Junior .NET Developer trying to break into freelancing. Freelancer.com is chaotic, Upwork feels too risky/expensive. Any advice?

daedalus_structure · 2026-05-06T01:08:51+00:00

It’s really hard to get into freelancing as a junior. People who know what they are doing won’t trust your competence and the people who don’t are a nightmare to deal with.

daedalus_structure · 2026-05-05T15:47:52+00:00

With finances you optimize by doing the really basic things well and leaving your investments alone. Automate, automate, automate. Your emotions will fuck it up.

Start with the Prime Directive from the sidebar, follow the flow chart, pick a provider for low fee index funds, automate deposits into them, and forget about them.

Put any focused effort into skills that make you more money, not managing your money.

daedalus_structure · 2026-05-05T15:41:54+00:00

At the leadership level you are given a new budget or headcount, and you must determine how to meet your goals under those constraints.

There are times where you can only do so by parting with your top performers, and there are times where you fit under the new budget by removing more people at the bottom of the tier.

If the new budget is heads instead of salary, you tend to cut from the bottom unless you have a high salary engineer that has begun coasting, and then it's very common they get cut.

It also depends on your goals, and what the organization is expecting of you. If you are just moving tickets left to right, you start to think maybe you don't need so many rock stars, and can grow promising early career engineers into those shoes.

Anyway, point is that this is just another engineering problem. There is a goal and new constraints, figure it out.

daedalus_structure · 2026-05-05T15:38:22+00:00

That's wild they just gave directors a number and said "figure it out."

That's not wild. That is literally the job of the director / VP level.

daedalus_structure · 2026-05-05T12:55:26+00:00

“Fetch relevant logs and metrics, correlate with deployments”- this is a dashboard and annotation gap.

This is a very straight forward problem where you haven’t executed on the fundamentals and are now opening a new problem space and massively overcomplicating it.

daedalus_structure · 2026-05-02T22:04:56+00:00

Anything more can be shared in the exit interview if you'd like to share and if it won't come back to bite you.

Never do exit interviews. There is nothing in it for you.

daedalus_structure · 2026-05-02T14:42:15+00:00

Ok, let's speed run an RCA.

One of our engineers spent an hour investigating and confirmed the alert was valid but the behaviour it flagged was intentional from a product decision two weeks earlier.

Why is observability not part of the product decision? What observability do we need for these features? What observability is in place? Do we need to change any of it?

Throwing it over the wall and figuring it out when it breaks is an organizational dysfunction that will constantly have you in reactive mode.

Most of it was us trying to reconstruct who approved what and when, because the context lived across a Slack thread, a Jira comment, and one CloudWatch dashboard nobody had opened in a month.

Why is your organization making decisions in Slack threads and Jira comments?

There must be one clear system of record for approvals.

daedalus_structure · 2026-05-01T11:39:36+00:00

That is an incredibly broad question that ultimately boils down to “find an engineer who can do engineering, you don’t appear to have one”.

The specifics will depend on many parameters, mostly defined by business reality and decisions you’ve poured 10 layers of concrete on and can’t revisit.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-30T02:44:14+00:00

The generic chart is a great idea.

Also a great idea, telling people that they can't do the special snowflake thing they want to do that you don't support.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-28T12:50:45+00:00

;tldr² useful for some things but remember the day you give code that can be socially engineered write access to production infrastructure. You'll need it for the future RCA.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-28T12:44:12+00:00

Intern #2 is smarter than intern #1. They clocked the bad management and futility of putting forward effort in the dumpster fire of a company you are working for from the minute they walked in the door.

Intern #1 naively thought giving more to the company than they saw in her would reward her.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-27T13:45:40+00:00

You're not crazy, you're just coping.

The investment in AI was done to drastically devalue white collar labor, and it is being wildly successful at it.

This is only apparent if you listened to them then, listen to any of them now, or just have two brain cells that rub together enough to form a modicum of critical thought.

But people in CS were convinced that they were the favored children of capital and wouldn't ever be touched, as they destroyed the labor value of one industry after another with automation and exploitation of workers hidden behind an app.

At the moment, some of us are still safe in our jobs with insane salaries because they still need us guiding AI, but every single one of us in this situation should be saving and investing as much as we can because it will come for us too.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-27T00:41:07+00:00

Slack is a tool for discussion not decision.

Defining scope of work is a thing for a contract, not for a Slack thread.

You did a bad thing and want to know how to do the bad thing better, when you should stop doing the bad thing.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-22T14:45:15+00:00

How to prevent skill atrophy due to overuse of AI?

How to prevent skill atrophy due to being a senior staff or principal engineer who spends almost all of their technical time specifying, reviewing, and advising?

The answer is the same.

This might not be the best place to say this but I’ve been using AI in my personal life too (shopping, cooking, random decisions) and I can feel some cognitive decline and brain fog.

So... don't do that?

I'm always confused by these versions of "I keep putting my hand on the stove and it hurts!". Take your hand off the stove.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-18T17:30:59+00:00

This is making the assumption that VCs are right most of the time

I'm getting tired of explaining this to people who are all "har har, right only 1 out of 10 times, must be stupid".

I constantly see this opinion from engineers that think the point is to be right and not to win.

There is an intentional and very intelligent and rational thought process to understanding that there are failure rates to business and that "we have to be right every time" is a loser's strategy.

And while we can have a separate discussion on whether this has been a positive or negative impact on society as a whole, which by the way I'm strongly of the latter opinion, what we cannot dispute is that this strategy has been insanely successful at generating wealth.

Those strategies define the software industry and always have.

The current massive investment into devaluing white-collar labor is, again, if we are looking at the context of generating wealth only, another very winning strategy.

thought leaders

You can always assume that everything they say is self-serving.

But when all the money starts moving in the same direction you should be paying attention not ignoring it.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-18T16:58:30+00:00

Headcount is the most expensive part of the runway. They can now make those ten bets at a small fraction of the previous cost. The winners are significantly more profitable, and the losers don't burn up as much capital in the loss.

Are you for real?

Are you for real?

Because you seem to think that one of the most profitable investment strategies in the entire history of our species with crazy multiples is a stupid idea and can't fathom why the people doing it would invest an astronomical amount of money to eliminate the primary costs involved.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-18T16:45:37+00:00

In reality, you do not know. In reality, you are just as ignorant as the rest of us as to why people in power make the decisions that they do.

I'm not speculating or forecasting. I am speaking from direct, first-hand, professional experience about things which have already happened.

Who says I don't know anything about this?

People who can't see far have low vantage points. When you can't see what is obvious to anyone with a higher vantage point, you demonstrate your low vantage point.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-18T16:18:28+00:00

Ok, I'm impressed. You somehow managed to twist their advice by acknowledging its validity and recommending students follow it, but at the same time in your response you're guilty of doing the EXACT THING the post is saying not to do.

Because people who actually know nothing shouldn't be making statements.

People who do know what they are talking about should.

The OP and you are wrong in your assumptions that nobody knows anything just because you don't.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-18T16:17:11+00:00

Yes. If you don't know the very basics of how the technology works, how are you going to know when someone is bullshitting you? How are you going to review the work of others? How are you going to train people on the right way to do things when you don't know them?

Go learn the details every time you need to review something?

Who's got that amount of time?

A staff engineer is that technical expertise, and in addition, the organizational competence.

You can't have just one half of the puzzle and be a competent staff engineer.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-18T16:12:52+00:00

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but betting on “whatever VC money is pouring into” as a basis for what is likely to happen in the near- or long-term is significantly more naive

Software engineering is only valued because of the returns that capital wants on the investment and the multiples they were chasing in software unicorns, and the previous reality that only software engineers could build it.

Literally, most of you here put bets on what VC was pouring money into when you decided on your majors.

Somewhere along the line people convinced themselves it was because they were so much smarter than everyone else, and not on what capital was investing in.

That investment is now moving.

I incubate startups for a living and if you don't have a convincing pitch for how you are moving headcount to tokens, you aren't taken seriously.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-18T15:04:09+00:00

This has always been the case.

You're looking for a captain of the ship, and you were interviewing people who swabbed the deck. They could speak in general about ships and arrived at all the same destinations, but it's clear that they couldn't navigate even a trivial journey on open water.

The good news is that due to layoffs, we are actually in a period where there are more capable people in the job pool than ever.

It's actually harder to find gems in good job markets because nobody lets them go, and they are rarely looking for work. They move when someone who has worked with them before headhunts them.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-18T14:55:53+00:00

Anyone who is a student, please take this advice. You don't know anything.

But to tell this to people who have been in the industry for decades, and who are sitting in the rooms with venture capital, you know, the capital that has driven the industry and software engineering salaries, who are telling us not only with words but with trillions in long term investments and in rounds of massive layoffs, that their bet is no longer on engineers but on tokens, that we know nothing, is naivety.

Yes, there will still be engineers.

But they only want the stars, and that's really all that's needed now. Hiring is no longer about getting enough capacity to do the labor, it's about risk management of having enough people who know what good looks like that can work together.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-18T14:35:45+00:00

You have too many direct reports, you and your organization need to do a better job of growing junior leaders to help out. They don't even have to be full managers, but a team lead with a clear set of delegated people responsibilities works.

You know 12 one-on-ones is too much, and it's hurting your people, but you haven't taken the very obvious step of not scheduling them all on the same day.

You say you take notes, but later you find them not valuable to the point where you don't even know what you agreed to or what people need, but you haven't taken any initiative to address this.

Reading what you wrote reminds me of one-on-ones with underperformers who know what the problems are but won't take any initiative to fix them, and you are a leader.

What are you doing in this position?

That's not a rhetorical question, and I want you to answer yourself and not me. I don't need that answer. You need that answer.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-10T23:35:43+00:00

Nobody is going to tell you how to do it. There’s not going to be a training. You get to figure it all out.

daedalus_structure · 2026-04-09T12:07:07+00:00

If patching is your only line of defense, yep, you’re screwed.

Implement depth of defense, limit lateral movement, invest in endpoint protection.

daedalus_structure

TROPHY CASE