New project and identities

Jeff Nichols has been working for almost a year on an intranet project for a large company. Jeff’s a smart guy with an interesting blog. That tells me that his project is probably interesting with lots of tough problems to solve. Thanks to Jeff, I’m now working on that project as well. The project is fascinating but I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to share about it; probably not much more than anecdotes and general things learned. I’ll find out more about that when I get started next week.

The structure of the project is a bit interesting. I’ll be working for a consulting shop who has the contract with the end client. The project isn’t a full time gig, although it will keep me quite busy the next two months, but the consulting shop asked me to become a part-time employee in order to simplify their accounting. So for the first time in more than two years I’m an employee again. I’ll be working remotely, dealing directly with the client, and largely setting my own hours, so it’s much the same as what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. Still, something about being an employee feels different.

This change has made me think once again about my professional identity. I started a blog entry on the subject almost exactly one year ago but never finished it, partly because I couldn’t effectively put my thoughts into words. And partly was because I figured no one would really care. I was thinking too much about my audience and not enough about myself. But I find that I think about the subject often and writing about it helps my thoughts coalesce. What I’m trying to say is that for the rest of this entry I’m writing for me. If you aren’t me you might not be particularly interested in what follows.

I started consulting two years ago when the company I was working for went under. It was the third time in 12 months that I’d been laid off when a startup went under. I was laid off (the third time) on October 31, 2001 as the economy was softening. After looking for a job and collecting unemployment for a while, I ended up with a bit of contract work for projects run by people I knew from past companies. A few months later, I decided to formalize the contracting I was doing and converted this site from a personal site and blog to a site advertising my services and professional blog. You can still see the old site in several incarnations (mostly without stylesheets or images) in the Internet Archive.

Since then I’ve waffled between wanting to appear as a big company and positioning myself as an independant consultant. What I’ve finally decided on is being myself. People that want to hire me for a project want to hire me, not a faceless company. People hire me for my experience and expertise, not because I have a team of people ready to swing into action for them. The voice of this blog is mine, the thoughts and ideas presented here are mine. If you like them, perhaps you’ll hire me. If not, then we probably wouldn’t have worked well together anyway. (I even experimented with writing this blog as we instead of I, but I didn’t like it.)

So that’s who I am, an independent consultant. Perhaps one day I’ll be in such demand that I’ll need to hire a staff to help with the work, but for now it’s just me. So if you want to talk to me about some work, whether it’s a small project, a short- or long-term contract, or even a permanent position with your company, let me know.