Daniel Crenna

A pattern of performance

I’ve noticed something I’m going to take the time to fully explore in the next while. Here it is: an “affected” developer starts at a big corporation, breaks off as a freelancer, and then finds a smaller group of like-minded individuals, great contributions and commercial success follows after.

To those still in the first intake, being a lone wolf seems like the best possible situation, but invariably, as I’ve experienced, a yearning to relate and to belong to a group takes over after awhile. You may even feel a sudden burst of nostalgia for your old environment and team, despite all of the many reasons you left that corporate culture being completely unchanged. That is a regression. Ignore it.

That there are others just like you is encouraging because it means you have a chance to find other non-conformist developers and band together to get the benefits of both worlds: sovereignty, and the whole-is-great-than-its-parts phenomenon. While most freelancers can build entire businesses from the ground up with their bare hands, finding others means they don’t have to.

I have a gut feeling that there’s scads of hard data to back up the success of this pattern, and that there’s a way to define, reproduce, and distribute it to others who are looking for more success / time / joy / etc. whether they’re freelancers or employees.

I don’t think the “boutique consulting firm” is much of a departure from square one, though, so I wonder if there’s a better way to ensure a standard of living for the whole team that still provides plenty of time to change the world.