I'm a Writer!

Not in the sense that I had originally envisioned - sitting in a Norman Rockwell-esque pose, pipe firmly clenched between my teeth, happily banging away on my typewriter as I churn through the Great American Novel - but I'm a writer nonetheless.

I don't mean this because I'm now making my way through my 53rd post of Chicago Bot Dog (though that would make more sense), but due to my initial 2 weeks as a consultant.  

[Aside: NaNoWriMo - or the organization behind National Novel Writing Month - encourages people to write 50k words over the course of a given November to spur their creative juices and stoke the fires of budding novelists.  50k words is approximately 200 pages.  Given that my blog posts are ~1k words, I've now written at least a novel's worth of content since starting Coastal Chicago in  April.

I have also, inspired in part by NaNoWriMo, written a novel in serialized blog form somewhere in the nearby blogging neighborhood if you want to go searching.  Except it took me way more than a month.  But I did it!]

Well, now that I've spilled around 200 words worth of virtual ink on writing, I arrive at the heart of my content, which has precious little to do with the theme of writing.

Instead, I want to talk about my early impressions as a consultant vs. my years as a full-time employee elsewhere.  I did, very briefly at the start of my career, work as a consultant.  But that was for a consulting firm, wherein I was employed full-time.  And I was very young.  And dumb.  So the experience doesn't quite equate to the differences I can enumerate now.

If you missed my announcement on LinkedIn, I'm working as a Process Consultant for Doctolib (you can change the site language at the bottom of the page if you're curious about the company and don't speak French), a company that helps connect doctors and patients in Europe.

Process Consultant is a title I chose myself because I'm highly uncomfortable choosing titles.  It's the reason I opted for President of my company vs. CEO - CEO seems like it demanded a little too much.  Not choosing something that indicates I run the company would get confusing, especially considering I'm a company of one.  Founder seems a little too pretentious to bestow upon myself (sorry, all you self-proclaimed founders).

Process Consultant is generic enough without assuming an unearned air of authority and gives me options for similar titles if my role changes at other consulting gigs (Software Consultant, Management Consultant, Sandwich Consultant, etc).

I won't get too much into what type of processes I'm consulting on at the moment, since it's immaterial to the post.  I'm also still learning what I can talk about externally as a consultant and don't want to jeopardize my contract 2 weeks into having a paying job again.

But that's a good jumping-off point for the differences between Todd the consultant and Todd the employee.

Previously, I was less concerned about discussing certain topics among broader circles.  I never volunteered sensitive information from my company, and anything that would've qualified for insider trading was information that I learned at the same time as the general public or slightly thereafter (wait, there are notices of mass layoffs in the paper?!?!).  But, I wouldn't hesitate to discuss broader notions of our tech stack (like our use of Kubernetes) or processes we followed (our use of Dev Ops concepts, for example).  

Now, I'm starting out with a bit more caution.  Because I've personally been employed for my expertise on another's behalf, I need to be careful about spilling someone else's secrets vs. my own.  It's one thing to be candid about your own experiences (although I don't think anyone would want to follow along if I posted my daily grooming habits).  It's another to do it on another's behalf without consent.  Then you're a gossip or just untrustworthy.

The other thing I've come to enjoy about being a consultant is my return to an hourly wage.  Nominally, there are things to appreciate about earning a salary, but in today's hyper-capitalist society, the benefits tend to get warped.

A salary is intended to pay you a flat rate (nominally based on a 40-hour work week), regardless of the time you work.  The typical thinking is that, as a salaried employee, you'll work more than the standard 40 hours, because "hard work" is defined as working more hours.  Never mind that 100 years ago, the arbitrary standard workday could've been set at 20 hours and someone now doubling those hours would be considered an extremely diligent worker or a workaholic clocking in an exhausting 40 hours.

It bugs management to no end (and, by extension, workers who've also bought into the typical corporate zeitgeist) that, based on expectations for either a company or an individual, someone can complete a 40-hour job in 32 hours.  The reaction is often "think what more that person could contribute in another 8 hours rather than clocking out early"  But that assumes that the volume of work itself is easy to quantify (with knowledge work, it isn't) or doesn't have costs (if someone's assembling widgets, fatigue and injury are real concerns).

Work and the ensuing pay that accompanies it should be set on agreed upon expectations, especially where salary is concerned.  If the worker meets those expectations, the salary is justified.  If the worker exceeds those expectations, pay should be increased and the two parties should reevaluate the expectations at the new level (Though, at some point, if you do wind up scoring a generationally talented individual, you're paying them to maintain that talent for you.  For humans, there's always room for personal growth.  But managers shouldn't continue to compare their engineers to a prior year's experience when you're talking about the top 1% of your high performers.).

If the worker takes 10 hours to complete the task or 50, that's immaterial to the expectations of the job.  Granted, being present for a certain number of core hours for your co-workers is also key, but I'd argue that's part of setting expectations and commensurate pay.  If a senior engineer is able to complete the coding portion of their job in 10 hours (though job duties are never this cleanly split in software engineering) but isn't present to mentor junior engineers, I'd argue they're failing to meet expectations.

Alas, dear reader, I've rambled on far too long setting up the premise for my post, and the metaphorical night is dark.  I realize that the only difference I've enumerated up to this point between myself as a full time employee and myself as a consultant is that now I'm squirrellier with the details I provide around the work I'm doing.  I spent the rest of the post fixated on word counts or mild rebukes of the current practices on distributing capital.

But isn't the mark of a writer, the ability to generate dramatic tension before rendering an inevitable conclusion?  Plus, those of you who've followed along for a while should know better.  I can't help myself when there's a good tangent to be followed.  

Next time: Todd the Full Time Employee vs. Todd the Consultant. 

Until next time, my human and robot friends.