Programmer for Hire

I’ve been invited to join the team of DealNation as their CTO.

This is a very good fit in a lot of ways, most of all because it has me doing my magic in a way that lends rocket fuel to a big venture that’s already got a lot going for it.

In retrospect there are 3 things I would say I did very right to precipitate this opportunity:

1. I set the bar for my performance very high from the very beginning.  The first impression I made on the DealNation team was an act of remarkable ability, and I, with confidence bordering on arrogance, stated plainly then that that’s just how it goes with me.  I’ve been delivering on that tall promise ever since.
2. I gave them a taste of what it’s like to have me in house.  When I offered the free day of me working with them side by side on my laptop, they got to experience the luxury of immediate communication to bounce around ideas, and the velocity at which development can get done when you sidestep the spec’ing/bidding/approving cycle of contract work¹
3. I shared with them a single-sheet write up of the value of me being their CTO. Drawing heavily from the coursework of Ramit Sethi’s Earn1K, I took the time to really articulate the how and why I could be of most value to DealNation in the CTO capacity.  Then I unabashedly shared as much.  Two months later, when the time was right, they came around to taking me up on that offer.

The path that we’ve taken together since January has us both clear that we’re a fantastic fit, and thus I’ve accepted the position and begin on July 11th.  Exciting times ahead, I can hardly wait to weave more web dev magic into everything they (soon to be we) are doing.

Notes:

I stood in the office of my clients having just wrapped up a successful quick visit, and gave a strategic, pensive pause.

“So… you guys get a free day.” I said plainly, as though what I meant was perfectly clear and well established.

It wasn’t of course, and immediately aroused the earnest curiosity that I was aiming for.  “What’s that mean?” asked one of my clients, as if right on cue.

“A free day.  Meaning I’ll come into the office at 9am prompt, laptop in hand, and be at your disposal to bang out whatever new features, tweaks, enhancements, or anything else you’d like to add to your system.  My super powers are yours to wield for a full day, no charge.  I totally dig working with you guys, and this is my way of saying thanks for the opportunity.”

(As an aside, let me point out that our working relationship had thus far been 100% based on me assigning dollar amounts to chunks of work (projects, features, enhancements, etc).  Hourly availability was never on the table, as I don’t really believe in that model for the kind of work that I do.  So to have me in the office to perform whatever work I could in a solid 8 hour day was quite the novelty, and a rather valuable one at that.)

“It’s a chance for you to get whatever enhancements or tweaks made to have you really love the system without worrying about the cost.” I went on to explain.  “Having me in house will enable me to quickly identify how you’re using things and what’ll make them even better for you.”  Eyes lit up at the prospect, they were just about to go live with the system for the first time, and having me after a few days of really using things was in their estimation perfect and fortuitous timing.  We picked a day during the following week.

“It’s good form to buy me lunch, during that day.” I said with a smile as I walked out, “Keeps me at my desk working on stuff for longer.  Oh, and for best results I also recommend having a spare monitor available… I can get more done when rockin’ the dual screen.”

The day itself was a hit.  My second monitor as well a USB keyboard (“in case you prefer it to your laptop keyboard) were there and waiting in my conference room setup when I arrived, and the whiteboard was loaded up with a huge list of check box-adorned to-dos.  A spirit of “yay, John’s in the house!” was palpably in the air.  I was well taken care of and lunch ordered in was delicious.

I say this all not to boast, but to point out how the human element can massively work in everyone’s favor in programming.  I’m human, so the excitement that I’m in the house pumps me up, which gives me massive focus and determination to have a rockin’ day, which creates superb results.  Programming at its purpose-filled, invigorated best.

And when 5pm rolled around, what was the net result of this 8-hour generosity?  My client loves their system even more, have gotten massive value out of the programming I did, and appreciates the heck out of me for it.  I walk on air as I leave the office after having the sensation of being a hero for a day, I’m better related to what my clients are trying to accomplish which henceforth makes me a better consultant to them, I’ve got a bunch more billable work to perform to wrap up and extend upon various bits that got done, and I got free lunch.

A day in the life of a programmer well spent.

I recently had a good sense to add this new boilerplate section to my standard project contracts:

3.5 RIGHT TO DEMAND SATISFACTION

Acceptance of this agreement includes the right to demand satisfaction for all described features, no more, no less.  I’m on the hook to complete all the described features to the point that you love it, and you get to demand satisfaction to that extent.  So do it.  If you’re not happy, and you haven’t exercised this clause, you’re technically in breach of this agreement.  Just sayin’.

In my years of experience I have never been burned putting myself on the hook called “my work is not done until you love it” , so I realized that I may as well get the benefit of advertising as much up front.

I don’t know that this sort of clause exists anywhere else in my industry.  Flippant language aside (which in my estimation is rad: if that sort of playfulness backed up solid performance turns you off, you’re not my client anyway), I think there’s a general fear about having to appease some fictional, nightmare client who is endlessly demanding.  In my experience, when it comes to my world of web programming, they don’t exist¹.  Oh sure, there’s always room to want more features, or a cheaper price, but that’s not what what’s on the table here.

This here is a promise to do great with all of the [meticulously outlined] features within the scope of work at hand.  Software development is generally a complex endeavor so I think the average bear understandably shies away from such a tall promise.  Fair enough.  I embrace it.  It keeps me honest and fosters a healthy pride in my craft, and if I just bring my art to it using my full facility with leading edge technologies and tricks, I don’t have to worry about falling short.

So I don’t fall short.  If my first attempt isn’t loved by my client, they tell me and I tweak accordingly.  No fuss, no muss².

That’s the second beauty of stating up front the right to demand satisfaction: it creates a conversational dynamic between my client and I that deliberately CALLS FOR that kind of feedback.  We become partners in the endeavor to create software that perfectly suits, and they have a role to play called “speak up if you don’t love it.”  When the invitation to do that is clear and on the table it is easy and fun to exercise, and moreover doesn’t get compromised by a desire to be polite.

Notes:

A fair question indeed.

I bill myself as an ultra effective development team of one, citing of course virtues like eliminated communication overhead, a shorter route from business vision to application design and implementation, nimble ability to adapt the application to changing business needs when they come up, and 100% accountability when it comes to turning out quality.

Oh, and it’s cheap to hire one person instead of six.

So naturally it has occurred to my clients on more than one occasion to ask me “what happens if you get hit by a bus?”  If I’m the guy who’s doing it all, naturally I represent  a sizable single point of failure.

Here’s my answer.

You replace me.  Though I do have  a publicly documented love affair with Classic ASP, Classic ASP developers are a dying breed, so it would be irresponsible to start any new substantial project for a client in that language. No, anything that’s built to last I would start in PHP or perhaps Ruby on Rails, languages that boast thriving communities of developer talent from which you could draw to replace poor old mangled (or dead) me.

Now then, when you replace me my successor will need to be trained on how to work on the code base I’ve laid down.  If I’m NOT dead I can guide them through to get them up to speed quickly.  I if AM dead the good news is that my code is quite beautiful and well organized, with perfectly uniform indentation and formatting, completely consistent conventions, and immaculately well factored.  Any developer who is worth their salt in the language I have laid down will be able to understand, trace, and build upon my code within one day of poring over it.  (If not, fire them.  Trust me.)

Furthermore, whatever I did manage to complete before carelessly failing to look the other way while crossing that hypothetical street will constitute a massive leg up on your project.  Remember, typical development projects tend to be heavily loaded on the front end with meetings, spec docs, planning, project management, and other such things that don’t get you closer to a usable piece of software.  Before that Greyhound sent me to a better place even a half-completed prototype done by me will have enabled you to shortcut through all of that, leaving you with a sensible solution strategy and design foundation already in existence.

So in conclusion: if I get hit by a bus, you replace me.  You’ll miss me as you move forward at not as smooth or fast a clip as before, but your project will have gotten the benefit of my precious last remaining pre-bus-hit days.

It’s kinda like getting Frank Lloyd Wright to draw up the plans for your house and then he can’t finish it.  It’s still gonna be a pretty snazzy house even if some junior architect needs to rough in details like which tiles to use in the bathroom.

Michael Gerber, in his treatise on entrepreneurship The E-Myth [1], makes a firm point of the dangers of working in your business when you yourself are the entrepreneur trying to run and grow it (i.e. working on your business).  He makes a compelling case that the activities of one and the other are not only completely distinct, but that they are also virtually mutually exclusive.

I completely agree.

It was a watershed moment for me when I acknowledged for myself that am far more interested in being a consultant than building and running a consultancy, even though the the latter carries with it much more prestige.  I love the kind of consulting and application development that I do, and at the same time I have no interest in building a team of me-clones to do contract consulting work.   So when it comes to me as a free agent consultant, I am much more about working in my business than on my business, and Michael Gerber is right to say that I haven’t created a business so much as a job.

The reason this is interesting at all is because of the fun twist on the in-the-business/on-the-business dichotomy that I love to play with: for an application developer who is not afraid to get his/her hands dirty with the daily roles and work of a given business, there is opportunity to make massive improvements to how that work is done.  An example will make this clear.

During my one straight job out of school at MonsterCommerce I held a number of roles and one of them was manager of the custom programming department.  We were an e-commerce company selling an already spiffy, feature-loaded shopping cart software package, but that didn’t stop loads of our customers from wanting it to do more new and novel things.  So we had a custom programming department that would take feature requests, offer quotes for the work, and execute the jobs when opted for.  About 2-4 requests would come in per day.

The system I inherited for managing these leads and projects was a drawer of a few hanging folders, my predecessor’s email in-box, and a notebook or two of notes.  The notebook system, it turns out, scaled maybe for two weeks’ worth of leads before becoming cumbersome and impossible to manage without jobs and tasks slipping through the cracks.  By this firsthand experience of working in the business I knew things could be better, and with programming skills, a desire to learn web programming (new to me then), and a dash of confidence (arrogance? ) I set out to create the solution I knew I wanted.

It was fueled by a simple vision: whenever so-and-so called, I wanted to type their name in, see their job on my screen with the complete lowdown (what they wanted, the status of the job, and even when we last talked and what was said), and be able to talk intelligibly about their project within 10 seconds as if getting it done was the only thing on my mind.  (I think a lot of visions are fueled by frustration of doing something a few times when you know it could be so much better.)

Taking inspiration (and the design aesthetic) from our own shopping cart software, I learned how to program web applications[2] and design databases, and built my dream system one weekend at a time.  It sat there, hosted humbly on the floor within the computer in my bedroom, during a time when each subsequent week a little more of my job was managed or automated by it.

After six weekends of development (and the interim six weeks of real-world use, testing, and tweaking), I was ready to show off my baby to the rest of the company.  It was well received by all the parties it touched upon: billing, sales, management, and my team of programmers, and getting adoption was quick and painless.  (The greatest honor was when the Design and SEO department heads both requested a similar system: I quickly forked off versions to suit both.  The second greatest honor was hearing that it wasn’t until 2009 until these systems were retired, fully 3 years after I left the company.)

Building something that good was made easy (almost trivial, it felt) because I was making it for me to solve my own day-to-day problems.  When my day-to-day usage revealed something that sucked I would simply fix it that night at home, and have a better system the next day.  I had bridged the creator/user gap.

Not only were the systems nice and made a manager’s job easier, it made the departments better.  Communication, coordination, follow through, professionalism and the bottom line all benefited.  It was the stuff of systematizing things that Micheal Gerber would classify as working on the business, and doing so happened because I was steeped a little while working in the business.

This is completely unconventional.  Software development talent seldom experiences the day-to-day work of the people for whom they create software for, yet what if that experience is a shortcut to making a really great system?  Though unorthodox, time spent by a developer actually doing a job for which he/she is to make a software system for may pay out overall in time saved trying to otherwise imagine, describe and communicate the software needs.   Any additional unimagined solutions/shortcuts/innovations devised by the developer-turned-worker are a pleasant bonus.  Furthermore it makes nice protection from rough or ugly spots in an application: if a developer is saddled with using his/her own creation (even if for a little while), they will be apt to smooth over and tidy up such unflattering features.

It may be a loophole to the notion that if you’re working in the business you can’t possibly working on it: insofar as software systems are concerned, at least, a person working the job who is able to design systems to make it easier is leveraging the former to help the latter.

Notes:

[1] It’s been 4 years since I read it, so please pardon any haziness in my recollection of it.

[2] This is the root of my [still persistent] fondness for Classic ASP, an arguably terrible and woefully outdated server side web language.  There’s always something special about your first.

There are some services for which I think the model of charging based on an hourly rate is appropriate.  Software development is not one of them.

Consider: some services fit the hourly model to a T.  These are jobs where the hours spent are directly proportional to the value realized by the hirer.  It makes sense that getting the hour long massage costs roughly double what the 30 minute session does.  Or manning a reception desk.  When somebody needs to be there, every hour that a body is there that creates value and fulfills a need of the hirer.

But software development runs counter to this notion.  We programmers are pretty much always hired to solve a real problem stemming from a real need, not to provide hours of coverage hunched over a keyboard, and certainly not to provide extended enjoyment for the client by virtue of working longer hours (the massage therapist might hear the phrase “hey, that’s nice, why don’t you do that a little longer?”, I don’t think a programmer ever has).

No, in software development it’s virtually always the opposite: the longer a project drones on, the more painful it is.  Just ask any stressed-out looking project manager who keeps getting excuses and pushed back deadlines from her development team.

But doesn’t more hours mean more quality?

Maybe, but that correlation is sketchy at best.  To realize a given set of features, a pro can often do it both better & faster: the number of hours spent becomes an argument against quality, not for.  (I’m much more apt to trust that a WordPress install got done right by someone else if it took them 15 minutes rather than 3 hours.)

Programmers can (and should) be hired on the overall demonstrable quality of their work, and a review of their portfolio plus a mutual understanding of the level of thoroughness/quality that is called for (throw-away prototype or enterprise level masterpiece?) keeps the fixed price model honest.  (Because yes, without that mutual understanding a developer could hack the fixed-price model by racing through a project and cutting corners, to say nothing of whether or not he’ll be hired again).

Alignment of Priorities

If we can assume that a contractor is guaranteeing satisfaction (and we probably should, right?), than a faster execution of a fixed-price project is in the best interests of both parties.  The client gets what they need sooner, and the effective hourly rate of the contractor is higher.  When an accurate sense of the quality to be expected and a correlate price tag are established, the fixed price model creates this  nice alignment of priorities between contractor and client.

By contrast, hourly creates a misalignment of priorities of client and contractor: the contractor gets rewarded for dragging their feet and making problems out to be more complex.  Not a huge amount of course, because in the logical extreme they’d get dumped sooner or later.  But it’s just too easy to milk the clock and divert energy from actually solving the problem, to instead convincing ones self and others that it’s more difficult than not.

Effective software development is all about fewer smart hours as opposed to longer hard hours.  Pricing for it should probably then reflect that, and by the  same token programmers should probably strive to avoid the Curse of the Hourly Wage.

It may be either a sign of laziness or of wisdom, but I’ve had a few conversations of late where I’m deliberately selling my clients on fewer and/or less complicated features.

On the surface this is bad salesmanship: I bill by the project, and of course the price tag for a given project grows with my estimate of the complexity of what I’m building (and hopefully the value gained by the client, as well).  The more features a client is certain they want, the more features I get to build and charge accordingly for that work.

So what’s up with my recent kick of advising fewer features?  Turns out it’s mostly situational with a dose of outside wisdom.  The projects I’m thinking of are both of an “expand in a new direction” variety: one is a pilot program to prove a new concept in their e-commerce, the other is to make a hub for a community to interact online in a way they haven’t before.

The dose of outside wisdom is the 37 Signals bit on the Race to Running Software which states simply “get something real up and get it up quickly”.  Both of my clients found it refreshing to hear things like “Tell you what, it’s just the pilot: we can leave the customer address book feature out for now, and add it in later if it turns out to be important.” and “Let’s see what your users do with just the ghetto-fab system of posting comments.  Then we’ll know what they’re bumping up against, if anything.  If it suffices, we’ll have saved ourselves a lot of extra work.”

Planning to build non-critical stuff up front involves a lot of guesswork and creates a bigger gap between speculation and real world feedback.

Would I like to be hired to build the customer address book feature?  Sure, it’s a tidy little feature that would be really slick and is clean to implement.  But let’s wait to see the first 5 repeat customers who place orders shipped to more than one address before we build it.  That will save time and money while we focus first on getting the system ready to launch at all.

It’s simply having an eye on the prize.  And I’m talking business win, not a juicier contract.

A few weeks ago I was on a conference call with a client talking about a new, expanded direction they were mapping out for their e-commerce.  The scope of the project was well within my reach to execute quickly and thoroughly, but there were good & valid concerns expressed over me being the keeper of the system as a one-man show.  After all, it would not work if a problem arose that only I was trained to address at a time when I was, say, gallivanting about in Panama: it would be irresponsible to structure a major part of their business to be vulnerable to failures that arise with poor timing.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’m a big fan of the benefits made possible by being a team of one.  I also really like the agility and flexibility afforded by being a solo act in the business aspect of my trade.  So when it was asked if I would hire and train up others to make possible a 24/7 manning and support of the project, I saw it fit to propose a re-framing of the situation.

This particular client is big.  The company has their own dedicated IT department complete with plenty of smart folks who are able to build, run and maintain complex systems.  They are also savvy about outsourcing: they know how to keep their own internal team smoothly handling internal operations by calling in outside talent to help with big initiatives when they come down the pike (which is why were having the conversation at all).

Rather than operate as a separate team on this project, I reasoned, why not have my contribution to the project be an augmentation of their existing resources?  Given they already have an in-house team that works on other things which integrate tightly with their e-commerce, I could do the heavy lifting for the project (that is to say: design and build it to everyone’s delight, and see it through to a successful launch), and then take necessary steps to leave their internal team empowered to own and maintain it with minimal effort.

It’s like building a building.  The work of the architect and the construction crew are distinct from that of the maintenance team and cleaners.  The better job that the former does enables an easier ongoing job for the latter.  In our case of software development I’ll refer to these two parties succinctly as builder and maintainer.

Characterizing a Successful Arrangement

So what are the characteristics that should probably be in place for such a collaborative hand off work to everyone’s delight?  There are a few things I can think of (this list is no doubt exhaustive, if you can name one I missed please leave it in a comment):

• The system handed over by the builder should as clean and intuitive as possible. Clean software architecture rules the day here, and any lingering patch-job hacks represent a great disservice of future burdens to the maintainer.
• The builder should train the maintainer. Without a doubt, the curse of knowledge can easily give the builder a comforting illusion that it should be easy for the maintainer to spot and fix problems the arise.  Rather, a maintainer should be left confident that they know how to navigate the structure of the code.  When they have reached that level it should be their call to make, not for the builder to assume.
• The builder should be accessible to the maintainer over time. Not 24/7 for hot fixes (that would defeat the purpose of handing off to a maintainer), but as an adviser for deeper, more long term issues including building further on the system.
• The maintainer should be technically qualified for the role. They needn’t be as skilled with the code as the builder (after all, it’s easier to maintain a well built system than to build it well in the first place), but they should be able to track down and fix minor bugs in addition to more regular maintenance.
• There should be general camaraderie and a shared commitment as a team between builder and maintainer. While hardest to quantify this is perhaps the most important: it’s a problem waiting to happen if a builder hands off the project with any air of “it’s your problem now”.  When the builder is oriented as a long term partner, his or her priorities are well-aligned with the project as  a whole: “I will do it right because I am ultimately accountable for its performance”.  The desire to avoid saddling the maintainer with a problem is a powerful motivation to set them up well.

These characteristics represent a chunk of overhead of the Augmenting a Team route, relative to using a separate one.  When handing off a project to a separate team, that team is free to manage long-term maintainability internally, however they deem appropriate.

What’s interesting about is that is how, in the scramble to get it launched, notions of longer term maintainability can (and do) fall by the wayside.  When a builder steps in to augment a team on a project, the above characteristics form a nice recipe for clean execution of a project; one that is mindful of both the initial work and long term maintainability.  It’s like having people over for dinner: you’re more likely to clean up your place out of courtesy to your guests.  A builder who knows that a maintenance team will be looking at and learning their code soon will do more to be proud of such a close inspection.

Last week the members of an organization I’m friendly with looked to me to what you might call “spot check” a project proposal that they had received.  It was a sizable project, so there was to look things over to ensure that it, as scoped out, would predictably leave them happy with the result when the work was all done and the fee was all paid.  I looked for answers to the following concerns:

• Are there any disconnects between the expectations of the organization and the contractor’s understanding of those expectations?
• Is there anything missing?
• Is the scope of the project sufficient to complete what the organization wants?
• Are there any gotchas, or foreseeable add-ons that will be needed later?
• Is the time line accurate and realistic?
• Is the price commensurate with the work, and reasonable against industry norms?

Doing this was a great opportunity: I got to exercise one of my more unique abilities to help out some friends, and I got a rare chance to compare how I roll with others in my trade.

What ideas, lessons, or insights did I take away from that comparison?  Plenty, but for now I’m going to focus on the one that strikes me the most:

I’m super inexpensive and work uncommonly fast.

(A corollary to that, I suppose, is that my sales process is rubbish: if I could pitch on a lot more projects a year I could perhaps get away with selling fewer but far less sweet-of-a-deal jobs for my clients.)

After fully grokking the project as laid out and enjoying a follow up conversation with members of the organization, I was clear I would be delighted to do it for literally half the price and could deliver it several weeks sooner, which made me feel pretty darn effective.  My deepest compliment however was what came back to me from the contractor: the presumption that in order to realize such cheap speed I would be using off-shore resources.

Nope, it’s just little ol’ me and my friends at Playground Creative. :)