum of money to pay me as your life coach oh two answers to that yes and also uh there's a whole new genre of of writing that i thought was horrible and stupid that i consume now with glee and it's all that boring business life coach productivity garbage and some of it is still horrible but I've actually, I used to just look at it and like sneer and now I look at it and most of it is horrible and nonsense, but, but I sift through it to try and find good stuff.

Cool. Like life coach is a thing I've made fun of a lot and I will never, uh, use a life coach probably. Well, except me, of course. Well, yeah. Besides, well, no one could ever replace your position as chief life coach. So you're saying the reason you would never use a life coach is because you already have a great one.

Yes. but but i could see the appeal of that kind of advice a little bit more because there the the scope of unknowns has just expanded radically compared to when i was a full-time employee because there's so many people whose job it is to make sure you focus on the stuff you're you're specialized in when you're working there's hr people and strategic people worrying about the strategy of the company and marketing people and i don't know i just do all that stuff myself now so uh advice is more helpful because there are a lot more things i know nothing about oh cool so i've heard as i've talked to people who have done what you've done and left a full-time gig

and worked contract a surprising number of them have said i could never work for anyone ever again like oh man i couldn't see it now you can so you're saying that now that you've done it you can see that yeah yeah yeah i i couldn't see myself working for someone someone full-time unless some some major things changed interesting it's just it's so nice to control your day and your week and your month completely and that that has trade-offs right it's easy to um use that control and do bad things either you don't work enough or you over commit yourself and then you work like crazy the second thing has definitely happened to me several times already. I've worked way more hours after quitting my job than I ever did at a full-time job. And

there's been some killer weeks. But I'd still take it for the chance to just like turn my computer off for a couple hours in the middle of day and hang out with my baby and then turn it back on and not feel guilty at all and not feel like I'm letting the team down or I get these special privileges or I don't know. I just do what I want and what I think is best. I wonder how much of our emotional energy is consumed in generating signals for the rest of our team when we work on a full time you know full time at a company so for me personally a lot of it was because i i do i run a conference i run a meetup i do a couple podcasts like there's a lot of non-work stuff i do and and sometimes i would have to do things during work hours to to work on those things and then i'd make

it up and i'd work extra or get things done at home but it just feels weird even though even though if you tell your team like hey i'm working extra to make up for this um it still feels weird yeah i've had that experience actually a big source of stress for me huh interesting and so now now that you are on the other side of that you've shed that stress because there's basically no expectation right from anyone yeah uh-huh except your baby who's like set my baby dad hold me now why will you not let me eat these pills well that's really cool i appreciate you sharing your experience i feel like i just interviewed you i feel like i just rambled so perfect we're even also i'll be selling you sending you an

invoice for the last 30 minutes later on today for this life coaching session happy to to pay Also, I only provide life coaching services for people who are trying to fail completely. So if that's you, you know, I might be able to help you out. I'm worried I'm going to make everyone jealous by being so successful. If you could help temper that, that'd make me feel better. So I guess to summarize, freedom is the main thing. I also have some desire to build a thing and kind of run stuff myself. and i guess this falls into the coward preneurship thing that this is a pretty easy

fairly low risk path to achieve that so cool well question answered arturo let us know if you decide to go into contract work we'd love to hear about it there are so many other things to talk about besides why i mean there's all we didn't talk about any of the house stuff that is a gigantic subject that most people are still figuring out definitely myself included and because you are most people are sure jameson is utterly representative of the entire human race well jameson how can people find out more about our show and support soft skills engineering they can go to our website softskills.audio where they can find past episodes and that is uh i don't think there's much else on the website actually um another way to support us is by tweeting about

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look to your left look to your right the cars on either side roll down your window shout at them to listen to the podcast all right well thanks for listening catch you next week