A tech professional argues consulting beats freelancing because client-facing advisory work delivers more value than isolated coding. Direct engagement accelerates results, deepens your understanding of their business, and creates feedback loops that help both sides. Senior staff at agencies do this best.
Consulting is better than freelancing. I find that a lot of people who are getting into tech who want to kind of hang out their own jingle, they start with what they call freelancing, and they seem to value being able to do work that is on their own, right? That is, they're not talking to the client, they're just sitting there in their happy place with their Visual Studio Code open or using their no-code editor or whatever it is. But I think that's really an error. There's so much more value as a knowledge professional in educating the client, and the client will get so much more value out of it in a very short period of time. In fact, you're gonna get more out of it because you will learn more about the client's business as a result. Taking this kind of more advisory role allows you to deliver a lot of value faster, and you're gonna find that most people hope the hard part of the exercise is the part where you're working with them. This is one of the reasons why agencies kind of work the way they do. It's the senior person who's in direct contact with the client who is talking about their business issues that actually is driving the big value. When you're working async, it's far lower value, so consult.
