How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Consulting

A few months ago I wrote about my motivation problems since switching to consulting. I think this was a somewhat natural thing to feel: I’ve built quite a few in-house software teams over the years, and consulting companies were my natural enemy. They hired many of the top people in my local area, and then wanted to sell them back to me at a substantial mark-up. What jerks!

A little over a year ago, I joined the dark side and became a jerk consultant. My former enemies are now my friends, and I’m the one being sold back to in-house teams for profit. I learned to live with that fairly easily: if we weren’t giving our clients value, they’d stop paying us – and we get heaps of repeat business. No, the economics of it weren’t the problem.

The problem was Mission.

I’ve always thought of myself as strongly mission-driven. When I worked in finance, I believed that what we were doing was making life better for our customers. When I worked in environmental engineering, I believed that we were helping our clients get the most environmental bang for their buck (my more cynical side occasionally observed that we were helping them spend the minimum possible to avoid trouble with the regulators). When I worked for a hospital group, it was easy to think of patient care as a worthwhile mission, because it is.

Oddly, what I’ve since learned is that my mission is much less available for rent as a consultant that it ever was before. Protecting the environment wasn’t my core mission before my pay check came from Pacific Environment, and it hasn’t been since I left. Patient care wasn’t my mission before I joined Ramsay Health Care, and it isn’t now.

Are those all worthwhile missions? Absolutely. But in hindsight, the mission I took on was entirely driven by who was paying my salary.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not unhappy with my career choices, and I think I made a positive impact on the world (and hopefully my local software industry) on my way through. But joining a software consultancy is a neat way to de-couple my mission from my salary. I still have a core mission, but now it’s much more in concert with who I am as a person. Readify’s mission is all about using technology to make the future better for everyone – and that speaks very deeply to me. I’m a technologist at heart. My secondary mission may be for sale, but the core goal of myself, my colleagues and my employer remains the same. That’s not just something I can live with: it’s something I can embrace.

So, that’s the mission aspect sorted – but I’m not the moony-eyed idealist I might like to think I am. You could see all of this talk about “Mission” as an exercise in justifying my current choice – just like I justified all of my previous employment choices. What about the economics of it all? That’s where my opposition to software consulting began, and it’s not so shallow-rooted to be slain by a simple mission statement.

Well, here’s where I needed to shift my thinking a little. I needed to start thinking about industry sustainability.

Before I get to the point, bear with me while I give you a quick tour through some highlights of my career. My first significant production responsibility came a few years in, when I was a Senior Software Engineer at a successful FinTech start-up. I reported directly to the Managing Director (who was from a finance background). Some years on, I found myself a Senior Software Engineer and Team Lead for an environmental firm, where I reported to a variety of people (including the CTO, and occasionally the CEO) – who were mostly from an environmental engineering background. During my time in the hospital industry, I was again in a leadership role – being such a large multi-national, there were a few more layers involved, but my boss’s boss’s boss (and most of his colleagues) were from a doctoring or nursing background.

I’ve seen this pattern repeated across many industries: flatly-structured software teams with little or no opportunity for career advancement, reporting to non-software people. Reporting to non-software people isn’t intrinsically bad: some of my all-time favourite people are non-software people (I even married one!). However, I don’t think it’s a sustainable model for our industry. I’ve seen far too many software developers come to realise that their best opportunity for advancement was to move sideways (out of software) – and I think that’s terrible. It’s almost become a truism that “software is eating the world”, and certainly one of the highest-value-creating things you can do today is to build software. Why would I help perpetuate a model which pushes our best and brightest to go and do other things?

Participating in a software consultancy like Readify is a way to break that mould. I’m in a leadership role, but I still have plenty of room to grow in my career without abandoning my core mission and my experience as a software engineer. If I decide that my current business group (we call it “Managed Services” but it’s really a combination of production engineering and feature development, driven in a Kanban style) doesn’t suit me, we have plenty of other flavours of software development I can switch to. If I really want control of my own destiny, I’m learning the business of software consulting – so I can always go and do software on my own terms. Mid-career, I have software developers reporting to me, and I report to other people from a software background – all the way up. I can move up the chain, or try to disrupt it – and either way, I’ll be participating in an industry model which mentors and builds software careers, from fresh graduate to C-level executive. Perhaps most importantly, I’ll be participating in a sustainable model – which keeps people in software, because it’s a great career with opportunities in line with any other you could choose.

Software consulting isn’t the only way to achieve this. Software-focused product companies offer the same potential sustainability. I can’t even rule out that my career might take me back to working directly in other industries – but if I do, it will be with a new understanding of the importance of a sustainable software industry, and an eye to ensuring that the technologists among us never feel the need to go do something else to advance their career.

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