24 October, 2014

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

Today marks exactly one year to the day that I left Sky
in order to work for myself. I thought I’d write up a very candid
postmortem.

Disclaimer: This post was hastily written, so is more of a
brain-dump than a carefully-penned article. Also, if you don’t fancy the idea of
someone going on about how great their job is, please stop reading now. I’ve
tried as as hard as possible to avoid gloating, but after several failed
attempts at self-censoring, I just let it all flow. You have been warned.

The work

I went into self employment
in typical me fashion: informal, optimistic, freestyle. My thinking was that
I’d had 6–7 years of amazing but very predictable employment, so I wanted to
make the most of striking out alone by not having any rigid plans in place. I
wanted to make sure that I wasn’t stifling any opportunities before I’d given
them chance to happen.

This worked out very, very well. The sheer variety and amount of work I’ve
been able to do as a result has been astounding. I was very keen not to go off
contracting and ending up working for three to six months at a time, and instead
wanted to focus on much shorter engagements with a higher number of clients.
This is why I explicitly chose to go the consultancy route as opposed to
freelancing or contracting.

In the last year I’ve worked for large companies like the
BBC and the
NHS, to smaller
companies, to working with
individuals from their home
offices.

The single longest engagement I had was with the
NHS, and
lasted just 21 days. The majority of my work has been single-day workshops with
companies, and a few week-to-fortnight engagements with several clients who
required a little more involvement.

The vast majority of my work has been consultancy and internal workshops:
heading into companies for short (often just one day) stints and assessing,
troubleshooting, teaching, and helping teams manage large and/or growing
codebases. This has been immensely rewarding and is exactly the kind of thing
I wanted to do.

I have only worked on three development projects in the last year. One was an
initial sprint’s worth of work to define and plan out architectures and
strategies; another was the
NHS project
which was several sprint’s worth of work handled in a very satellite fashion;
another is still ongoing. I’ve really enjoyed the dev work, but only because my
role has, again, been very consultancy led. I’ve turned down every project
that has had already-finished designs and just needed someone to build them,
because that is just a fundamentally broken way of working, and something I
really do not want to encourage or participate in.

A worry I’d had about stepping away from day-to-day development work and going
consultancy was about falling behind the curve and losing the real-world
experiences of being a developer. What ended up happening was the complete
opposite: as a result of parachuting into companies for a day or two at a time I
was exposed to a lot more varied and diverse problems than I would have done if
I’d been working on dev projects. Spending a little bit of time with a lot of
very different companies meant that I was solving more problems than ever
before, and this is great news.

The types of projects and companies have been very varied as well, which is
something I knew that I really wanted from day one. The reason I’ve not taken
the contracting or freelance route is because I don’t want to work on the same
projects for months on end at the expense of variety. I absolutely love working
product, but I also wanted to use my move to self employment to get to work with
a lot of different products, teams, and environments.

The lifestyle

The lifestyle of self employment has been one of much privilege for me. I’ve
travelled to—and worked from—places all over the globe. I’ve met dozens, if not
hundreds of people, I’ve eaten great meals, stayed in some beautiful hotels,
made new friends, experienced new cultures and places, all whilst calling it
‘work’. I honestly cannot believe that this is my job now. Sometimes I do
just sit and grin to myself about how fortunate I am to get paid to do this.

That’s not to say I haven’t earned such a great job—it’s been something I’ve
actively worked toward since I was 17 years old (or earlier, depending on where
you draw your measurements from). I’m very aware that lifestyle isn’t
immediately available to everyone, because it was never immediately available to
me. It’s something I’ve had to work very, very hard at to attain, but it’s
paying back tenfold. If you’re considering a move to self employment, I would
advise that you lay as much groundwork as you can before you take the leap.

The work–life balance has been amazing. I’ve not had any quiet periods that I
haven’t wanted to have; I’ve turned down more work than I’ve accepted, I’ve
replaced quantity of work with quality. I’ve had a very relaxed lifestyle
interspersed with hugely rewarding work and plenty of travel. This is something
I really, really enjoy.

I had two notable discussions with friends, earlier this year, about my work.
One friend asked me:

Harry, you’re always Tweeting about what a great time you’ve had with all
these nice people. Are you just saying that? Surely they can’t all be great
companies and people…?

I do tweet a lot about products, teams, and companies I’m working with, and it
is always favourable. There are a couple of reasons I do this: one, to publicly
praise the work of a particular company or team (I like to use my platform for
good where I can); and two, to less altruistically but subtly promote the fact
that I’m running a workshop for someone, and you could have one as well. This
isn’t falsified or for the sake of appearances: it’s true. Every client and team
I’ve worked with has been great. It wasn’t until I was asked this question so
directly that I realised just how great my clients have been. I’m sure not
everyone can say the same.

Another friend, who’s not in the industry, asked me how working for myself was
going. I answered with something along the lines of Ah it’s so much fun…
and, once I’d finished speaking, my friend just said with a genuine look of
amazement on his face:

I absolutely love that your first response to a question about work is that
you’re having fun.

Again, I’d never even thought about it like that until it was pointed out. My
instinctive response was about the fact that my work is a lot of fun. I didn’t
mention money, or clients, or troubles; all that was on my mind was how much fun
I’m having. I’m a very fortunate person.

There are downsides, though: I’ve lived out of suitcase for a year; I spend a
lot of time alone, be that travelling, hotel rooms, or dining (A table for
one, please. is probably my most-used phrase of the year); travel is tiring
and can be very unproductive unless you force yourself to work (I send most of
my email from airports and trains); and you have to up and leave a lot of teams
and people you get really invested in. This, however, is just what comes with
the territory, I guess.

Another negative is health. Not that my work has affected my health, but it’s
a lifestyle that lends itself well to unhealthy living if you’re not careful.
Eating in restaurants so often means a lot of rich food (usually coupled with
alcohol). Getting used to dining alone when working has found its way into my
non-work life. I eat out in restaurants far too often. I’d go as far as to say
that 11 meals in 15 are in restaurants, which is crazy when I stop and think
about how much I used to cook, and enjoy cooking. It’s a very privileged problem
to have, but it’s a problem nonetheless.

Business

Business has been great! Really great! I’ll spare you the actual facts, figures
and financials, but I did some rough calculations and worked out that I was
7.3 times more profitable being self employed than I was as a Senior Developer
at Sky. Money was never a goal or key driving force in my decision to work for
myself, but it’s interesting to look at how things panned out. It’s been a
year free of any financial worries or concerns for the business.

It’s been a very good year for the business, and despite working far, far less
than I did in full-time employment, it’s been a very financially stable year.

I’ve decided that, although the figures are really, really great, they can
easily be made better. My downtime is very important to me—I don’t want to work
each continuous day for weeks on end—but I probably ought to be more
productive with it. I did a lot less cycling and mountaineering this year
despite having an order of magnitude more available time. I didn’t waste any
of that time, but I didn’t do anything particularly focussed with it. It was
perhaps too leisurely (the extra weight I’ve gained is testament to that).

Also, the nature of consultancy is that it’s very inefficient. I’m the
company’s single point of failure, so if I don’t work, the company doesn’t earn.
Also, as I’m selling my time, and there’s only one of me, the business model
currently can’t scale—I can only be in one place at one time. It might be
interesting to explore ways of making CSS Wizardry Ltd. more efficient.

Year 2

More of the same, please!

There are a few key points I want to address:

• Eat better.
• More productive use of my downtime.
• Investigate making the business model a little more efficient.
• Perhaps take on more dev work.
• More/better open-source work.

But other than that, I want to carry on as I am. I already have some really,
really cool work/clients lined up, doing exactly what I want to be doing. This
is, for now, my dream job. I’d be silly to change that.

Highlights

Honestly, it’s impossible to say. Perhaps it was

All this to say: I really, really love my job.

Year one has been fantastic, and I want to extend a huge and sincere thank you
to every client, every team, every individual who’s made it as fun as it has
been. Thank you so much.

Here’s to Year 2.