Category Archives: Motivation

Leadership, Motivation, Software

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Consulting

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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.

Motivation, Software

Consulting and Motivation

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Caveat: I’m very hesitant to post this publicly. Please read it in the sense I’ve written it. I’m being vulnerable in the hope of opening up discussion on a topic which I can’t see people talking about, but which I think is probably important.

I’ve spent most of my software career as part of a product team. Whether I’ve been writing code (mostly), managing people (when needful, and more often lately), mentoring, or doing any of the many little side-roles which are needed to build a successful product, I’ve always been able to rely on the fact that everyone I’m working with has the same big-picture mission.

I’m not talking about “producing great software” here. I’m talking about the alignment between business, and product, and people – over the years it has ranged from “let people put a $2 coin into a kiosk and use the internet” to “produce weather forecasts to help mines make better decisions” to “provide better patient outcomes in hospitals”. That shared mission has always been fundamental to my own sense of purpose and motivation. It’s what makes me feel worthwhile as a person, and it helps me justify to myself the salary I get paid – I would hate to feel like I’m being paid money but not adding value!

A bit less than a year ago, I moved from product teams to consulting – and the rug has been pulled out from under my feet.

It probably doesn’t help that I’ve moved straight into a leadership role. I don’t have one client for weeks or months at a time – I have somewhere around 20 clients simultaneously, as well as leading a team of consultants and being part of the overall leadership of my state and my national group. My usual source of motivation – that shared mission – hasn’t just been diluted. It’s been shredded, processed, ground up, kneaded into dough, cooked, and handed back to me in a form I just don’t recognise.

I needed to find a new source of motivation.

I went looking online, and there’s not a lot out there. I read listicles about how to stay motivated as a consultant – “Exercise!” “Don’t sweat the small stuff!” “Take time to recharge!” “Just believe in yourself!”. I read (or mostly listened to) books about consulting, and they gave me all sorts of strategies – for being a better consultant. I just haven’t been able to find much (anything?) addressing my motivational problem.

I’ve had a string of successes, mostly great outcomes, and one or two things which haven’t gone well. I’ve watched the various strategies we’ve used to motivate people with lots of interest – hoping I’d find something to get my gears engaged. Positive call-outs, monetary rewards, team-building exercises. They’re good strategies. They make me feel good in the moment. It’s a great team – some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. That can be hard to deal with in itself, but I’ve mostly moved on from my imposter syndrome to something a little more complicated, so that’s OK.

None of these things has been a solid substitute for the fundamental sense of purpose I used to get from being part of a team with a mission. A mission beyond just “build great software” – that’s just a means to an end. A mission like “create better hospital outcomes for patients”. That was a good one.

I have clients with missions now. Some of them even believe in their own missions, and occasionally they’re missions I care about too. But I only get to care about my clients’ missions sometimes – and other times my mission is aligned with my own team (whose mission is somewhere between “build great software” and “keep the client happy”), and sometimes I’m worried about the broader group or consultancy. Sometimes I’m aligned with the sales team, and sometimes I’m opposed to them. Sometimes I’m focused on a client whose mission I disagree with. Success, then, means making the world a worse place (from my point of view).

The best advice I’ve found so far has been this: find a sense of pride in the quality of your work, and the reputation of your team. Good advice, I’m sure, and probably very fulfilling for some.

I haven’t had any luck decoupling the quality of my work from the outcomes and the team and the mission. Quality work is just another means to an end: accomplishing the mission.

I normally write blog posts because I feel like I’ve got some knowledge to share, but the more leadership I do, the more that I understand it’s not always about dishing out nuggets of wisdom from on high – it’s about facilitating discussions, and helping create understanding from our shared experiences. So here I am, ending a blog post with the same uncertainty that I started it with.

Please, reply here, or reply to this tweet. Whether you’re a consultant now, or you have been one in the past and struggled with the same thing, or you’re on a product team and get your motivation from another source. Whether you have an answer, or a different perspective, or just more questions – let’s talk about this topic. One of the biggest industries in my city is consulting, and I feel like this is a big topic which just isn’t talked about. Let’s start talking.