Before I was born my parents started a small skilled trades business fixing restaurant equipment which ended up being very lucrative. My mother managed book work and compliance and my father handled all the repairs. I have always sought to replicate their success in my own career. When I asked my father what advice he had he would just say “Treat your customers well and give them a good deal”. I always felt like that was a bit too simplistic but in many ways he is correct. Developing a valuable product or service is its own skill in and of itself but attracting and retains customer is often where people struggle.

I specialize in embedded systems engineering and am competent with most of the modern stack. It took me over a decade to the point where I could independently solve most of the technical problems present in a given engineering project within and around my domain. I developed that technical expertise within relatively sheltered environments such as at internships and full-time jobs. I have recently started doing part-time contracts on the Upwork platform and have had to cultivate an entirely different perspective from the paradigm I use at my full-time job to be able to maintain successful relationships with my direct clients.

Like most freelancers, I got started in online freelancing when I was out of a job. I knew, however, that freelance engineering would not be quick or easy money. You have to understand that if someone is willing to pay you money to debug their code its likely because they’ve already reached the limits of tools such as ChatGPT or other code generators. As a freelance engineer you bring only two assets to the table:

• A strong problem solving instinct
• Human empathy and understanding

The growth of generative AI means that the difference between a software engineer and everyone else is knowledge of how to work software development tools and to build working solutions using the microservices written by AI.

The other skill you bring to the table is the ability to effectively translate the needs of your client into the vision they have in their head. I personally find much fulfillment in my part-time work because all of the clients are small business founders who have a clear goal of what they want to accomplish with technology in their mind’s eye. My job as an engineer is to burst the pernicious bubble of unnecessary cloud costs and to teach my customer how to build a truly lean start up. This requires letting go of my ego and any sense of pretentiousness.

No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

I offer my services to clients at a flat labor rate. And I fulfill the contracts using my self-built computer setup which has an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU and an Intel i9-14900k CPU. This means that by hiring me, clients don’t have to pay a dime in cloud costs until a very well thought out solution has been containerized out of my local environment.

I pride myself on helping clients avoid the cloud as much as possible. Cloud service providers prey on the technically less-experienced by making confusing menus, hidden fees, and unreachable support staff that often leads to huge cloud spend on unknown services. The great danger of AI, big data, and other trends is that naive founders confuse paying for AWS with actually making a good product. Many engineers don’t know how to bootstrap a web app into a Docker container and test it locally before paying for an auto scaled Kubernetes cluster.

Thankfully for my customer it is in my best interest that they not give their money to a cloud provider for as long as possible. The more value I can provide to the customer at no greater cost than parts and labor the more money is available for my labor costs in their budget.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the cloud. I understand the value of content distribution networks, the important of separation of developer versus cloud provider security responsibilities, and the utility of being able to rent resources rather than to buy them. What I am wary of, however, are clients who have been seduced by AWS, GCP, or Azure to think that $300 free credits is anywhere near enough to start a company. And once the customers have already spent the free-tier discounts they are so locked in to that cloud provider that they’ve already created a huge loss item on their balance sheet that might sink their business.

All of this plays into my reflection about what my father said to me many years ago. If you really care about your customer you won’t let them waste their money – you will focus on making their dreams come true.