Startup teams also aren’t great as they should be at being even slightly kind and thoughtful to their future selves.
Understanding greenfield usually means iteration, a small amount of conceptual architecture and organization before dialing into the matrix to go full Neo can go a long, long way.
Specifically, it’s easier for startups to create productive new beginners in their codebases.
Out of curiosity, how do you go about finding clients for this kind of work?
Most of my clients were from a local meetup where I eventually got to know most people quite well and they me. It was mostly word-of-mouth where people remembered "Oh! <other startup> had similar problems and WJW solved it for them".
Startups naturally thrive on an early team that loves building new things, but the flip side is that they rarely seem to go back to fix existing stuff. That leaves a gap for people like me, who prefer to take something that works poorly and make it bulletproof. For some reason this quite often seems to involve db access patterns but there's a fair bit of algorithms work too. Usually the "building new things" engineers are quite happy to let me take over the investigation into why the 150 line SQL query is slow, so it's a win-win.