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You may have to prove yourself by building your own successful product or a stellar reputation of doing similar heavy lifting at other companies before a company will trust you with that kind of role as a freelance gig.

There are folks who become “fixers” but they have a long history of being fixers and have usually worked in multiple different orgs achieving similar results regardless of org structure, strategy and cruft. It sounds like you are itching for such a career, but it requires starting somewhere. Many fixers also take full time leadership positions at the company for a period of time and then move on once the problem is fixed. The leadership position also gives you direct authority over the process and resources, which you will need as both likely need to be tweaked. That the project is failing is likely a combination of poor process and some bad apples, and both usually need fixing. It’s rarely that “everyone on the engineering team is incompetent.” Without the leader title you will not have the organizational authority to fire/hire or change process.

You may want to consider the offer of the leadership position seriously: The company sees the problem within itself, sees you as a fixer and is willing to hire you to do your magic. This is how you build your reputation in this market space. Give yourself three to five years to implement the changes, then move on to a different company with a different problem to fix. It’s also a great way to find out if you’re truly as awesome as you think you are :).

> Hopefully this doesn't arrogant, but those companies can't hire someone of my caliber.

Well obviously if they can’t pay market rates, and you didn’t even think it was worth asking, then it’s not exactly a great example of a consulting client.

I’m not sure what these hypothetical contracts that you didn’t even pursue because you don’t think the companies could have afforded add to the conversation, though.

It doesn’t sound like these clients were typical or even remotely competent.

I’m not sure why you think a company that wanted to hire you for a leadership role would pay you as a free-lancer to do that role. Generally consultant and full-time hiring pipelines and roles are fully separate, for a variety of reasons.

Also, just in case it wasn’t obvious, this comment does read as extremely arrogant. A company wanted to hire you, you didn’t want to work there because they’re “average/mediocre”, so you’ve decided w/o engaging with them that it might be fun to pop in and just solve all their problems for them.

As parallel comments have pointed out, networking is crucial to contracting, because it’s the primary way that clients connect with you and decide to work with you. If your mindset is that you’re a rockstar saving crappy companies from their mediocrity, you’ll quickly find yourself with a poisoned well.

yeah, pretty hypocrite that the author doesn’t work to work for a company, because it’s not his caliber, but then accepts a freelancing gig

if you don’t want to work for a company for any reason, why did you accept the offer?

why is that so hard to understand? this has been a good source of clients for me.

i dont have any faith in your product or your leadership - you really seem to be chasing your own tail, and working for you is just going to be pointless and frustrating for both of us.

however, you want to hire me because i'm an expert in X. actually I am, and if you give me the go ahead I'll basically fix all your X problems in 3 months and be available for ongoing work if necessary later. you really dont need a full time X guy, I promise you I'm going to be bored after that first little bit.

i want the money, the engagement, and the opportunity to grow my network. that works for me. hanging out on slack with your team all day and having a weekly zoom where I remind you yet again that if you dont test you can expect problems later doesnt.

> ...i dont have any faith in your product or your leadership

Sounds as not a good proposition for me as a client. It breaks the trust in your effort being for the best of my interest.

No that different from a mercenary's logic. Even then some loyaly to the payer is expected.

How would you go on supporting the product past completion of your work? Saying that it broke in the part that you did not write? Well, you touched it, you "own" it... at least in client's mind.

sounds like you really dont want a contractor. i try to be available for followon work, but i cant promise anything really.

instead of trying to find another senior X person to come on fulltime, maybe you should pay someone to pick up X?

I think that because that's exactly what I was discussing and doing with multiple companies.

The only reason I never got into serious compensation talks is that I was just testing out the waters to see if my contacts could help me find interesting work.

I did actually do some small and limited architectural design projects / tech leadership projects (think 40 hour total project time over several weeks) and I was able to get a rather high rate for that.

I'm not sure why people are saying contract leadership isn't a thing. My day job routinely hires temporary contract leadership for things outside our wheelhouse. The people we contract are people who would never work at our company because it's beneath them, but they're willing to take some short highly paid contracting jobs.

It's not arrogant if it's true, it's just candid.

We would never communicate things like that - that would be arrogant, but if he's giving us the reality, then it's fine.

That said - the 'Red Flag' to me is that someone things they are going to 'contract' and 'help out a bit' and 'fix their architecture'.

This seems worse the a bit glib, it seems upside down.

This seems like someone who might be a good engineer and who has worked on good teams ... but doesn't have the maturity to understand how these projects tend to unfold.

'Fixing a Broken Project' has to be the most scary thing in software and in most cases it's not doable.

Teaching some best practices - yes. Helping to identify problems - yes. Maybe slicing off a few obvious things, sure - i.e. maybe they need a caching strategy.

But when 'Thing are Wrong' there are usually a lot of problems and 99% of the time, someone thinks they can hire a 'Savior' to come in and fix it. The 'Savior', offered a pile of money is likely to buy into their own ability to be the 'Savior'.

But the psychological development from those frothy heights, as the realization sets in that they're crashing on the rock of Scylla ... well there has to be a good German word for that.

We should try to recognize the variety of inputs that may have created what resulted in seemingly an 'architecture problem' when that might not be the source of the conundrum. A team of 'mediocre people' will probably only ever be capable of doing something to a certain calibre. The Winnipeg Symphony will never sound as good as the NY Philharmonic, College Basketball teams are not competitive with Pro Teams etc..

Funny, but in my experience, under-developed problem statement like “fixing a broken project” is the main reason why companies do not (cannot) offer competitive compensation for this kind of work.

What is the monetary value of “fixing a broken project”? Nobody knows, because the root cause is not known - and if they knew the root cause, the problem would have been defined differently from the start.

So what happens is company tries to hire someone to diagnose the root causes. But diagnostics brings no inherit value to the org until problems are actually fixed. Which means nobody is willing to invest into diagnostics. Which means they try to fill in some flat rate position for these diagnostic purposes, position which fits the project budget, with compensation unrelated to the scale of actual problems at hand.

Another issue is that “fixing a broken project” engagements are usually launched by middle management responsible for success of these (already launched) projects. Proper way to approach this as an external consultant would be to go one level up, take a look at the actual company strategy and this project’s goals, and rework the way whole project is launched. At many times the easier way around is to re-setup, re-steer, or kill this project altogether - but this requires a different level of involvement.

In the end you are stuck on an underfunded engagement where actual proper solution likely lies outside of your area of responsibility (you are being hired by middle management, so you cannot effectively go above their head and reach the actual solution).

some problems cannot be fixed. they either need to be cancelled, or they will run to completion using 2 or 3 or 4 or X times the budget and schedule.

the real value is identifying these projects early. but identification is not near as difficult as getting the message understood by the stakeholders.

Just be mindful sometime adding frosting to a terrible cake doesn't make it taste good. And the failure to pivot looks really bad to you. So your $300 hourly rate is not really deeply utilized. Consider project billing and also think about internal barriers (including humans that might be resentful or threatened) and how you might clear them.

If you're doing strategic work it still needs to get implemented. And you're not doing that work. But the result is what the CEO will convey as your reputation to your next client referral reference check.

Just some thoughts.

Then once you start working with them you discover that the tech and architecture are a reflection of their management structure, and then you find out they really don't want a port/rebuild, they want a new product (but this only becomes apparent half way through the rebuild).

Green field projects are much easier, but you really need to have a great product owner/manager.

Tldr: It's not just coding, it's people.

> legacy PHP system

That's Yahoo right? :)