“Can you offer some insights in how other people might apply your approach? Are you a contractor? How can you tell if someone is offering a job of the sort you want, and how do you convince the gatekeepers you can do the work well?” asked the person on HackerNews
And I replied…
Sometimes I am a contractor.
Sometimes I am on W2.
I am a contractor right now.
Because the company is new.
But I will probably be W2 one day, very, very, very soon
Possibly tomorrow. Or by the next cheesey moon.
As to how?
I build “stuff.” Then I show “stuff” to them.
Them being people, them who run companies overly small and underly big.
It takes me to new jobs. Or brings in a gig.
I message everyone on LinkedIn. And at hackathons too.
And meetups, and greetups, and gatherings old and new.
Anywhere I can think of, I reach out to the them in the Bay,
and those NFT’d out weirdos down in L.A.
Sometimes directly in Frisco, and that one guy at Cisco.
And then them say “can you come here and work for us to build ‘stuff?'”
And we talk about fun things as I walk through the code.
And sometimes I find out, in the course of the day,
they are really building “it” which I’ve already before built,
and I say “no, not interested” and we go on our way.
Other times it turns out they want to build “it+that”
but they don’t know how to build “it”
but do know a world about that “that”
And somewhiles it is the other way round
They’ve got the shape of the problem
But not the geometrical bound
Sometimes the glue that bonds “it” and “that” doesn’t work
and I come up with some new formula for the glue that will stick
And somewhiles it don’t pay well, but it’s the problem I pick,
My career might seem strange to them that build “it”
But I’m happy for me, because I don’t I give a shit
I’ve talked with entrepreneurs, this that they’ll say:
“We’re planning on sending a Musk to the Moon”
But that Musk asks always impatiently ‘will it be soon?'”
Turns out they’re just building yet another crap app
And so I wave them away, it don’t sound like no fun,
“We need you”, they say, “we can’t get our math right”
“We’ve put Musk in the Sun!”
I’m always happiest when stacking “that” on to “it”
Sometimes I’ll add one, five or eleven to see what will fit
There’s an upper, upper limit of the stacked up that “that”
Sometimes it’s nine, more likely sometimes its four,
But if we just keep stacking, eventually I’ll look for the door
I once had a project where they’d divided “it” by zero
And I got to fix “it”, and look like the hero
And I’ll go to my grave, working each day
And my last words will be “I had fucking fun all the way!”