Readit NewsIn my childhood in the Soviet Union “plumber” was what parents scared their kids with “if you don’t study, you’ll become a plumber”. And that profession was extremely undesirable and didn’t pay well.
Also in many SEA countries both professions aren’t paid well.
I think in North America it’s different because it’s highly regulated and barrier for entry is high.
So I post on LinkedIn & Reddit, and I am not doing it in a spammy way. Do some outreach through LinkedIn and post on YCombinator on my personal account on the monthly who's hiring/freelancing posts. But a lot of the traffic I get comes from organic search and reddit -> clients. I had a client who told me they found me on Twitter; but I never even posted there, so someone reposted an article.
I am under MUCH more pressure to deliver more in shorter periods of time, with just me involved in several layers of decision making, rather than having a whole team. Which may sound scary, but it pays the bills. At one company I contract with, I now have 2 PMs; where I am the only dev on a production app with users, shipping new features every few days (rather than weeks).
It feels more like performance art, than it even feels like software development at this point. I am still waiting for some of my features to come crashing prod down in fantastic fashion, being paged at 3am in the morning; debugging for 12 hours straight because AI has built such a gigantic footgun for me.... but it has yet to happen. If anything I am doing less work than before - being paid a little more, and the companies working with me have built a true dependency on my skills to both ship, maintain and implement stuff.
I’m wondering how did you land your current gigs?
Thank you.
We used to say (tongue in cheek) that after 250k, the MB diesel engine was broken in. I don't think MB makes them like they used to anymore.
Someone I knew had it and they drove it 24/7 in 3 shifts and it had over a million kilometers on it. Visually looked fine and ran fine.
- Gemini can't make me a calendar appointment between myself and another person for 30 minutes in the next week. Heck it can't make appointments yet. - it can't edit or collaborate on Google docs, just insert. I edit my docs in cline or Claude code as markdown and upload. - speaking of, I don't think they have a MCP for working with docs or sheets - Gemini is worse than a Google search at helping me with sheet formulas
There's all these unique places in googles ecosystem I feel they could/should be excelling at AI at. They're not.
Hell I noticed yesterday searching for my remarkable preorder from years ago that you can't exact string search Gmail anymore. Searching for remarkable was pulling up "amazing". They're just degrading all of their products to stupidity at a time when I and AI can use more powertools
I like fixing problems.
Same results in the end but the impression by the clients improved a lot.
Vacations don’t need to be stereotypical though. To me vacation nowadays means simply taking a break from my main money earning activity (typically a job, but I had a business before too).
When I travel these days I don’t even plan anything. Just land in the city and let it be. Just wonder around and explore. That’s it.
We have ostensibly spent much of our evolutionary budget on the ability to run ~indefinitely no matter what. Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level. We have connective tissue that stores and releases energy. Our bodies can reject on the order of 1kW+ of heat steady-state through the magic of evaporative cooling.