During that wave of layoffs at the end of last year, several of my buddies didn't escape it. Same for me—I took the severance package and went home. The first two weeks were pretty nice: sleeping until I woke up naturally, playing games, and watching shows. But by the third week, seeing my bank balance only go down and not up, I started to get anxious. Mortgage and car payments don't care whether you're unemployed or not—they get deducted when the time comes.
There was no other way, so I started lurking in various freelance order groups for work. Back when I wrote code at a company, I thought as long as your technical skills were awesome, that was enough—architecture, algorithms, performance optimization, I could talk about them off the top of my head. But after taking my first freelance job, reality slapped me hard in the face.
The client was a small e-commerce business owner who found me through a friend's introduction. He said there was a backend management system project, one-month timeline, and the price was pretty low. I was in a hurry to get started, so I took it without thinking much. The project itself wasn't hard—just some CRUD work. I used React plus Ant Design, which I knew like the back of my hand. After finishing, I ran it locally, tested it with no issues, packaged it, and sent it to the client.
Half a day later, the client sent me a screenshot on WeChat and asked, "Bro, I can't really understand your code. Can you make it neater?"
I was stunned. How much neater could code be? I opened the screenshot he sent and almost choked. It turned out he had directly opened the bundle.js file I packaged, which contained Webpack-compressed and obfuscated code—tens of thousands of lines crammed into one line, with variable names all a, b, c, d. In his eyes, it was a pile of gibberish.
I explained to him that it was compressed, used for deployment, small in size and fast to load. He half-understood and pressed further: "Then can you give me a readable version? If I want to change something later, or if someone else takes over maintenance, this is impossible to work with."
At that moment I suddenly realized that what seemed perfectly normal to me—"compression and obfuscation"—looked to the client like "this guy is unreliable, his code is written like crap." He didn't understand what Tree Shaking was, didn't know what an AST abstract syntax tree was. He only believed one thing: code has to be readable by humans.
After that I learned my lesson. Before every delivery, I used a JS formatting and compression tool to reorganize the code. The tool is simple—it restores compressed code into a format with indentation, line breaks, and variable names that are still short but at least structurally clear, then generates a document for the client to see. Sometimes I'd also proactively format the source code with prettier, add comments, and send it all together.
Guess what? For the orders I took afterward, client satisfaction went through the roof. A girl doing self-media asked me to make a small tool. After receiving the code, she was thrilled and said, "Even though I can't understand it, it just looks professional." Another client directly recommended me to his friend, saying this guy is meticulous in his work.
This made me think for a long time. We in tech easily fall into a kind of self-congratulation, thinking we're awesome because we used the newest framework or wrote a clever algorithm. But what clients actually want is very simple: the thing works, if there's a problem you can be reached, and the code shouldn't look like an ancient scroll. Especially for those non-technical clients, the standard by which they judge whether you're reliable is sometimes just whether the code looks neat.
Now in my freelance workflow, formatting code is a mandatory step. No matter how small the project, before delivery I run it through the tool and generate a readable version. Sometimes I'll also write a simple README telling the client how to deploy and how to change configurations. Just this little bit of extra effort has helped me build several long-term clients.
So you tell me, is being laid off by a big tech company scary? Yes. But sometimes, looking at it from another angle, it's precisely because I left that environment that only cared about KPIs and OKRs that I truly understood: technology ultimately serves people. What clients care about isn't how profound your code is, but whether you can make things easy and reassuring for them. And code formatting—this small thing—is exactly the switch that makes clients feel "you take them seriously."