I'm a wage slave, but years ago I helped a struggling consulting agency blow up.
It's usually marketing. That's probably why revenues are low too. Once we had marketing sorted out we had more work coming in than we knew what do do with. So we promptly raised our rates and became small but profitable.
Don't quit your day job until you have too much work to do it.
I don't want to dump a rant (but I did anyways) but start online and start local. Do geofenced ads on Google and Facebook. Put in your ads that you're close by. Even in online age companies they can drive by and see have a huge edge, so this is best place to start with ads, you will have a solid handicap against powerful national ad campaigns. Know your market, for instance, we discovered a lot of older guys running small businesses listen to certain AM radio stations and ads there are super cheap. Some of them still read newspapers too. Lots of little insights like that eventually give you an edge. Marketing is all a big competition for eyeballs at the lowest price.
Another plus was partnering with an IT company. We gave them IT work, and they gave us software dev work when there wasn't an off the shelf fix. After years of this the owners merged the two companies for good profit.
Organic reach is just as important as ads, if not more. Figure out what problems you could solve for clients and start writing articles about them. Don't outsource this to ad agencies. They write fluffball articles with no substance and Google will deepsix you. Find the most knowledgeable person on the subject that doesn't want a fortune or even who wants to promote their own shit that doesn't compete with you. Humble-brag but I have some articles related to my specialty that still rank #1 on Google for our targeted keywords a decade after leaving that place. At one point 20 articles that I wrote brought in 70% of traffic. No idea what their metrics look like now, but I'm sure they still bring in tons of traffic to this day. TLDR: organic reach is super important because unlike ads, it's free.
Your best bet early on is copying successful competitors. There's a lot of services out there to monitor competitors ad campaigns and website organic reach/links. Mimic your competitors at first, leaning on closer physical distance to make up for worse targeting until you got your beat then rise up against them or find your own niche.
Again small advantages build up. One of our biggest local competitors used a help widget on every site they wrote. I eventually found all of their clients from this using DNS and we systematically called them all and took a good fraction that had issues with their hosting.
I am convinced it's all marketing. Software consulting is a generic business like a restaurant unless you specialize in military guidance systems or Fortran or something. Just like a restaurant, the food matters but marketing is what makes or breaks you
I don't think an ask thread is a good spot for a rant, but the JVM languages have changed a lot over the years.
You imply that Java is big and heavy when JS/Node Python and Ruby use more ram and run slower than Java in basically every benchmark. And V8 runtime and JS language complexity is just as big as Java these days.
Java is very scalable. If I was force to work on a million+ line project I would pray it was Java or C#.
Java ain't going to win any beauty pageants but it's a solid all rounder. The guy you keep on roster because he can fill any position, not because he's the star hitter.
Multi threading has zero overhead in normal Java web frameworks. It's thread-per-request so you don't need to worry about thread safety any more than you do in JS. That you didn't know that implies you haven't worked with many Java web frameworks.
JS has become a huge language, just as big as Java. So is the runtime, V8 is gigantic, comparable to JVM. I use both every day.
Vert.X is nearly identical to Express JS including all the callback stuff. And that's one of the harder Java frameworks to use
Its very unprofessional and not polite of you to assume my knowledge from few words.
As for java frameworks like spring they mostly suck because of way too verbose java syntax and over engineering mentality usually coming with any java framework.
Also i never said express js is a great example of web framework.
But i know for sure that i can spin up simple crud with db, tests and some logic behind it in less than hour in rails.
While java devs still arguing about “right” architecture.
That was rude especially for HN, my apologies. I'm a big Java fan but you're right about verbosity and ceremony about startup. There's ways around it but not stuff you would read in a book. Tribal knowledge really like starting a project using a maven archetype and using lombok judiciously.
Java gets a bad rap which bothers me because it's really a good choice for backend work even today. Sometimes it bothers me enough that I lash out needlessly.
The irony is that Republicans caused this. More specifically, the Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
He was instrumental in the Citizens United supreme court decision that gave free speech and unlimited campaign contributions to corporations as if they were people. Of course other Republicans hailed this decision at the time.
Well, now that corporations are saying and doing things they don't like I bet they're having second thoughts about their shameless loyalty to corporations over people.
Republicans of old would never fine corporations for enforcing their own community rules. But the Republican party of today is something else. Something darker, or much whiter, maybe both.
Let us remember that big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook generally have 49.9% of their employees contractors.
Why nearly 50%? Because that the highest amount you can have without additional liability. If they could get away with it, far more than 50% would be contractors.
The gig loophole benefits only super rich corporations. It's crazy to see so many people defending it. The sole purpose is undermining a century of worker protections.
Technology has made it easy to tweak jobs just enough so they fall under contractor status. When these laws were written nobody could imagine systems where work is reassigned in seconds. The rules about flexible schedules etc we made for a different time.
I've driven for rideshare. It's not like freelancing at all. You can't turn down rides. Can't set your prices. Can't choose your clients. Can't do your own advertising. You can only drive certain models and years of cars. There's rules about modifications you can do and how you treat customers. You have little to no control once you "sign on". It's a regular job with flexible hours
100% percent of the reason I didn't go work 'for' Microsoft was that I'd be a temp-to-possibly-hire contractor. And from the former contractors I'd talked to (one recommended by the recruiter!), it was clear contractors were treated like second-class citizens by Microsoft. From what I was told, contractors couldn't participate in networking events or even get free food employees got because Microsoft was sued for misclassifying workers.
So instead of reforming their business model they just switched to a model where they made clear contractors were contractors--by treating them like trash. Fuck that.
this is not isolated to microsoft, or the US. Everywhere I've worked, the contractors we've had have been treated like second class citizens. The smart ones even insist on it.
Why? Because if they are allowed to enjoy the amenities of a normal staff member (free snacks, invite to company events, etc.) they run the risk of being classed as employees... which is bad news for everybody, not just the company. If you as a contractor are found to be incorrectly classified, that can mean a massive accounting headache, loss of tax benefits, possibly being required to enroll in a union, and lots more.
I've worked in Iceland and the UK, for 5 different companies, each one employing lots of contractors. All of them avoid these benefits for said reason. You can read up on IR35 if you want to know more about the UK rules (although it's been recently revamped making contracting a lot less appealing).
> Let us remember that big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook generally have 49.9% of their employees contractors.
These are not the same type of contractors as 1099 contractors such as gig workers. Contractors at these big companies are usually employees of a staffing agency. They don't get sweet tech company benefits, but they are generally employees and have nothing to do with gig workers.
> Why nearly 50%? Because that the highest amount you can have without additional liability. If they could get away with it, far more than 50% would be contractors.
Which liability are you referring to? I've never heard of this and would love to look up what you're referring to, but you aren't being specific.
I heard it years ago, can't find a source either. I believe it was something related to a court case. Some legal argument that could apply if total employees was over 50% contractors.
As someone that's forced to write C occasionally Rust is a godsend. I prefer high level languages but when I need the performance it's nice to have something that doesn't feel like it's from the 80's.
C is extremely painful. C++ is a shitshow. Rust is glorious in comparison.
Rust, or something like it, will definitely replace C/C++ someday. And rust has way more traction than anything else
It won't replace JVM/CLR. Rust community is pretty against GC and even though lifetimes are wayyyy better than C memory management they're not nearly as convenient as GC.
If Rust ever gets a good GC it might very well replace VM languages. But even if they started now, it would take years.
Rust also has long compile times. Java and C# projects, even huge ones, build in a couple seconds because compilation is done in JIT. Go is AOT but sacrifices some performance for fast compilation too. It's important for a general purpose language where performance is not #1 concern but maybe #2 or #3. Same story as GC. Sacrifice a small amount of performance for convenience. That's not what Rust is designed for.
Rust is positioned as a systems language to replace C dialects and it that I think it will be wildly successful
You're not setting your own rates. You can't choose which rides you take. You can't follow your own rules.
Remember when Uber was giving back to back rides to drivers that had Lyft driver app installed so they couldn't effectively drive for both? That doesn't sound like freelance work to me.
Much of the pay structure is based on hitting a certain number of rides per week. So to get "decent" pay rate you need to work a certain number of hours.
Sometimes the company even owns your car and leases it to you contingent on doing a certain number of rides.
And you have no input on which rides you get once you go online.
It's nothing like traditional freelance work. It's more like high tech pizza delivery driver. And those workers are all considered employees.
> You're not setting your own rates. You can't choose which rides you take. You can't follow your own rules.
As of a few years ago you can choose which rides you take without penalty. This is effectively how you negotiate rates as well. Only drive during busy times and accept high rate rides.
> Remember when Uber was giving back to back rides to drivers that had Lyft driver app installed so they couldn't effectively drive for both? That doesn't sound like freelance work to me.
The back-to-back ride thing has nothing to do with having the Lyft app installed or not. It's a great feature that allows you to have your next ride lined up while on the current ride. It dramatically increases profit and efficiency (which also means less dead-miles -> less gas wasted -> less emissions). You can decline these "back-to-back" rides just like any other ride request.
> Much of the pay structure is based on hitting a certain number of rides per week. So to get "decent" pay rate you need to work a certain number of hours.
If you drive when it's busy the incentives don't matter. My take home-profit (even after depreciation of vehicle) is $15-30/hr for about 20 hours per week.
> Sometimes the company even owns your car and leases it to you contingent on doing a certain number of rides.
I don't know any Uber drivers in my city who lease their cars from Uber. Never heard of this happening.
> And you have no input on which rides you get once you go online.
You get all the ride requests near you. You can decline at will with no penalty.
> As of a few years ago you can choose which rides you take without penalty. This is effectively how you negotiate rates as well. Only drive during busy times and accept high rate rides. <
Apparently, that was harming Uber’s business and they are considering removing that feature from the driver app.
> As of a few years ago you can choose which rides you take without penalty.
That wasn't there before and I have no reason to believe it now without evidence. Turning down rides always had negative effects such as less rides being assigned to you.
> The back-to-back ride thing has nothing to do with having the Lyft app installed or not
You should look this up in older news articles. AFAIK that's just not true. Maybe it's changed, but at one point Uber was changing their app behavior when you had Lyft driver app installed.
> If you drive when it's busy the incentives don't matter.
So you're implicitly agreeing with me that the incentives are perverse and encourage you to drive during peak times?
> I don't know any Uber drivers in my city who lease their cars from Uber. Never heard of this happening.
Then I encourage you to read about this. There's a large fraction of people who don't believe anything unless it's happened to them or their friends personally. And I think this is a shame given how available information is with today's internet. This definitely 1000% happens. I've seen it with my own eyes.
Contrary to microservice cargo cult, it's possible to build a relative monolith that scales infinitely. The bottleneck is the db, but if you have a schema where data is easily sharded you can scale it infinitely.
There's plenty of giant monoliths that scale fine. Like Google's analytics and gmail. If you have a database that can scale microservices are more about isolating code between different teams than any performance advantage
We run mostly Java backend and JS frontend, same story.
Tons of opportunities for optimization but company doesn't want to spend the time and devs appreciate the extra fuckoff time