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Tim Abell & (sometimes) David Sheardown look for ways to help you solve your problems with computer things.
Send us a voice message: https://www.speakpipe.com/ssbf
- https://timwise.co.uk/
- https://twitter.com/davidsheardown
Hello and welcome to another software should be free with myself team Able and our
special guest Neil Millard who has recently released a new book called Confident Contractor
which fits nicely with what I get out to these days.
Neil is DevOps Professional of the Year 2024 which is very impressive.
Currently at HMRC I believe, correct me if I'm wrong.
That's right.
Cool, with a specialism in cloud deployment, Terraform, AWS, lander Python, ECS, Atmesh,
automation, scaling, security and from what I see of the biography, quite a long history
and all sorts of other things as well.
And also the author of Who Moved My Servers which I'm starting to be able to make.
But mainly we're going to talk about contracting because the new book is Confident Contractor
so hello Neil and welcome to the show.
Hello Tim.
Cool.
Yeah.
All right, let's get right into it.
So I think I want to start with a bit about who is Neil.
So obviously contracting is a thing for Neil.
But I've read a bit but I'd like to hear from you.
What was your journey to the current contracting and authoring?
What would be a...
As far back as you want to go?
Wow, that's a long way back.
Let's not quite go all the way to my birth, that would be too far wouldn't it?
And I guess I entered the IT industry as a professional in about 95 which is quite a long
time ago now.
And I found that whilst I was in like what you would call a traditional job, things situations
happened like I was made redundant after two years and then I went for another job, found
one pretty easy.
Two years after that I then got made redundant again which someone would say is I'm
lucky but I would say hang on this is thing called two years maybe that's a sign that I could
get a two year contract.
And maybe you had two two year permanent jobs from the start of your career.
Just paying a picture for me because that predates me about in terms of my career sort of started
around 2000 just around the dot com crash.
So okay.
What did the tech industry look like from your perspective then in terms of technology and
business and kind of let's just how it felt and how well known contracting was as I
saying from what you saw?
So 95 is kind of the birth of the internet in order to give a good anchor for when that
was.
And we're talking Intel 486's which is not a very fast chip by today standards.
And whilst I'd been programming as a hobbyist on stuff like speckies and BBC microse.
I entered the industry as a trainee and that meant working on shop equipment like tills
and printers and things like that.
And so it was like not the desirable way to get into it I guess but it was a way in and
I was very green in terms of working because I hadn't been in the workforce for that long
either.
It's been a trainee.
And so there was a few consultancies so I worked as a third party consultancy originally
part of thorny MI.
So they were if you like the support arm of thorny MI's hardware kit.
So if you were a shop like like a wasis.
I don't know if I don't think I'm still around anymore but they used to sell clothes as a
clothes shop.
You know you'd walk in lots of hangers and stuff and there'd be a little till in the corner
that would take you.
You mean the shop not the brand?
Not the band.
Not the band now.
Right.
No the shop, the clothes shop.
And you could as a shop you would buy semi-pause equipment, electronic putter sale and
then you'd have a support contract for somebody to come in and look after that.
And so I was working for one of those companies that looked after the tills after it went
in and that was great fun because I learned lots and lots about hardware because previous
to that I hadn't really dabbed in hardware at all.
It was all software side things.
And doing lots of miles in a drive in between being queues and all sorts and things like
that.
And the reason why I was made redundant from that job is at the end of two years I got
promoted to being a real engineer.
You know how to do in the two years of training.
Got put on a contract with one of the water companies who then decided they were going
to insource everything.
So they sacked the third party provider and hired their own people internally in order
to look after their stuff.
Yeah a common story at the moment.
Yeah so there s always that cycle everything goes in cycles.
Insourcing and outsourcing, outsourcing which ones better.
Well if you ve got eight quid by ten pounds worth of bananas it needs is better.
You can end up short every time.
So yeah that s how the first one came to an end.
So then I got another job and then this one s a little bit more convoluted but ultimately
they outsourced which is kind of crazy.
So I was working for an internal IT department because I thought oh everyone s insourcing
therefore I ll be safe on an internal department right.
No they then decided to go the other way and outsourced to one of the big, one of the
big IT companies who were based out of Bristol and then they made me and several others redundant
as a result of cost savings I guess you would call them.
So then I figured well this permanent job stuff isn t that permanent is it?
So I m not as well go contracting and at least I know in theory when it s going to come to
an end and apparently contractors get paid more which at that time there was quite differential
between what you would get paid as a permanent employee and what you could earn as a contractor.
So how much was that tax and how much was that just difference in day rate, equivalent
day rate?
Roughly, I know, not too difficult.
A bit, both really.
So as a per me I think we re talking a few years ago now we re talking something like 27
grand a year as a per me and as a day rate if you translated that directly I think that
something like 130 pound a day.
I don t know if I m into the rest of the ship might be a bit off there but in that charity
the day rates were nearer 250 so nearly double what you could get as a per me and it is not
quite that good now unfortunately but that s where it goes you know these market forces tend
to balance out but yeah back then it was quite, see there s very, very high risk to be an
IT contractor because it was mainly based around project work.
So you get a load of people.
Now I was in the industry when we had the Y2K bug and so there s a lot of people that are
hired in order to fix this bug in software and stuff because it couldn t count more than
10 and then as soon as it rolled over to sort of 8,000 to 2000 you just had a big supply
of IT contractors on the market because not because there was any big layoff so in Hank
to do the economy and thing but there was just no project work anymore and so that had an
effect on day rates I did expect but again nowhere near as bad as it has been during COVID
you know we do have to talk in completely different reasons and stuff.
Yeah it was kind of old for me because I joined the workforce at that point I joined so I
finished uni in 2000 so I would have been after exams and I was like April May so pretty much
co-incident with that.
I joined the market but I had no expectations.
I was like oh someone s going to pay me for to do something cool.
I didn t really have any credentials like I d like to program at uni so for me it was like
start of the bottom and work up so I didn t kind of affect me personally so it s really
interesting to hear the perspective from like before that and then coming through it.
So contracting was a known thing originally.
Like how well, like within, because it was a much smaller IT community at the time wasn t
it like it s enormous now.
Yeah, yeah because you kind of had a bunch of communities and really you had London
and what they called the, well did they call it anything?
They might call it a Silicon corridor or something but basically it s talking to them
for which is Reading, Braxton or Swindon.
That s kind of where all the companies were you had Microsoft and Oracle, Siemens, that
kind of HP, you know, all that kind of mix.
Yeah, and Microsoft and Oracle are still there at the time, sorry, but yeah indeed.
And you know, contrast that with now in GA you s still got a big London following but
you ve got stuff popping up most notably in Manchester and quite a lot in Bristol and if
we spread our wings a little bit further than that it took in sort of leads, Cardiff a little
bit, I d an edit, as I ve seen a few in Edinburgh as well, which is interesting.
Yeah, it seemed to be IT pretty much everywhere though.
Yeah, it s definitely true.
And obviously the post COVID spread, like that drawer of London has diminished a bit and
people have gone to the home counties and the coasts and the things.
Still servicing London clients.
Sure, yeah, the geography has changed completely.
It s not really what it was anymore, you know, I don t think we ve even got capacity and
offices to get everyone in at the same time.
Yeah, I don t know, there s certainly not the right shaped offices from what I ve been
hearing.
And some slightly odd, just to go off on that dandruff it, and slightly odd practices like
I m hearing all of these things were like, they ve decided that we re going to be like
two days a week in the office but we re not going to say what two days a week in the
office, everyone has to go in the office for two days and sit on headsets to all the people
that aren t.
Yeah, make a sense at all, it s completely ridiculous.
And on the flip side, like if they do like go, oh, well, you know, Thursday s day s day so
we can all see each other, then there s not enough room, there s not enough meeting space.
They ve got the wrong kind of setup, my view.
So yeah, it s definitely growing pains on that, hopefully common sense will prevail and
they ll provide the right shape offices and the right sort of schedules.
We shall see.
What about the IR-35 thing that is a current pain point?
Was that, because that was introduced originally in the late 90s, wasn t it?
What was your original awareness of that as a, as a thing?
I don t really remember it being a thing until sort of 2016, or something like that.
I think that was when they changed it to be more rigorous, wasn t it?
That I think it existed in some form?
Yeah.
But I wasn t worried about it.
I mean, it kind of all appears because somebody says, if you re doing the same job, you
should be paying the same amount of tax.
Yeah.
And is that okay?
But that completely ignores all of the other factors, like contracts are short lived,
potentially.
And you ve got to pay for your own training.
You don t get holiday pay, you don t get sick pay and all of these things.
So it s not really comparing apples and apples at all.
Yeah.
There s so much risk.
I literally was working on a client and their stuff was slow, so I bought a much faster
machine so I could actually get anything done.
That s a significant outlaw.
Yeah.
Yeah, you used your own equipment.
And you have to pay for everything as a contractor.
So yeah, it s an odd situation, but yeah, about 2016 when I was aware of it.
And I think that s when they made it more rigorous for the public sector.
Right.
Yeah, they tested it out there, didn t they?
Yeah, which is kind of funny, because I and a bunch of colleagues were working at H.
Marcy at the time.
Right.
And they sent out quite a few letters saying you re exempt from my 35.
Huh.
Yeah, how does that work?
Can it listen to sound fair?
Interesting.
So they can go after the other government departments, of course.
But they won t have to the BBC hard and they won.
Yeah, that was a big one.
Yeah.
And I think that s the government department is a different question.
Yes, very fluffy line there.
Yeah, let s not go to that one.
What about the limited company structure?
Because when I arrived in contracting in 2012, like that was just a given.
Like, if you want to go contracting, you set up a limited company.
Has that always been the case for your knowledge?
Or is that a, because I mean, there are options, the sole trader and partnership and
what have you, but I don t think anyone would take a contractor on without a limited company
currently?
No.
And I think that s primarily around insurance.
So as a contractor, you are again, it s a big difference between being a paid job and
being a contractor.
If something goes wrong, you're personally liable for it.
Yeah, if you write some software and it inadvertently kills somebody, then you get the
liability for that because you wrote the software.
Yeah.
No, more realistically loses the company millions of pounds or has a day to breach or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, that s a less extreme example.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, there s a monetary loss.
Oh my god, you introduced a bug.
You pushed out to live and our systems aren t live for two days.
Yeah.
We got to have that.
We have some short-term.
We have a short-term.
We have a short-term.
We have a short-term.
Yeah.
And so put in the contract within limited company, limits your liability.
Yep.
I mean, that s the whole point of having a limited company is so that it limits how much you're
on the line for in terms of monthly value, whether you're looking to protect any asset.
You know, if you're investing in property, you can put that in a limited company because
then if that property then goes, you know, goes south or one key or whatever, they can only
sue the company for the assets that it has got and it doesn t affect anything outside
the company.
So as a contractor, you wouldn t want to be a sole trader because that gives you an unlimited
liability.
Yeah.
Same for partnership.
Doesn t give you any protection, but you can have a limited liability partnership, which
is another structure.
But as soon as you mention partnerships, you're then talking about more than one person.
And then you're into the MSP rules and I'm trying to see what is in this piece and for
managed service provider, I think.
Something like that, yeah.
So there's also a bunch of other legislation around managed service providers that limits
what they can do.
And so if you're seen as, you know, you fall into those brackets, then yeah, there's the
whole other raft of legislation that you have to look out for.
So that's why you don't see that very much?
So the limited company pretty much is the anyway, if you're outside of I/O35 and if you're inside
I/O35, then you tend to sit under an umbrella because then they tax you correctly in the
very corners.
Yeah, that's quite a modern thing, isn t after they finally tighten some of the last screws
on that particular legislation?
Sure.
But when I first entered contracting, I did go through an umbrella route, an umbrella's
existed way back then.
So that was always available?
Yeah, that was always available because, you know, as somebody entering a new thing, let's
call it a thing, shall we?
You're into a new thing, which your happens to be contracting.
There's lots of variables that you don't know about.
There's loads of mistakes you could make like, how do you run an open limited company?
How do you create one?
You know, what are the rules and stuff about running one?
Who do you need for a port to?
All this sort of stuff.
And you just want to focus on doing your best for the contract you've just signed.
You might not want all of that distraction to learn more about.
And so, using an umbrella company enables you just to focus on the work and not focus
on the admin.
And so, you know, that's the way I went in because it allowed me to explore the other stuff
that I needed to know about being a contractor without having to know everything all at once.
Yeah, that exactly matches my approach and experience.
Having quit a permanent job in 2012 to go contracting, as it were, I did exactly the same.
I took a contract through an umbrella company on a low-ish rate.
And I didn't have the mental capacity to go and figure out how to run a limited company
at the time.
The contracting was very new, bit scary, bit daunting.
And then I knew it was less tax-efficient.
But I just didn't want to take all of that on at once.
And it was considerably simpler, like signed up with this company that sorted the payroll
and sorted out all the taxes and made sure that was all straight.
You know, I don't know, I can't remember how the invoicing worked, but did some work.
Money went in there.
Money came into my bank account.
All taxes paid, all sorted, all through the right routes.
And I think I did, I don't know, a few months doing that.
And then conveniently that contract ended.
I was like, okay, cool, yes, I'm definitely cool with this kind of risk profile than doing
contracting.
I like this as a thing.
I like the kind of show up, show you value, get rewarded for it, take on a project as
a specific fixed term thing.
I'm going to keep doing this and then set up the limited company.
And again, I didn't really want to do the whole thing.
So some of the accounts and see firms will manage all that.
I mean, just got easier now with companies out of some, what have you automating a lot
of their systems and having better online systems.
But yeah, the accountants just for a not particularly big fee did all of the paperwork and
made sure that that was all correctly set up.
So again, I still didn't entirely have to worry about it.
And we won't talk about my history of being with actually managing to get my account
sorted at the right time because I've still been focusing emotionally on like satisfying
my clients and keeping them happy.
So I have a count on us to keep me honest, still.
Yeah.
And I don't know if we want to go in this direction, but there's certainly a lot of horror stories
about accountants that, well, you're running the company.
You know what you're doing.
You know how to run a company, don't you?
And a lot of people that run companies don't know what they're expecting because you don't
know what you don't know.
But there are some good accountants out there who will say, here's a bunch of stuff you need
to know.
Here's a letter telling you everything.
And then you receive the letter, I don't know, might be in January.
And that's the last you hear from them until they go, oh, well, we haven't got this information
for you, so we didn't do anything.
That's not very useful.
Come on, likes.
So, yeah, your mileage may vary, just way, yeah, good accountants are really good and bad
accountants are numerous.
Yeah, I've been let down previously and it just proves the point that you are responsible
for your own accounts being correct and your own legal filing has been correct.
You can't take your after-all because you can delegate it and that's fine, you can get
the hard work done.
That's fine.
But they might lay you down and I did get that down and I got fined because I was a year
late with something.
And fortunately, fair play to them, I won't mention their name, but fair play to them, they
did pay the fine for me, so I didn't end up out of cock pocket, but I could have done
without it, frankly.
And I will give a shout to Gorilla who have been very good since I did my research on reviews
and I've not been disappointed with them.
But still, it's important that I keep on top of it.
Yeah.
You are the director of the company in the book, Stops with You.
That's right.
Yeah, the R-35 doesn't reflect that as a thing either.
Yeah, it's just a little bit of a late spinning.
Cool.
Well, just take a different direction.
We talked about how you got into contracting, which is fascinating for me as someone
who came in at a different time to learn a bit about what that looked like.
What about the tech itself?
What drew you into this as a world and has obviously kept you here?
Yeah, I mean, I didn't imagine.
You could have spoken to a 16-year-old me and I wasn't expecting to be in computers.
And my first love, if anything, would be in a pilot flying things.
But my eyesight was not good enough for the Navy, so that never happened.
That dream got to spell quite quickly.
And so I thought, okay, the next best thing would be to be an engineer, fixing the things
instead.
Maybe I'll get a chance to fly them or fly in them at some point.
But all the while, I still was quite an introvert and saved up loads of money from doing paper
round and bought a specky, second hand as an expectation, and quite enjoyed programming
on that.
And so I did computer studies at school as well.
And so it was always like a good passion, but not quite as strong as wanting to fly helicopters,
but kind of that then disappeared entirely.
I didn't go to university at all.
And I sort of half flunked out at A levels because I started year one, I was in one college,
and then we moved to another college and the syllabus didn't line up.
So I essentially did A Level Maths twice, but only one year of it.
And they didn't do computer science at all, so I couldn't do that in the second year.
And so yeah, it was quite a mess.
Just proves that you don't necessarily need educational bits of paper if you can get
the experience some other way.
And so my dreams have been an engineer in terms of mechanical engineering.
The entry or cramps are pretty much yes, you need a degree to do that.
So not going to university killed that one off, but I did quite like programming and so
I did lots of programming and stuff and I was just waiting for the door to open to get
in there.
And so I knew a guy that already worked at the company and I think they probably got a referral
fee for introducing me.
And we're delighted when I got the job because they got a 50 quid referral fee or whatever.
Right.
Yeah, on the education thing, did you then need or choose to follow up with technical
qualifications?
I mean, I did a couple of things, but it was useful at the start of contracting, but beyond
that, I haven't really bothered.
No, I guess my love of certificates is strong.
You know, I love getting a gold star and pat on the head.
That's really, that feels nice.
But in terms of practical use, getting started is quite nice.
But as I mentioned, my first foray into IT was being a trainee.
So it was a two year program where they gave me a lot of training, you know, how to fix
a printer and they were talking laser printers and it completely disassembling and putting
them back together again.
Obviously with screws left over, but ask for learning, right?
I'm sure they were added by the instructor.
They weren't honestly left out from somewhere else important.
And so then they did a couple of training courses.
So compact was a big company at the time, it's been bought by HP since and so it's like,
you know, here's just how you fix a compact server and you get a certificate for it.
So at the end of that two years, I did have quite a few certificates, but ultimately it was
my two years experience that got me into the next job, not the certificates from my perspective
anyway.
Yeah, you never quite know, do you?
No.
And then I guess as I progressed onto the more server side of things, I was slightly
lured by, should I do a Cisco examination or CCNA or should I do a Microsoft examination,
the MSC or MSSA.
And whilst I kind of dabbled in, did a couple of the exams, I just didn't really feel that
it was required of me to do that and therefore the motivation just wasn't the same.
And I don't think it's done me any harm by not having them.
Yeah, that seems to be a common story in the industry.
Like, as a contractor, I meet all sorts of people and I've had a fair few permanent jobs
as well.
And that's one thing I really noticed is the store, I love asking people like how did you
get into it.
And the stories are just all so different.
I just took, I wouldn't name them in the case, they don't particularly want to shed, but
someone I met along the way who I enjoyed working with immensely.
They were working for a finance company and they were doing the spreadsheets and then they
liked doing the macro programming and then they were like, this is interesting.
And then they went off and did a geography degree and then they ended up doing the GIS systems
and we ended up working on a thing together around that.
And that was kind of like, I'd say mid-career coming into that, like a few years on me.
And then they sort of arrived with a bit of paranoia that they'd missed something because
they didn't do the computer science route.
Like there was something that the computer science people knew that they didn't and there
was this golden inside us, E-curates.
And eventually they realised this and they were like, there's a few series that you
probably need to learn and there's some theoretical programming stuff, like the proof stuff that
maybe you become aware of but don't ever need, it's more of an academic interest.
And eventually they probably outstripped me in a lot of ways, frankly, in their depths of
knowledge.
It was good fun when we got to the point of like, he was challenging me on things, instead
of the other way around.
Because initially he thought I was going to have it a go when I pulled him up on all
the things that I knew, goodness knows what that looks like for a hindsight.
Because I've learnt a lot since then.
Yeah, quite often it's just putting labels on things that you've discovered, that's actually
called that, right?
Okay.
So you both know it but you've arrived at it for a very different route.
Yeah, that's what I found when I discovered programming patterns, which I lived a relative
to each other, programming life for probably 10 years in relatively small groups.
The internet was not quite such a good way of learning about all of the things going on
out there.
I hadn't discovered conferences and things.
I don't know, I assume that they were happening.
So then I felt my way through design and then I found out about patterns and started reading
all of those and was like, oh yeah, I did a thing that was a bit like that, I didn't
know I had a name.
Yeah, all these things.
Yeah, cool.
So the subject of the book to like move on to kind of the next thing is, well, the title
is Confident Contractor which I think is a wonderful title.
So I think what would be cool would be to talk a bit about contracting specifically, partly
from general interest, partly selfishly.
I have my own challenges, I'm definitely keen to see what I can learn along the way in this
conversation.
So this might be a bit random because I've got kind of just a selection of thoughts that
I will fire off at you at random.
So just to kick off, so probably one of the most topical things in contracting is I-35
which we've mentioned already.
I've been kind of okay.
It's definitely been a bit more gappy for me, like more breaks between things.
I've not taken anything inside I-35, it doesn't really fit with the way I want to work.
I like, I want to do a project.
If it's inside I-35 that tells me that you're looking for an employee to move around, or
that you haven't bothered to do the work, to figure out what it is you're even hiring.
I'm more interested in kind of like building a proper business to be honest and that would
be very much products and that kind of offering, you know, products and projects.
And obviously there's the other context of like the still consequences of the whole COVID
thing that was a bit scary and people had various experiences of that.
But it's obviously still affected the market in some ways.
The interest rates have gone up because of the general global macroeconomics that I won't
go into because that's a whole different show.
But it is what it is and the result of that is the investment money has largely, I wouldn't
say dried up, but it's not in such easy supply as it used to.
Because investments now have to work much harder in order to get the return on investment
when you can put it in a bond and get 4-5%.
So now you have to, the big investments are thinking more carefully and they're not necessarily
pouring it all into tech.
So we've seen off the back of that, we've seen layoffs, which is obviously being fairly
big news.
You know, the fact a lot have been offloading decent numbers of people like I have no idea
whether the ratio of important jobs, useless jobs, great people, terrible people, even tech
and non-tech, that's not really clear from what I've seen.
You can't really, if me as an individual have got this specialist skill, there's quite
a deep, technical skill.
And I see like, oh so and so, layed off 10,000 people, well, is that they layed off 10,000
highly skilled specialist consultants that are going to be competing with me?
Or is it like some support people and things who could just never do what I do?
We don't really, I'd, maybe you have any info, but I've not really seen anything on kind
of what that breaks down like, but the point is, there's a bit of a doom and gloom environment,
I don't want to call it a doom and gloom environment, but this is why here.
And it's contracted to some extent, the supply and demand has flipped a bit.
So with that, and the I-35, the effect that's had.
So my sort of fairly blunt question is, like, do you think contracting is still worth
doing in this environment where it's become a lot more difficult?
Well, the short answer is yes.
And the longer answer is, yeah, everything is in cycles.
So the reason why there's a little bit more, I don't know, more supply of techies and less
demand of techies is because there was a lot of overhiring going on during COVID.
Now, all of a sudden, everything had to go online.
And it was kind of like I mentioned this earlier, you know, the way to K-Bug almost created
the same situation where we need a lot of developers, all of a sudden, to fix some code and then
once that had passed, and in this case, COVID has passed, we don't need those skills anymore.
And so some of them will be there because it was easy to get a job in those people who
just, if you've got a pulse, great, you're hired sort of thing.
And so, you know, the fact that they will then get let go and they'll just find something
else, whatever the next thing is, you know, be it midnight shelf stacking or some more glamorous.
So yeah, whilst there's a huge overhiring and now there's an underhiring, but I feel that
if you know what you're doing, then there's a market for you.
I mean, I was looking at LinkedIn this morning or this thing, it was just a 183 jobs were
listed, a contracted jobs specifically on LinkedIn for, you know, all sorts of gubins,
but IT contracted jobs as well as searched for, which tells me that the market is coming back
from where it was, you know, because there's always an overreaction, you know, whenever you
talk about markets, they cut deep and then, you know, try and fill in the gaps afterwards.
But I think the main thing around contracting and this kind of plays into some of the risk
around it is because it is more project-based, it is more skills-based and it's not putting
a bum on a seat because we want some resource, but we're not quite sure you're doing.
We actually want you to deliver this deliverable, you know, it's this product, it must do this
that, you know, the, they might not know exactly what that looks like, but they've got a vague
idea of what it should look like. And so for that, I think contractors will always be in
demand because you're going into a little bit of financial theory, you've got capex and
opX. Capital expenditure is where you're spending lumps of money, whereas operational expenditure
is where you're devoting some endless sort of budget to it. It's a bit like where you
can buy a car or you can rent a car. It's kind of that kind of mindset of, yeah, if you buy
it straight out, that's your capex and it's a big number, but it's done and it's got a definitive
end date and all that sort of stuff. Maybe a car is not a great example for that, but if you
think of some unsubscription and it's ongoing, then you don't know how long that's going
to last for and it's a reoccurring expense and some businesses when they're setting up a
new project, they don't like that open-endness of it. So they don't want somebody in a job
that they're going to have to fire, they would rather say, hey, you come in, do this for 12
months and at the end of the 12 months, you say goodbye and there's no hard feelings.
Yeah, so salaries go under, opX, don't they? Yeah, completely different budgeting. So my
understanding is the CFO will look at the total opX and look at the total capex for the
year and they're really twitchy about opX going up because that will affect the profitability
of the company forever without further control and whereas capex is like, we're going to
make this investment to build this thing, to bring us more income or save us this cost.
So reduce our opX. So that will not just include contractors, it includes like everything
that they have to spend, spin it up soon, it could even be like, build a whole new office,
like build this gigantic software system and the people, the contractors that go in there
are just like another line item on that as I understand it. Indeed, yeah, so it just fits
a different need. Yeah, I think that's an important point. I think a lot of contractors
like I'm often certain come across and certainly permise, like don't really know about
the capex, opX thing and I think sometimes they wonder like, why are we being told it's
so hard to give pay rises and yet you not are coming on with it, coming in with your fancy
cars and your like high day rates that they may or may not know about, like how's that
okay? And the answer is that it just comes from a completely different budget, like it's
a project budget, it's a capital expenditure budget. And again, like you say, we're expendable
in the sense of come in, build the thing, deliver the value and go away again and no more
invoices. Yeah, and to touch on what you said earlier, it's usually funded quite differently
as well. And if you've got a capital project, then because it's got a defined cost to it,
the business might actually borrow money in order to fund that particular project, whereas
if you've got somebody on an ongoing salary type basis, then that needs to come out of
the profit or the operating margin or whatever you want to call it. So you don't have the
same flexibility in that budget at all. And speed of return matters as well, I've become
more aware of this recently because I've been reading a bit about investment, so like
looking at it from the other side of the investor and like an investment that makes sense
in six months to get your return, perhaps doesn't make sense if it takes two years. And
that really relates to what we do in terms of like if we can't deliver the results quick enough
to make their investment worthwhile, then they maybe don't get the value out of it. Yeah.
And because of the potential to borrow the money, it also has a relation on the interest
rates. They could afford to borrow the money for basically free. Free in terms of the
obviously have to pay the money back, but no additional charge on top of that. And so that
gives them a lot of opportunity to build new stuff, whereas with a higher rate, it's more
expensive to borrow money. So therefore those projects might not be so attractive anymore.
So how much do you think that awareness of this whole capital, and the kind of like financial
side of the way businesses operate? How much do you think that's useful for a newer existing
contractor to know about and understand when it comes to like winning and executing on
contracts for a client? I think it's useful when negotiating, because we all like to be
negotiating, we're selling, we're negotiating, and often the customer, you need to understand
why they are investing the money. And particularly in my main focus, which is DevOps, I don't really
create anything. My benefit, you know, why are you going to hire me is because I'm going
to save you money, I'm going to save you time. You know, you've got three developers working
flat out, but they're doing all of this manual stuff. You hire me for three months, I put
some systems in place, and now those three developers can do more time developing and
less time flapping about with servers and employees and all that other stuff. And so it gives
the business a better return on their on their uphicks, their staff that they're paying for
their on day, it makes them more efficient by giving me the project and the opportunity
to make their processes a little bit slicker. And so having that understanding between
the two does help you, you know, express the benefits to the customer and perhaps the
language that they would understand. And do you, to what extent do you think the customers
come in? So when they've decided to hire a contractor, assuming that you're not just
kind of cold selling them into hiring someone, they won't go into it. Okay, we want a contractor
to do some DevOps or whatever. Like, how much is that kind of top of mind for them in terms
of like that, that becomes an important part of that conversation? Like, do you think that
you need to be kind of leaning into that and selling that to them or is it like, they
know that and they're just happy that you maybe get it? Yeah, I mean, in classic contract
to speak, it depends, along with some expensive or made a mess there. Exactly. Cause some, some
customers know that they want something achieved, you know, whatever that happens to be and they'll
go to a recruitment agent who specialise in contracts. We want to see ICD pipelines. Yeah,
and so the recruit will say, well, if you want somebody with those skills to deliver that,
then the market rate is currently this. What's your budget? Whereas sometimes they have no
idea what their budget is and they need that sort of third party guidance to say, well, if you
want somebody who's actually going to deliver that for you, it's going to cost you this.
If your budget is less than that, you might get what you want, but might take longer, which
is actually cost you more. And if your budget is more than that, then great, have two of them
instead. You know, maybe they can do it half the speed because, you know, the mythical
man months and all of that sort of stuff. So it depends on how knowledgeable the customer
is and whether you've got a middle man to work with in there as well. And if you just start
in out in contracting, then chances are you're going to speaking to recruiters and they will
be dealing with a lot of that negotiation for you. And so it's not so important. Whereas
as your business matures and you're talking to customers directly, it's a lot more valuable
to them and to you for you to be able to speak the same language.
Right. So early in your contracting career, like a bit like the umbrella thing, you can
be like, okay, a recruiters sorted out the value proposition. I'll just show up and do
some work and then maybe later on if you want to like have a bit more control and understand
your projects and you want to increase your value and rate, then you might want to talk
to a CTO or something and say like, yeah, this is what it's going to get you.
Indeed, yeah. Yeah, there's still a progression to be had, you know, even if you're experienced
and then you're going to contracting this the whole other raft of skills that you will
pick up as time goes along. Oh, tell me about it. It's been a learning journey, I'll tell
you. Yeah, I mean, I went into it with an open mind, but even just learning what a limited
company isn't how to operate it has been a learning thing and then, you know, the wins and
losses along the way with various clients and effectively sales, people don't really
like to call themselves, but it is sales. Even if you're selling to a recruiter who already
has a place, you know, it's still sales. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you're not going to be any
person that who it's talking to. So you still need to have some element of selling
this is cool, it's selling. Yeah, you know, I have to be able to see be a good or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, especially in the current market, like from what I've heard, the recruiters
drown in like a couple of hundred CVs for everything they post, but the quality is, there's
a lot of low quality things. Yeah, CVs landing. So they like immediately filter out 190.
So yeah, yeah, but even the good people are like, there's competent right now, I'm hearing
like, yeah, we've got three or four really good options showing up at the moment, which is,
you know, good for the clients comes and goes, let you say, Benjamin's. Yeah.
So many, so many aspects of the whole contracting thing, there's all sorts of interesting directions
to go in. I think I want to go back to the book a bit. So, because there's a thing that we
haven't talked about, which I think is important, which is like the why of the book. So that I've
read your confident contractor, but I think it's an excellent coverage of like the whole
picture of contracting. Like there are things in there for someone like me, like rounding
out my knowledge, even having done it for that long, like some thought about like how you
progress forward from where you've got to. That's really useful. And you know, occasionally
get, you know, permanent people that I work with. I'm quite often rubbing shoulders with
maybe junior engineers who are thinking about their career and they're, you know, curious.
About the contracting thing, they maybe don't know it's what's involved. They don't, you know,
they see us as these mysterious people that pop up and disappear again. And yeah, this
would be a fantastic guide from in not not too long a form. So to give someone a like, this
is the whole of contracting. Like I think you've done a great job of without kind of focusing
in on like DevOps or programming or something like for an IT contractor generally. Like this
is what that life looks like. This is the kind of things that you need to make sure you
don't worry about. So you're, you know, you've got into tech then from there, you've come to
the same conclusion as a lot of us have like, Oh, these permanent jobs are not very permanent.
Are they? And as my mate said to me, you know, a year's money in the bank is better job
security than you'll get out of any, any employer for sure. Yeah. Did you have a family and
then good luck. But that's I'd so you've got this career path and, you know, you're currently
gainfully employed on a contract with HMRC helping them do their DevOps things. What's motivated
you to like help the broader contractor community because this is, this book is obviously a great
service to the contractor and, and hopeful contractor people out there.
I think it's because I'm getting older and I want to help, you know, I want to be that guide
that I never had when I wanted to get into contracting. So I think it's purely altruistic.
I just want to help people with it. Not. And I think that just comes with age, you know,
you, you have a few sort of epiphany moments of, you know, what can I, what can I do? How
can I help? How can I leave a positive mark? Yeah. I mean, I was lucky. I, when, when I was thinking
about contracting, I had a friend who was already contracting. So I, like, they encouraged me,
they, well, pushed me a bit, they gave me a bit of a picture of what that might look like,
you know, I, I heard of it as a thing. But I think if I, if I hadn't had that and a lot
of people don't, then being able to, assuming Google will lead them to it or a podcast,
who knows, you know, will really appreciate like that, that guide in, in such detail. Yeah,
it's, that's, that's great. It does seem to be a, a, a stages of lighting, doesn't it?
Like, it's, this is the first era of career is like, oh, I can earn and I can like provide
some value. This is cool. And go back to socializing outside of that or whatever is your, is
your saying? And then I'm personally in the stage of like, oh, blind me, family is expensive.
Yeah, suddenly, suddenly get a bit more motivated to like push a bit harder, which is, which is
cool, you know, and in terms of kind of how that's aligned. So the first, first, 12 years,
was per me things of basically coasting along and enjoying myself and, you know, pushing
myself a bit in terms of moving companies when I stagnated and things. And then contracting
was the next like, all right. Well, I, I tell you what mainly pushed me into contracting
was, I never quite knew when others per me whether they just couldn't bother to get rid of
me or whether I was really providing value. Because you know, it's not, it's not that
easy to hire a per me. It's a bit of a hassle. It's like personally stressful, especially
when you're working for small companies. And there's always a bit of me like, is it just
easier to pay me my salary and put up with me than it is to like, turn me out like, there's
a disconnect here between the value I'm providing and that's provable and like the set up, the
legal set up, the employment set up. And with contracting, you're just so much closer,
like, you sign a contract, but the week notice, like basically it's, and I've seen it, sometimes
it, it does, it happens less than I perhaps expected. Like, I've seen people keep on really,
really terrible people for God knows what reason, even though like the contract says we can
get rid of you tomorrow. It's quite odd. But on the flip side, I've also seen the same
of like, yep, we're not getting value. You got four days by. Oh, and if we're happy,
we'll go tomorrow. Cool. Yeah. All right. That's the end of that. And, you know, we'll pay
you a dues and that's the end of the, so, and I really like that. And it's really met my
expectations, mostly of, I know that every week that I show up, I put a time sheet in, I
raise an invoice. Like, there's a much higher chance that they still think they're getting
value. And especially being more expensive than the permise, like that if they're not getting
value, they're going to go like, nope, next or not doing that. Like, for example, one of
the projects I was on, I was supposed to be three months and after two months, it turned
out the project was bigger than they thought it was going to be. And this gets a bit into
the CapExOpex thing. They basically had a fixed budget to get this thing done. They were,
they were very tight margin company. And it like, because it turned out to be more complicated,
the maths basically went, we can keep you at this higher rate until the end of the months,
but you're not going to finish because this has turned out to be bigger. We can't afford
to keep you on for another month because that's more than our budget. But we have this per
me who's not nearly as good as you. He might take three months, but that one adds up. So,
bye-bye. So yeah, it can be very, very real from that point of view. And then,
beyond the kind of like, all right, motivation, let's build value, let's build business or
however you want to see it. Then I listened to a lot of entrepreneur podcasts and like, I've
heard a lot of origin stories of people who've been through the whole journey, they've built
and sold successful businesses and my view. And it's a really common theme of like starting
to think more, you know, the kids are growing up, starting to think more about legacy, starting
to think more about impact and, yeah, I can definitely see that as an excellent motivation.
I'm very glad you've had that motivation because I think you've produced a great thing.
Thanks. Yeah. I suppose the realization was having a conversation with my daughter, we
were doing what they call it discovery days at university or something like that. Is that
what you're thinking about going to uni? Yeah, when you're thinking about you going to
uni or which uni you're going to pick. Right. Yeah. And she just gave me the perspective
and she says, you know, what course would you do? And I said, well, I think I could teach
that one. And it's like, as she was expecting me to say, you know, the opposite, which one would
I sit here and learn about and not actually stand at the front and teach it? And, you know,
that was for me the epiphany moment of, yeah, I'm ready to share my knowledge with everyone
now and, yeah, who can I help? Right. Was she asking the question of like, which one
would you be a student at? I think that's what she was asking because that would have been
her point of view at the time. Yeah. And you just read that as like, which one do you think
you would be electroreval? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's brilliant. What a moment. Yeah. So, yeah,
like I've started to feel like in terms of like the value I provide to the world, you know,
like building a project and what have you? Solar engineer, it has a fairly limited upside
like, and then like lead dev has a slightly bigger upside. But teaching can have a really
huge upside because of the leverage, like the multiplication impact of what you do. Yeah.
Yeah. But at that point, it's not, you know, the family has moved out, you know, they're
not as much a demand on your resources anymore. You mortgage is paid off, you know, your costs
are reduced. So it's not really a monetary motivation anymore. You've got enough to survive
and live on and maybe go on some nice holidays as well when it's not a big strain on anything.
And so this, it's, there is a lot of upside to it, like you say, but at the same time, that's
not the primary motivation. What do you think might be beyond this for you? Like, you've got
your existing, are you going to carry on contracting for the foreseeable? Because you mentioned
in the book, kind of like the path beyond contracting or the path for growing, you're
contracting. Have you got any direction you've considered for like where you might go from
here? Well, in the immediate future, I've signed another 12-month contract, go on another
project. And that's delivery kind of things? Yeah, it's in a DevOps area, it's providing
deployment pipelines for some other software that I've never dealt with before. You know,
the customer is experiencing the problem where they've got a number of developers, developers
are very excited about getting their software from the dev environments through to production,
to the point where by the time it gets to production, one of the developers is very happy
because their stuff's in there, and the other developers are, well, where's my code gone?
It gets overwritten on the way, which is obviously not going to create a lovely environment
for everybody at all. So they want somebody to come in and create a bit of order and sort
their processes out. Right. So that's my immediate future. Beyond that. Oh, before you move
on, what level do you and do you like to operate? Because obviously there's the like solo building,
DevOps, and things, and then there's the like advice, leading teams, like where do you
and can you sit on that spectrum? I'd like to pair, pair programming is been a thing
for ages, and in those previous projects I've been on has given me the opportunity to
learn new stuff, which is always good, you know, stuff never stops in our industry, but at
the same time, you know, getting back to this teaching thing, you know, pairing with junior
developers allows me to pass my knowledge on and help them out. So, I mean, don't get
me wrong, I love sitting, I can sit in my laptop and program for a couple of hours and then
think, oh, I should probably eat something or drink. So, you know, those moments still occur
because it's still a passion for me. But again, sharing the knowledge is always, always
feels that gap as well. So would that look like pairing with one of the permanent employees
of the client? Or would that be another contractor or you bring your own person along?
It's usually with the one of the employees because the customer is like that. I'm training
up one of the employees, which is nice. And I'm also passing my knowledge, you know, knowledge
transfer over because projects come to an end, like you just given your example, you know,
there's going to be a per me that's not quite as good, but they'll be able to soldier on
without you. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely like that. I do, pairing
with someone who's, I did that on the civil service, that one of the, the first civil service
software engineers to come through the, like, their internal training in the department
for education. They, and I ended up pairing with them because I'm a fairly sociable chap
and always, always trying to help people, like, there's what I know whether they want it or
not. And yeah, I really, really enjoyed that. And yeah, you're right. One of the,
um, CTOs, I was helping out not that long ago. I was just sort of getting a sense check
of like, are we, are we aligned or we on track? And I was like, you know, what do you want
to see out of this? Like, you know, we're a little way into this. And the one liner I got
back was, I want, I want my people to be better after you left. Which is really interesting
because that, that, it's kind of not the premise of what I got hired for in a way, the premise
of what I got hired for was a bit, I mean, there was a kind of like, oh, well, we want to
improve, but it was also like, we've got some stuff to build. We haven't got enough capacity.
Um, so it definitely is a thing that's valued. I've like, I think contractors are quite often
seen as like, world experience, which is definitely true, isn't it? Because, you know, we get
to see so many more things than someone who works at the same place for 10 years. Um, and
you know, there's one thing I like about contracting is like, he said next to someone new, you
learn what you can from them. And, you know, a little bit later you're on and you don't
it again. And, you know, that was, that's my longest permanent job of six years. And after
four years, I'd done everything I could and I'd learned everything I could and I knew everyone
inside out. And then the next two years were like fairly stagnant for me. It was a bit
hard to jump because it was really comfy. And I liked it and it suited me. Um, so yeah,
I'd be on in the further future. Uh, I don't know. I don't think that far ahead to be
honestly. That was a perfectly valid answer. Um, yeah. You know, some people just have a plan,
don't they? And they just like ruthlessly execute. And some of us, you know, we're a bit
more meandering in that school. Yeah. I had one those when I was 18 and it didn't work
out well. Well, it worked out, but not in the way that the plan was. Yeah. And so after setting
up a few plans and failing the targets a few times, I figured, yeah, let's just make the
most of whatever is presented at any time and have a much more care for attitude to it.
But that took a lot of painful learning to get to that realization. Yeah. I mean, in the
modern culture of like mental health, mindfulness, like trying to try to unload some of the like
never-ending stress, particularly in some of the more stressful times, that's a good attitude
to have if you can take that kind of more of an approach. Yeah. Yeah. It took a lot of work.
I can tell you. And a new way for out. No, Blimey. Yeah. That's a pretty extreme measure.
I won't tell my wife you suggested that. Yeah, probably best night, too. So, all right,
she won't get this far through the podcast. Unless you're pretty zen, then I'll do you
then you're okay. Me, Zen. I think she said, what happened to you? I used to be fairly
zen before I had like pressure and responsibilities in the moment. I'm a little bit neurotic because
I'm trying to juggle family and contracting and is all changed. And like I say, there's been
some gaps and I've taken the opportunity to be like, okay, cool, things have got different
what am I going to do? Well, the kids are going to grow up, you know, they're there.
Six and eight. So they're okay. The hardest years are behind us. And now it's going to get
easier in some ways, you know, and in five years or ten years, you know, I'm going to be
a bit more like you looking for something meaningful rather than like, oh God, how do I make everything
work? Yeah. So my, my beyond contracting as like at the moment, at least, like, I'd quite
like to build a product business, but because I've got no time, that's incredibly difficult.
And I've got no leverage. So I'm going to instead build an agency and, and rust, this new
interesting programming language. And I'm just going to basically scale up programming
because I like working with teams and like, we're talking about mentoring things. So yeah,
that's my beyond. Cool. But anyway, it's not about me on this one.
What are they? Like to grow these things. So back to the book. And am I right that that's
a self-published on this one? Yeah, something is. Yeah. Cool. What was your, what was your
thinking about that and like, how's that been? Well, I published the first book. He moved
my servers through the same route. Where did you? Yes, that's self-published as well. And
it's not that traumatic, really. I mean, I don't expect to be a millionaire from selling books.
I'm not an author, you know, I'm quite good at programming, I think. But writing books
is a different skill and it's quite tricky. So the publishers never going to pick up my
work and go, oh, Neil, can you write us a world best-selling book for us, please? And so
it's kind of my get-go attitude of, well, let's just get on and do it and find somebody
to publish it. And, you know, they're really supportive. They've got, they've got a book
funnily enough that tells you how to write a book. They sort of a process that you couldn't
follow along and, you know, it gets you through some of the hurdles, round some of the issues
and then once you've finished your manuscript, they'll sort of help do the final proofreading
and type setting and get it available on Amazon for you. Ryan, and even design the cover,
it's always handy. Nice. Do you remember the name of that book? Are we think press?
All right, all right, I see. Okay, cool. I shall try and get a link into the show notes
for that, because I'm sure lots of people are interested in that sort of thing, particularly
people who are a bit later on in their contracting careers. So in terms of, I mean, you say,
you know, not also, I think your book begs to differ. I think that's a quality piece of writing
and then I think that's a quality book. So I think you can definitely say you are an author
like you don't have to be sniffed out by a publisher like the world is changing. You
never know. They might come chasing you for the next one. Was that with an upfront? Who
knows? But yeah, in terms of like that proofread, because I've heard that people, like if
you go to like mining or something, I was listening to an interview with someone who'd done
that and you know, they had a professional editor that went through it with them. Like,
what did they have anyone that called themselves an editor? Yeah, that's part of the package.
Tell me about that as an experience. Like what you put in versus how it gets changed
and what you get out and how you feel about it. Yeah. So sometimes it feels quite critical
as you might expect. As they're telling you you're wrong or you're rubbish or it's bad or
I don't think it's got quite as bad as that. I mean, when I wrote the first book, obviously
there's a bit greener around it is and I delivered them a manuscript and they said, right,
there's two books here, which one did you want published? Oh, okay. Obviously the message
wasn't strong enough in any particular direction and it was lacking structure or whatever. So,
you know, I got to the end of the draft. I thought, who are written a book and then they're
like, actually, no, so it's completely rubbish. Just do it again. So I kind of learnt from
that and so this time round, when I wrote this one, I put all the structure in place and
I had quite a clear idea. You know, the first thing I wrote was the chapter pages. So I
think the chapter pages you've got there now are 80% of what I wrote on day one. And there's
been a few additions, a few subtractions and a little bit of jiggly and about of order,
but other than that, you know, the structure is pretty much already there. And so then when
I gave them the final draft, they then asked questions and stuff. So it's not just me on my
end. Is that like by email, do I call you? Video call? No, it's over email. So they use the
markup functionality in word. So they're just highlight a load of text and then they'll
put a comment next to it that says, you know, we don't quite understand what you mean here.
Can you rewrite it or sometimes they're quite helpful in that they'll highlight this bit
and they say, we think you mean this. So we've changed the text to say that is that okay.
And so you can get documents and comments nice. Yeah, indeed. Yeah, I think it's markup
mode or something they call it in word, isn't it? Yeah, it's on a lot of that. Some like
that. So yeah, it's a collaboration at that point if anything. Nice. And I've heard
people like quite it's quite common to hear people have written a book on podcasts. It's
a pretty standard like writer book and then talk about it. And quite a lot of them say that
was incredibly grueling. And some of them say, I'm never doing that again. And some of them
say, I will do it again. Like how how was for both of them like how what was the emotional
journey like for for writing the two books and would you do it again? I probably do it again
because I found it easier to second time mountain. I can imagine like in thing you practice.
It gets easier. But it is it is quite tricky because you know, got full time job. I'm doing
contract. And so then it's you've had to you've got a full belly and then your buzzer goes
off because you have to have a reminder that says go write something. You know, I don't feel
like writing in this like, well, that doesn't matter. You just got to sit there and okay,
I had to structure this time. So I've got at least a subject heading to work on. And then
you start typing and then three hours later you think, well, I better eat something now or drink
something. So it's it's more the the foreboding feeling of doing it. But then once you get into
that process, you're just kind of writing for a while. That doesn't happen all the time.
Of course, sometimes you'll just sit there and I've written two sentences and half an hour
like it's just not really working today. But the reason for having the structure there is
I can go cut a bit earlier than that. So if I'm sitting there at a heading and I've only
looked it for five minutes and written two sentences and like I said, well, maybe let's
look at another heading. Maybe I'm more inspired to write about a slightly different subject
that's in the book. And so that gives you a little bit of choice about how you can attack
it. You don't have to write it in order. And sometimes you don't you don't keep everything
that you've written. You know, you might write three pages of stuff and actually only edit
it down to one page because you're going a bit crazy or what you've written is so good.
Actually, I'm going to steal all of that and create another chapter which might have
happened. You know, that sounds like a great approach. Yeah, I've not not got as far as writing
a book yet. I don't know what I'd write about. I do my blogging and I quite enjoy that. But
it's all over the place. I haven't kind of got a big idea yet. Yeah, because actually
some people that have turned a blog into a book which I guess is okay if it's got quite
good theme to it. Yeah, yeah, something very good. I'm actually in the middle of like occasional
reading through Richard Stallman's collected essays which is really, I mean that's obviously
got some history to it. And yeah, I mean, like as long as you kind of know like, okay, this
is a collection of writings over the years and like you say it, it does have a theme to
it and some stands the test of time and some don't. That's kind of cool. It's not the first
kind of blogging to a book that I've read. Yeah, it's not my favourite book, so which is
my name Babylon is what, 20 little stories or two other. And it's not a very big book either.
Yeah, I'm not right that one. I hear people mention it. So in terms of, let's dig in a bit
to the content of the book. I have some things that kind of caught my interest and that's
what would be worth having a bit of a chat about if you're cool to continue. Yeah, yeah,
I'm still good for juice. Can I open question? I don't know if anything
jumps to mind is fine if not. But do you have any kind of particular suggestions that perhaps
stuff that's not necessarily covered in the book per se, but something that you would think
would be a useful tip or like thing to consider for both new and old contractors. It's interesting
that, yeah, that's a very open question. Yeah, I mean, I will dig into some of the other
more detailed bit as well. I was just wondering if there's like a top of mind like, you know,
someone that comes up a lot, or some different way of thinking about things. Yeah, I suppose
it imposter syndrome popped up quite a lot. And I think we both dance around the subject
already on this chat. You know, what's stopping you from getting the sack? Is it the drag
of having to replace you? Or is it, you're actually quite good in doing OK. And, you know,
that trust in yourself, you know, the reason why it's called confident contractor is because,
well, you don't have to be confident to be a contractor. It really does help because you've
got a lot of other situations that could happen that will test you from not only a technical
perspective, but also from if you've been in it a while. There are skills and developments
that you can have as a contractor. You know, you start out as a contractor. You don't know
much about limited company. You know, six or seven years down the line of being a contractor,
you might think, hey, now it's time for me to do some more presenting public speaking,
go into conferences as a as a creator of content for others to see rather than as a participant
and that kind of thing. And sometimes being a contractor can feel quite lonely. And,
and so certainly getting out to meets before COVID, easy. There's loads of meets you could go bump
into people and see people talking and that and that's not really come back in the same way that I've
seen yet. I think mainly because people aren't working in offices, there's no nucleus of people
anymore to go to a physical meetup in order to enjoy pizza beer and somebody talking about
whatever they're passionate about. But there's the online thing, but it's not quite the same when
you have to pay for your beer and pizza. No. Yeah, I mean, I've started to see it pick up a bit,
which is good. As I mentioned, I'm part of the rust community now and they've they've had their
second conference and an intermittent London meetup. And I've actually started a redding meetup
because I can do that every month, quite easily. Okay, which is cool. And like the dotnet one,
one of the other agencies runs, which is being quite good, they've started that up again. So there's
definitely a bit more happening, which is really encouraging. And yeah, like I did two contracts
fully remote and it is, it is very isolating. Like your friend's a little squares on the screen.
For a long time, on the imposter syndrome, you're right that like the moving to contracting has not
entirely eliminated the, I'm not quite sure whether I'm valued enough and earning my wage.
Like communication, because sometimes can be very minimal. Like go to a saying, like particularly if
you've got some people in the middle like recruiters or consultant season, have you or
you know, if the even if the team that you're in is quite like, what's the word? Like they communicate
that, you know, they go, good, they stand up. So they've got a really good communication. They do
lots of pairing, but like the team is not necessarily the customer per say, like the person,
there's the person that you spoke to that got you hired and maybe there's some other people in
the shadows that could kick you out on moments notice. And so on the one hand, like I do find myself,
like I've started to notice, I think it's left me a little bit more anxious having done it for like
so many years. And on the flip side, in terms of like knowing that you're providing value, otherwise
you wouldn't be here. Like the number of completely hopeless people that I've come across and
like people that have been decided at hopeless, but they just haven't got around to getting rid of them,
makes me realize that, you know, I'm not going to rest on my laurels. I'm going to deliver all the value
I can. I'm going to keep improving my skills. But there are people who are pulling really serious
day rates day in, day out. And they're like, why are they paying these people? A couple of choice quotes
from someone I wrote with for an outgoing contractor who they took agents to fire was like,
yeah, they would be much more useful if they were counting the gravel than the car park.
Oh, do you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that may have been
100% accurate, unfortunately. Never mind the the share chaos that someone can great use, like
actively bad, like someone can cause far more problems than somebody who does nothing.
I seem to find yeah, they tend to get rid of it. Yeah, I think you're not a little quicker.
Like sorry. Yeah, yeah, but when people are actively causing chaos, they tend to get shunted out a
lot quicker. Whereas if we're just quiet, yeah, they know it's difficult, but yeah, the imposter syndrome
never quiet, never. Yeah. Have you got any kind of strategies or tips for kind of like
soothing that part of the brain? I think it's useful to be wary of what you talk to yourself with.
I'm going to put that in English. Yeah, as in that internal monologue, but the the internal voice
is sometimes to be conscious of it, but just disregard it. Yeah.
And it's like, yeah, that's the point of view, not one you have to agree with.
Yeah. And where that internal monologue comes from, who knows? It's always there.
But most of the time, it's job is to not get you killed, which is quite a nice job in our
our glorious environment that we live in now. Yeah. So it's not very useful to you as a person. And
I guess when I was younger, I would seek out validation, you know, I mentioned certificates and
shiny stars and the pads on the head. But that can appear quite an idea if it's too far. Yeah.
So yeah, my best advice would be to to notice that internal monologue and then swiftly ignore it.
Yeah, you alluded to having been on journey and by all means back out of this conversation,
job as if you wish to, but I'm curious. Like what has been that journey? If you like,
what was the point of which you realised that you needed to adjust your thinking and how it affected
you and like, what's that journey been for you? Like, what have you done and what resources have you used to
get you to a better place? You certainly seem pretty chill now, which is cool. Yeah. Yeah, there was a few years
ago when I was quite stressed. And that's before the, the hair turn colour. I recognise
any other stresses and that difficult, but what to do about it?
I think the thing that did it for me, so as an interviewer, I didn't use to like talking to people,
you know, the computer was my friend. As you said, the squares on the screen are off-frains.
And they just do exactly what they are supposed to do, sometimes not.
But talking to other people and hearing their experiences makes you realise you're not that special
in terms of being a human. You know, there's quite a lot of humans on the planet and
we're wired up quite similar in that, you know, we worry about the similar stuff.
We panic about similar stuff. We've had experiences about similar stuff. And hearing other people's stories
and sharing your own story with them makes you realise that actually you're not that different
from everyone else and you're probably okay. So when you say you're not not that different, you mean
as in, so before you realise that, what are you thinking?
Before I realise that, it's very much a case of, this is my problem, I've done something stupid,
this is only affecting me, which couldn't be further from the truth, because everyone else out there
they're just putting on a brave face. And if you get behind the mask that everyone else puts up,
you've got all the same shit and crap and worries and things going on in their mind.
But they don't think you can see it, and you don't think they can see it and you're just all lying
to each other, it's really quite bonkers when you break that wall down.
Yeah, yeah, definitely, I mean, for the sake of openness, I spend about 90% of my time stressed at the moment.
Which is probably not very healthy.
As long as you realise that somebody else out there would feel the same as you in the same situation,
I think that's what I'm trying to get at is what that different.
I'm not broken, it's just how everyone would react in their circumstances.
Exactly, yeah. And then if you can find somebody that is in the similar situation to you,
or even better, somebody that's just one step ahead of you,
they can engage you through that and help through that situation.
And you mentioned listening to other people's stories, like where did you find those stories?
That was facilitated by a lovely couple.
A couple of life coaches you might call them.
And they had Richard, the main guy.
He had his realisation quite early on because he built up a property company
and then was made bankrupt and lost all of it.
Who? Which is quite a life reset.
And he was fine afterwards.
And it's kind of like, well, that's the worst that can happen.
Everything else should be easy from here.
And so then he met this other lady called Liz and then together they got a business that
sort of brings people together to then share their stories.
You get that experience of what actually everyone's got shit going on.
And if we just talk to each other, we can learn from each other's experiences.
Gosh, that was amazing.
Yeah, that's what that nearly turned into.
That's why I went and gave that to the publisher.
They said, "Oh, you've nearly got two books here."
For the first one because it had a lot of that journey stuff in it,
but I'll be taken out and I've just got left with a techie book.
I see.
We would be fine this lovely couple if we wanted to hunt them down and join in.
All the video show notes, if you don't know of the top of your head.
Just fine, I'll make a note to quiz you about.
Sure.
Find a link.
Yeah, I'll make sure it's in the show notes if we can dig that one out.
That's a great service.
Cool, I will come back to you on that one.
We'll go that in the show notes because that's a useful thing.
I didn't even know that it existed as a thing.
That's a useful thing.
So what kind of links of time was that period for you of like going to these sessions and hearing?
Was that in person?
Or was this like online?
Yeah, that was in person, back in the day.
We all went to a bar in a field.
There was six of us, plus Richard and Liz in Northamptonshire for five days.
Is there a kind of retreat as they would call it?
Kind of like retreat, yeah.
And so I got to know the other five people quite well through that shared experience.
How did they, because obviously if you just sat on your phones and ignored each other,
you wouldn't go live it?
So how did they facilitate that into something that turned into something meaningful?
So the, I guess the first day is kind of introductions.
And it's right, we want each of you to share a story when something was really good,
make it happening in your life.
Those that are thinking ahead of going, oh no, because then tomorrow we're going to talk about
the really shitiest thing that happened in your life.
And then so day three was then how you can balance the two,
because going through life is a moment of shared joy and happiness and terror and despair.
And you know, you can bounce between the two and I think the medical profession, they call that
bipolar, whereas if you can somehow balance it, don't go solo and don't go so high, then you
you can sort of gradually get a curve where you're generally happier.
And by understanding that the shit is not yours, it is given to you by somebody else.
What I mean by that is, your parents teach you everything you know until about age of seven.
Some of that stuff useful and some of it's not so useful.
It just stops my kids. I'm sorry, they're still time.
And so if once you realize that perhaps the internal voice actually sounds a little bit like
your parents at times, because it is and if it's saying something rubbish, that's history is gone,
it's passed, it's not relevant anymore. And so once you've made that connection, you can start to
filter that out. And so you then don't start, you don't feel so bad because it gradually disappears,
the more you filter it out, the more it disappears. Yeah, I mean, but like you were saying earlier,
my understanding is it's not, because I've come quite a long way on that particular journey myself,
and my internal monologue has mostly gone away, frankly, but there used to be particularly negative,
like very self-critical. Yeah, and yeah, my understanding is it's not so much that you filter it out,
like that doesn't work exactly. It's more like you acknowledge it, I move on, you hear what it's saying,
I've heard one of the tips which I thought was kind of cool was you give it a name,
oh that's you Bob again, like yeah, okay, thanks Bob, thanks for your input, okay, I'm going to carry on with my life now.
And it's really not dwelling on it and not turning it into something else that allows you to,
and like you say that voice gets just like, each time you like, aha, there's that voice again,
all right, I'm going to go back to whatever's going on right now in the moment,
and it just diminishes over time. My kids have taught me a lot about this, like, they are able to go from
floods of tears, angry, the worst thing in the world, and then like something will catch their
attention, and it's like it never happened. And to start with, I would be all stressed and upset,
because like they were being really difficult, and then like I'd miss the good bit, because I was
still in a funk about it, and I realized, I'm just missing out here, so I have to be able to move
quicker, and it's really helped me like, oh, okay, are we having a good time again, cool, right, drop
all that, so I'm much more able to move with it, I mean having kids is a pretty extreme way of fixing
that, but yeah, yeah, not for everybody, but kids can teach us a lot, they're really thinking,
did it sales? They are good sales, yes, especially good at sales.
So, about this retreat and that journey, because I don't want to drop that
prematurely, because I think this is super valuable for people who are anywhere in this journey,
frankly, and so we're at the retreat, so you came into the retreat with this kind of,
it's me and I'm broken, and like it's all going, no one else has this, I see the Instagram effect
of everybody else, and everyone else seems to be fine and coping and holding it together,
must be something wrong with me, so then you have this retreat and you hear these stories, so
take me through as much as you want within the retreat, but then like beyond that towards your,
much more then much more balanced self. Yeah, I mean whilst that's the start of the Zen
journey, it then takes, because that's really just the moment when you realise that that negative
voice needs to be listened to, like you said, it needs to be listened to, but then just ignore after
it's, so I don't mean to ignore it straight out of hand, I mean give it the exercise, but then
know that it's just talking complete rubbish and forget about it, and so knowing about that, then
then start your journey of not getting rid of it, because you can't get rid of it,
but at least minimising its effect on you, stopping feeding it is what I guess.
Yeah, you're just letting it exercise and run around, letting it be heard, and it feels better
and goes away, you've heard me okay great, and then it goes away, and then, until the point where it
doesn't have as much impact anymore. So yeah, those first two days are really quite hard, but they're
really insightful because you then realise that you're not broken, you all have this shared
experience called life, which gives you good bits and bad bits, and you're all born into an area
where you have some carers who are doing their best to care for you, but not all of their advice
is valid all the time. And so then, I guess one of the exercises is a sausage machine day,
which everyone gets excited about, and it's a metaphor that says, if you're thinking today's
going to be shit, and you put that into your sausage machine, then what's your sausage that's
going to come out like, it's going to be a shit sausage. So it kind of delves into perhaps a
little bit of positive affirmations in order to try and reset the balance here, so look on life
more positive, but it's not necessarily just, oh, everything's going to win, you know, I'm going to
win the lottery, it's going to be sunshineing and all that sort of stuff because that's not realistic
in your brain, won't buy it. It's more along the lines of whatever happens today, I know that I
can cope with it. It's more of that kind of level. So yeah, I expect some shit might happen today,
but that doesn't matter because I'm ready for it, you know, bring it on, and that kind of positive
energy, I suppose, some might say. And so yeah, sausage machine is all about, you know, if you
want to do really rubbish sausage based on your experience, what would you put in it? And
then that's the worst thing it could be, and imagine the best day ever, what's all the things
that's going into the sausage machine for the best day ever, and that's the other side of it.
And then again, it's those two extremes and trying to balance them out.
So with the opposite of that, the, like, I'm kind of middling, okay, and then one bad thing
happens, and it's like, see, it's all terrible, I knew it was going to be terrible, days ruined.
Yeah, it's the kind of stop you from falling into that trap.
So if you go into it going, there will be bad things, but I can cope, then
you start the day kind of okay, a bad thing happens, and you're like, ah, a bad thing happened,
I coped, and it helps you reset. Yeah, exactly, nice. You've done this before,
some of it, I had a business coach because I was trying to do something, and I got stuck,
and I couldn't work out why, and yeah, they helped me a bit with their stuff, because, like,
literally, they called the intro, they're like, "Oh, you're stressed."
It's like, "Oh, no, I'm telling you."
They introduced me to, there's a methodology called ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy.
Okay, because they nailed my personality, they're like, "Here's the research and practice guide book,
which is about this thick."
They had me.
Cool, right? I shall read all of that and enjoy it thoroughly, and it had all of like,
here's the research, and this is why this works. And it's basically, you've got CBT,
which cognitive behavioral therapy that everybody already knows about,
and this ACT thing is showing better results than the CBT. And a lot of it is,
I mean, the title kind of says it, acceptance and commitment, like, you accept the things
that are going on, I think, "Oh, I don't even know who got to meet you just to accept them."
I thought I had to get all worked up about them.
Oh, okay, fine. But, yeah, it's an interesting thing. So, yeah, they've done some of the journey,
to be sure. Yeah, because I've heard similar, like, circle of influence.
There's certain stuff that you have influence over, or you can actually do something about,
and then there's stuff outside of that, which might influence you, but you can't do anything about.
And so, there's no point stressing over that sort of stuff, because
stressing isn't going to fix it, it's not going to help it, it's just going to make you feel worse. So,
you know, recognize that is out of your control in carry on.
Yeah, that's best you can.
Yeah, I've heard that your circle of, like, carrying should be slightly larger than your circle of influence.
Like, you should care a little bit about the things that you can't control,
but you shouldn't observe about it. Yeah, yeah, they were.
They were different concentric rings of things. Yeah. But, yeah, not stressing out about the things
that you can't control is huge. Yeah. So, beyond this, on this ongoing journey, from,
so we've left the barn, and kind of got that, oh, okay, it's not just me. So, what is the journey
on edge from there to now that, like, how's that been? Yeah, really slow after that.
Yeah, I mean, it is one of those moments where you go, I'm not broken. I want to tell everybody
that I'm not broken at the same realization that they think they are broken, and you don't really have,
you don't really have the skills to show them that they're not broken because it's a really difficult
thing to do one-to-one. Especially if, you know, as family members that you can see
are in pain, you always want to help them. But, unfortunately, you're too close to them,
and you can't. It's when there's horrible things, really. So, once you then get over that of trying to
fix everybody else, you think, "Oh, actually, you know, it's about me, you have to be selfish again."
And, yeah, then you might rebound or you might bounce low or whatever, and
it's then keeping some reminders around, I think, of what you learn that week because it's easy
then to slip into the status quo and go back to where you were. Once that initial, you know,
much the initial excitement has worn off. So, how have you done that? Like, what's been your thing for
kind of keeping that front of mind? Well, as I alluded to, changing why has really helped.
Yes, you know, when it was a sad fact that one of the forms of a lot of my stress was the person
that was attached to, I say one of, there's a couple of others, but once I took the decision to get
out of that relationship, making a decision was really hard, but once it was made, everything was then
quite tranquil by comparison. And then I was fortunate enough to find another lady who was
more zen than I was at the time, which probably wasn't that difficult. And by her, then keeping me grounded,
then helped me become more zen.
Yeah, there's been very much of a bigger impact than the person who's been doing your life with.
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, my wife and my best friend, we spend a lot of time together, and
yeah, we obviously have a big impact on each other.
That's not a big deal. So, speaking of spending a lot of time together,
and at risk of taking it back to the contracting, that leads me nicely into like work-life
balance, or integration, as some people like to call it, which I'd rather like.
So, with all that in mind, keeping that more balanced mindset, and the life that you want to
enjoy, what do you personally do to make sure that you have balance and work doesn't ruin the rest
of life? Well, one of the benefits I would sell as a contractor is that you get a really clear
demarcation between what you're doing for the project in terms of time. In my current project,
I'm building a day rate, that day rate in the contract says, 9 to 5, and it means that at 5 o'clock,
I don't feel obliged to that customer. Now, there's a little bit of flexibility in this,
I think it has to be. I mean, life events happen, so they're going to give you wiggle room,
and production events happen, so you need to give them a little bit of wiggle room.
But on the whole, I feel I've got a better work-life balance as a contractor, because I can remain
detached from the organisation, whereas when you're a member of a permanent job, per me, you feel
much more, you feel like there's much more at risk, and I've seen permise almost burn out,
because they're doing stuff, and my advice to them is, they could sack you next month.
Don't be that invested in it. Like an unequal loyalty? Yeah, it's not a fair exchange at all.
And so, yeah, being a contractor helps you really have that objectivity about it.
But it's interesting, because I'm journaled, everyone would necessarily jump to that.
I have come across people working longer hours,
for out of perhaps, on such a duty or fear, sometimes that bored him.
I think I probably approach it a bit like you, like, this flexibility, but at the end of the day,
they're buying my time, and it makes me uneasy when something takes longer, because it
does have to be harder, or something is in the way. I don't like that, but nonetheless, if I
know in my true self that I have put the effort in and I've put the time in, then I can rest easy,
in terms of the actual project delivery. I mean, what would you say to other people who are
contracting or thinking about contracting? And wondering how blood those boundaries should be,
or do you have to excel beyond all the other contractors, or can you kick back and run two
contracts at once? There's obviously the two extremes. Yeah.
There are, I think, as long as you're delivering value for while there,
and your customer is reasonable, then if okay,
which they are not all reasonable, then not all customers are reasonable,
which I think is what you're alluding to is some customers will expect you to work harder
because you'll be in paid more, but at the same time, it's not really about working harder,
it's about the value that you're delivering. On any given day, I could write a piece of code,
like today maybe, I've written a piece of code, it's two lines long, it took me 15 minutes to write
it and test it and deploy it, because of all the other groundwork, and with that piece of code in
there, that'll make everything else run easier. I could argue that I've delivered a ton of value
in 15 minutes, and not because of a desk for eight hours,
and that's partly because we are in a creative industry, and not many people get that.
You know, by the same token, there was another piece of code that I was writing,
and I was in the moment, and we all know about context switching,
if you once you've got some built up in your head and you're working on it, it's quite easy,
but if you have to drop it to pick it up again, there's some inertia in order to get back into that same spot.
And so it's five minutes to five, and I'm thinking, do I really want to do this now? And I said,
well yeah, I've got all the context now, I might as well see it through, and so you get to 20 past five,
and I've done the testing and all of that. I'm not going to ship it into production at time
at night, don't be silly. My value is the on-call people too much, but I've completed it to the point
where I don't need much context to pick it up again in the morning, and then to take it to extremes,
there's sometimes when you're working on a problem, and you're sitting on the sofa trying to have
some chill out time, and maybe speaking with your friend or watching Netflix or other streaming
services are available, but this problem is just boring a hole in your head trying to come up with it,
and again, we're in creative industry, we can't really escape that, so
sometimes it's difficult to get a work with balance, but other times it's quite easy to use the clock
against the customer, if you will. Yeah, I'm definitely related, I'm on the flip side,
like you might be staring at a problem in the middle of the afternoon, and just getting nowhere,
and getting out and going for a walk might actually get that sorted and give you a bit of fresh air.
Yeah, taking a rest is sometimes the best thing you can do, for sure.
One of the things about contracting is you are, as they say, chief cook and bottle washer,
and if you're solo contracting, you have to write the same tune, sing the same tune, no wait,
you have to put your profile out there, you have to brush up your skills, you have to find work somehow,
and then you have to deliver on it, and certainly in my experience, it's been like time for money
40 hours a week, and that's particularly in programming, it's just such a focused thing,
it's very hard to do anything else, it makes sense, but if you really want to kill it,
and then, I think we'll talk about promotion at some point, but if you then do podcasts and conferences,
meetups and goodness knows what else, some plural site courses and some certifications,
you're basically running three full-time jobs if you're not careful, and that could very easily
get out of hand. Personally, I've taken the approach previously when times were a bit more normal,
where I would finish contract, and then I would do a bunch of that, and then I'd worry about the next thing,
and that was going to find, because there was always stuff around, now it's not quite so clear, because
you know, if I go, all right, I'll have a break, and then I go, okay, I'm ready to do something,
in my tiny ages, to find something, and now I've had twice the break, actually, actually wanted,
so what's your thinking around, like, making the business of contracting work, but also
not burning out, and overdoing it, and falling apart, mentally?
Yeah, so in the same way that I would treat the company time for my customer, quite rigid,
in a nine to five, I would do the same about your personal time,
you know, have a lunch break that is sacred, and try not to do anything in the middle of that lunch break.
Now, I'm pretty good at this most of the time, but occasionally someone will say, "Hey,
we want to give you some more money for doing something for lunchtime," and I'm like, "Okay,
I think, I think I might do that." And it's very tempting to do that,
as long as you know that you're going to pay for that later on,
in terms of energy, or motivation, or whatever, so I guess it comes back to the work, life balance,
really. I mean, one approach that I did have to it, so when I wrote the first book,
I negotiated my customer, I happened to negotiate quite a rate rise on one of the renews,
and then at the same time I negotiated a four-day work week,
which looking back on it is like, "How the heck do I do that?"
So I managed to get a high day rate, lower hours, which gave me a day back,
and all in all balanced out, the honestly invoice was nearly the same as a result.
But presumably, they were happy that they were getting value for money, so it's actually, yeah,
yeah, I'd already proven my value, this is my thesis of contract renew, I'd already been there
for a while and proven how much value I was given to them, so they were happy to pay more,
because of the perceived value, and yeah, without me for a day a week then gave me time to do some other
stuff in this case, right, book. So that's one way of managing it, like if you've got some
additional thing that you want to do for your business, then bring the contracting in a bit,
try and get a four-day a week contract, or something like that, yeah, okay. It's not something I've
ever tried, I know someone else who's got a four-day a week permanent job on the same basis, they have
other pursuits, and that works for them. Yeah, yeah, a couple of guys that are doing that,
different reasons. I mean, one of them's got, they're at the start of their family,
and so they've decided that they're going to do a four-day week, so that they can spend more time
with their son. Yeah, that's definitely got to be. Time you can't buy back. Exactly.
So, yeah, as long as you're aware of it and just make sure, I mean, I think scheduling,
as boring as that sounds, scheduling these blocks in for when you need to do stuff is the best way
to handle it, to make sure that you don't put too much in. Scheduling downtime is as important as
scheduling work time. Have you ever, like, come close to burnout yourself? Like,
yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, internally, I call it overwhelm. I just get to a point where I can't focus on
anything because I've got too many plates spinning at the same time. And so, the only way out then is
to pick one of the plates and put it down before it crashes, so that's the way out. Like,
don't push yourself, so ridiculously hard. Yeah.
Hmm. How do you, like, get the confidence to put one of the plates down? Like, because there could be
like some fear that, like, if you put one of the plates down, it's all going to come crashing down
and everything's going to stop working. There is that, but also from experience, I know that,
if I don't put one of the plates down, everything will crash. Then you put all of the plates down.
And that's a far worse position to be in. Yeah. So just pick the thing that's least important
and put it down. It'll wait.
All right, so I'm going to move subjects a bit. I've got a few other things I want to cover.
I shall try not to. This has been superb. We're running.
A good length, which I love the fact that we can do this at podcast. Like, the conversation is good,
let's just keep talking, which is cool. Maybe rattle through some of the more like tactical stuff in
the book and see if you've got anything like to add, maybe I'll pick a few things in quick succession.
You mentioned Ipsy membership, which has been on my kind of to-do list.
What do you know about that in brief as I think, and how important that is for contractors?
I guess my motivation for joining up to Ipsy, and they were called some else before that,
is mainly around the IR-35 thing.
So you can get insurance for just about anything, but what you can't get is sort of a voice and
representation and stuff. You know, you can badge a UMP, which might help, but Ipsy as an organization
deal with a lot of contractors, whether you're a window fitter or an IT person,
whatever, you know, independent dentist, I don't know, there's all sorts of jobs out there for everybody.
And so they represent all of that, and you know, really provide some support around IR-35.
So that's the main reason why, but they also offer other services that might be helpful to contractors as
well in terms of free templates and things, like legal paperwork and things like that, it was also available.
Is that right, that's useful to know?
Yeah, and it's one of those things, they don't really push any of that stuff, you have to go look for it.
Cool, CV review service, all these kind of things, but yeah, they're not very good at promoting
themselves, so you really do have to dig into them. If you're going to sign up for that membership,
get in there and see what is available.
Right, cool, yeah, that's good to know. I was aware that they were quite active on being a voice
to government on the issues with IR-35, which is important, they're kind of aggregating the
the number of people that that's affecting, because we don't have, like you say, we don't have a lot of voice
individually. Yeah. What about, sort of, on the skills thing, you mentioned like rats and daps,
but in terms of, you know, it's never a really an ending question intact, because it changes so
down fast, and you've chosen the DevOps route, I've chosen the like programming and lead dev kind of
route for the time being, currently, on that, maybe Rust, which you'll see. In like, choosing the kind
of niche versus flexibility, like where do you kind of feel like optimal is in terms of
being a successful tech contractor?
How are you supposed to answer that? Well, the official answer is t-shaped.
(laughs) Yeah, the official answer is t-shaped, because as a contractor, you're expected to hit
the ground running. But you can also have some influence over what contracts you accept.
And then in terms of what that t should look like, it's what you find your most drawn to,
because you all be most passionate about learning it and doing it, and you can be an expert in that area,
for sure. Although, yeah, I mean DevOps, that doesn't sound very specialist, does it as it goes, but
it used to be, I think, like, all of these things, because the technology landscape is getting
broader and deeper and broader and deeper, like, like, they didn't used to be such a thing as a
front end web specialist, and now that's the thing. And yeah? Yeah, well, to have the script,
isn't it? (laughs)
And as you're talking about UI, UI is also split off into its own thing.
In my experience, like, the little companies, they need someone who can do everything,
and the bigger they are, the more they want, like, the, I don't know, Kubernetes backplane specialist,
or something. He said, "It's not really never, it's talking about..."
No, I don't know what you're embedded in. You said Kubernetes, yay, money, no.
That's so last year, it's all AI this year. Yeah, so just, yeah, big data that's coming back, isn't it?
That's the same thing. Yeah, I'm a niche, niche or, like, broad. I mean, like, how have you
thought about it in your particular journey? Because it's easier to be niche than it is to be broad.
And I don't know if that's a flippant statement, but that's, you know, it's really, it's really easy to
stand out if you've got a specialist skill set versus trying to be a, what do they call it?
All things to all people? Yeah, that's what my put in it. I was going for the technical,
full stack developer. All right. Yeah, that's increasingly receding into the review mirror,
full stack developer. Yeah, thankfully, because, you know, what does it mean? I mean, I have to do
JavaScript. Yeah, yeah. For an end developer. Yeah, I can be a backend developer now, and that's fine.
Enough to do. So, do you, I mean, you're doing DevOps for HTML, so like, do you pitch, like,
something within the DevOps space? Because as you say, that's grown, as I say.
Yeah, so I do pitch more around automating processes, right? So not so much the technology,
saying more of a, like, the pictures about automation of manual things.
Yeah, I mean, I don't care what program I'm in language use, you know, I'll go across any language,
whether it's golang or JavaScript or, no, I've not touched pull phrases. Pull, what the heck is that?
Python for everything, right? It's just about understanding what the process is at the moment,
and then making sure that that can be automated. And I've done this new move time. So,
money supermarket, they wanted to be able to upgrade a database software,
including schema changes with minimal downtime. And so it's like, okay, what does that process look
like end to end? What all the bits we need? And then building it out, it took about 18 months to
pull that together. Whereas at HTML C, where I'm currently, it's more about, we've got some
developers, they've got some code. What's the quickest path that they can get that built and
deployed onto a Docker, whatever infrastructure? So, yeah, I guess my focus is more around
defining a process and then getting all the steps done in between, rather than building servers or
building Jenkins jobs or whatever. Yeah, I was specialising specifically in, like,
get a hard pipeline. What's a member of that? For example, yeah. I tell you what catches my ear on that,
it seems to me that your pitch is closer to the value that the customer is after than the technology
per se. Like, they don't want Kubernetes, they want productive developers, and they get productive
developers by automating the things that developed them annually. Was that conscious, kind of,
messaging, choice, or is that something to you? Now, I'd say that's probably conscious,
with my selling hat on, to make, you know, nobody wants drill, you don't go to being
queued or buy a drill because you want a drill, or actually some people might like that. But most of
the time you just want a hole in the wall. Yeah. If you could rent a drill and discover,
and then give the drill back, people would be happy, you know, to go, "Oh, I know what, that's what I wanted."
And so, from the customer perspective, yeah, they want to know what, how you can help their
individual problem. What's the problem? They're dealing with how can you fix that problem,
rather than, you know, what make of software you're going to use to fix it?
Does that change who you talk to about value, because if you're kind of thinking,
deep technical, like, "Let's say, are they incorrect?" You end up just talking to a recruiter who already
knows that they need a drill, or a, "Donut programmer," or whatever. Does that change the conversations
you can have, and who you have some with? And it, I don't think so, really. I mean, I suppose the
thing is when you're talking to recruiters, they will, they tend to put down skills, because they're
trying to weed out CVs and stuff. So rather than just putting down Kubernetes, they might, they might
put down, you know, have you used Docker containers? Or they might just list all of them, they might go
crazy in Kubernetes and rancher, and at ECS and Google Apps, and, you know, just go crazy and list
everything, and to the sign in your reading, that thinking, there's not a customer wants all of
that, surely. They just want somebody that knows what they're doing with Docker containers.
But when you're talking to recruiters, it's not that clear cut what the customer wants, because
they don't want to tell you who the customer is. They don't tell you, they don't even want to tell
you what the customer wants. They've already whittled down to the skills that they think the customer wants.
So it can make talking to recruiters difficult, but it can make talking to the customers directly,
easier. When you say the customer is directly, well, kind of like I'm guessing like a CTO or maybe
a CEO for a smaller company, like, yeah, it would be, yeah, it would be the technical level, like say CTO.
And normally they're quite well protected. So like,
like the kind of drifting into the, the conversation about like how you sell yourself as a
contractor and like what you'll reach to market are, like you mentioned a couple of things in the book,
like you mentioned networking. And we, you know, we talked about like towards the end of a contract
and thinking about looking for the next thing. There's sort of related things, like, you know,
consultancies have been quite a good market for me. recruiters have been a good source of business for me.
I've had a lot less direct contact with CTO types, which I just assume are kind of the main
buyer, unless it's really big in which case maybe a level down. And you mentioned networking and
like you mentioned meetups and events and whatever you say in terms of the way you talk about the value
that you bring instead of like, oh, I do this tack, which is going to lead you more into the world
of recruiters, which is what I've generally done. And leading more with that kind of higher
up the value chain of like, I automate things to a manual. I don't know what I would say for why I do.
Probably I'd deliver successful software projects without any of the nonsense would be more
the thing. But even if I can say that, if I'm still talking to recruiters like you say, they're like,
don't care, do you take my CV skills boxes? And, you know, when I'm getting repeat business with
people, like, they've had a much longer exposure than they kind of know what I bring. And I don't
even have to tell them, they're just like, you know, soft side problems, reliable, etc, communicator.
And of these kinds of things that you can't put on a CV as check boxes. So, how,
personally and selfishly interested in like how to get to those kind of, those direct conversations.
I don't have as much against recruiters as a lot of people in the tech world do just to be clear.
But in terms of like, growing the business myself, like, I personally have an ambition to build a
multi-person business, like a multi-person agency. And I can't do that through a recruit,
just that's a non-starter. But you say they want to own the relationship.
So, indeed, yeah. What would be your advice on, on like that, that, getting that direct
access, or all of these things I could do, what would be effective in your mind?
So, two things immediately come to mind, you know, networking is by far the best way of doing that.
And growing that network can be easier, hard based on what other assets for better word you already
have. So, when you're starting out, the only asset you've got is your CV.
You can bolster your CV by saying, "I delivered this product, like a case study, if you like."
And that can bolster your CV out. If you've got a blog, you can then start talking about what you've
delivered, as well as the case studies. And then maybe somebody will see that and contact you.
But that's quite farfetched, you know. There's billions of websites available, the
tax of them, seeing yours is very slim, which is when it comes back to networking again.
So, it's ashamed that the networking events have gone away. But then it depends on the type of
event that you go to. If you go to a techie event, then there's going to be lots of techies there.
There's probably not going to be C3 in decision makers. But they might know somebody, you know,
if you are talking at an event that not elevates you to the next level straight away,
you might have some people in the audience that are just techies, but then they can take that
information back to their boxes. And they can say, "I've learnt about this thing." And I'll say,
"Well, who told you that?" Well, this dude was speaking about it at this thing. "Oh, what's his name?"
And then if you're easy to find through that route, and it would like having a good LinkedIn profile,
then you might get the link through there. Or link with the techies personally, the techies
themselves are linked internally to the CTO, which gives you another route in. And so it's just
basically about having those personal connections who are talking to you because you're making
the right noises through articles and blogs and talks and presentations and whatnot.
Did you? If they say, "Get up on stage and say, I'll teach you a cool thing that's kind of related to
what I do." And I've been learning a bit about how proper sales, people do proper sales.
I've even got myself a HubSpot account and I think in sales navigator, just to see if I can do it,
I guess. I mean, my mate said, "Well, why would you do this yourself?" Just hire a salesman,
but that aside, I'm kind of interested in that. But what it's kind of exposed me to is,
there is so much in there of like, it's able to cater for a full-on sales organization,
like 100 salespeople of all of the various levels building a full-on funnel. And I'm like,
cool, right? In my typical, always fascinated by a tool kind of approach to life,
I want to do some sales, watch what I did, let me go and find the sales tools and see what they do.
But what it showed me is, you can do an absolute ton to drive sales, but in terms of,
a solo contractor or a small consultancy, maybe later in life as a contractor,
or just having more business than you can cope with, which is never a bad thing, even if you're solo.
To what extent? Let's say the minimum bar is, you show up at a few events a year,
maybe a small meetup with 20 to 30 people attending, and you say something useful to people. So,
that's where we start. That's not too hard for people to do, once they go over,
they're kind of like, "Oh, God, that's terrifying." Once you've done it a few times, it's not too bad,
I've done a few, and I really enjoy it, I can definitely do more of that.
So, this is where I just haven't seen beyond this past. I've heard from lots of people,
"Oh, people will come to you, you will get referrals to the CTO, they will check you out,
or whatever." How hard do you think that you, if your pitch is reasonable,
if the service you're offering has some value, that's obviously a basic,
how hard do you think that you have to work to draw those out? Do you have to go stalking the
Mon LinkedIn and get emails of attendees and harass them regularly, or like everything they post
on LinkedIn and try and get introduced, or like, "Does they just land on your doorstep?" I'm like,
"Oh, hey, I heard you can do a thing."
A mixture of both really, so I've had, it wasn't even a CTO, it was a CTO attached to contact me directly,
to say, "You can do dev-op stuff, my tech team are telling me they need a dev-ops person,
can you help us? Can you come in to the office for a meeting?" Because management
he always wanted to see face to face, right? Yep. And so that's happened? How did they find you?
They found me through LinkedIn. Oh, right, literally, they hadn't heard about you through a talk,
or a conference or anything, like... There was a lot of people, you know? Someone says we need a dev-ops
person, who's in my network that does dev-ops? So that's kind of like, "SEO for LinkedIn, isn't it?"
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so having that LinkedIn profile helps them find you that way if they're looking.
Yeah, so sadly, that wasn't through my network, that wasn't through anything else,
they found me on LinkedIn because I'd already done a groundwork to have that profile on there.
They probably clicked through on a few things just to get a fuzzy feeling about me as well.
You know, because nobody wants to do a Google of you and find out that you're a serial killer,
but you've served your time now and it's okay. So there is a fair bit of what I call profile work,
which is just making sure that if somebody looks for you, they can at least find you.
And then it just comes back to the network, you know? It's talking to people that you've worked with
previously, speaking with other people that you'd like to work with, you know, aspirational, but
you know, if you want to work for Lego, find somebody that's in your network that knows somebody who
works for Lego, right? Not going to get to the CTO straightaway. It's a very long burn process.
And I think you've alluded to it already when you looked at the HubSpot software, you know, it can be
like a 20 stage process from an initial outreach to a signed contract. And there's a heck of a lot
of touch points in the middle that could be there. And that's what sales people are really good at.
They understand what those touch points are. So having the profile means that somebody can see you,
that's like marketing. Okay, they're putting their offer out. They can help me with my problem.
And then the flip side of that is the sales guy who will then say, okay, now we've got this lead,
this person that's interested, digging into the detail of what is your problem, what is your budget,
and then providing them with the assets that says this is how we can help you when you want us to start.
Have you ever had to do like an investigation, like a little like a week of investigation before you
get the the meaty delivery project? Because I know, gather that's a bit of a thing sometimes.
It is, yeah. This particular one didn't go anywhere, but that's the nature of it.
I did charge for the discovery. Yep, that's important.
Yeah, so we call it the discovery phase. I was on site for four weeks.
Oh, I think so.
Yeah, I put a couple of demos together for them over the course of the discovery phase.
And then they said, that looks lovely. We'd love to work with you, but
then it all fell over. Yeah, I mean, I did run of those, mostly as a favor, for someone who reached out
and like they clearly couldn't afford to kind of level what I normally do implementation at.
Yeah. And then one thing I realized is the little businesses have a lot of the same problem as the
business big businesses. They just can't afford a gang of contractors to come and sort them out.
Like they just have to make do. Yeah, it's not my market, I'm a fraud.
And so that's why most of my customers are bigger business.
Not to start up and what about the dreaded cold outreach of like
phoning and not winning someone up?
Not my thing. That's when salespeople come into the room.
If you've ever been up a high street and you've been charity mugged by a chugger,
they're there to talk to anybody who's going to speak to them in order to get some money for the
charity. Yeah, you can just say, well, how much you get paid? Do you want to do some outreach
calls for me? Yeah, they're doing things for money. It's great.
Have you ever engaged the salesperson? I have engaged a salesperson.
Yeah. Give me some insight into because one of the, as well as being allergic to recruiters,
a lot of technical people are completely allergic to sales and mildly allergic to marketing,
which is a bit of a mental block if you're going to run a limited company that needs to do sales
and marketing. So yeah, Paul Buckley, kind of a bit like what was your experience of that?
I have to say that I wasn't very good at leading them properly.
There's several things that a good salesperson will want to know, one is,
what is the biggest problem you're going to solve? And the second one is, who are you solving that for?
So if you can articulate those two items over to a salesperson and then let them do what they do best,
find that target market and describe that problem to them.
Right. Yeah, and those are often the hardest questions if you're
like not quite so far in your journey, I guess. But I suppose it's like you said before,
is it's a journey of evolution and contracting? We sort of say,
per me contracting, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that does it? It can be actually like per me.
Okay, I've got a number other, I've got a limited company and then I get some contractory recruiters,
but like professional growth for a contractor within that period of contracting could look like,
you know, start with recruiters, then start with some more direct contact through the message
that we talked about and then have too much work hire someone, put your rates up, depending on what suits your
own life. But you know, if you're trying to run an expensive family, you might like scale up and have
more people and like build the bottom line. If you're like more of like what, what life balance you might,
be like, I'll just put my rates up and then yeah, I'm still, the money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean,
initially extremely gifted, you're not going to go per me and then bang when a consultancy,
unless you're already a per me from a consultancy at a management level, in which case, yeah,
that's transferable skills, right? But yeah, as a, as a, as a dipped return water, like the path you
described is a journey through building skills, both technical and the soft skills?
So where, where would it like, regard it kind of regardless of how well it went for you specifically,
that based on your understanding of the world and sales, like where would like, engaging a salesperson
fit in the ideal world for you and like in hindsight, how would you manage it? How would you
compensate them? How would you kind of get what you want out of it really? Sure. So I wouldn't
hire them until I had a clear product. You need to know what you're selling. But in order to have
a clear product, you need to have a clear understanding of the two questions I said earlier, which is
the problem you want to solve and who you're going to solve it for. And then the third answer
within that little trilogy is, have they got the budget, which we've also touched on?
Right, because it's all very well finding people that are in your target market that've got the problem,
but they've got the budget, they're not going to be a high, yep. So you need all of those three things in
the pot. And so once you've got those three things, plus the assets like the case studies, because
you've done it before, then your salesperson will find you attractive enough to want to work for you.
And if they can see that, yes, that's what the market looks like. And yes, they do have that problem.
And yes, they do have the budget. They'll be able to see the money. They'll be able to smell it
to say, yeah, I can sell you all day long because of those three parameters. And if it's like that,
then you know, you can give them a commission. And I was like, how much do I want to sell?
Off they go. I mean, like a rocket. If you haven't got those things defined, then you're going to have
to offer the salesperson incentive, which normally means like base salary or something,
right, with a commission structure on top of that. So if you have to do that, it means you don't have
those assets like that may be fooling them yet. Okay. So that's a good signal, then, so in right,
if you can't attract any salespeople on pure commission, then perhaps your offering isn't quite right
yet for that kind of acceleration. Exactly. Cool. Well, I ask a lot of those questions very selfishly,
because it's so, someone suggested to me recently for this kind of rust consultancy thing, I've been
chipping away at that I should just get a salesperson on commission. I didn't even occur to me
that you could do that. But would you think that would ever be value for a solo contractor, or is
that only if you're like trying to scale up beyond that? Yeah, I think it wouldn't be attractive enough
to the salesperson. They wouldn't be able to earn enough commission to support themselves if it's
just so low. So looking. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I get one of the things that I thought of before
and I've heard other people mention is the idea of like getting a recruiter to work for you instead
of the other way around. And I don't believe that works. Like they always work for the people with
the money and find you and take the cut on that end. Like, I'm not aware that it can work the other
way around. They sell you. No, if the anyway they're going to sell you is if you give them the money,
which you're before being up getting to do, I mean, you could, I suppose. Yeah, because
they're sales people. They chase the money. So if you're giving, if you're the customer, that means
you're paying them the money, they go find me a contract. Yeah. But now I don't think that's really a thing.
And once you've got a stream of work to do, in terms of actually like delivering on a contract,
I look a couple of questions around that. Something that's come up for me a couple of times is the idea
of like a regular reporting, sort of leads into the communication with your client and the various people
in the client. So like I've mentioned before, like sometimes I'm embedded in a team and I'm doing
daily stand-ups and the team itself is a very tight communication, but there might be some other
important stakeholders that are a bit less connected, like the CTO if you're dealing with end
directly or a consultancy is quite common for me. And they don't necessarily know what's going on.
And one of the consultancies I work for was like, can we have a monthly report? Like just a written
good, bad, ugly, indifferent out of the box kind of things. What's been you're thinking around
sort of out of band communication with clients to make sure that that relationship stays
tip top? Yeah. Sometimes it's not appropriate,
just to guard about, you know, out of band communication as you say, some people get really
edgy around the reporting hierarchy. So what you might have to do is you can still create the
report, but you just have to send it up the right way, send it through the right chain,
which I find works quite well because then the your direct contact, if you like,
then feels happy that they're in control, even though you've written a document.
Sure, they might doctor it on the way up, who knows? So if you've got, like, you're in a team,
there's a lead dev, maybe a middle manager, or a CTO, but you're kind of engaged by the CTO,
rather than kind of skipping all of those levels and giving them a direct,
you might write your report and then let them surface it up, but maybe check in the CTOs actually
seeing something I suppose? Yeah, if you've got the relationship with the CTO, then check in certainly
that, did you get the report? They might say yes or no, you know, you can follow up like that.
But if you're sending the report through that chain of command, if you want to call it that,
then everyone feels involved and at least part of the process, it's just the way of
growing in network is being nice. On the other hand, if you've got a direct relationship with
the CTO and they ask you directly, can you give me a report and give them that report?
Yeah, I guess. Have you ever felt the need to push beyond what they've asked for in terms of
reporting and communication like, "Oh, be proactive around it." Do you think that's a good,
a good, good or bad idea? I think some would see that as a bonus,
talk about assets and being able to sell yourself and if you can say that we will do a weekly report
about what's been done and what benefits this is to the business because they'll always have to
the benefit to the business, then, yeah, that puts you in a happier place in their eyes.
Cool. Yeah, I kind of wondered about that when it's not necessarily been asked for because I can
see that as a plus, like, but in a way enough, that's the people. Indeed, as long as you can, once you've
set that expectation, as long as you can keep fulfilling it, yes, because what you don't want to do
is set an expectation and then fail miserably a month later when you haven't done it and they're
expecting the same again. Yeah, I should share one cautionary tale. I had one go bad.
No, it had to be stiffer, like, it wasn't the end of the contract, but it was still a bit like,
"Oh, goodness, in that I sent a pretty blunt report, like, through the consultancy to the
senior folk and they just immediately sent it onto the whole team." I think, "Oh, God,
what did I say about so and so?" Not being very good.
So, yeah, like you say, you don't, doctoring or like being distributed beyond perhaps where you
thought it was going to go to, I think it's, it's just, you have to kind of assume that these things
might get shared to the whole company at some point. Absolutely, if you've shared it to one person,
you've shared it to the entire planet, same goes for uploading stuff on internet, right? Yeah, it is
a bit. Yes, there are no private forums. Also, in terms of like servicing clients, so if your
if your sales is going well, I've never been able to run more than one client at once, and I'm not
talking about the morally dubious, like, pretending to work hard and not and doubling up an out,
because that's obviously completely unethical. I'm talking about like legitimately in the open,
like maybe a split week or something, you know, two days for this client, two days for that client.
For me, for me, in certainly in call face delivery of programming, I've never done it. I would imagine
I'd find that incredibly difficult with the context, which, like you've mentioned, is that
something you've had in the experience where they're all seen done? Yeah.
I have, and yeah, there is a certain level of context switching that is required. So,
in that case, I would make it quite clear on which times you'll work on, which client
preferably broken up by day, you know, so if you've got the situation where you can do a split week,
where it is two, you know, Monday and Tuesdays for one client, and Wednesday, Thursday for the other one,
then that makes your brain much easier to cope with, you know, in terms of, you know,
I'm dealing with a whole block of that. Now, some customers might not like that, so, you know,
this is where it pays to be more in demand of any completely customers.
Otherwise, yeah, you're not delivering your best if you try and, you know, deliver for two customers
on the same day, you know, you might start mixing up IP and design and things, and yeah, it really
makes it quite stressful to try and keep that demarcation. So, you know, keep those barriers as solid
as you can. So, like a single day is like a minimum for easy switching or easier switching.
Easier switching, yeah. I mean, I've done like a morning and an afternoon, this is kind of a minimum,
your morning for one customer and afternoon for another, you know, you've got that lunch break
just to clear mind, which, yeah, but nothing, certainly nothing less than that.
Is there any advantage to like, juggling multiple clients? I mean, I'm kind of guessing that
in terms of not having a cliff at the end of one of them finishing is obviously a thing,
which I suffer was in my own business, like a contract finishes for better or worse,
and it's back to the scramble.
Yeah, I mean, for me, they're on different rates, which can help.
You know, all customers pay the same day rate.
So it creates sort of a different level of balance, like you said, it's not getting that cliff
edge when the contract finishes, but it also seeds, you know, the groundwork I suppose for being
a multi-person agency, right? Because when, when you get two clients on board, then, you know,
maybe you can get three clients on board, and then at some point you're going to have enough
overhead to make it worthwhile to hire another person to come in to help you.
Yeah, that makes sense. And then you're, you're off to something that isn't really contracting
at that point, it's more like running a consultancy. Yeah, yeah, and then we're into the MSP
territory. Yeah, yeah, and so you touched on this as like towards the end of the book, like,
what's the off ramp for contracting? Is it, you know, retirement or growing a bigger business
or entrepreneurship, which is an entrepreneurship vision entire other subject, which fascinates me,
but it's probably, the underscores of this particular conversation. I'm going to like head towards
wrapping up because we've got all sorts of wonderful territory. One of things caught my eye
as well as the book. You mentioned that you have a three C's to become a confident contract, of course.
Tell me about that because I don't know anything about it. Yes, this is a bit of a deep dive
beyond the confines of a fairly concise book where you can access to me for a whole day,
this is one of the formats where we go through all the sections and you know, you can,
as well as going through the material in the book, there's also the opportunity for you to throw,
you know, actual questions and concerns directly at me. So if you'll stuck it any bit,
then it gives you a deeper understanding of the subject matter. And then in addition to that,
also got a slack community so you can come onto there and again ask questions and continue a
journey with that support and helping handle. Cool. And what prompted you to offer this as well?
I mean, certainly just to say, it certainly sounds super useful. It's all very well,
reading the book, listening to a podcast, but everyone has their own unique things that they're stuck
on that they want to get with. So that one-to-one is totally valuable. I personally hired a business
coach for exactly that reason. I'd read a lot and I still didn't know what to do. But yeah, what
motivated you to open up that in your diary, in your busy diary, put it sound a bit? Yeah. So
there was a group of lads who were with a consultancy who are thinking about
doing contracting and they approached me and said, you know, we value you as, you know,
I've worked with all of them individually before. And we want to know your knowledge, you know,
can you set aside some time and come workshop with us for a day? And I said, yeah, sure, we can
put something together. And rather than it being in person, we delivered it over a spirit of two,
four days, but only like an hour a day or something like that, just to give them time to digest
an auto to fit it around my busy diary at that time. And so they found that immensely useful and
so I thought, okay, this is probably valuable, so let's offer that out. Gosh. I mean, they will go far,
if they are motivated and intelligent enough to be like, oh, here's someone who knows it,
let's get them to tell us that. That's amazing. Indeed, yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah, going contracting is
going to be the least of their problems, I think, like they will fly through that with your, with your
resistance. And in terms of them, like, I'm interested to know what you see, like in the broader
horizons, like you, you know, obviously talked to a variety of people, they're in a variety of positions
in what you've been doing, like, AI aside, does that make sense? Because that's the current peak
as the hype cycle. So perhaps we'll forget about that one and this is something with substance going
on there. But like, what do your kind of like early whisperings on the vine from like the sea sweet
and the people in the ground that you're kind of seeing the future direction that I guess the
relevance is going to be like if someone's deciding which of these various niches to dive into, like,
I think you did very well to get into DevOps. Like, I saw that one as a good opportunity. I personally
avoided it because I don't like doing with other people's software, I like writing my own.
So yeah, what's the current outlook that you see from what, what are people are talking about that's
kind of the next thing? So I think people are still talking about deploying software easier.
Yeah, still a fath. Related to that. Yeah, it's still, you know, put it in a Docker container.
Okay, I've done that. It's still a fath. Yeah, it's still very tricky. Not not too much, you know, to
get it all on one machine in the front. It's great, you know, you've done it, array, Docker compose,
sorted. But if you then need to scale that up in any way, that's where all the pain comes in.
And I don't think there's a really neat public way of doing that. I mean, I know a couple of platforms
that will do that in a Heroku music, it comes to mind. Yeah, and if it fits your needs,
then you don't mind the price. Yeah. And that works for simple type developments.
It feels like proof of concept startups. Indeed, yeah. Yeah, it's very good for sticking
this stuff on there initially, but you're soon going to hit that. Hopefully, if your product is
really awesome, you're going to hit that scale up space. And that's still really a not a solved
problem, I don't think at this point. Interesting. So maybe some opportunities there for like helping
companies with what's out there now, and maybe even innovating on some of the products around it.
The platform. Yeah, I don't think Kubernetes is the answer, that's just too damn complicated.
It's very complicated. Yeah. And like on the other side of it, like the
pipeline, some might have you, like, having been in a few places that have pushed that really
quite hard and done quite a lot with it, like it does, does a gap there. Like for all that is come
along way, like once it gets complicated, you've got a lot of, yeah, I don't know, a lot of yaml.
A lot of yaml. Yeah, yaml is definitely the answer. Yeah, that's interesting. And there's a lot,
there's interesting stuff happening that's kind of related in terms of the reducing the overhead
of what's deployed. I think really interesting things that's coming down the line is the
what's that technically, but in browsers. Web assembly, that's the one I was looking at. So you've got
Web assembly in the browser and you've got wazzy Web assembly, common interface or something,
which allows it to interface with desk and network and what have you.
A hosting model like serverless kind of hosting model where that's the container for your
business logic code instead of Docker or some kind of, um, heroic who kind of thing, that that's
got definitely huge potential to be like Docker on steroids in terms of, um, reducing the overhead
of the infrastructure down to just such a ridiculously low level, especially if you put
something like rust in it, which has got also ridiculously low overhead, like the amount of scale for
the amount of money you spend is going to be insane. Um, and I think when AWS or Azure or whatever,
pick that up and that becomes the new deployment thing, I think that was going to change things quite
a bit, but you're still, you're still going to have that like, well, okay, cool. How do I get my code out
get hard, or bit bucket or whatever into that thing? How do I do all my networking? How do I do all my
I.e. C. That's still all could definitely be easier for sure. Yeah, I say there's a lot of fat
fall around it, whereas it sounds like it should be really simple. Yeah, for sure. And at the small
level, it is more work for the contractors and I don't see the AI doing it yet. Like I've played,
played a bit with the AI and like it's really good for getting you off the ground.
Like, oh, right, me a guy, I'm piling for this and like it will get it like 80% right.
And that's cool. And I'm sure it's going to get better, but in terms of like
replacing the consultants, no, John's not, not all this point.
Now, I mean, it still misses that depth of context. Yeah. Well, I think that's the thing.
The ability to trust it as well.
Divis that. Oh, look, it took this massive shortcut. Yeah. It went one, two, five, you know,
all the way up to three and four. Yeah. Okay. It was just easier to open up all the
fireballs. So I did that. Yeah. Yeah. I hallucinated your fireball. What fireball?
Cool. Okay. We've covered so much. As I was going to think as you want to mention before I
before I wrap up, I mean, I will, I will ask you about your book and where to find you, but
on that kind of wondering journey that we've covered is the something else we should dodge on.
No, I mean, I think big data, stir thing. Right. Yeah, that's definitely, there's still good
money for data scientists in, in tech for sure. Yeah. Lots of unstructured data that needs wrangling.
More data lakes. I hear as a hot topic still. Yeah, indeed. We do not to do with it, but we've
got it. Right. Yeah. Data suspect. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, I can't go without saying thank you.
It's been amazing. I've really enjoyed this. Thank you for letting me poke into all of the corners
of your life, and not just the the tech and the book. It's been really good. And where can people
find the book? Where can people find out more about you? So you can find out more about the book at
Confident-Huyphon-Contracted.co.uk. It is available on Amazon the 24th of July.
In Kindle and Poverlack editions available on pre-order, so don't wait till the 24th.
Get the pre-order. And you can find out more about me on Neil Millard.com. Lots of other stuff
on there too. Cool. Awesome. Thank you very much for that, Neil. I've really enjoyed that. And
hopefully there's some listeners hanging on because this has been good, but this is what I love about
podcasting. Like, there was a lot to talk about, and we talked about it, but I'm really happy.
Cool. So with that, thank you very much. And that's been another episode of Software Should Be
Free, where is Neil Millard and myself Tim Abel. Subscribe, like, yadde yadde yadde yadde. All of the
end of the show things. And do check out Neil Make Contact, follow him on LinkedIn or read the book.
I hope to see you on the next episode. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye.
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