He Left Big Tech Burnt Out. A Year Later, His Books Are Full.

Martin learned to code putting a flame behind his MySpace cursor and pimping out his sister’s Neopets store. Building things was always a little bit magical.

By the time he left Big Tech after nearly five years as a staff engineer, responsible for developer tooling used across an entire platform, the magic was completely gone. He’d stopped coding for fun. His work had become about SLTs and how other people felt about the output, not whether the output was actually good.

A year later, his books are full.

The Breaking Point Isn’t Always Dramatic

Martin didn’t leave because of a single bad day. He left because of years of small erosions.

A long stretch in Big Tech had hollowed out the thing that made him good in the first place. He’d spent two and a half years as an engineering manager, performance cycles, promo fights with other teams. Sixty percent of his job was admin. The rest was fighting for recognition of work he could barely remember shipping.

For engineers and designers who’ve been in corporate tech long enough, this part doesn’t need much explaining. The treadmill starts somewhere around the time you realize you haven’t built anything for yourself in years.

The 60-Day Firebreak

Before Martin took a single client call, he made himself a rule: for the first 60 days minimum, he wasn’t going to work on anything for anybody except himself.

“I didn’t want to hear any client feedback. I didn’t want to be building things with other people and how they were going to feel about it in mind. I just wanted to build things for fun again.”

He cooked every recipe he’d saved in the New York Times Cooking app. He read books. He walked his dog. He slept a lot. His Oura ring scores jumped through the roof.

The financial backstory that made this possible: Martin had made himself a promise before leaving. He would get six months of living expenses in the bank before he pulled the trigger. Not “I’m pretty sure I could find work.” Actual runway.

“If I have six months of money in the bank, I can tell myself a really believable story that for at least three months, I don’t have to worry. And at the three-month point, if I’m feeling anxious about it, I’m very confident that I can find a good paying gig within 90 days.”

This is what separates a considered exit from a panic move. The runway doesn’t just protect you financially. It gives your nervous system enough room to actually rest, which is the part most people skip entirely.

The Cottage Problem Nobody Warns You About

When work started up in June, it didn’t come at the pace Martin expected. He’d assumed the people who would hire him were VPs of Design, CTOs, Chief Product Officers, and that they’d be banging down his door. They weren’t. And the ones who were turned out to be genuinely difficult to work with.

Instead, it was founders. Exclusively. Founders with a specific problem: they had a dev shop or a head of engineering they didn’t trust anymore. They didn’t understand why a project estimated at five days had taken five weeks, and they didn’t understand why what showed up on their screen looked nothing like what they’d paid for.

But there was a wrinkle Martin hadn’t accounted for: the summer.

“Every one of these people has a cottage. I don’t have a cottage. I would love a cottage. But they were all at the cottage for July and August.”

The founders he was trying to reach were happy to chat from the dock, but nobody was actually starting a project until September or October. Half his expected revenue vaporized. By fall, he was looking at roughly half of what he’d made at Big Tech, genuinely asking himself whether this was going to work long-term.

Then September hit, everyone came back from the cottage, including some of the founders who’d first reached out over the summer, and everything changed.

What You’re Actually Selling

“It wasn’t pixels or code anymore. It was a technical co-founder, trust, and an insurance policy against the agency that burned you last time.”

The pricing shift wasn’t about charging more per hour. It was about stopping the hour conversation entirely.

“Hourly is totally the wrong move. What founders end up doing is spending more per hour for the fewest hours possible.”

The reframe: Martin wasn’t selling deliverables. He was selling a technical co-founder on retainer, trust, clarity, and a creative thought partner without the equity.

The frame that changed everything was pricing against the alternative. Not against another freelancer. Against the agency that charges $80K and delivers something the client barely recognizes. Against a full-time hire with all the overhead, culture fit risk, onboarding time, and salary attached.

When the conversation becomes “me versus a full-time engineering hire” or “me versus the shop that burned you last time,” the number stops being an objection and starts being obvious. Founders get better output, faster. They don’t pay for idle hours.

Once that clicked — really clicked — Martin stopped having to sell very hard at all.

The three-question pricing reframe:

• What would they pay a full-time hire to do this?

• What did the last agency charge them, and what did they actually get?

• What’s the cost of the problem not being solved in the next 90 days?

If your rate is less than the answer to any of those questions, you’re undercharging.

The AI Multiplier Is Real, But Not How You Think

The AI story everyone’s telling is about speed. Martin’s is about something more valuable: capacity.

“It’s not that AI makes one project take a third of the time. It’s that AI makes that project take 70% of the time, but I can do three projects at the same time.”

That’s the actual multiplier. Not raw speed on a single task. Parallel leverage across a whole client portfolio. He’s doing the work himself, reviewing everything AI generates, and feeding it high-quality input so the output is actually usable in production. He’s not a vibe-code prototyper. He’s a 15-year engineer who now has, in his words, “an unlimited amount of intermediate to senior developers I can delegate implementation work to.”

The other piece: roughly 10% as many meetings as he was in at Big Tech. The performance reviews, promo fights, status updates, gone. That time now goes directly into client work that measurably changes their businesses.

“The meetings I do have are prepared for, high-quality, and ones I’m actually excited about 90% of the time.”

What Freedom Actually Looks Like

Martin is a caregiver. Two sick elderly grandparents. Other family responsibilities. These aren’t minor logistical footnotes. They’re major, ongoing responsibilities that a standard corporate calendar would have made nearly impossible to navigate with any grace.

“Nobody owns my calendar but me. I can move things around. I can tell a client I’m available starting three weeks from now. No vacation requests. No unpaid time off filed in a system.”

He talks about high agency, not the way tech companies use the phrase, usually meaning “willing to work hard without being asked,” but in its actual sense: the ability to make independent decisions about the structure of your own life and day.

“I have violent ADHD, which is a superpower in 90% of my work. But sometimes it means the very best thing I can do for me or for a client is to go to a yoga class at two o’clock in the afternoon and come home and have a super productive afternoon and evening.”

The tradeoff is real. You don’t get to leave your worries at the office. There’s no clean clock-out. But for Martin, that’s a trade he’d make again without hesitating.

Who This Is Not For

Martin was asked directly: who is this not for?

“Someone who really values having a boss. I have some great friends who need a manager. They really need someone to tell them they’re doing a good job.”

That’s not an insult. It’s an honest observation. Some people are energized by clear directives, structured feedback, and the psychological safety of a defined role. Going out on your own strips all of that away. You set the direction. You judge the quality. You hold yourself accountable.

“If you’re someone who really struggles to follow through on your own commitments or needs to be managed, those are things you can solve for, but I don’t think you can do it solo.”

The corollary is equally important. If you already chafe against that structure, if you do your best work outside what the org chart allows, this doesn’t just give you a career. It gives you back the thing that made you good in the first place.

For Martin, that was the code he first wrote to make a cursor trail fire across a MySpace page.

He found it again.

If nobody was watching, what would you build this weekend?

This is the kind of conversation I live for. More like it every week at The Fractional Playbook.

Thanks for reading,
Gev