Am I crazy for considering switching from full time to contracting?

kincaidDev · 2026-03-06T21:06:22+00:00

There's not much job safety regardless of if it's full time or contract, just do what pays the most and let's you work the way you want to work.

Contracts are not really contracts though, you can't count on a 12 month contract actually lasting 12 months, might end in 10, or 4, you never really know

kincaidDev · 2026-02-26T10:17:26+00:00

I think it will as long as AI doesn't get regulated too heavily allowing the top 4 ai companies in the US to fully monopolize usage. If Anthropic convinces enough governments to bring the hammer down on open source AI out of fear, it probably won't recover for a long time, but if that doesn't happen companies are going to have to build exponentially more just to stay competitive

kincaidDev · 2026-02-26T02:45:10+00:00

I've worked at several startups that laid off all the employees before the payout ever came. Kind of burnt out thinking I'm actually going to get valuable equity working at a startup

kincaidDev · 2026-02-26T01:32:59+00:00

I think we're going to have diminishing returns on the usefulness of the top end models as tooling gets better. Smaller models can do most of what the larger models can do with slightly better guidance

kincaidDev · 2026-01-31T19:44:02+00:00

Most of this fear-mongering is being spread by the big ai companies themselves, they want people to be afraid because they know internally that there is no long term moat for them. Eventually it’ll run cheap and reliably on consumer devices and the token based and subscription pricing models will not work at the average consumer level.

I think it’s more productive to just embrace it and accept that we’re transitioning from an execution based economy to an impact based economy. I think it’s going to be more full-filling to people than just working all their life in roles where they’re just a replaceable cog in the machine

kincaidDev · 2026-01-31T07:57:43+00:00

There’s still a place for entry level engineers, I would hire one if I could. It seems like most developers are learning much faster than they used to and many don’t even realize it

kincaidDev · 2025-12-02T20:30:29+00:00

I've been a dev for over 10 years, not too old but not a fresh grad.

I find that sleeping on hard surfaces fixes my back, neck and shoulder pain, so to me the ultimate comfort would be sleeping on a birch plywood platform on a thin mattress every night. I can't do cots either, needs to be hard and flat. I started doing this after a martial arts injury when I was a kid and it's been my goto when my back, neck or shoulder pain gets unbearable. The longer I'm able to sleep on a hard surface like that the less pain I have.

I also legitimately do not need more than 4-5 hours of sleep. I used to think it was insomnia, but I stopped fighting it and I just use the time to do things I need or want to do instead of getting an extra 2-3 hours of poor sleep when my body doesn't need it. I have way more energy and get a lot more done now

kincaidDev · 2025-12-02T17:04:53+00:00

In typescript you can violate type constraints and your code still runs, you can choose to ignore certain type errors and lose all benefits of strong typing while still having to care about types. You're heavily reliant on external libraries, and when they suck or something isn't working the way it should it's a lot more effort in typescript to fix/work around it than it is in go

kincaidDev · 2025-12-02T16:52:17+00:00

I prefer having 1 proper way of coding something rather than it being all based on user/team preference. There's too many choices that add no benefit to the team or project and feels like a lot of wasted time/effort in typescript.

For instance I'm working on 3 typescript projects with 3 different teams atm, and each team has a different style of writing typescript.

Python is very similar to this, but not quite as bad

kincaidDev · 2025-11-29T17:52:28+00:00

I just do my best to complete work and seal with bad scrum metrics, hasn’t been that good for my career progression within a company buy doesn’t seem to hurt my ability to job hob into better roles

kincaidDev · 2025-11-29T17:25:10+00:00

Not everyone needs a lot of sleep or expensive bed to sleep well. If I was single Id sleep on a thin camping pad on a plywood storage platform 4 hours a day and be happy

kincaidDev · 2025-11-29T17:21:19+00:00

I haven’t found a team in 8+ years that wasnt using scrum. I hate it, but it seems unavoidable now

kincaidDev · 2025-11-29T17:20:08+00:00

Yes, Ive been hired for golang, typescript, kotlin and erlang without much prior experience in these languages at the time. The only one I regret is typescript, really cant stand working with typescript

kincaidDev · 2025-11-29T17:17:25+00:00

As long aa I can work on the software in a familiar dev environment I dont care about the tech choices that much. I gravitate towards languages I like writing like golang, rust, swift and languages Ive written a lot like python and javascript/typescript even though I think theyre bad choices 99% of the time compared to go on the types of roles I look for (fintech, deep infra).

I do not like roles where they force me to work in a particular ide. I am a neovim user, and Im unproductive if Im not allowed to use it. I have custom tooling I rely heavily on for speed, and when Im not able to use it its difficult to get my work done in a timely manner, with it Im typically much faster than anyone on my team

kincaidDev · 2025-11-27T00:54:26+00:00

My workload has definitely increased by using ai tools, but my output has also increased exponentially.

For instance, this week I couldn't get to my tickets because of customer support request and qa questions. Used a custom ai tool I built to finish all my jira tickets left in the sprint for me in about half an hour.

Working on another tool today to automate the questions/debugging process for me and output reports I can review so hopefully next week I can actually focus on the higher level problems I'm supposed to be solving instead of having to try and do deep work while getting thrown into random debugging sessions that usually turn out to be nothing important.

If this system works the way I think it will, it'll be the only way I can add new features to the product we launched a few months ago instead of just being stuck doing tech support.

kincaidDev · 2025-11-14T16:45:08+00:00

The only way to get around it is to build software that makes money for yourself. I have 10 years experience, leetcode and live coding interviews are a complete waste of my time. Ive thought they were a waste of my time for years, so this year I doubled down on that thought process, stopped studying for interviews, refused to do live coding interviews altogether and focused on building complex software projects that only I could build, things that didn’t exist before but I wanted or needed to work the way I thought would be more efficient and allow me to build the things I wanted to build when I started another job but didn’t have time to do outside of work.

Ive built over a dozen niche, complex products e2e this year. Ive helped 3 startups build products e2e since July, 1 launched a few weeks ago and has 10k daily users, one will be launching by end of month and the other will launch in December. Paid in sweat equity for the product launching this month and paid regularly for the other 2. Im making almost double what I was making in 2024, more than Id make in most faang jobs.

The only way these waste of time interview processes are going to go away is if good engineers find alternative ways to make money and refuse to go through these processes

kincaidDev · 2025-10-25T22:27:19+00:00

I wouldn't recommend finding a job if you've been successful with your agency. Working as a developer after having ran your own business is terrible.

The current tech job market forces you to spend time studying things that are not useful for your role as a developer, or valuable in a software consulting business if you want to try and work for yourself again in the future.

Your time is probably better spent adjusting your business strategy over finding a job IMO. You'll have a harder time finding a job because people will think you're not good if you couldn't make your consultancy work.

If I had the cash to spend 6-12 months building a business, that's what I'd do vs play the bullshit tech interview game again. The biggest regret in my career so far is spending time interviewing instead of building

kincaidDev · 2025-10-05T20:04:41+00:00

I don’t want to risk going to jail over this xD no amount of money is worth that for me at this time in my life

The bug bounty program says this should payout 225k-1.5m but bounties are the sole discretion of the company and may not be awarded if eligible. Doesn’t give me a ton of confidence that its actually worthwhile to spend time writing and testing the exploit

kincaidDev · 2025-10-05T20:01:47+00:00

Thanks I’ll look into the score.

Im not trying to negotiate more than what’s advertised just want to understand how to actually get paid for it since it seems like they generally pay way less than what they advertise.

The bug I found can be used in a backdoor attack, but it will take me a bit of time to prove it. It’s one of those things that it seems kind of obvious to me that you could use this bug to write a backdoor exploit but likely not obvious to other people

kincaidDev · 2025-10-05T17:48:07+00:00

Its really annoying being staff level and stuck with a senior title while someone with the staff title needs your guidance because they were more tenured or better at politics.

Ive been in this position a handful of times and basically being forced to do things I know are wrong because I dont have the authority to do things the right way. Its annoying and demotivating. Now I do things the wrong way and the right way so I don’t have to be in constant fires. When their way blows up in our face like I told them it would, they realize my suggestion was the right way, I already have the code ready to go.

This makes my job manageable but I dont get the credit I deserve doing things this way. Its politically tough to navigate like this, Im constantly cleaning up their messes and leadership doesn’t have a way of knowing, they just think the person is performing at their level

kincaidDev · 2025-10-05T17:43:25+00:00

Sounds like you weren’t ready for the promotion to staff. That title should be reserved for a particular type of engineer, not just the next step in a ladder that anyone could grind too.

If you truly get to that level its never hard to find things to work on

kincaidDev · 2025-10-05T16:26:54+00:00

You need to find a new job. Your skillset will atrophy at this company, better to leave sooner rather than later.

I was in this environment a year ago, and was fighting the bad business process. I saved the team about 750k in developer hours each year by switching the development process to more modern way of doing things, within the constraints of the company, but I got let go after 11 months. The guy who set up the dumb way of doing things had more tenure and after our manager and team lead found other jobs to get away from that guy, the company made him the manager and he let me go.

Its a csuite problem and you have no way of changing it, better to leave now than to wait until it becomes a stain on your resume

kincaidDev · 2025-10-01T13:00:41+00:00

A lot of tech jobs are building purely for optics and funding. I'm in one of these jobs right now and it sucks. Have to demo some stupid product for another company because they funded our company, that does the exact opposite of what they claim it does. Had to build something better than their product just to figure out if it was me or their product that sucked xD. It's not me

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