Always Charge By the Hour

Consulting is the ancient, noble art of making money by telling people things they don’t want to hear in a way that makes them pretend to appreciate it.

I highly recommend The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M. Weinberg - it’s essentially a bible for anyone crazy enough to make a living as a consultant in just about any industry, including IT. It blends brutal truth with sharp humour, exactlywhat’s needed to survive in a world of clients who have problems - but never the ones they’ll admit to themselves without an external voice. Because the real problems are always bigger, more complex, and, most importantly, stem from people, not technology.

Every system that looks broken is, in reality, a victim of someone’s pride, laziness, or the illusion that "it’s always been this way, and it worked." Or perhaps it suffers from the abandoned-nest syndrome. And if you think the problem is purely technical, that just means you haven’t yet reached the root cause - the person or process that created it. Most clients never want to hear that something is bad. They’d rather you tell them their situation is a great foundation for further innovation and then magically make everything work without changing processes, people, or - most importantly - the budget.

When you try to change something, you hit the classic effect, almost intertwined with Ohm’s law - the harder you push, the greater the resistance. And the client will insist until the very last moment that everything was working fine until you showed up. Your real job, then, is to make the idea of fixing things seem like theirs - because that’s the only way they’ll accept it.

The fundamental rule? Never try to be an expert in everything. If you spread yourself too thin, you’ll end up like jam—the wider you go, the thinner you get. A mediocre consultant who knows a little about Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI usually can’t implement anything without desperate Googling - which fundamentally undermines their usefulness. And remember, every consultant has their favourite tool and often tries to apply it to everything. If your hammer is Agile, suddenly every problem looks like a backlog to be reshuffled. If your fetish is blockchain, then every database must be “decentralized.” The problem with a favourite tool also reveals itself once everything has been “fixed” with it - when someone utters the ominous phrase “let’s monitor and observe,” which means nothing more than “we’ve just built Frankenstein, and he could fall apart at any moment.”

Unfortunately, not everything is a nail, and sometimes you have to put the hammer down. Weinberg also warns about the biggest danger in consulting - money. You think you have principles, but all it takes is a large enough paycheck, and suddenly, you start believing that a lack of unit tests is just part of the company culture or that “the team is like a family” - which, of course, means they’ll burn out completely with no chance of a raise.

And finally - remember, you’re not here to fix a system or solve a problem. You’re here to translate technical jargon into executive language, mediate internal wars between teams, and take the blame when things blow up. A proper consultant is hired for an obscene amount of money in the name of risk minimization. You’re the buffer that absorbs the impact when things don’t go the way management hoped. If you can do that with a straight face - congratulations, you’ve discovered the greatest secret of consulting, and it’s not you who should be learning, but others who should learn from you.

Weinberg created a must-read for anyone who has ever heard “Can you take a quick look at this?” and ended up in months of unrelenting hell. Full of brutal truths, dark humour, and advice that might just save your sanity. Read it, remember it, and above all - always charge by the hour. If you ever feel that a client genuinely wants your advice, sincerely cares about improvement, and will implement changes because they truly understand their value, stop for a moment.

Maybe it’s an illusion.

Or maybe - just maybe - you’ve found a unicorn.