Q5 - Alistair Cockburn

Q5 - Tell me about your consulting work.  What do you like most about it?  Least?

 

This one should be short :).

 

What I like is that I get  control my own time. I can say 'No' once my travel schedule hits a certain threhhold (50%). That was actually the reason I quit IBM – they put me permanently in the field, and I started traveling 5 1/2 days a week, coming home Friday night and leaving Sunday afternoon. I lasted 3 weeks and then turned in my resignation. The primary immediate advantage I got was the ability to say No.

 

The second advantage, related, is that it's my own business, so when I work overtime, I know who's benefitting from it – and it's me! (Not some corporate stockholder or exec shooting for a bonus). Then, when I'm not actively working, I know what I'm dong and why – I'm changing baby diapers (OK, that was back in 1994), helping kids wth homework, going shopping, or going swimming. When I was an employee, that was all "the other me, the one outside work". Nowadays, it's all "just me", whether I'm filing papers, doing bills, shopping, consulting, teaching, writing, hiking, inventing flip-flops, whatever. There is "work me" and "home me", there's only Me. That's a really freeing feeling.

 

On the downside, my brain can never shut off. I call it "riding the fences" (rancher duty – making sure cattle can't go through a hole in the fence). It's a little process that runs all the time. I can't stop it. Invoices, clients, the work pipeline, the bills. I've met other small company owners who tell me the same story.

 

The other, and from my perspective, biggest downside, is that I don't have professional colleagues to trade notes with and learn from. It turns out that keeping up with all the new technology is done much better in an office situation – there's all this osmotic communication about the new browser APIs or Google's new products or something about the Eclipse interface or ... or ... or ...

 

Taking it all together, I'm much happier being on my own.