The Income North Star: Upwork edition

Hey folks!

The north star, from this week on, is to get income, as my “runway” is starting to make me a bit anxious. The obvious ideas here are to go back to being a full-time employee or contracting as a software developer. If I have to do any of them, I’d like to test the waters with contracting or freelancing first.

Let me be real for a second, I dread going back to doing endless tech interviews. Specially, knowing that the kind of companies I’d like to work in and the opportunities and experiences I’d love to have can be rare. But you know what I dread more? Not being able to pay the bills.

Talking about going through the normal job funnel, having a strong professional network helps a lot, and I admit I need to improve in this area. It’s easy to lose contact. Life goes on, you catch up less and less and one day we stop. In the last years, I’ve tried to put regular events in my calendar to remind me to keep in touch. Nonetheless, even if we’ve lost contact, I appreciate tons of previous colleagues I’ve worked and built connections and camaraderie with, and would help them in a heartbeat.

If I were to choose my own adventure, creating a company would be up there. That would be a story of great lessons. My head’s full of ideas about how to do product, engineering, structuring the organization… and, as the quote says, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. I can also be a solopreneur, and that’s still in the cards as a side hustle.

Anyway, rambling’s over.

I'm experimenting with Upwork. The game plan in Upwork is to get reviews first. You do this by applying for urgent, low-paying jobs and being one of the first people to send a proposal. With some reviews, you can have a chance to apply for the jobs you want. If you are a nobody—that’s me!—with 0 reviews, you won’t get any jobs. I sent 16 proposals in total related to software, each within minutes of the job been created, and got no response. I’m going to give it another week or two applying to random jobs, not only software. If it doesn’t work, I’ll move on.

In parallel, I’m looking at contracting jobs on LinkedIn and exploring full-time jobs as an employee on early startups and “normal” companies, to see if, by chance, there are a few interesting opportunities. In the end, the title is not as important as the experiences I rather have.

This week’s briefer:

• Programming Under Surveillance

• Friction instead of tech debt

In this article, Tim Ottinger talks about pair and mob programming and the reasons people might not do it. Pairing and mobbing, from my experience, are much more humane than people think.

Friction instead of technical debt

The debt metaphor in software has always been elusive to people besides developers. It was great in its context, the financial sector, but when you take it out of that context and apply it to another, with people with different shared understanding, things can, and did, go wrong.

Kent Beck now uses friction, which is fitting. I’ll start using it instead of tech debt.