I’ve covered a lot of things on this blog in the past year and a half, but one of the recurring themes is going independent.  I’ve run interviews with Corey Haines, J.B. Rainsberger, David Hoppe, and Rosie Sherry, along with several posts about my own journey as a digital migrant.

A few people expressed concern over what I was writing.

After all, most North Americans are looking for those ‘job’ things, with the benefits, paid time off, corporate retirement plan with unemployment insurance if things go badly.  By pushing people to go against their natural instincts, I am pushing them to make an unnatural choice.

At least that’s the argument.

I’m not too worried about the person that shouldn’t go independent.  They won’t read these articles, or if they stumble on to them by some great accident, they certainly won’t do anything about it.

No, I am looking to find people on the fence, who have the inclination, but lack a little something – people who want to be inspired.

Today, I’m going to try to inspire you.

The Set Up

Imagine for a moment you are a director of IT, trying to plan out what you can do in the next year. You have, say, thirty employees (five supervisors, each with four direct reports), a fair amount of hardware, and influence over a few ancillary departments. Your fiefdom includes production app support/helpdesk, the Windows Server Team, the UNIX server team, the network guys, and the DBAs – or something like that. You’ve probably seen the setup before.

Your problem is that the world keeps changing, and as it changes, the skill sets you need change. The programmers are talking to the end customers about the benefits of cloud computing – how they could roll out changes at the push of a button – but you don’t trust Amazon’s EC2 and you don’t know anyone who knows OpenStack, and don’t have budget for Windows Server 2012. Even if you did, no one on staff knows Windows server 2012. Then there are the business users who want to get off Outlook and to go gmail — but who knows how to integrate LDAP with gmail? Not to mention the Business Intelligence Initiative. Now you’ve got to hire someone that knows how to support that tool, too. Not to mention (mumble mumble I could do this for three more paragraphs).

If that sounds convoluted, confusing, and too much at one time — well, welcome to the head of a typical director of IT.

If you are lucky, as an IT director, you might get budget for two full-time employees. There is just no way any two people will have the skills on all the new systems you need.

Or, for the price of one employee per year, you could hire five different freelancers for four weeks each — or ten for two weeks.

The freelancers come in, do the integration, train the staff, create the policies, and go away. No long-term impact on budget at all; next year, you can hire ten different people, with ten different skills.

It turns out this is an economically reasonable choice.

Do the math. 5 people 4 weeks = 20 weeks, means the typical freelance contract worker gets 2.5x the hourly rate of an employee. Add benefits, and it could be 3x.

And they should.

Long-term contract labor has some amount of job security; you get a six month contract. Regular employees get unemployment benefits and implied longer-term job security. The economic tradeoff for that is reduced wages.

I am not trying to be judgement here; I am speaking in terms of economics.

When I talk about going independent, some of my friends are scared.  They are worried.

But wait.  Take a moment.  Make a list of your strengths and skills – especially unique skills.  Are there skills in that list that some executive, somewhere, might find valuable enough to rent at a premium?

If the answer is yes, well, congratulations.  You could probably be talent if you’d like … but don’t quit your day job just yet.

All I am saying is that you might have more options than you previously realized.

Forget about living out of your car and starving — that IT director needs you.

You just need to find him.

Let’s keep talking.

When we last heard from our hero, he had left his position at Socialtext for a life of roses and caviar as an independent consultant.

More seriously, I had a problem: A fair bit of writing assignments, a few speaking engagements, and no long-term client.  For that matter, no idea what my ideal client looked like.    Did I want to do short-term consulting assignments, “assessment and recommendation”, hiring and placement, or long-term contracting?  Was I willing to travel?Well, okay, it’s not all roses and caviar, but it does definitely have its advantages.

There are plenty of folks who have plenty of different advice, and it all depends on your situation.  In mine, I played a fishing game:  I put a note out on the internet that I was available for work, and waited to see who bit.  (The trick to get that to work is to put out a blog post or two every week for three or four years, with good content, before you hang out your shingle.)

Did I write that I “waited”?  I’m afraid that’s not very accurate.  It would be more accurate to write that I “went crazy”, continuing my involvement in user’s groups, professional associations, finishing up the book, and keeping up my column in STQA Magazine and my blogging.  After three months, I had my first assignment, and had about as much in the checking account as when I started to go independent.

But I’m getting ahead of things.

My friend, Lanette Creamer, was consulting for a client in Northern Indiana from Seattle.  To get there, she had to fly, so the travel expenses were eating into her fees – and due to the flying, she was working less than forty-hour weeks.  About that time she became literally sick of traveling.  When it came time to renew, she didn’t pursue it — but she did have a friend to recommend.

So I had a lead.  Actually, I a had a few leads; a work-from-home 75% of the time position for a silicon valley company; another contract lead from another company out West, and a half dozen that never got to the third interview.  In most cases, the company wanted an employee, had a different vision for it’s strategy than mine, or wanted me to move the family.

In the end, the Indiana job won out.  The rate was high enough that I could stay down there four nights a week, so I could write at night.  The distance was a little over a hundred miles; a nice monday morning/friday afternoon drive.  If there was an emergency, I could bounce home in a couple hours, no need to buy plane tickets.

Most importantly, the contract gave me time to think, to figure out the consulting model, which is just starting to get interesting.

More next time.

By migrant class, I do not mean H1B visa holders, I mean the people who have to move, at least part-time, in order to find a position to suit their skills, personality, temperament, and lifestyle/pay requirements.

This is not a new idea; the “globe trotting consultant” is a cultural cliche.

Despite the preponderance of 21st century communication tools, the concept of the migratory worker is coming to technology.

This new migrant class is happening for a reason.  Today I’d like to write about why it is happening, how it will play out, why it is coming to technology, and what that means for you, me, and every keyboard jockey in sight.

Hold on to your hat, it’s about to get rocky.

How Migrations Happen

First, the migrant class; the folks you see at the construction yard, cleaning the hotel, on the farm, or in the big van going back and forth to those places.  They move for one reason: Opportunity.  Right now, the United States has more jobs than we can fill in certain sectors; that creates a void.

Forget that baloney about ‘stealing’ American jobs: These are jobs US Citizens are not willing to do, at least not at the price the company can afford to pay.

Where there is a void, people step in to fill that void, and I can’t say I blame them.  If there just wasn’t work in my neck of the woods, and I heard about jobs far away paying a living wage — enough to support me and my buddies.  Hey, for that matter, five of us rent a house, there will be money left to send home to the family — I’d certainly take it.

If you think this is just about Mexico, give it some more thought.

The Technology World Today

There are certainly some companies that are growing and making profits – NetFlix, Google, and Amazon come to mind.  Have you noticed that each of these “new” media companies is killing off some older, larger business?   Amazon killed the bookstore and electronics retail (remember CompUSA?  Circuit City?  Barnes and Noble?) Netflix is hurting traditional network television, and Google (along with the rest of the digital world) is destroying old-world print media.

At the same time, the entire Fortune 500 have figured out how easy it is to grow through acquisition, and how that can enable economies of scale.  In other words, after the aquisition, you have two HR departments, two legal departments, two IT departments, but you only need one.  Do you see what I’m saying here?)

The second trend I’ve seen adding to this is a push-back from telecommuting.  My friend Chris McMahon has speculated this is due to waning influence of early adoption companies likes 37Signals.   It does make sense that companies like Google, which hit twenty-one thousand US Employees in 2011, gets a little more press than internet-darling 37Signals, which hit twenty-six around that time.  No, not twenty-six thousand.  Twenty-six.

37Signals is the company offering telecommuting to hire the best (who don’t want to move) — Google is going to ask you to move.  To one of their dozen or so development offices, sure, but move, nonetheless.

Yet at twenty-one thousand employees (Microsoft hit 56,000 the same year), Google may find that it is approaching a saturation point for hiring; the local market, and even the “new graduate and mobile” market, simply can not keep pace with demand.  There will be a void.

Economics tell us than when this kind of void appears, someone will fill it; that there will be some folks willing to not move, but instead migrate, for a short time, to New York City, or San Francisco, or Seattle.  They may keep the house, or plan to live for a short period of time in the city, for the potential of a job that pays substantially more than they could make back home.  Even if it’s only a contract position, no, especially if it’s a contract position, because in those cases, the tax benefits for travel are better, the hourly rate higher, and the duration is time-boxed.

Along the way, hey, if you room with a few close friends and split costs, you can support a family and maybe even put a little bit of money in the bank.  Or work a six month contract while living dirt cheap in a high-cost area, then take six months off to live the Jimmy Buffet life.

We’ve been seeing this in corporate America for years through visas and greencards.  Why not do it with people who are citizens, who can travel freely and work for any US Employer?  My prediction:  We will.

Us

There is a coming digital migrant class.

As I write this from my little boarding house, far away from family, friends, and the life I knew twelve month ago, I have to say, it’s coming to technology, and I am among the class.

Next time, I’ll tell my side of the story.

More to come.

It’s time to finish up our series of interviews with Rosie Sherry, founding of SoftwareTestingClub.com.  In case you missed them, you can read part one, two, and three online.  It’s okay.  I’m a web page.  I can wait.

Are you back?  Great.  Let’s get to it.

Matt Heusser:  One of your goals when you started all this was to spend more time with your family.  Has that worked out?   How are things now compared to, say, when you had one of those ‘employer’ things?

Rosie Sherry: It has worked out, and at the moment it’s almost too good to be true. I couldn’t look back to be honest.  I remember times when I had to drop my son off at nursery at 8am. Pick him up at 6pm.  As soon as I got home I would put him to bed.  I could never go back to that.

It’s one of the things that really drives me.  I love the flexibility I have, I couldn’t imagine a day/office job at this stage in my life.  This makes me want Software Testing Club to work financially for us even more.

There was a time about 2 years ago where I was trying to do too much.  There was not enough work life balance. My boys weren’t happy at the school they were in.  My husbands and my work commitments had changed and we realised we weren’t tied down to any specific location to live.   It was actually a bit of a turning point for us.  We took a good look at ourselves and decided we weren’t happy with where we were in life and felt a fresh start would be good.  We took 3 months off to go travelling (whilst I was pregnant…not the best idea!) then put a pin on the map and decided to move to somewhere new, which ended up being Cambridge (UK).

The move we made has been great for all of us. I’m much more focused now on getting things done and having more clarity in my goals.  My husband works from home now. I’m also slowly getting better at doing things that are important – particularly spending time doing more exercise and cooking the homemade healthy meals that my family loves.   Life gets so much more complicated 3 boys in the house – it’s so easy to let these things slip.

Matt Heusser: You’ve started a website, a newspaper, a crowd-sourced test service, you do placement, sell adervtising, and, now that you’ve been successful, you offer marketing, PR, and community building services.  That is an impressive list.  If I can ask — what’s next for Rosie Sherry?

Rosie Sherry: The main focus now is to really get all of these things, plus The MInistry of Testing, to work better.  Alot of the stuff I’ve done so far has been somewhat experimental.  They’ve given me more insight into what we actually want to do or in some other cases, what we don’t want to do.  And of course, it’s given us insight into what our customers actually want.

I always have ideas of more things I’d like to do, but can’t really execute on them at the moment.  These mostly related around online products and communities.  I love the internetz  My husband says he can’t keep up with all the things I’m doing and want to do…

Matt Heusser:  Let’s say that one of our readers is stuck in the classic 8-to-5 job rut, maybe with a one-hour commute each way, and wants things to be different.  Maybe this way, maybe that way, but different.  Maybe they have a mortgage, large family, student loans to pay off.  Maybe the employer is the only big (or only tech) employer in the area, and they don’t feel they have qualifications to do anything else.  Do you have any advice for them?

Rosie Sherry: In most cases, qualifications don’t matter. At least in my world they don’t.  People want to know that you can do an excellent job. If you want to freelance, focus on your reputation.  It might take a while to build up, but if you do a great job then your network will do all the sales for you.  If you are looking to build a product, then start small and test out your ideas with people.  Don’t get yourself into debt over it, at least until there are seriously positive signs that it will work out!

Last, but not least, believe in yourself.  I look back at who I was 5 years ago and can see how I have changed and how my confidence has grown.  I’ve not made my millions yet, but as a person I’ve grown lots and am pleased I’ve always tried to do the right thing and keep to my ethics.  I was told the other day (by someone who I’ll hopefully be working with more) that no one has ever said a bad word about me.  This makes me happy

Matt Heusser: Thank you for your time today, Rosie.

Rosie Sheery: Thank you!

Speaking of what might be possible …

What’s next for the blog?

I have a few friends who are independent or living alternative IT lifestyles that i’d be happy to keep interviewing.  Or we could talk about the on-demand business (what ever happened to that?) the impact of 24/7/365 on  web sites, and that combined with Platform as a service — did you know that Windows Azure went down for most of leap day?  We could talk about the future of the tech career as a I see it, or my own lifestyle story.

What would you like to hear about?

I’d like to hear from you.

After the first and second part our interview with Rosie Sherry, lead organizer of SoftwareTestingClub.com, things are just starting to get interesting.

No, really, SoftwareTestingClub.com.  It is a real thing, a website for software testers (yes, the tiny niche of the IT industry) to get together to talk – mostly with a European focus.

Yes, they also have cutesy images.  What can I tell you, it seems to be working for them.

Lately, the folks from SoftwareTestingClub have moved into training and placement — they even have a physical print newspaper!

In this day and age of linux is free and a webserver plus hostings costs $60 a month, Rosie Sherry is building a business.

Again, I admire her.

Back to the interview.

Matt Heusser: You are in a good niche, and offer a unique a compelling alternative for testers in the United Kingdom in Europe, where traditionally there has been little test education outside of ISTQB, and very little test community. At the same time, you are trying to run a business, at least to produce some stipend income, right? (I have no problem with this. You are providing a service and, in my mind, should be paid for it. You are also taking a huge risk.) I know people are reluctant to talk about numbers, but our audience would really like to know — can you tell us the kind of revenue software testing club made in, say, it’s second or third year, and the kind of expenses it took to get there?

Rosie Sherry: I was speaking to someone the other day and he said I was doing things the wrong way around and breaking the rules. He said usually companies go out to make lots of money, then donate or do things for a good cause. Where as we’ve always put the community first, we don’t see why they shouldn’t be first. We turn down opportunities for deals that could make us more money because it doesn’t go with our ethos. We could be making more money, but in our heart it would be the wrong thing to do. However, at the heart of this we do believe STC should and can pay its way by paying me and everyone else involved a good wage.

So much is changing at the moment and we are currently in the process of trying out new things. Ask me this question in a year. I’m writing a private blog / book at the moment about the internal day to day stuff of what is involved. The highs. The lows. And probably the figures too. It’s not something I’ll release now, but definitely something I’m looking to release at a not too distant stage. You can keep me motivated by registering your interest here – http://leanpub.com/rosiesherry

Matt Heusser: You’re running a website, doing placement, offering marketing and PR services — what does a typical day in the life look like for Rosie Sherry? I know, I know there are no typical days. So tell me about five of them and we’ll try to draw a picture in our minds.

Rosie Sherry: I wake up early because I have an 8 month old. We have an aupair who helps out at the moment so mornings aren’t too stressful. Sometimes I help get the kids ready for school. Other times I do a bit of work. Other times I go out for a cycle before the school run. I then do the school run.

I work from home during the day 95% of the time. Sometimes I have meetings (face to face or online), but I carefully plan these around my kids so that I can be there in the mornings and afternoons. I also sometimes go to a fitness class whilst the kids are at school. This means strange working hours, but that’s ok. Often I’m found working late at night. Or answering emails whilst my son has a bath. Some people may not agree with this and think that I shouldn’t do work with my kids around. But it works for me. And compared to most people who have to travel to work every day – I do the school run most of the time. I speak to their friends parents. To their teachers. Have their friends over. I have a good understanding of what is going on with them at school. I also cook and eat with the family most of the time. And tuck them into bed virtually every night. (Virtually as in ‘practically’ not as in ‘cyberspace’, lol!)

I go out in the evenings sometimes too, but again this is carefully planned around the kids, especially my youngest.

We’ll come back to Rosie next time for one last interview segment — Where she will talk about what’s next for herself, the site, and give some advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.  Don’t miss it!

I’ve been running a multi-part interview series along the theme of re-imaging your life.

Consider, for example, quitting your day job to sail the world — Adam Yuret did it. Or reframing your job so that you are independent, and can trade time for money; both J.B. Rainsberger and David Hoppe did this.

But maybe you don’t want to travel the world or take long sabbaticals to go lounge on a beach (or go mountain biking, or rock climbing, or whatever.)

Maybe you just want more time with your family.
Meet Rosie Sherry.

Rosie was a freelance software tester from 2001 to 2004, when she took a ‘day job’  doing the same thing for the next few years.

Then the children came, and, suddenly, dropping the kids off at day care and driving in to an office felt … less appealing.

Heavily involved in the software test community, Rosie went back to freelancing but also lead the start-up of SoftwareTestingClub.com, an online community site for testers.  The site now generates a comfortable income, and, combined with her freelance work, allows Rosie to work from home with less hours than a day job, and the flexibility to work after the kids are in bed.

We might you might like to hear from her.

Matt Heusser: Let’s start at the beginning Rosie — How did you become a freelance tester, and how much did you family rely on your income?  Did you have a partner who provided the steady pay check?

Rosie Sherry: In 2001 I was hit by the dot com boom and bust and got made redundant.  Finding a permanent job at that time was really difficult, but I managed to keep myself busy with freelance work for local and London digital agencies.  Initially it was a mixture of contract and freelance work, these are often incorrectly seen to be the same things.  Contracts are usually more like temporary permanent jobs with specific work locations but with better pay.  Freelance work is built around the deliverables, not the location. I found myself often sitting about during contracts with not much to do, I really didn’t like this, so once my contracts ended I would let the cilents know I was available for more work, but only on a freelance basis.

I don’t know how childcare works in other countries, but in the UK it’s not cheap.  Full time nursery care for example can easily cost £800 per month per child.  Multiply that by 2 for me (at the time) and it becomes alot of money per month to earn even before I can think about spending any excess on anything else.  Yes my husband works and has always earned more than me.  We’ve always made a deal that if I work I have to at least cover the childcare costs.

I’ve got 3 kids now, sigh, but at least 2 of them are school age now.

Matt Heusser: So in 2003 you took a day job.  What made you interested in that, and, looking back, how do you feel about that experience?

Rosie Sherry: Well here’s a story….

I took a permanent job in early 2003 and had my first child in November of that year.  My job didn’t last long.  All was going well until I mentioned I was pregnant.  I went from having a nice boss to one who completely ignored me and my needs. It was a stressful situation at the time and I decided to quit, after I got myself signed off sick for stress.  Not something I’d like to go through again.  I’ve taken a permanent job since.

Since having my first son, I’ve freelanced as a tester. Helped with my husbands business. Diversified into learning about building communities, marketing and the social web. I was also involved in setting up some local coworking spaces. And started The Software Testing Club and related projects.

Some have been more successful than others financially, but all have been a great learning experience.  I never went to university.  Nor completed my A-levels here.  I see alot of this stuff as my education.

Now, I’ve done my learning and I’m ready for the next stage!

Speaking of the next stage

There’s plenty more to come about the process Rosie went through to become independent, how she mixes the business with her life, and the multiple ways that software testing club generates revenue, from ads to training to placement and flash mob services.

Don’t miss it.

So far we’ve had two posts interviewing Corey Haines about his life as an independent technologist (part one and part two) but we haven’t gotten to the deepest questions – his biggest obstacles, how he overcame them, and how he paid the rent.

It’s time for part three, don’t you think?

Matt Heusser: What do you think was the biggest obstacle to you doing this tour – was it social, financial, cultural?  And how did you overcome it?

Corey Haines: I think the biggest obstacle was psychological. I would be invited to a place, and I wanted to provide value. I didn’t always have a sense of what the expectations would be, so I often had to go in blind and just start. It was common to not even know the people I was staying or working with. I had to learn to just go in and do my best.

Over time I got more comfortable with it, though. I think the key was just doing it, showing up at their door, not letting any creeping worry overwhelm me. One reason I kept it as “pairing for room and board” was that I wanted to minimize the possibility of disappointing my hosts. I figured I could always provide that much value.

I think there is a beautiful ‘anti-obstacle,’ though, to doing this: the community. It is easy to look at the past three years of my life and see a guy who went off and did something interesting. But, little of it would have been possible without the interest of the people I spend time with. I try to frequently meditate on how awesome everyone is for letting me do what I do.

Matt Heusser: What have you been up to lately, Corey?  How do you pay the rent, and what is that life like?

Corey Haines: These days, I live in Chicago with my girlfriend, Sarah. I still do a lot of traveling, mostly visiting companies to do in-house trainings for their teams. These trainings pay the rent, as well as keep my traveling itch scratched. I also head out occasionally to do coderetreats at fun places, usually around conferences.

Sarah and I have our hands in a lot of different pots. She’s a developer, too, so we work on different projects together. For example, we’re starting a small consulting business to do technical advising for non- and less-technical founders of startups. We also have plans to build a product together.

All-in-all, I am enjoying the life that I’ve etched out for myself. There are less than ideal parts, but I’m working towards changing those into good parts. Going out on my own, seeing the world, meeting as many people as I can, these things have all left me with an enhanced appreciation for our community and the work we do. I’m very fortunate to have met and worked with some amazing people.

Matt Heusser: One final question, if I might.  Do you have any advice for someone in a dissatisfied position in life, considering radical change, but perhaps, at the same time, a little scared of the idea of change?

Corey Haines: Change can be scary, for sure. Especially if you are in a position where you feel stuck. My main recommendation is to stop complaining (both internally and externally) and do it. Now, I had an easier situation than a lot of people: I got fired and didn’t have a family. However, I’ve met people with all sorts of large dependencies that still made a big change in their lives.

One option is to make a list of all the reasons you can’t do it. Then, go down that list and see what are actually true obstacles and which ones can be resolved. A lot of times, our obstacles are based on a lack of information. So, do some research and start collecting information about them. Say you are worried about health insurance; go online and get the actual facts about what health care will cost for you (my current, reasonably good health care costs around $370 / month). I’m not saying all your obstacles can be dealt with, but you might be surprised.

Another piece of advice I give people is to ask whether they really need ‘radical change’ or if something smaller could help. Do you need to change your job, or could you find another place in the company? Perhaps your current place lends itself to being a ‘just a job,’ and you can find your joy outside.

Matt Heusser: Thank you for your time today, Corey.

Corey Haines: Thanks, Matt. I appreciate the opportunity to share.

Last time I interviewed Corey Haines about his journeyman lifestyle — leaving the day job behind and travelling the country on a pair programming tour in trade for a place to crash and maybe “fifty space bucks for lunch, gas and tolls.”

We’re back for part II of the interview, where we covered Corey budgeted and planned for his tour, how the tour actually took shape, what he did … and what he learned.

Matt Heusser: When I went through a similar life change, I took at step back and did some very hard math — for example, how much I needed to make to keep the lights on, as a percentage of previous salary, then how much I actually spent, and how much I actually earned, over the next six months or so, until I got comfortable.  Did you do an exercise like that?  How did you decide that you could afford to go on the tour?  How did you decide how long to make the tour?   Did you keep your apartment or house?  Did you have any income while you were touring?

Corey Haines: (Smiles) I know a lot of people who do those exercises. I’m not that great at it. I actually simply looked at how much money I had and figured that I could make it for a while. I didn’t do a lot of purposeful skimming back. Honestly, I just thought “hey, I have some money saved up, looks like a couple months worth.” I had a house in Cleveland, which was half-rented. So, I still had a mortgage to pay, plus other expenses. I initially was thinking it would be a quick 3-week driving trip before getting a full-time job. I quickly realized, though, that I was going to keep doing it for a while longer. It is amazing how far money can go when someone else is paying for your food.

During the time I was actively on the road, I only had one real income-generating gig: I taught a short “introduction to test-driven development” class. This generated a couple thousand dollars. Otherwise, I did my best to keep my visits just about room and board. My expenses were paid completely out of my savings. All-in-all, I estimate that December through September cost me around $20,000.

There were two significant money-oriented events, though.

In April of 2009, I completely ran out of money. Luckily, my tax return came in at the same time, so I found myself with a bunch of cash. That funded a continuation of the tour through the summer.

In October of 2009, I had lined up a couple month contract at Think Relevance. Unfortunately, at the beginning of September, I ran out of money; ran out like not having enough for my mortgage. I just needed enough to make it for a month to the contract; I had calculated it as $3000. So, I turned to the community and put up a “hat in hand” blog post, asking for donations to support me for a month. I had a good following of people watching the video interview series I was publishing, and I had met and spent time with a lot of people, so I thought I might be able to find 300 people each willing to give me $10. The response completely blew me away. Individuals and companies contributed at a rate I had a hard time believing. Within 24 hours, I had reached the goal of $3000, and the donations kept coming in. In the end, I hit a little bit over $5000. I was able to pay my bills and live until my contract. I vowed to take half of all the extra money and reinvest it into the community. I spent 2010 trying my best to do that by supporting and leading coderetreat community training events around the world.

Matt Heusser: Tell us about the trip.  Did you have a ‘plan’?  How did it pan out? How did you pay the rent?  What was the tour like?

Corey Haines: Honestly, I didn’t have an over-arching plan for the tour; I just went with the flow. People contacted me, asked if I could come, and I did as much as I could with them. Even the idea of doing the video interviews came after I had left: I was about 30 minutes outside of Cleveland and thought I should buy a flip camera and do interviews with the people I visit. I didn’t know what we’d talk about, but I figured it would be interesting. Those videos ended up as a fantastic journal and view into a lot of the thoughts swirling around in the community. There are a set of videos called “Road Thoughts,” which are just me sitting at the side of the road sharing my ideas. These started on the way from Brian Marick’s house in Champaign, returning to Chicago. I was a week and a half into the first tour, and my head was absolutely bursting with thoughts. I had a few hours by myself in the car, and I just couldn’t contain myself. So, I pulled off at a rest area, set up my camera and just started talking.

As another example, in January, I got an email out of the blue from Anthony Eden, who lived in the Orlando, Florida, area. He had seen my videos (alongside the interviews, I had also started a video series called “How I Got Started in Programming”) and thought it would be cool to have me down at Acts As Conference doing some. I told him it sounded good, and I’d be happy to spend a couple weeks in the Orlando area pairing if he could whip up enough sponsorship for expenses (including flight, the two weeks would run somewhere around $800). I got an email the following morning saying to buy the plane ticket. So, I spent the first two weeks of February down there. I did some great video interviews, paired with some awesome people and spent a few days with Anthony and his family working on the product he was building at the time.

Wow that's a lot of stickers

The early parts of the tour were chunked into 2- to 3-week trips. For my summer trip, though, I planned a bold and adventurous 3 months of continuous touring, driving 6900 miles, from Cleveland to Miami to Prince Edward Island and back to Cleveland. I left at the beginning of May and got back home at the end of July.

The tour was one of the best experiences of my life. So far, that is.

Whenever I think back on my active time on the road, I find new and subtle things about it.

Some of the biggest effects were the result of the pace. I spent anywhere from 1 to 5 days at a place. I didn’t spend more than a week anywhere, as I felt that would shift from the idea of ‘just visiting.’ So, I might be at one place on Monday and a completely different place on Tuesday or Wednesday. Because of this, I had to learn how to drop in on a codebase and quickly focus on what was being done that day. When you have one or two days to contribute, you learn to block out the natural tendency to want to ‘understand the big picture,’ and just focus on the code in front of you. I gained a lot of experience of sitting next to someone, looking at their system and form a picture of what that particular section was doing.

Another important aspect was the fast pace of learning and teaching. Everyone had something to teach and was eager to learn what others had taught me before. So I got into the habit of learning something at one place, then teaching it at the next place. Sometimes the teaching was explicit, sometimes it was just part of working together. Either way, I found myself absorbing ideas and quickly sharing them, solidifying my own understanding of it.

Ok, we’ll have Corey back in another week or so to talk about his obstacles, how he overcame them, his advice for other on this path … and how he pays the rent.

Stay tuned!

In my previous article I interviewed J.B. Rainsberger, a sort of traditional globe-trotting-consultant turned early retiree living the life of the itinerant IT consultant.

His story is inspring, but even as I wrote it, I could hear the comments in my mind. “But Matt”, you’d say “I haven’t written a book, founded an international series of conferences, or have the cachet to command high rates for short-term consulting.  What’s a guy like me to do?”

Meet Corey Haines, that’s what.

Corey’s story might be a lot like yours — leaving a large IT shop he was frustrated with, not working out as a culture fit at a startup, Corey found himself 35, unemployed, in Cleveland, in the heart of Ohio’s rust belt, in 2008.

Instead of thinking of how horrible life was, Corey took charge, downsized his life, and went on the road, conducting a journeyman tour of the united states.

By journeyman, I mean a traditional learning tour.  He made plans to go in a loop over several states, programming with anyone who offered to provide him a place to sleep and some food.  Corey was transparent about what he did, blogging, recording videos, and tweeting on the trip.  (A couple of times, he stopped by the side of road and just talked.  I found some of those talks the most interesting.)

After 10 months of doing the journeyman tour, Corey found that he had become working with programmers to learn new things — and he had a lot of new things to share.  After settling in Chicago at the beginning of 2010, Corey started looking at ways to keep a free lifestyle while still keeping food on the table. One over-riding goal: don’t get a full-time job.

Nowadays, Corey spends his time between a few different projects: doing in-house development trainings at companies around the world; advising non- and less-technical founders of startups in the Chicago community; helping coordinate and sustain the coderetreat community and events; and building fun applications with his girlfriend, Sarah Gray, also a developer. All of this includes a lot of travel, as Corey ended 2011 with around 135,000 flight miles on Delta.

I asked him to share a bit of his story.

Corey Haines: Getting fired was indeed a shock. I wasn’t happy at the startup, but I definitely wasn’t expecting to be fired. I came home in a bit of a daze and posted on Twitter that I was no longer employed. Luckily, it wasn’t long before I started getting messages from people interested in talking to me about possible prospects. That was very encouraging, allowing me to shake off worry about the future.. I had some money saved up, enough to last me a few months, so I decided to take a bit of time to relax and consider my options for the future. Perhaps it was time to make a real change.

Matt Heusser: What made you think about doing a tour?  How did you make the decision to pull a Nike and “Just do it?”

Corey Haines: For a few years prior, whenever my friend and mentor, J.B. Rainsberger, and I would see each other, our conversations would drift to the idea of traveling a bit Pal Erdos-style, just programming with people with little-to-no strings attached. When you think about it, how freeing would that be? As we make our way through our professional careers, it is easy to forget the reason that so many of us started programming in the first place: creating stuff with people. When I was a teenager, I remember periodically getting together with a friend and just writing code: no deadlines, no politics, no managers breathing down our necks. What if we took time to recapture that feeling?

When I lost my job, I realized that I was in a position to seriously consider trying it. A lot of my friends have told me they are used to hearing me say “I wonder what would happen if” and following up with some sort of crazy idea. The ideas don’t always have a concrete end-point or goal. Sometimes they are just an idea, a curiosity, about doing things a bit differently. In a way, this was one of them.

Over the course of 2008, I had met a lot of freelancers and others who worked from home. One of the biggest complaints I heard from them was the lack of someone to pair with, someone to pass ideas by. So, while spending October relaxing and recharging, I started formulating a bit more structure around the travel. I would travel around for a few weeks, staying with these freelancers, pairing for a few days, then moving on to someone else. Being fairly community-minded, I had a vague thought around starting up a freelancer pairing network where you could swap pairing hours.


Unfortunately, as I sent out a few initial feelers, I ran into a couple roadblocks. First, it was October, and people were thinking more about holidays, not about having some guy sleep on their couch. The other issue related to the network I initially contacted. Throughout 2008, I had spent the majority of my time involved in the local Microsoft-oriented programming community, attending a lot of local conferences in the midwest region of the United States. While the individual people were open to the idea, the companies they worked for often had problems with the idea of a non-employee working on the code. Companies using Microsoft technologies tend to be either larger or catering to larger companies. This definitely has a significant influence on their flexibility when it comes to having some random guy pair with their employee. As October was coming to a close, it looked like I might have to scrap the idea until after the new year. And then I went to RubyConf at the beginning of November and saw David Chelimsky.

I had met David for the first time in 2004, and we kept in touch off and on over the years. I would see him at the annual Agile conference and occasionally at other ones. Most of the time, I would see him coding, walk up and say “what are you doing,” and we would end up pairing on some code. At the 2008 RubyConf it was no different. I told David my idea about a tour, and he promptly said “I’ll be your first. Come to Chicago.” So, I had my first stop. Once I started making the plans, I had a couple other people contact me: Uncle Bob Martin sent me an email seeing if I wanted to stop by; then Brian Marick asked if I was interested in heading down to Champaign, IL, to spend a couple days working on some code for his book “Ruby Cocoa.”

After that, word started to spread that I was actually on the road. People started watching the video interviews I was doing, and more and more people contacted me, interested in having me come and work with them.

More to Come

We’ll leave Corey here talking about his first tour, then pick it up next week to discuss how Corey planned for his tour, what he learned, the obstacles to his success — and how he overcame them.

This is the boat. For Reals.

Last time I introduced my friend, Adam Yuret, and the story of this three-year boat trip from Seattle, Washington, down to Mexico and back.  (Perhaps I should say, his one year trip, which he took three times.)

You would think this would sink his IT career, yet Adam, who has no certificates, no degrees, and did not complete high school, is doing just fine.

We’ll pick things up this week, to talk about how the trip went, how it impacted his career, and what’s next for Adam.

Matt Heusser: Tell us about the trip.  Are you glad you made it?  Would you do it again?

Adam Yuret: You summarized the trip well and much is written on the blog. It was nothing like we expected and we had many serious crippling mechanical failures, ironically none of which were the result of a 30 year old boat and all of which were to systems we’d payed handsomely to have a “marine professional” make “bulletproof” for us. That was a lesson in the “God Complex” cognitive bias, just because somebody claims to be a professional and earns their living for a long time doing something doesn’t mean you won’t do a better job than them just because you actually care about the outcome. This also applies to a certain famous person who wrote literally /the/ book on their marine-related field. We are both very glad we made it. At sea you bond with people very quickly, We grew our family by several people around the world with whom we keep in touch regularly and I suspect will continue to do so for the rest of our lives. We learned a lot about ourselves. I know you all imagine margaritas and tropical beaches but in actual fact steering a sailboat by hand loses it’s majesty after the 36th straight hour in mountainous pacific swell and heavy wind and rain in an open (uncovered) cockpit. When you turn on your motor and wonder what that noise was just to discover that the guy who built the mounts for it screwed up and  the 500lb diesel motor has jumped off it’s mounts causing your propeller shaft to shear it’s set screws and is about to slide out the 1″ hole in the boat under the water which will potential cause you to sink 30 miles off the coast of nowhere Baja Mexico.

But you climb into a tiny space over sharp pointy battery boxes and  attach a hose clamp to keep the shaft from leaving the boat. Then you lose all your wind and spend 3 days drifting 30 miles (average speed is usually about 100 miles every 24 hours). and when you finally get where you’re going you have a very broken engine and have to spend many hot days bloodying your knuckles trying to put it all back together. I don’t mean to sound like it was all miserable, but the famous quote that comes to mind is “Adventure is adversity in retrospect.” and we would not have had as amazing highs if our trip were easy. We actually might do it again when our son is old enough to appreciate it. I can think of few better ways to educate a kid in many diverse areas than sailing on your own boat to other countries. I hope we’re able to make it happen someday in the next decade.

Matt Heusser: How has the trip impacted your tech career?  What do employers think about the trip?

Adam Yuret: The trip was the very best thing I ever did to my career. I agonized over it for a long time before we left. Here I am making a very nice living with no paper credentials. I literally had no idea if I’d be flipping burgers when we got back. In truth I was in a trap where I was working. While I was head-down trying to figure out a way to get our team out of the waterfall process of ad-hoc testing, endless death-march crunch modes testing things nobody really understood a whole community of practice was advancing the field of testing. I was asking why testers can’t be involved in the designer process years before I’d heard of ATDD. When we came back our first time I ended up taking my old job back but before my old employer made me an offer I had a series of interviews with an exciting new company in Beaverton Oregon who wanted me to start their first testing team. During my interview with their CFO the topic of my trip came up. My policy is not to talk about our trip because many people might not care about the details or may not relate but this guy pressed me. After the third time he asked me for more specifics I explained what we did in detail. He said “Wow, you seriously sailed a little broken boat with just your wife as crew thousands of miles down the Pacific coast to Mexico? I couldn’t be more impressed if you’d told me you were one of those elite Submarine jockeys!” I didn’t really know what he meant by that but I gathered that he wasn’t put off by it and they tried very hard to hire me. After I turned them down (because I felt wrong taking a position that required long term commitment) they all worked late on a Friday night to try and make me a more appealing offer. I was really flattered by them and we seriously considered canceling leg 2 of our trip so I could go work for them. Ultimately we agreed that we were committed to finishing what we started.

Anyway, while we were out the 2nd time we met a couple of people our age who were also in the business (this is very rare as most people out there are retired and over 60) two boats, actually. One of them told us to give Seattle a try when we were done instead of returning to Portland. This idea appealed to me a great deal. On one hand I’d be leaving my professional network behind. Oh the other hand, I didn’t want to go back to the place I was for so long, nor did I want to go to a culturally similar place. Moving to Seattle meant knowing nobody, I’d have to count on myself to get a job there and meet new people. Those friends on that Seattle boat sweetened the deal by offering to let us live on their boat in Seattle while they went on their 3 month honeymoon. So the cost of moving to Seattle was zero. We went for it and the first job interview I had was with Jon Bach. Jon and his brother introduced me to a whole new world of testing I never knew existed. I had my first test audition at Quardev with Jacob Stevens who called Jon in to meet me afterwards. Jon continued the audition and much to my surprise showed me that I actually knew what I was doing. It turned out I had a marketable skill I didn’t really knew existed to that point.

I attended my first professional conference ever, CAST 2011, the year after we moved to Seattle, as a speaker. Since then I have presented at Lean Camp, and STPcon in Dallas. I can say with a large degree of confidence that had we not quit our lives and gone sailing I’d probably still be an individual contributor (or worse still a manager) at that company in Portland. I now enjoy being part of a large community of passionate technologists in not only the testing space but in management, leadership, and consulting.

Matt Heusser: What have you been doing, IT-wise, for the past few years — and what’s next for Adam?

This pic is called, and I am not kidding, weird fog in San Carlos.

Adam Yuret: I still work for Volunteermatch but I’ll be wrapping that up at the end of January. It’s been a great run and I’ve learned a lot and even taught some things. One of the things I taught is that in order to have an open collaborative agile team, you need to be co-located. So they’re going to move the position in-house and since I have no interest in moving my family to the bay area I’ll be moving on to new things. I am discussing some internal coaching opportunities here in Seattle and considering going into business as a management consultant/agile coach with a deep testing background.

Honestly I have no idea what the next year will bring but something about selling everything and going to sea on a broken boat has a way of making you not sweat the little things. I am crazy-excited for the next chapter in my career.

Matt Heusser: Thank you for being so open, honest, and free with your time, Adam.  I am sure the readers appreciate it.

Adam Yuret: Thanks for having me.

]]> http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/unchartered-waters/on-a-boat-with-adam-yuret-part-ii/feed/ 0