Good morning MEWs
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Season is changing quickly here in the CPT. Quite fresh this morning and only getting light close to 7 AM.
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Happy Toosday! Nice and cold here, such a relief. Hope it stays.
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Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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Morning all. May your Wednesday be wacky.
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Morning all
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Good morning everyone.
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Morning all
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Howdy!
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Ello people of the palace
All is ready for our move on the 20th - its scary, work from home until at least 1 June is freaky again!
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Happy Pi Day!
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How ridiculous is this!
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Wow, thats crazy.
R16,500 for a 65sqm unit in Cape Town surrounds? Sounds about right, to be honest. I’ve seen higher prices in the Durbanville / Tyger Valley, not to mention the Atlantic seaboard…
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Morning all
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Well considering we just moved, signed a year-long lease for our 13k pm apartment, which will likely increases by around 8%. And I have just been informed of my 3% annual increase, so I do not know how much longer I will live here to be honest.
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Times are tough for companies right now. Speaking from experience, our rate negotiations with clients haven’t been able to keep up with salary expectations. We have been offering a minimum of 7% increases (with spot increases much higher than that based on individual contribution and value), while our clients only give us maximum inflation-related increases. Our current average rate increases are around 4%, which means our profit margins on long-running projects have been eroding over the years to the point that we’re at break-even this year. Hence the importance for consulting companies (like us) to constantly seek new clients and projects that offer us the flexibility to bump our rates up industry-related levels.
The alternatives we’re looking at is developing micro products to bolster income, doing it on non-existing budgets, using the time people should rather be spending on billable work to bolster income and cashflow. We have 3 ideas we’re working on currently and while they won’t make us instant millionaires, they will help us carry through difficult months where we’re waiting upon milestone payments for our non-T&M projects.
It really is a difficult juggle if you don’t have any financial backing and need to pay 50 salaries each month.
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Well if you’re looking for someone to provide a little extra work in odd hours here and there a week, please let me know, I don’t ask much just a little pocket money 
Serias!
#AskingForAFriend
That paints a grim picture indeed!
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I know it sounds quite depressing, but, miraculously even, we’ve been going for 11 years now. Just when all hope seems lost and a large project comes to an end, a new one is fabricated out of thin air, or a new client comes on board based on a previous reference, or an existing client decides they need a burst period of extra manpower.
At the end of the day, this game is all about keeping your reputation intact, as you only get new business based on referrals. No amount of social media marketing or advertising campaigns is going to convince an IT executive to spend millions on a project, just because they use popular memes when advertising on Reddit or Facebook.
Also, unlocking new markets by dabbling in this like expert witness statements for legal matters has also been paying dividends. I’m currently juggling 3 reports that I’m writing and updating based on feedback from legal counsel, and the relationships that I’m building through this will undoubtedly pay dividends in the coming years.
And being able to wrangle LLMs for your own purposes. Seeing as its on everyone’s lips these days, understanding what these things do in the backend, how to reign them in to do your bidding, all while not paying the OpenAI’s and Antropics of the world a cent due to your ability to RAG and self-host smaller language models, is opening up quite a lot of opportunities for us.
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