u/Cute-Complaint-106

I was one of 40 engineers laid off in a round that was framed as "right-sizing." I'd been at the company for six years. I was the only person who fully understood our legacy reporting system, which was a Frankenstein of stored procedures, cron jobs, and a Python service I'd written in my first year.

The layoff itself was clean. Severance was reasonable. I went home Friday afternoon and started updating my resume.

On Monday morning I got an email from someone in finance asking if I was "open to consulting on a critical migration project for a few months." It turned out a quarterly report had broken over the weekend and nobody on the remaining team could fix it. They had a board meeting on Thursday. They needed the report.

I quoted three times my old hourly rate, billed in monthly retainers with a two month minimum. They agreed within an hour. I'm now in month seven of what was supposed to be a "few months." I've made more in consulting fees than my full year salary plus severance.

The same VP who approved my layoff signs my invoices. We've never discussed it.

I came from web development where cross-browser testing is annoying but manageable, you run it in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, maybe Edge, you're mostly done

Android device fragmentation is a completely different category of problem and I did not take it seriously enough before my first launch

I own a Pixel, I had two friends test it on a Samsung S22 and an OnePlus, everything worked, I felt covered, I was not covered

in the first month of production I discovered meaningful bugs on MIUI, on older Samsung One UI versions, on devices with 3GB RAM, on one very specific combination of Android 12 and a particular screen resolution that I still don't fully understand, none of these were edge cases in the sense that the affected devices are rare, they're some of the most common Android hardware in the world

the thing nobody tells you early enough is that your personal device and your circle of friends represent maybe 3 or 4 points in a device ecosystem that has thousands, and the Play Store doesn't grade on a curve for indie developers who didn't have the resources to test more broadly

I learned this the hard way and I think about it every time I see someone post asking why their reviews are bad when the app feels fine to them

caramelization time drops from 40 min to about 18.

I used to do the standard thing: oil in pan, hot pan, onions in, then salt after they start sweating. Took forever to get them properly dark.

Two months ago I started salting them in the cutting board while the pan was still cold, leaving them about 5 minutes while I got everything else ready. The salt pulls water out before they ever hit heat, so when they go in they're already half dehydrated. They skip most of the "sweat" stage and start browning almost immediately.

Total time from raw onion to deep mahogany caramel: about 18 minutes on medium low for 2 large onions. Used to be 35 – 45 for me.

Two things I had to relearn:

- Use less salt at the start than you think. You're seasoning a smaller volume of finished onion than you started with.

- Don't crowd. The water still has to go somewhere; if the pan is full you're back to braising.

Curious if there's a downside I'm not noticing.