Why keep score? If you have a password manager, the number is irrelevant. But: KeePass 2052. Cheating because I work for an agency... so we have hundreds of clients' passwords to store and selectively distribute to the team.
i don't find it to be a baffling question. i think the unspoken part of this is "this is a really stupid system, someone ought to do something about it". i hope in the next 20 years that password managers are a thing of the past, but for good privacy-preserving reasons.
1. Talk to people. At the very start of an agency business, you get clients by talking to people - at networking events, conferences, via LinkedIn, etc. You don't get those first clients by sharing stuff on socials or doing paid ads.
2. You'll never make money if you start with that negative assumption - "companies that are strapped for cash already". Companies have cash, otherwise they wouldn't be alive. You just need to be a valuable place for them to invest that cash.
3. When you first start out as an agency, you'll do a lot of underpriced jobs, say yes to lots of things and learn a lot, but not make much money. Later you'll learn how to say no more and make more money. Read Blair Enns' book "Win without Pitching".
As a freelancer, I want to leverage others (I'm a Laravel dev), and step more into management/pm and agency lead, how do you get to the point of hiring others and using their talent in replacement of your own? I'd like to do full digital agency, and is it better to niche down? Like maybe just target real estate or lawyers or something?
TLDR: Burned out dev, freelancer thinking of moving into either digital agency, or maybe an ai consulting agency (I think this will be big, and i love all the ai stuff going on and am fascinated by it), trying to make the jump from 'just me' to me + subordinates.
This takes me back... 25 years ago I visited a company called "Zeus" in Cambridge UK, who made a web server that competed with Apache httpd, and was told about their developers' Escape pedals.
Mid-life burnout/overwhelm and long term low-level stress can all contribute, in my and my team's. experience. You've not mentioned gender either - menopause in women can cause brain fog etc.
You end up feeling like "25 year old me was so much sharper and quicker, wtf?!"
Assuming that: you work in tech; you're probably not neuro typical; you've developed so many coping strategies for life's ups and downs you don't even think about them;
... have a look at what does stick in your mind. Are you spending a lot of brain power on underlying anxious thoughts, stuff that's always flying around your head that maybe focusing on work helps to ease? Is your mind acting like something's hogging the CPU?
Bluntly, most tech people are either some kind of ADHD or Aspergers, or both. Well-Adjusted Adults (/s) don't generally want to spend all day speaking in extremely logical terms and fighting esoteric error messages from their computer. IMO a lot of scrum practices and tech company culture is centered around making work more tractable for people with these kinds of neurodivergances.
In relation to what GP was talking about, if you have spent most of your life with either of these conditions it is likely that part of your normal every-day functioning involves employing some set of defense mechanisms and learned reactions. Part of that in the past may have been developing an affinity for computers. It can be hard to navigate a world in which most people seem to understand more about interpersonal interaction than you do, and/or where most people are cool with ambiguities that don't make sense to you. These strategies take up a lot of CPU power in your brain, and can (among a whole host of other things) make your memory more foggy because you are busy spending all your time in a kind of low-level survival mode.
As an aside, poor autobiographical memory is a really common side effect of ADHD, a condition which can be philosophically framed as having a difficult time connecting to the past or future as well as other people can.
Maybe this is not very HN-style of a response, but I want to sincerely thank you for your careful answer. I’m probably learning something about myself just now. Something I’ve always suspected, but didn’t put a finger on it until now. Will investigate this further.
I'd be curious to know how many people access the Berkshire Hathaway website from a phone. If they do get any mobile traffic, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's from more BlackBerries than iPhones.
Yep... post arrives to "O'Rourke", websites tell me "your name is invalid", checkouts tell me my details are incorrect so I can't pay. And not just small sites - I've seen it on banks, large retailers, companies who should know better.
Sometimes it's due to a legacy back-end system dating back to the 1990's or earlier, so they have to strip out "bad" characters before sending the order or contact form through.
