Aaron Erickson is a veteran technology consultant, writer, and technical evangelist with Magenic Technologies, based out of Chicago. He has spent the majority of his career catering to the individual needs of companies of all sizes. His strategic consulting focus has been centered around delivering high-value solutions that break new technological ground and bringing added value to both up-and-coming clients, as well as those who are already established.
For the past 16 years, Aaron has worked with leading-edge companies, providing prescriptive guidance to both the knowledge workers–those who actually produce the software–as well as the management side of the business, including CEOs, CTOs, and other executive staff. His experience has led him to do business with a variety of clients across financial services, supply chain, and insurance, vertical industries. His consulting mantra in recent years has been technology matters, but business results matter more.
Aaron is frequently invited to speak at events such as TechEd, VSLive, and .NET user groups on topics ranging from the highly technical (F#, C#, LINQ, and Functional Programming), to more business-focused topics that open the floor to an exchange of ideas, best practices, and observations about the specialized world of technology consulting.
Aaron has been a Microsoft MVP since 2007. He has written for .NET Developers Journal and InformIT. He blogs at both nomadic-developer.com as well as for Magenic at blog.magenic.com/blogs/aarone. Readers can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/AaronErickson.
The Nomadic Developer The Nomadic Developer
Preface
Sorry, I beg to differ—Information Technology does matter!
—My response to Nicholas G. Carr’s seminal Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”
Technology work—making companies, governments, and other organizations leverage information to work more effectively and reach more markets—is one of the most exciting places in which to scratch out a living. In one day, a really good practicing doctor might deliver a couple dozen babies. A technology practitioner, on the other hand, might write an algorithm that matches advertisements to searches that leads to billions of dollars of profits (and with these profits, jobs for tens of thousands of people) for not only the company that employed the developer who wrote the algorithm, but thousands of other companies that are smart enough to leverage the service of the company that employs the developer who wrote the algorithm. Although certainly not an accomplishment on the scale of delivering life, creating that much economic value and productivity—enough to feed an entire small nation—is certainly a significant contribution to society!
To put it another way, there is nothing more powerful or potentially game changing (and sometimes, more disruptive) than information technology in the hands of smart, innovative, and disciplined people. There are examples we are familiar with as consumers—everything from email to calendars to tools to manage budgets like MS Money and Quicken. They are just the tip of the iceberg, though; most large companies use some sort of technology to do everything from understanding their customers, trading securities, balancing the books, performing medical diagnoses, underwriting insurance, controlling spacecraft, controlling your car, designing energy-efficient power grids, and doing dozens upon dozens of other things that companies—not to mention, society at large—literally depend on every single day.
In other words, technology touches, in some way, shape, or form, almost every decision, every action, and every strategy a modern enterprise might undertake. A good friend of mine, technology strategy consultant Michael Hugos, has an expression: “Technology, by automating the routine, allows knowledge workers to concentrate on the exceptional conditions, leading to a more responsive, more capable enterprise.” From that standpoint, it is hard to see any company on the face of the earth that could not be made better and more efficient through the use of technology. The only limiting factor becomes the limits of creativity (finding solutions), the limits of our expertise, and the limits of our discipline (developing solutions).
Of course, with respect to Mr. Carr and his assertion regarding information technology in the May 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review, he is almost right: Information technology devoid of people doesn’t matter. What does matter is innovative application of information technology by people, which is the entire point of the business of technology consulting.
Creativity, Expertise, and Discipline
The three elements that really need to be mixed to create useful technology solutions are, ironically enough, hardly about technology at all. Technology is just a mechanism by which these three primary elements—creativity, expertise, and discipline, which exist in people—can be transformed into business results.
Of course, these three elements are really the keys to being successful anywhere. The issue really is that, in the context of a company, being good at all three is hard because they apply to all things. A car company can typically have creativity and expertise as it relates to building cars because that is where the company’s investment and passion are. The same is true for most other areas of expertise, including technology. The reason we have technology consulting companies is so that we can create a community of technology professionals dedicated to using their creativity, expertise, and discipline to produce great technology solutions for clients. Having such a community of professionals, where success of the community is not dependent on success of something they don’t directly control (as it would be in a car company because a car company sells cars, not technology), is the chief reason why technology consulting companies exist.
What This Book Is About
This book is about technology consulting companies and how a technology professional might be successful working for one. It is the collected wisdom drawn from not just my own mistakes (which are legion), but mistakes of others who have been kind enough to share their experiences in this book as well (their insights appear as shaded sidebars embedded in the text). Of course, you can’t have a careers book without a happy ending, so we talk about and celebrate successes alongside our failures. But as everyone knows after a few years, failure is frequently a much better teacher than success!
Consider this book something of a career guide that maps out how most firms work, covers the kinds of employers to avoid, and provides some sample career paths beyond the career paths you would normally think about in a technology company. I have aimed to provide a good mixture of advice and realism, mixed with a bit of inspiration and unconventional advice, so you don’t confuse this book with something that might be written by one of those folks you watch during 3 a.m. infomercials when you have job-worry insomnia and someone is telling you “Rah, rah, power of positive thinking.”
Why I Wrote This Book
Technology consulting is a business that globally employs well over three million people. To put it in perspective, more than 1 in every 2,000 humans alive today work in technology consulting. If all the world’s technology consultants lived in one city, it would have a population roughly on par with the city where I live and work, Chicago, Illinois. I would add that such a mystical city would be a great place indeed—if you could get past all the pizza and Mountain Dew consumed there. (Hey, let’s admit it, some stereotypes are true!)
To put it another way, although definitive numbers are hard to find, the quantity of technology consultants and technology service professionals is comparable with that of many major professions such as accounting or law. However, although there are many books on how to run a law practice, how to advance in a law practice, not to mention television dramas and movies about the practice of law, and so forth, there are not many books on how a technology services practice is run.
The evidence of this, of course, is that because there is such a dearth of information, many people come into this business unprepared. To the budding technologist who finds himself or herself in the technology consulting business by accident, not understanding how a firm works can lead him or her to not only being taken advantage of, but to making scary career-limiting moves. For example, a firm might say, “We think consultants should rotate to new clients every nine months.” A consultant who is unaware of the real pitfalls of the business might request to be moved off a less-than-perfect client nine months into a project during a recession. This might lead to the request being granted but also leads to a layoff a few weeks later, when that person is sitting on the bench.
I know this because I, as a consultant, have made that mistake and many others. And I have friends and colleagues who have done the same.
Of course, the other main reason I wrote this book was, to be blunt, that as this book goes to press in 2009, there is a certain urgency and need for relevant career advice. Although economics is called “the dismal science” for a reason—one of which is the difficulty in predicting what will happen even with the best information—it’s important to have a conversation about the skills necessary to survive a downturn in the economy.
Who This Book Is For
This book is designed for
- Currently practicing technology consultants
- Students entering the field of technology who are considering consulting as an option
- People who work in technology for a “brick-and-mortar” (that is, nontechnology) company, who are considering switching to technology
- Spouses of people in technology consulting, so they know what is driving their spouse nuts
- Managers or owners of technology consulting firms who want to improve their companies
- People with idle curiosity on the topic
Note that I am a software developer by trade, and some of the advice will seem suited toward that particular sector of the technology consulting business. That said, most of the advice can be translated easily to other areas of technology consulting, whether it is interaction design, infrastructure consulting, database consulting, product implementation, or the dozens of areas adjacent to software development consulting—the area where I live and breathe on a day-to-day basis as a practicing consultant myself.
How to Read This Book
You can be thankful that this book is not like a novel, a la Lord of the Rings, where you will have no clue about what is going on if you don’t read Chapter 6. You can r...
