zenpaul

Family game night on Jitsi video conference.

Went from seeing my parents and siblings in person once a year to seeing them virtually every week. I'm much more involved in their joys and struggles. It's a healthy dose of laughter and silliness every week.

Two important takeaways here.

"In fact, in the fine print, the CDC’s flu numbers also include pneumonia deaths."

"If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu."

For the average person, COVID-19 is better described as "highly contagious and extra deadly pneumonia".

I can relate! I started my SourDough starter SanDy a week and a half ago and have made a couple of great loaves since then. I'm on my way to the store tonight for more flour.

The overriding thing is to "take care of each other". If they want more updates, send more updates. If they want less updates, send less updates. How do you know what they prefer? Ask them.

Communicating about communicating is underrated.

"If you write about your passion, you will never lose enthusiasm because you are creating a little corner of the internet that’s yours, you made it, you made it beautiful, and now it’s also available for everyone else, but even if no one shows up, it stands on its own."

One of the most inspirational statements I have seen in a while.

jiggawatt has a good example.

The thing is that managing inevitable scope changes is an art and a science. Some changes get accepted as part of the project, others are scoped as fixed price updates and others are very hard to scope so may be hourly. In any case this involves identifying the changes, scoping the work, estimating the work, pricing the work and then negotiating with the client to accept the pricing on the change. All of that takes time, often has little to do with the actual development and adds additional risk. That change control is the delicate balance of pleasing the customer while continuing to make money without taking on too much risk.

Yes, the consulting agencies or headhunters do just that. They do the day to day work of talking to hiring managers. Then they take their cut either when they place someone full-time or take a cut out of the hourly consulting rate.

It varies from place to place, but in the NYC metro area it is common for companies to only staff up through agencies so there is no chance to go directly to companies unless you know someone inside the company already.

Good point. From this thread it is clear that people have made a go of it with project billing in some domains. I develop enterprise business systems that are generally too large and complex to reliably estimate or manage to a fixed budget.

In any case, all it takes is one project with one unreasonable customer who demands extra work and then doesn't pay, to wipe out the gains from lucrative projects.

Also, in the long term you accumulate responsibilities like mortgages and families that makes that low-risk monthly revenue stream so important.

Good luck making $2M as a solo consultant. In order to take on projects that big and maintain your customer pipeline you almost certainly have to build a team which is what I call creating an agency.

Billing hourly or daily is about the same. Weekly gets complicated. It is all about reducing risk, locking in cashflow and getting compensated for your time and energy.

Yes, absolutely.

Also, once you get good rates, you ask for a higher rate from the next customer. If it is higher than their highest rate they tend to tell you what their highest rate is which gives you a great place to negotiate from. Like, maybe I'll take less if I can work remote 2 days a week.