I haven’t written anything in four months. This period of prolonged silence is best explained by the unexpected difficulties of the business that I started in 2024, on the assumption that it must be possible to make an ethical, human-centered business on the basis of how incompetent the general market seemed. In fact, one difficulty in particular has threatened to put an end to my writing in its entirety. This topic is embarrassing and I have no idea how to navigate it, so I’m just going to rip the band-aid off in the hopes of keeping the blog alive. Please brace yourselves, and I hope this doesn’t disappoint you too much.

After a quiet start, the past few months have been going really well, it looks like I was approximately right about everything re: the median software nerd, median manager, and median [insert salaried profession here] being trivially easy to outperform for fun and profit. To my absolute dismay, it would appear that I am good at management and the much more dangerous L-word.¹

Hrrrrrrk. I think I’m going to be sick. People shouldn’t be writing things like that outside of LinkedIn. I am wracked by feelings of wrongness. The word “pallid” springs to mind. I fear that I’ve acquired one of those parasites that alters its host’s behaviour and then walked straight out into genpop.

This sounds like a good thing, but I’ve been writing and deleting this post over and over because it turns out that I was totally prepared to write the “I was wrong about everything” post, but not the “I was right about everything” post. The first issue I’ve been faced with is that it’s hard to write about succeeding without feeling self-congratulatory, but I suppose the only solution to that is uh, not write about what I’m experiencing, which leads to aforementioned four months of quiet. And secondly, the nature of my day-to-day problems has shifted dramatically – the industry has not suddenly become sane, but my relationship to it is totally different, which runs the risk of threatening the nebulous concept of the “voice” of the blog.

Nonetheless, it is what it is, so I’m going to talk a bit about what I’ve learned over the past few months, and maybe a bit about the future of the blog.

I. The Other Economy

In 2023, Egbert Teeselink at TalkJS wrote this about an article I put out on the importance of disregarding most language about improvements that corporate management uses with staff:

It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo.

At no point does this article, or most articles like it, do any effort to realize that things are not always like this. Even if there is some unavoidable law that huge companies inevitably fill their ranks with idiots, like this article suggests, you do not need to work at a huge company.

Most people do not work at huge companies. There’s lots of amazing tech companies with fulfilling jobs and they want you, now. But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”.

Two years in, I agree with the thrust of this critique. I've matured a lot, especially in the last six months, with the painful corollary that I must have had a lot of maturing to do. In the article, I did not say that it was impossible to escape the soul-crushing vortex of the open-floor office, but what Egbert correctly detects and points out is that I wasn’t sure if it was possible. Or rather, it was obvious that it was possible, but I didn’t know how to do it, and to make matters worse there is no good social script for solving this problem. I didn’t have to announce my lack of direction for him to pick up on it.

For example, consider the case where I decide to become a professional poker player. I don’t really know anything about playing poker, but a cursory browsing of a few forums will give me some results that will at least put me on the right track. I just had a go at this, and the first result seems pretty mediocre but it includes three books – I’ll be much better off after reading one of them than I am now.

Now, what if you wanted to find a “good” job? That is considerably harder, and the pathway is littered with a huge number of what I think of as "traps", i.e, things that are prima facie plausible but are total wastes of your time, with the worst ones being those that put you in a loop where you don't realize you're trapped.

For one thing, Egbert’s note that you don’t have to work at a large company is incomplete – I agree that a smaller organizations have more variance, so there is a higher probability that a given job will be decent, but there is also a higher chance that you’ll work with a fucking psychopath. I know of a CEO here in Melbourne who sues people who quit, which is insane, doesn’t work, and is nonetheless going to totally ruin your year. A fair amount of our current work is spent cleaning up the messes created by small consultancies that were founded by non-technical leadership who wanted to cash in on tech sector payouts, and their workers are not treated well. A small company improves your odds a bit, but is nowhere near enough to solve the problem.

Secondly, if you look for advice on how to get noticed at a better organization, you will mostly get really bad advice, or the advice will be lacking enough that it’s hard to execute on correctly unless you already know what’s correct (in which case you didn’t need advice). Do you know how many people ask me to read their CVs, as if that makes even one lick of difference? An employer that’s asking for your CV as anything other than a formality is going to pay your mortgage, but they are probably not going to meet the standard of “genuinely good to work at”, and more importantly this is a terrible way to get a job. People who are good at their jobs can do this for 1-2 years at a time with no result, and when they fail to get jobs they assume their CVs are incorrect rather than that the approach is fundamentally misguided.

Or you’ll be told to network. With who? Where? How? I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but most of the big meetups in Melbourne are absolutely flooded with people awkwardly job-seeking, and they’re generally pretty miserable. Nonetheless, many people keep attending them because they’ve been informed that this is what networking is, and when they fail to get results, they assume that they must have bad networking skills.

There is a lot of advice out there, but the advice that you’re going to run into as an average person making a foray into the job search was mostly written by people at dysfunctional normal companies, so you are not only getting advice from people that have failed to make it out, but the person doing the writing may not actually understand that they’re in the “bad” part of the tech sector. After all, many people don’t realize that it’s a bad thing not to have any working tests in most codebases – why would you expect them to recognize other problems consistently, let alone be able to solve them?

And similarly, if people who are in the “bad” part of the tech sector can’t clearly understand that there’s a better part to it (or cannot perceive how to get there), people in the “good” part of it similarly struggle to understand just how bad the bad part is, and are unable to understand why someone would stay there. Those reasons are myriad, but suffice it to say that from a “normal” company, the path to sanity is so thoroughly obfuscated that when I started the business I was quietly worried that maybe you couldn’t get paid for thoughtful work. This is absolutely not true, but it was really, really not obvious to me that this was the case, and I suspect that in another two years I will start to forget what it was like being in the Scrum hellscape, wherein I will be writing messages asking “why you just don’t quit lol?”

Suffice it to say that there are totally reasonable companies out there, and they probably do want you as Egbert pointed out. The problem is that many of them probably only want you after you’ve quit the typical company because many people staying in that situation aren’t psychologically ready to be in a high-functioning team. Many of those teams are filled with lots of people who have strong networks and self-confidence, and that’s an important part of what makes them high functioning. Even on my small team, we can only handle the income variation gracefully because everyone knows that, in a serious pinch, they can generate high-paying work for themselves to stave off homelessness.

(I also quietly suspect that there are so few good companies around that, if you have really high standards, starting one is easier than finding one, or I obviously wouldn’t have started one. A quick glance at Egbert’s company reveals that it is very similar to mine despite no cross-pollination – a small team, fully remote, with minimal ritual, high autonomy, all the perks are traded out for money, and we both inexplicably program in Elixir. I think I might just be in the sweet spot where I’ve matured enough to converge on that operating model while still remembering what I thought two years ago.)

II. Why Don’t You Just Quit Lol

No, seriously, why?

When you suggest people should “just quit”, there is inevitably someone that goes “Just quit? And then what, starve to death? End up in another terrible job because we’re all at the mercy of employers? God, what a privileged take.” I have been that someone. In fact, if you look at Egbert’s comment, you will see that someone immediately responded with something close to that, and it doesn’t look ridiculous in context. If you have 2.5 children, no money saved up, a crippling mortgage, etc, let us agree that we will gently part ways here. You are an adult who knows the state of your finances, I don’t know you at all, and none of this applies to you. Go in peace.²

For everyone else, oh man, I really should have quit earlier. It was such an absolute waste of time hanging around trying to do anything else. I had, of course, quit previous jobs and ended up at other terrible companies – largely the result of my network, because most people work at companies with grey-slurry workplaces, so most networks land you there! – but quitting into unemployment is totally different.

Putting aside that you won’t have money coming in, the most salient obstacle to doing this isn’t actually a financial consideration for many people – especially if those people have been on even low-tier software salaries for more than a year or two. No, it’s actually the vague aura permeating society that if you lose your job, you will mysteriously die. Every time a friend gets depressed and wants to leave a job, they’ll run it by me, and the clear subtext is that their friends and family talk about it as if they’re in the midst of a psychological crisis, and maybe they should slow down, line up another job before quitting, and so on, because only crazy people unhook themselves from the misery-to-money device.

The thing is they are in the midst of a psychological crisis, precipitated by their working conditions, and the advice to continue under those conditions can be just as irresponsible, if not more so, than quitting entirely. It’s not that there’s no risk, but the fear seems to outweigh the risk. For many of the people that talk to me about this, the real risk isn’t homelessness or whatever they are subconsciously imagining, but being forced to do a very embarrassing couch-surf. Every single person I know that has been fired or made redundant has managed to find another job. Every single one of them is fine now, and every single one of them got a raise at the new place.

Those are the people that were forced out and looked for a new job. The people that deliberately quit into unemployment basically get jobs whenever they want now, and their main issue is that they want to conduct personal projects but are constantly being lured by the siren song of huge paydays.

A lot of things change when you deliberately opt out, and then don’t waste that freedom throwing a million CVs into the black hole that is Seek³.

For one, you can take some time to seriously get your life in order and wait until your brain is ready to start doing things again. You’ve got a hell of a lot more energy because now you don’t have to commute if you don’t want to, and when you do you can go back home to unwind pretty quickly. You can meet a ton of very interesting people because you’ve got the bandwidth, energy, and flexibility to swing by their office and spend $10 on coffee for the two of you. You’re totally free to read anything, write anything, and work on anything you want. In my experience this miraculously transmutes itself into money because it gives you fun things to talk about, which it turns out people love, and as an added bonus you have lots of fun things to talk about.

There are plenty of ways to screw this up, but the main one (in my assessment) for programmers is following the deeply-embedded-and-seldom-introspected scripts like trying to spin up a SaaS offering, which is appealing for many irrelevant-to-success reasons like “I might be able to go months without having to think about rejection and get to feel productive tinkering”. But you will probably spend six months on this and earn $0, with some small probability of earning between $1 and $10,000,000, then be forced to go back to a bad job. Providing extremely boring services, like specialized contracting and education, removes much of both ends of the spectrum – you’re a lot less likely to earn $0 and $10,000,000 is out of the question. And listen, a few million dollars sounds great, I agree, but you probably need something closer to $100,000 to be in a sustainable situation, so aim for that!

Of course, there is risk. There always is. A few of my high school peers have passed away from things like freak aneurysms in the past few years. There was a canoeing incident while I was at university that killed a classmate, the usual assortment of cancers and car crashes, that sort of thing. Some number of them would have spent their last year doing tedious bullshit that they could have otherwise avoided. Yes, we all have to go through some level of that – my taxes are boring but it seems a small price to pay to spend 2026 out of jail, presuming I make it there – but it’s worth considering that if all your risk is identical to everyone else’s risk, acquired on autopilot, then we aren’t even minimizing risk so much as not making a decision.

III. Not Needing Permission To Earn

This may surprise you but every single person that has ultimately decided to hire us has had no idea who I am, or about this blog, and so on. At most, we’ve gotten introduced by blog readers and the rest of the conversation has panned out as if we were any other consultancy, and we’ve just started work on developing a sales pipeline that is completely unrelated to the blog. One of our team recently managed to close a deal that way while working full-time at a pretty intensive day job, in a state he recently moved to, with a long commute, a mortgage, and two children. This problem is very tractable.

Once we had some of that sales pipeline working, I had a dreadful moment where I realized that I would struggle immensely to participate in a conventional job search again because the idea that you need permission to earn money is sort of ridiculous, but it’s the only model that most people in corporate environments have ever experienced.

In one sense you do need permission to earn money if you aren’t stealing it – someone has to agree they need something from you. But the insane theatre, the middle managers, the CVs and cover letters and recruiters, it’s all so fucking silly once you’re outside of it. It turns out that sales do not have to be much harder than going “Ah, you’ve got a problem? I could take a look at that for you and come up with a plan to fix it up” and then someone wires you $10,000 if they think it’s plausible that you could solve the problem⁴. It’s really not that different to selling someone plumbing, except your margin is almost 100% in software, you don’t need a professional qualification or to leave your house, and in fact it’s pretty amazing across basically every dimension, save that some people have such insane ideas about software that it’s too late to save them.⁵

This is very empowering! If you’re competent and put some amount of effort into demonstrating that competence, you too can be unshackled from the dreadful grasp of recruiters, with their too-white smiles, gray handshakes, and inability to respond to emails on time. If you’re able to generate even half of what you need to live on solo, then you’ve doubled the amount of time you’ll survive without conventional employment. The “Fuck you!”⁶ money was inside you the whole time! Everyone has to learn how to get along with other people and make concessions, but with a little bit of autonomy it has turned out that this is possible to do in an entirely reasonable manner, where each concession and conversation makes sense and isn’t ridiculous theatre performed by people who don’t even have an interest in the job being carried out correctly. And yes, you’ll have to compete against liars sometimes, but you have beautiful asymmetry in your favour – you can actually build a track record of shipping, and they will siphon away the people that you wouldn’t want to work with anyway. If someone thinks they can slap an LLM into their company⁷ and it’ll solve their problems, and you can’t explain to them why the current generation of models won’t work, you don’t want them as a customer. They will be disappointed with your frail mortal delivery, being unacceptably tethered to cruel reality, and we must unfortunately leave them in the Desert Of Not Shipping, where the buzzards will sup upon their desiccated flesh or, worse, put them on Azure.

When I was back in university, I used to make a small amount of money teaching statistics to psychology students. It was only maybe three or four thousand dollars a year, and the marketing consisted entirely of one comment on a university Facebook page per year. It is not that much harder to sell competent IT consulting.

IV. Blog Changes

I’ve been worried a bit about whether the change in context will make my writing disinteresting. I’m sure that for some people it will be gratifying to see that a philosophy of ethics, competence, and passion can win out (at least at a scale that makes a small difference and feeds a small team). But perhaps it’s also unrelatable, or dissipating anger through action saps something from my voice. I have serious, effective outlets for frustration, and if I can’t make a difference then I probably haven’t closed the deal and I will soon be very far away from the feeling of helplessness. When someone is so incompetent that talking to them begins to drive me to annoyance, then we probably aren’t going to close the sale and the problem solves itself from an emotional perspective. (Also when a team is very competent and doesn’t need consultants, we also don’t close the sale, and the problem – me – solves itself. The system works!)

I have a lot more time to read, but the nature of what I read is pretty different. I can afford to read much more complicated texts, especially now that we’re pulling in enough revenue that I don’t need to churn through so much sales material, which is generally effective but not interesting to write about for an audience with taste⁸. Because my days are mostly free when we aren’t actively engaged, I can take a lot of time to synthesize them into our working practice. I’m currently thinking very heavily about how to take some of the conversations I’ve had with Iris Meredith on Clausewitz and applying some of the thoughts from her to the design of software engineering delivery cadence. I would have never had that time months ago.

I’m a lot more empathetic when people struggle with their jobs or are even totally driven by their egos, but also now get asked to weigh in on things like redundancies and project cancellations,⁹ so my opinions feel less heated but also have the capacity to incinerate things rather than produce disgruntled essays.

I see lots of crazy stuff, but usually under the cover of NDAs, so I can’t really write about them unless the stories are of a very precise nature wherein they’re still fun after obfuscation and wouldn’t upset a client even in anonymized form. When I do see crazy stuff, I now wield the Righteous Power of Consultant Positioning and lay about my surroundings with great force and holy vengeance. I can channel the anger into real results, and it is probably not an exaggeration to say that the outcomes I’ve managed in the past month trounce most of my accomplishments in the first five years of my career. I got a security department to whitelist Python for every analyst in a Big Corp. Do you understand how powerful I’ve become? Do you see what I have wrought?

And, most importantly, even though I am some sort of borderline management consultant now, as pointed out by our lawyer Iain McLaren who I have yet to forgive for this label, an employee at a large corporation high-fived me two weeks ago and said that working with the team is the most fun they’ve had in years. We may have our sales collapse, especially when the likely AI bubble pops and does God-knows-what to IT budgets around the world, but I simply can’t imagine going back to a company where I don’t have a good time.

In any case, I hope that explaining what has been going on for the past few months and the context for any upcoming writing will make it easier to write in the future and maybe be a little bit more entertaining than the same old stuff as always. I’ve grown past many authors over the years, and I hope that a shift in tone is going to be something that keeps things interesting for readers instead of being an unwelcome development.

V. The Most Important Update

In 2023, someone wrote this to me:

I'm sorry, but this needs a privilege/gratitude check. You are guaranteed your salary, and you're welcome to take on the same level of risk your company is by starting your own. If you think it's so easy go ahead.

I want to take a moment to say “It really was easy, you impotent fool! Look upon my works and perish, nerd! You could have written the same thing to hundreds of people on the internet and they would have backed down, but you somehow picked the one person that would remember your smug comment and build all of this out of spite. It’ll be yeeeeeears before you’re ready to face me! Ahahahahahahaha–”