og2023

I read it as reverse engineering WTF challenge... cool stuff though, seriously.

We have become so cloud-native (god forbid!). Just recently I realised that I can save an interesting page to my hard drive instead of saving its link. What a wonderful word has opened since! It's so liberating to live without all these bs tools.

> I think positioning yourself as an expert / bridge between technology and business is what will future-proof a lot of SWE.

Could you provide a few examples of roles and companies where this could be applicable please?

Thanks for the suggestion - I don't have ADHD. Good luck though as it might become challenging at times!

Seems like nobody noticed the "delve" part, which is a very dark irony here.

I can totally feel the 'half-assed' part. One of the real reasons I am avoiding getting a well-paid job is because it feels that it's impossible keep it and dedicate enough time to anything else really, let alone building a business on the side.

Thanks for the question. I believe it's impossible to answer once and for all.

Currently, I like doing many things, finding the bottlenecks, and overcoming them. Today it's demand generation, tomorrow it's product and tech, and ultimately it's me being inadequate in some capacity. Which means lots of growth as a person, which feels very real, like you can be shy of being in front of another person and therefore avoid doing sales calls. This is big and feels much more real than 'growing' in an organisation where you're told to do XYZ to impress your manager so that they can beg their managers to get you into the raise quota, or even worse, simply bang your head against the 'we don't have money now' wall at a typical smaller company.

Being in control, jumping on interesting things to constantly learn something new and stuff like that are a good bonus as well.

Thank you for your reply.

Re this: >I'm currently working part-time on retainer, which allows me to work less than full-time and still make enough money to live (definitely less than a full-time job, but enough to live comfortably)

That's quite a good position to be honest.

> Then start working on taking part-time work on top of your full-time job.

This is what I've been doing for the past 3 months but only to save some extra money as our main income is 90-100% spent on necessities every month. I charge per hour probably within the 50-70 percentile bracket in my location. But I can't see how I could charge more without being much more specific than just doing regular software engineering.

As a qualified engineer and owner (in terms of responsibility), I quite often get compliments on how well I handle things - with attention to detail, without oversight, pushing things to the completion, etc. This made me think that probably I'm lowballing myself with this (shitty) startup job.

But on the other hand, I don't know where else I could 'remain myself' in the way of not becoming a professional SLOC cruncher or, God forbid, the ultimate PSC-driven developer.

That's interesting. How much do you save per month?

I didn't think about explaining the obvious right away, so putting a comment here. Having a 'regular' job of a manager or a software engineer is fine but feels like I am not using most of my skills and not developing as a person. So the question really is how to apply this broad skillset to the world without getting into the confines of typical SWE roles.

Made me burst out laughing

That's odd. I've been using my Mx vertical for almost 5 years already, literally every day.

Laughably I was even debating getting a compact piano to practice on versus VR. Boy how silly I was choosing the latter!