The Lazy Developer's Guide to a 6-figure Paycheck
Fuck it's easy.
The Call
Every executive makes the same first call. I’ve heard it 50 times:
“Hey, uh, I got your name from [mutual contact]. We have a... situation. Our [system] is [broken] and we have [important event] in [absurdly short timeframe]. Our team says it’s impossible to fix quickly. But [mutual contact] said you do impossible things. Can you... can you help?”
Then silence. They’re holding their breath. They’ve just admitted they’re fucked to a stranger.
“I can take a look right now. Send me access.”
The relief in their voice is physical. You haven’t fixed anything yet and they already feel better.
Executive Psychology 101: Speed
You think executives care about clean code, properly normalized databases, or your elegant microservices architecture.
Here’s what’s actually in their head at 3am:
“The board meeting is in 2 weeks. Revenue is fine but our tech is held together with gum. If anyone looks closely, they’ll realize I have no idea what my team built. Our biggest client is one bug away from leaving. I’m about to raise Series B and due diligence will expose that our ‘platform’ is actually Brad’s laptop running Python scripts. I need someone to make this not embarrassing before people with clipboards show up.”
They need cover, not code.
When an exec hires a dev team, they’re thinking: “At least I can point to 50 headcount when the board asks why we’re still broken. If 50 people can’t fix it, how is that my fault?”
When they hire you, they’re thinking: “Please God, let this be the adult who just fixes it before anyone notices I’ve been pretending to understand what Kubernetes is for three years.”
One saves their career. The other just delays the inevitable.
Executives live in quarters. Q1: Problem identified. Q2: Solution designed. Q3: Implementation. Q4: Results. You fix something in a day that they budgeted a quarter for? You just gave them 89 days of their life back. Of course that’s worth whatever you’re charging.
Speed means something deeper though. In their world, slow means either incompetent or milking the contract. Fast means you know what you’re doing. Simple as that.
The One Miracle Fix
So, we’ve established that our client base is formed of (a lot of) speed junkies with anxiety issues, now what?
It’s all about gathering context as fast as possible, ideally in the very first call. Identify their main problems but keep your ears open to the rest. Take a lot of notes, ideally record and transcribe using AI. Then obtain access to the codebase, it is usually enough.
After this, it’s easy. Using your notes, unleash your AI on the codebase, guide it with your expertise and build a shared context with the machine. Look for easy fixes, but also for obvious high-impact issues.
Example: I once got hired for a quick payments API refactor but after “Your 2FA mechanism is flawed, here’s the evidence and what I can do about it” I ended day one with a 6 week security contract worth 20 times more.
At the end of day 1, present your work, and a roadmap of what to expect next. You are now also a subject matter expert in their eyes, congratulations. They trust you more than their colleagues because you have no reason to lie.
Once you’ve built the day 1 context, you need to maintain the perception of speed in their eyes while you fix what you´re originally hired for. For this you need to attend calls and provide real time value. USE YOUR AI. A lot of problems raised in tech calls can be debugged-refined-solved meaningfully in under 5 minutes with basic understanding and fast searching abilities. The AI supercharges that step.
Watch what happens when you fix something during a call - while they’re still explaining the problem. You can see it in their eyes. The pupils dilate. The voice changes. Their “senior architect” said the search feature would take six months. The consultancy quoted $2M for infrastructure optimization. Their CTO keeps saying the system is “complex.”
You just proved everyone’s been lying by fixing something while they were still describing it.
One impossible fix and you own them forever. That’s how trust works at this level.
Fear of Exposure Is Your Main Ally
Real call I received recently:
“Tomorrow the enterprise client calls. They’ll ask about the timeout errors. I’ll have to pretend I know what a timeout is. My CTO will say it’s complex. The client will hear ‘we don’t know.’ They’ll leave. That’s 30% of our revenue. The board will ask why. I’ll say ‘technical challenges.’ They’ll know I mean ‘I have no fucking idea.’ I’ll be unemployed by Christmas.”
They’re terrified of being exposed as someone who’s been cosplaying competence. You protect them from that exposure. That’s the real service.
They all know their team is lying to them. Every standup. Every update. Every timeline. The offshore contractors bill 40 hours for 4 hours of work. The “senior” engineers don’t understand the core business logic. Their CTO googles basic terms during meetings.
They’ve always known.
Admitting it means they hired wrong, managed wrong, trusted wrong. Every decision, wrong. It means they’re not qualified for their own job. You let them skip that whole reckoning. You just fix it. No confrontation needed. That alone is worth your fee.
Fix something impossibly fast and watch the politics shift. That CTO who said it needs six months? He’s updating LinkedIn because he knows what your one-day fix means for him. The vendor who quoted $500K? About to lose three other accounts when this exec tells their network. The board member who recommended their nephew? Not looking so influential anymore.
You’re the exec’s new power source. They’ll protect you like their life depends on it. Because it kind of does.
The moment they become a client for life is always something small. “Oh, I noticed your SSL cert expires next week so I renewed it.” Something they didn’t know was broken. Something they didn’t ask you to fix. That’s when they realize you’re not just following orders. You’re actually watching their back.
Around month three comes the conversation. “What would it take to bring you in full-time? Equity? CTO role? Name your price.”
Listen to their voice. Hear that tremor? They’re not recruiting. They’re panicking. They want to own exclusive access to their emotional support system. They’d rather overpay to own you than risk you not answering at 2 AM.
Say no. Scarcity is everything. “I can’t be full-time, but you’ll always be a priority.” They’ll pay anything for “priority.”
Imposter syndrome
An important note. The entire time you’ll feel like a fraud. The entire time you’ll provide fantastic value to the client. Those two things are fact and you’ll have to reconcile them in your head. Imposter syndrome will hit hard, comes with being a very well paid API call.
You’ll need to remember the ROI, the value they get from you, the safety that someone cares and knows what they’re doing that lets the client sleep at night, is priceless.
Channel this feeling into delivering better quality, safer, faster. Tackle the things that everyone complains about but no one has time for. Convince yourself that you’re invaluable because to them, you are.
Don’t reveal the trick
And when they ask how you fixed it so fast, they don’t want the truth. They want to hear “I’ve seen this before” or “Your competitor had the same issue.” Never “I used AI” or “ChatGPT wrote it.” They need to believe they hired expertise, not just access to tools.
They expect expensive. Cheap means you don’t understand the value, you’re not that good, or there’s a catch. $500/hour feels right to them. Expensive enough to signal competence, cheaper than their lawyer. It fits their mental model.
You could send them garbage code and as long as problems disappear, they’d pay. They can’t evaluate your work. They’re evaluating their anxiety level. You’re Xanax that can deploy to production.
They don’t understand what you do. They don’t care how. They just know when they call you, the scary thing goes away. That feeling - problems evaporating, being protected from their own incompetence - that’s what they’re buying.
The game is making executive problems disappear faster than they can worry about them. When you fix something so fast they don’t have time to panic, you become invaluable.
What they’re really thinking, even if they’ll never say it:
“I don’t understand what they do. I don’t understand how they do it so fast. I don’t care. Problems go away when I call them. They’re the only honest person in my entire technical organization. Worth whatever they charge.”
Stop thinking like someone who writes code. Start thinking like someone who removes executive headaches. That mental shift is worth $300K/year.
The executive isn’t your code reviewer. They’re a frightened person with a budget who needs an adult. Be that adult. Send the invoice.
You’ll never lack for work.
