I Usually Talk About Career and How to Land Better Jobs.

I usually talk about career and how to land better jobs.

But there’s something that almost no one mentions:

To get paid more, you first need to know how to solve real problems.

Recently, a SaaS company reached out to me because they had "scaling issues."

It wasn’t about millions of users.

It was that the system started to break as it grew.

What I found:

Queries without indexes → unnecessary full scans

Poorly configured connection pool

Workers consuming more than the DB could handle

Non-existent timeouts

Retries that amplified the load

Nothing exotic.

Fundamentals.

After:

Analyzing with EXPLAIN ANALYZE

Tuning strategic indexes

Limiting concurrency

Properly configuring the connection pool

Adding timeouts and backoff

The system stabilized without needing to scale infrastructure.

Why am I sharing this if I usually talk about careers?

Because in interviews, everyone says:

“I know Go”

“I know microservices”

“I know distributed systems”

But few can explain:

How to detect a real bottleneck

How to align concurrency with DB capacity

Why poorly designed retries worsen latency

How to measure p95 instead of averages

That’s where your level is determined.

Better jobs don’t come from knowing more frameworks.

They come from knowing how to solve problems that others can’t.

And that is trained by building, breaking, and fixing real systems.