July 9, 2017
Shipping code is laborious
If you’re an experienced developer, there are almost certainly a bunch of things you are capable of doing for your clients that are less work, lower risk, and higher profit than coding.
Things like:
- Advising them on tech stack choices
- Designing a system architecture
- Vetting 3rd party technology choices
- Acting as an expert resource during a high risk project
- Connecting them with potential dev hires
- Overseeing a migration from on-prem to a cloud provider (or vice versa)
- Optimizing their development pipeline
- Decreasing their AWS bills
- etc etc etc
When I suggest this to folks, they usually reject it out of hand for a variety of reasons, like:
- “My clients would never pay for that sort of thing.”
- “I couldn’t get enough of that kind of work to make ends meet.”
- “I wouldn’t feel comfortable charging for that sort of thing.”
...but the BIGGEST MOST COMMON objection is:
“BUT I LOVE CODING!!!!”
I hear you.
I’m a web dev at heart. But over a year ago, I vowed to stop coding for money.
And guess what?
I still get to code on a regular basis. I have one long term client that I still do some really cool frontend work for, I work on my own internal projects, and every so often I bang out a quick app for myself or a friend.
I’m not suggesting you stop coding immediately and forever.
Rather, I’m suggesting that you look for opportunities to deliver value to clients in ways that don’t involve writing shipping code.
If you keep your eyes peeled, you’ll start to notice them. Over time, I betcha you’ll start to shift to those sorts of low-risk, low-labor, high-profit activities.
(And as an added bonus, these sorts of offerings are a perfect fit for value pricing. If you’re having a hard time ditching hourly for your dev work, spin up a few of these to get your feet wet with value pricing.)
Yours,
—J