It’s been an interesting couple of months. While I’ve been getting the business going, I’ve also been trying to get my house ready to sell, trying to sell the house, and picking up contract work. What’s been amazing to me during the process is how utterly unreliable some companies and individuals are that I’ve worked with. For instance, I’ve dealt with plumbers who said that the work they were doing replacing galvanized pipe under the house would be done within a single day and ended up losing some shrubs I just planted because the water was off for three days during a heat wave. The same plumbers also managed to knock some duct work and a dryer vent loose, ultimately causing moisture problems under the house, which made a buyer back out at the last minute.
Reliability is not free, nor is it cheap, but lack of reliability is even more expensive. In terms of business, the problems they created cost me several thousand dollars, both in repairs and in opportunity cost (because there were quite a few hours I was not able to work out of the house when I expected to be able to, because we had to go through the process of showing it again).

Editor’s Note: I had initially scheduled this post for last Thursday. Due to some things that were going on related to depression (not for me, but for a friend), I elected to put off the posting.

Depression is something I’ve noticed that is remarkably common among software developers and other IT folk that I’ve worked with. I’ve had some pretty unpleasant experience with it myself. It’s a strange thing when it comes up. There often seems to be little reason, or what reason is there is vastly overblown. I also don’t have a cure for it, and neither does anybody else. Anybody who tells you otherwise is trying to sell something, and you’ll be solicited for whatever it is in short order.

Wise generals of the past have an old saying. No battle plan survives first contact. It’s true. Whatever you have planned is subject to the whims of fate. I had plans going out on my own as a freelancer. Some have come to pass. Others have been…adjusted by experience. I think everybody that makes it through their first six months or so has a list (and everybody further out probably has updated their list as time goes on). This is my list so far of the things I’ve noticed that nobody really told me (or they suggested, but I didn’t listen very well). Here are my top 16 things that I just didn’t really understand fully until I started freelancing.

Judging by the actions of a few companies I’ve encountered over the ten and a half years of my full-time, professional programming career, many companies would like to quickly lose their most talented people, preferably to their competitors and preferably for easily and cheaply avoidable reasons. Towards this end, I’d like to offer a list of suggestions of ways to make absolutely certain that your development staff is interested in greener pastures, no matter how much barbed wire they have to climb to get to them. Here are my suggestions for how to achieve near perfect turnover (except for sadists) within a three to four year period.