[HN Gopher] Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interest...
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Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
Author : ftruzzi
Score : 415 points
Date : 2021-04-19 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (truzzi.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (truzzi.me)
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| Question for the author: would you really work for $1/hr? Why?
| That's essentially zero, and for zero you could work on whatever
| you like all day. Is it being part of a team? Being able to say
| you have a job (and put in on your resume)? Is it that you don't
| have your own ideas of what to work on?
| 0x7374657665 wrote:
| Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the intersection of
| "interesting" work and "valuable" work is pretty small.
| Rochus wrote:
| Welcome to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
| csours wrote:
| What does 'developer experience' entail to you, and how does your
| company express this for prospective and new hires?
| mrweasel wrote:
| > No PHP, Java or maintenance work.
|
| I can understand not wanting do maintenance, but I also wonder:
| How much is there to be made from dealing with all that legacy
| stuff from the last 20 years? I suspect it's a lot.
| MrDOS wrote:
| Ignoring the money for a second, I think for some people
| (author clearly aside), maintenance work _can be_ the
| interesting work. As long as there 's buy-in from the business
| side of the house - they understand the goal in its full extent
| is to reduce technical debt and increase future development
| agility, and that there will be no visible changes to end users
| - it can be very rewarding to refactor old code.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Yes! Maintenance and refactoring is a huge creative
| opportunity, if management isn't thwarting you. Dismissing
| languages and maintenance outright makes think the author is
| just difficult to work with. Even in modern places,
| maintenance and refactoring simply need to be done every so
| often. That's part of the job, we can't only work on things
| that we want on someone else's dime.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Getting paid appropriately to do work that you genuinely enjoy is
| a privilege. It certainly is nice if it works out that way, but
| most of the time it does not. A lot of the work that needs to be
| done in the software world (that pays well) is just not terribly
| interesting.
|
| My work is not always very exciting, and that's okay. I work
| normal hours and have purchased my own beautiful home at 24.
| After work I have freedom to do whatever, and enough money to
| pursue pretty much any hobby that I want. My employer sponsors
| books, courses, and conferences, and provides great healthcare.
|
| I would rather have a stable, but boring, job over being broke
| and working on something interesting.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| If you're doing what you love, you'll put up with the other
| necessary crap.
|
| Eventually you can share some the unfun crap to other team
| members.
|
| Instead, what you may want to do is get into consulting.
| brailsafe wrote:
| It's baffling to me why so many in this thread are so cynical,
| when burnout and bullshit like being a "passionate" engineer are
| so hyped. Of course you need to do some things you might hate
| doing in any given job. But, software engineering is a stressful
| and often times unforgiving drudgery. The vast majority of
| startups and companies serve the most vapid or ethically
| questionable markets, or are totally opaque in terms of where
| your value goes. Every startup ever asks you to "believe in it's
| mission" and that's typically to acquired (but ostensibly to
| change the world, through handcrafted advertising). If you do
| participate in the drudgery of programming for one of these
| hapless corporate entities or pointless startups too long,
| especially with no other personal reward than money, the thought
| to end your life or switch careers might cross your mind
| frequently. Good job OP, I like the idea.
| LeicaLatte wrote:
| For double the pay, you can document my code. Triple for unit
| tests.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| How about: Hire me, pay me what I'm worth, _and_ give me
| interesting work.
|
| Why should we make any compromises on the activity that we'll
| spend the majority of our lives doing?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Because no one owes you a job you like? It's great if what
| you're good at is what others are looking for. But outside of
| tech and math that's often a rare proposition.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Conversely, we don't owe anyone labor for uninteresting work.
|
| I suppose that's the beauty of having the freedom of choice.
| hu3 wrote:
| I agree but for many the freedom of choice falls short when
| facing bills. Then one has to work on whatever pays their
| bills and it's exhausting enough to make the dream even
| harder.
|
| I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be able to work
| mostly in greenfield projects. I worked really hard to get
| here and keep working hard to stay here.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| You do owe labor in return for money though, unless you're
| an entitled tech or crypto bro who has grown up in a bubble
| without any understanding of how the other 99% of people
| live their lives (by just scraping by).
| mlboss wrote:
| That's correct. But "freedom of choice" looks like a luxury
| if run out of money.
| corobo wrote:
| It's on you to get the job to be fair. If it's not interesting
| work then you goofed by accepting the job
|
| Interesting is subjective, you can't make every job interesting
| to every person.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| rattle your network until you find a tenured professor who has
| interesting-to-you grants, and talk them into letting you join
| the lab as a visiting researcher.
|
| if you do it right they'll be overjoyed to have technical staff
| who aren't degree candidates and you'll get something tasty to
| intellectually munch on.
| yulaow wrote:
| He did not graduate so he is not eligible for any work as a
| researcher inside any eu university.
| azhenley wrote:
| Couldn't he be hired as an engineer or technical staff?
| yulaow wrote:
| I don't know for all the eu nations, but for those that I
| know staff researcher positions still require degrees (and
| there is a lot of competition to get those because they are
| even more limited in number than tenure track positions,
| just with far less requirements)
|
| In mine in particular everyone has at least a Master Degree
| with some publications. One of two even got a PHD.
| exdsq wrote:
| This isn't correct. You can work as a researcher without a
| degree, certainly in the UK. A general example would be an
| associate professor at a business school with extensive
| career experience who might contribute to some papers. An
| anecdotal example is myself; I don't have a bachelors degree
| but during my masters degree I had some summer research work.
| I ended up not finishing the masters degree but did chat
| about the possibility of going back to do a part-time PhD.
| yulaow wrote:
| I don't understand.
|
| In UK you can be associate professor without a degree?
|
| Then you talk about your time "during a master degree" but
| you say you had not a bachelors... How can you do a master
| without a bachelors?
|
| Now I understand why other members of academia, even when
| UK was part of EU, treated it as a special case for
| research positions. Btw not judging, just saying it is
| totally different of what I expected.
| exdsq wrote:
| > In UK you can be associate professor without a degree?
|
| Yes, in rare occasions! More frequently without say a
| higher degree. One that springs to mind is the current
| Professor of Poetry at Oxford University who read
| classics for their undergrad but with no further
| education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Oswald
|
| I know there are other examples but I'd need to google a
| bit to find them. Notable people who got a PhD without a
| Bachelors or Masters in the US include Wolfram, so it's
| not just in the UK where rules get a little bent.
|
| > How can you do a master without a bachelors?
|
| Experience in industry counts if its highly related. I
| was offered or interviewed for postgraduate courses at
| the University of Leeds, Oxford University, University of
| Leicester, and a few others. All in Software Engineering
| and I eventually accepted a part-time position on an MSc
| in Computer Science. A bit of rigmarole but not that much
| - I started the course at 25 with 6 years experience in
| tech. After some pestering I was able to help with some
| lecturers papers which led to the whole PhD discussion
| but dropped the MSc because it wasn't as rigorous as I
| hoped it'd be (I'm interested in the foundations of
| computer science and this was more applied). If it helps
| I've been to doctoral summer schools in both the EU and
| US without any credentials either!
|
| Maybe the UK is the only place with such ways, I emailed
| Stanford a while back (I'm moving there this Summer, my
| partners a postdoc, and wanted to try audit some of their
| postgraduate CS courses) and got shot down pretty
| quickly!
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| I understand degrees being a requirement for medicine or hard
| engineering, but for research and topics of the mind it's
| just an expensive, multi-year hazing ritual into academia.
|
| Plenty of good people go straight into industry after getting
| their BCs. (or avoid degrees entirely) because of this.
| alexf95 wrote:
| Yea i feel like a job in research would be best fit, but that
| probably also requires a certain level of graduation.
| Fomite wrote:
| It doesn't, necessarily.
|
| I've hired people to work helping support academic projects
| without ever looking at what their degree is in.
| tgb wrote:
| My lab actually did this for a bit. They hired a programmer who
| was retired but bored and just wanted to do something for far
| less than market rate. She was great and got a lot done but two
| problems:
|
| 1) It took my boss significant effort keeping her busy with
| things to do: explaining the problems we needed solved, etc. is
| non-trivial
|
| 2) Since she was working for so little, she could basically
| dictate what she was or wasn't doing. The very fact that she
| wasn't on a real salary meant it was actually harder to work
| with her in some sense.
| Fomite wrote:
| A couple notes:
|
| 1) You needn't necessarily restrict this to tenured professors.
| Indeed, plenty of new tenure-track professors have both the
| need and startup resources to potentially hire you if you're
| likely to boost their group's productivity.
|
| 2) It's hard to fund people with grant money who weren't
| written into the grant in the first place. So while grants
| might be interesting as an indicator of interest, they don't
| necessarily ensure you'll be hirable. Which means either
| patience, or hoping they have a small slush fund somewhere -
| which is _more_ likely for a tenured professor, but not
| exclusively so.
| avipars wrote:
| So true, as long as I'm being paid a living wage I'd rather build
| skills than wealth
| reggieband wrote:
| So many responses here are of the type: "My org couldn't hire
| someone like that for legitimate reasons". They then list a
| series of fears they might have with such an employee. This is
| typical engineering thought, a pessimism firmly rooted in
| avoidance of problems. Engineers tend to focus on what can go
| wrong so that they can avoid negative outcomes. One myopia of our
| discipline is we don't often consider "what would the world look
| like if this went better than expected?"
|
| So my advice to the OP is to focus on opportunities and positions
| that do not require going through engineering gatekeeping. Other
| disciplines tend to have more optimistic viewpoints and tend to
| be more willing to accept risk when they feel there is potential
| for high returns. I would recommend finding small startups that
| are looking for part-time engineering folks.
| MarblePillar wrote:
| That isn't just "so many responses", that is _every single
| response_. Never try to sell an engineer _anything_ ,
| especially not _" your self"_.
|
| Fortunately, engineers don't dispense budget.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| If you learn how to find what's interesting about the dullest of
| topics or tasks, you will never be bored a day in your life. I
| enjoy taking on tedious tasks that few people want sometimes.
| Being able to do something and do it well despite my brain
| yelling at me that it doesn't like it brings me satisfaction.
| Also, after a while my brain quiets down and starts enjoying
| itself. Perhaps the author should try this more often.
| paxys wrote:
| Wanting to do interesting work and not caring about money is the
| perfect environment to start your own project/service/company. If
| you want to work for others (especially on a contract basis),
| don't expect groundbreaking work to fall in your lap.
| decafninja wrote:
| This is interesting!
|
| My own anecdote: when I graduated from college I had zero
| experience aside from one internship at a small noname company.
| No one would hire me. I started reaching out to local companies
| big and small saying I would work for free if they'd use me. Not
| just programming jobs, but also general IT or even helpdesk jobs
| - anything remotely computer related. None took me up on my
| offer. I suppose they saw me as more of a liability than an
| asset, or that onboarding costs still wouldn't be worth having
| free labor. It was an interesting eyeopener.
|
| But since you're experienced, your story is different from mine.
| clairity wrote:
| it's not that free labor isn't worth it, it's that it's a
| lemons problem. that is, (the signaling indicates) uncertainty
| is high, which is what makes it expensive (or if lucky, a
| fantastic deal). most people are rather risk-averse and
| therefore prefer safe choices, with the commensurate
| relinquishment of potential greater gains (and greater losses).
|
| the lesson should be to value your labor correctly, as large
| deviations in perceptions of value mean that transactions won't
| happen. a more astute approach would be to communicate your
| (accurate) understanding of your own value and your willingness
| to negotiate alternate dimensions of value in exchange, like
| getting experience faster or doing more interesting work in
| exchange for less money.
|
| tl;dr: establish a common understanding of value, then
| negotiate.
| decafninja wrote:
| Of course this was communicated clearly - that the reason I
| would be willing to work for no pay was because my objective
| was to gain experience. I also mentioned that if they
| considered me valuable and worthwhile enough, to feel free to
| take me on as a "real" employee down the road.
| clairity wrote:
| that's not clear at all. you essentially keep say you'd
| "work for free", rather than "my work is worth x, let's
| exchange". the latter puts you on equal footing
| psychologically, while the former puts you at a distinct
| disadvantage.
| decafninja wrote:
| No, I mean back when I was actually doing this. The
| communications to the companies I would reach out. Not my
| posting HN.
| pwned1 wrote:
| Minimum wage makes it illegal to bring you on for zero pay just
| to get experience.
| julianlam wrote:
| Tell that to the gaming industry. There are enough people
| looking to get a foot in the door, and enough companies
| looking to turn the other way.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't know what the limitations are but unpaid internships
| are not uncommon in certain industries.
| pwned1 wrote:
| There are rules under federal law:
| https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-
| interns...
|
| Basically an internship has to benefit the intern and not
| the employer. It's akin to taking a class.
|
| Any HR rep looking at these standards would not permit
| someone to come on for free in these circumstances at the
| risk of being penalized for violating federal labor law.
| corobo wrote:
| Honestly if someone wanted to work for me for free I'd think
| it's a scam of some sort so wouldn't touch the offer
|
| Sort of a "hmm.. why is this person unhireable elsewhere.. what
| do those companies know that I don't?" combined with a concern
| of "this guy's gonna clean out the office when we go home"
| mywittyname wrote:
| Yeah, "i'll work for free" sounds an awful lot like, "you'll
| pay me with a pound of flesh."
|
| An engineer needs to be capable of earning their keep. Even
| if they are a novice.
| Mc91 wrote:
| I did something like this in the mid-1990s (looking for Unix
| sysadmin work - or something similar) and then again about four
| years ago (programming work).
|
| Both times it worked, although I had to cast a wide net and
| wait a little bit. Both were very, very small underfunded
| companies. I didn't say I'd work for free, but said I was
| working for the experience and job recommendation more than the
| money.
|
| Honestly for the second one it was more about the
| recommendation, of having something to put on my resume other
| than my own S-corp and what have you. I could get most of the
| small scale experience myself (although they pushed me into
| NoSQL, GCP/EC2 and other things I wouldn't have ventured into -
| and turning mockups into code too). I was very up front with
| them too - I promised them I would do cheap work for them for a
| month and would then be open to offers, and if someone wanted
| to hire me for six figures I would probably take it. Oddly
| enough at both companies (1996 and the more recent one) I spent
| about 18 months working for the company before being hired by a
| company actually willing to pay.
|
| In the recent situation, I also was fixated on a niche which
| made things a little more difficult for me initially, although
| now I am better off it took a little longer to get going in
| terms of getting paid. Small tech companies are generally
| looking for people who known HTML, CSS, Javascript and web
| frameworks like React. If you look like, without needing that
| much help, you can do tickets/stories to implement features on
| a web site that uses React, and can pass the standard interview
| gauntlet for that type of job, I think you will find a job
| fairly quickly.
| watwut wrote:
| It would not be legal for them to do that.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| "I would do anything" moves quickly to the bottom of the stack.
| In there I see (maybe wrongly, but when hiring first impression
| matters) no motivation. I look for people passionate about the
| work, who have skills and interest on using those. But help
| desk or programming require very different skills and are quite
| broad.
| decafninja wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at least back
| then (10+ years ago), quite a few people working helpdesk and
| IT (system admin, network admin, etc.) were CS majors. Or at
| least it seemed so from my own network. CS was seen as the
| gateway degree to any kind of computer related career, not
| just SWE. Are things different now?
|
| I am actually not a CS major - I'm an information systems
| major. Funny enough, another IS major friend and I ended up
| as SWEs (him at a FAANG at that), while a whole bunch of CS
| major friends are working in IT as system or network admins
| or helpdesk managers.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Are things different now?
|
| For me personally, if I were going to go into some other IT
| fields tomorrow, I'd skip the expensive ass degree period.
| A lot of IT feels closer to a modern trade than anything.
| decafninja wrote:
| A lot of jobs require a degree just to get past the HR
| filter though. In fact, I distinctly remember seeing a
| even a lot of helpdesk jobs requiring "degree in computer
| science or related technical major". Again, this is 10
| years ago, not sure what the landscape is like today.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Such roles still exist and a bunch of people like it.
| Instead of sitting in front of their own computer and
| hacking code and a amazing problems there it's finding
| problems in an application with communication with a
| different person. Depending on organisation and level this
| can be quite technical as well.
|
| But when hiring I look for other skills and other interests
| depending on the role and a key qualification is interest
| in the kind of role.
| ProjectBarks wrote:
| This might sound crazy but free may be worse than offering to
| charge. "Free" is saying my work offers no value and may even
| cost more through your time.
| mcguire wrote:
| One question:
|
| Who are you and why should we care?
| alex_c wrote:
| Interesting thought experiment! Let's take it one step further.
| Can the "pay what you want" value be negative?
|
| As a manager I would be responsible for providing you with a
| steady stream of interesting or meaningful work. I would have to
| structure the work to fit around your flexible schedule, shield
| you from doing the parts you don't like, and change it up if you
| start getting bored. But I would not be able to rely on your
| output for anything mission critical.
|
| How much would you pay me to provide this service to you?
|
| (Please take this as tongue-in-cheek not as a snarky comment, it
| genuinely is an interesting thought experiment despite the
| obvious issues it raises).
| ftruzzi wrote:
| You raise a very valid point and yes, it could be a net
| negative.
|
| However, what I was trying to do here is to reach organizations
| or people that already work the way I'd like, so that work is
| already organized in a flexible/async fashion and the
| arrangement can be a net positive for them.
|
| And I think you should apply the same reasoning to the
| definition of "interesting work" or "meaningful work". Try to
| see the big picture, from a bird's eye view: a piece of work
| can be interesting or meaningful even if it has boring parts.
| Almost anything has and we probably wouldn't be here as human
| beings if we couldn't handle that. Carrying sick people up and
| down the stairs is strenuous (and repetitive?) but can still be
| a net positive because you feel so good for helping them. Same
| goes for writing software or any other kind of work.
|
| I think that, as a manager, you should not shield me from the
| boring parts of any work but you should make sure that my
| overall "working experience" is a net positive for
| "interesting" and/or "meaningful".
|
| Thank you!
| antipaul wrote:
| The world is, I think, big enough for such an experiment to bear
| fruit.
|
| I predict you'll get some decent offers, so cheers mate and have
| fun!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I wish you the best of luck. I can relate to where you're at.
|
| One thing that I have been doing, my entire adult life, is
| _shipping_ product. A lot of "ship" is not fun. There's all
| kinds of boring stuff, like good design (as opposed to "just
| enough design to get started"), good coding (as in "code I'll
| understand when I come back to refactor in three months"), good
| quality (as opposed to "Who cares? I'll be out of here, before
| they run out of integer space"), good testing (as opposed to
| "I'll write a few unit tests that show it handles low-hanging-
| fruit problems"), accessibility, localization, aesthetic design,
| supporting documentation for users, administrators and
| developers, etc. You get the drift. Lots of "not-fun" stuff,
| there.
|
| For me, I've always enjoyed "finishing" projects, and that means
| _shipping_ them, so users get their grubby little paws on my
| work, and start abusing it (and, sometimes, me).
|
| I'm taking on a CTO role (I've actually been doing it for months,
| but we're formalizing it). I was asked to write my own job
| description. I used words like "Accountable" and "Responsible" a
| lot. I got used to that, working for a Japanese corporation for
| 27 years.
|
| Not fun. But I get to run the whole show, and _ship_. That 's my
| idea of fun.
|
| Oh, and I totally relate to the thing about LeetCode interviews
| and whatnot. I have tens of thousands of lines of code, ship-
| ready projects that people can clone, build, and run, dozens of
| articles, etc. It has been my experience that these are totally
| ignored; which I consider... _not sane_.
|
| I have found the greatest pleasure in writing software that helps
| people help people. These organizations don't usually get "top-
| shelf" talent, so they tend to have a great need.
|
| Again, good luck.
| fasteo wrote:
| No offense whatsoever, but after reading this I was expecting to
| see a true rockstar CV, but that's no the case.
|
| You are brave, tough. And I mean if the most positive way.
| dnndev wrote:
| Be your own boss. Start consulting. It's interesting everyday.
| You get to pick the work you accept.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| It's so good to hear someone else put into words what I feel.
| Having fulfilling work has been absolutely my #1 goal for as long
| as I can remember, like since I was 12 or 13 years old, and by
| that I mean it's more important than getting married, saving for
| retirement, traveling, having fun. It is a constant thought every
| waking moment in my life, the same way when you're hungry it's on
| the forefront of everything you do.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I was always deathly afraid of this, in fact I was never really
| interested in wage labor period. For some years my ideal was
| doing independent consulting where I had control, I could pick
| what I worked on and could get a ton of exposure both to
| technical issues and wider business experience.
|
| Well it quickly became apparent that that really wasn't an
| option for some dumb kid. I had tried freelancing for a few
| years but got sick of the overwhelming amount of people who
| just wanted me to update their WP site. After humming around
| for a year or so I gave up trying for anything greater and just
| accepted a string of low paying, "boring" development jobs.
|
| > I genuinely believe that for those of us who feel this way,
| there is nothing else to do but pursue it.
|
| Yeah I'm starting to feel this way again, so fuck it, might as
| well. I haven't been nearly as productive as I should have been
| the past years though. I have a better idea of what I want and
| there's really only two choices. One of continuing stagnation
| or one of putting in the work and attempting to pursue
| something better. We'll see though, I'm not betting on anything
| working out.
| yosito wrote:
| I'm not primarily a financially motivated person. And I would
| prefer to spend my time doing something interesting. But in my
| experience, taking on some one else's projects that are
| interesting but not well paid has always gone badly.
|
| Positions are usually low paid for one of two reasons: either
| there isn't a budget for it, or there is but they're being cheap
| and cutting corners. If there isn't a budget, that's a sign of a
| failing organization or a bad startup idea, so probably not a job
| you should take. If they're being cheap, that's a sign that they
| don't respect or value the people doing the work, which is a huge
| red flag.
|
| I've taken jobs that were essentially volunteer work because I
| got to work on projects that were interesting to me. I've also
| taken jobs that weren't that interesting to me which paid
| generously. In the end, much of my volunteer work wasn't valued,
| and seen as disposable. The more highly paid work never got
| interesting, but having a decent amount of money took off a lot
| of the financial stress and ultimately made me happier and
| enabled me to spend more of my free time on things that
| interested me.
|
| At this point, no matter how interesting, there are only two
| people I would do underpaid work for: myself, and my grandmother.
| vehemenz wrote:
| What about PHP or Java has anything to do with not "programming
| at a more advanced level"?
|
| These are general-purpose programming languages. Due to their
| design, some patterns/paradigms might seem more natural to
| implement, but you can build anything you want with them.
|
| For an experienced programmer eschewing conventions with this
| "resume", I am surprised by this comment.
| atraac wrote:
| It kinda makes him sound like a spoiled junior who only touched
| the 'hip' stuff and is disgusted by a sign of stability. I
| remember being in that place as well.
| MsMowz wrote:
| >For an experienced programmer eschewing conventions with this
| "resume", I am surprised by this comment.
|
| They only have about a year of full-time engineering
| experience, so they might not recognize this yet. (Not trying
| to talk him down; plenty of people without much experience
| still do valuable work, but it's only natural to have blind
| spots.)
| jjk166 wrote:
| You're never going to find a job that's constantly interesting
| and fun. Even if you love doing something normally, there will be
| days when you have to do it, and that will eventually become
| unpleasant.
|
| Don't strive to do what you love, do what you take pride in. When
| you are working towards a goal which resonates with you
| personally, all the tedious, unpleasant, painful moments and all
| the other obstacles in your way just make your eventual triumph
| sweeter.
| jedberg wrote:
| > You pay what you want, per hour
|
| Just a technicality, but if he sets the number of hours a week,
| then he is still somewhat in control of his own paycheck. If I
| were the employer, I'd want to set the hourly rate as well as a
| fixed number of hours per week, or at least a max.
| d0100 wrote:
| In a similar venue, I'd really like to get some 4-6h work done
| per week as freelance projects, but it is very hard to find the
| kind of work that fit short, weekly hours like this
| ctvo wrote:
| Without a need for money, I need to rely on this person's ability
| to be a professional out of the goodness of their heart. Nothing
| in that post or their previous work says I can rely on that.
| Frankly nothing in the post or their history shows they have the
| ability to deliver value that outweights the headache of
| planning, managing, and integrating them into an existing team
| knowing how fickle the relationship can be.
|
| It's not similar to a contractor relationship, since there
| there's at least contracts and deliverables that give some
| clarity to planning.
| lstodd wrote:
| As if a craving for money somehow makes professional out of ..
| whatever.
|
| You completely misunderstand what "professional" means and what
| the "professional pride" is about.
| moritonal wrote:
| So Francesco says they refuse to do technical interviews and says
| their CV and Github are proof enough.
|
| The CV shows experience as a freelance engineer at Apple for a
| bit, then an engineer for Samsung which they were made redundant
| from. Their GitHub is 3 projects, a python script, a breakout
| board and then a beta libary. They argue that's fine though
| because they'd work for PS1/hr, but the real cost of an upfront
| hire is my time, not money.
|
| The author seems to not understand how key money is for the
| relationship between manager and employee. I have plenty of
| employee's who'll work on interesting stuff in their own hours,
| but I pay them so they stay around and do the boring bits like
| docs, DR, testing, support, bus-factoring.
| [deleted]
| defaultname wrote:
| "but the real cost of an upfront hire is my time, not money"
|
| The most arduous hiring processes are often little more than an
| illusion of selection, yielding a process that is more the
| rolling of dice. Most hiring processes hire based upon
| interview skills that have extraordinarily little correlation
| with job performance.
|
| Google has such a famous interview process that everyone tries
| to clone it. For that they get employees with an average tenure
| of 3.2 years, made worse that internal project-to-project
| migration is endemic. They have a tiny core of institutional
| knowledge, and then a passing army of travelers.
|
| This industry would be far more robust if it hired quickly and
| fired fast, because the _only_ way you know how someone will do
| in the role /team/org is by actually having them in the
| role/team/org. Everything else is just loose proxies that do
| little. Iterate through people and just punt out the ones that
| don't work. That _shouldn 't_ be a big deal.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Interviews aren't the only cost of hiring. Onboarding is very
| expensive for knowledge workers.
| defaultname wrote:
| Onboarding is expensive at _dysfunctional_ organizations.
| Further, the reality that churn is high among better
| employees [1] offsets the concern.
|
| But regardless, going through an extensive vetting process
| is an illusion. It has extraordinarily little correlation
| with actual work fit or productivity, but the more
| "rigorous" the process, the more likely you are to stick
| with a poor fit.
|
| [1] - low performers will hang around forever. The
| fundamental of the hire slow/fire slow reality is that
| eventually every organization is 80% dead weight. If you
| want to avoid onboarding costs (versus dealing with the
| issues that make onboarding expensive, which is almost
| always institutional liabilities), hire the worst
| candidates and they'll be with you forever.
| SilurianWenlock wrote:
| perfectly said +1
| johncessna wrote:
| > This industry would be far more robust if it hired quickly
| and fired fast
|
| Agreed 100%. Maybe the fail fast movements in the SDLC,
| devops, marketing, and product management will start reaching
| into HR.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I didn't even know Apple or any of the other FAANG's hired
| freelancers.
| bserge wrote:
| Quite a few "AI" companies hire their "AI" via intermediaries
| like Lionbridge and Appen heh
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| All big corporations hire consultants when they can't hire
| (freeze or fast enough) but need specialized skills or extra
| hands.
| hintymad wrote:
| I'd also add that interesting or meaningful work itself is a
| scarce resource. One has to work on finding such work, instead
| of waiting for someone to give that work. One also has to
| compete for such work. Salary is a small factor in the
| equation. Indeed, salary sometimes is a signal in this case
| instead of a barrier. For a meaningful project, free is
| probably more expensive than an above-market pay.
| salil999 wrote:
| Their GitHub profile has more than 3 projects - you might have
| only looked at the pinned ones.
|
| But overall, I somewhat agree with Francesco. I used to work at
| a large corporation where majority of the work was minor config
| changes and rolling out deployments for handsome pay (somewhat
| KTLO work). I left because I wasn't growing my career. As
| companies get bigger the money gets bigger as well but the
| interesting work gets much smaller. At the end of the day, once
| you have a solid product in place you need a lot more people to
| just keep it running vs. work on some very interesting
| technical work. I think applied research is the best way to go
| for very interesting technical work but I think the bar is
| pretty high for that.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| KTLO = "keep the lights on"
|
| Basically just barebones maintenance to keep a product
| running.
| dragosmocrii wrote:
| But if the work becomes smaller, and they pay bigger, doesn't
| that mean you now have more time on your hands and more
| financial security to do something that piques your interest?
| I understand that one would like to switch from a boring but
| well paid job, in order to grow their career, but I feel this
| is for people who need to be told what to do. If you're not
| that type of person, you have so many opportunities for
| growth: study a new technology, join an open source project,
| identify a way to optimize/improve a process at your current
| boring job and convince management to do it... If you have
| the initiative, you can create the opportunities that you
| seek. But if you truly are bored of your current job, the
| people you work with, etc etc then yeah, there's no point
| staying even if the pay is great (reminds me of Tony Hsieh's
| Vesting in Peace moment he described in his book, or his job
| at Oracle)
|
| [Disclaimer: by using "you" I am not addressing you
| personally]
| the_only_law wrote:
| > But if the work becomes smaller, and they pay bigger,
| doesn't that mean you now have more time on your hands and
| more financial security to do something that piques your
| interest?
|
| Depends on the environment I suppose. If its a classic but-
| in-seat, locked down, corporate environment, you're
| probably still constrained for a similar amount of time.
| salil999 wrote:
| > But if the work becomes smaller, and they pay bigger,
| doesn't that mean you now have more time on your hands and
| more financial security to do something that piques your
| interest?
|
| I actually used to think similarly. I might have worded it
| badly but when I mean the work becomes smaller I am talking
| about scope and impact - not necessarily the effort
| required. The example I can give is what I described above:
| config changes. At a high level it sounds pretty simple but
| when you delve deeper into how your company/team works with
| such technologies then there are many barriers in place
| which hinder you from getting work done efficiently. And
| processes are slow. In my old team it used to take ~a month
| to deploy our software world-wide.
|
| You are correct about financial security. At least for me,
| I am not comfortable enough taking a risk to start
| something on my own or make a big career change.
|
| I think the overall goal is that you SHOULD be told what to
| do - up to a certain extent. I am a software engineer so an
| example for me would sound like "design me a system that
| does this" or "a customer is asking for this feature
| request" and that's it. Everything else can and should be
| left upon the engineers to figure out. Good engineers will
| design a good system with respect to time for delivery and
| feature request compatibility.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > They argue that's fine though because they'd work for PS1/hr,
| but the real cost of an upfront hire is my time, not money.
|
| Well if it's freelance work there are situations where the
| upfront time cost is not massive, especially if it's a task
| with a limited scope. I know this because I hire freelancers.
|
| But yea, I don't have a bag of small-scope, interesting and
| meaningful tasks lying around...
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Everyone I've ever worked with just does the tasks they want
| they way they want and if you twist their arm they will do
| things that advance the mission and benefit paying customers
| grudgingly.
| dontchooseanick wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of https://dilbert.com/strip/2016-08-07
|
| :)
| ftruzzi wrote:
| I completely understand your point of view and I would think
| the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work
| I'm trying to avoid.
|
| I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay
| around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and
| in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office
| if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-
| crushing for me. I might be happy doing that kind of work part-
| time and remotely (almost nobody offers part time work) or I
| might want to do that later in life.
|
| I read a post about Gumroad here on HN, and that's how I want
| to work. The way Gitlab does it is also very interesting.
|
| There must be other people who feel and think the same, and the
| post is just a way to try to reach them.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think the solution needs to live on both fronts.
|
| IMO the boring bits are boring because there's no time spent
| to make them not boring.
|
| On all layers of society there are tasks that are under-
| tooled and under-organized and if you make them worth doing,
| people will enjoy doing them 24/7.
| langitbiru wrote:
| I created a part-time jobs board, ParttimeCareers
| (https://parttime.careers). I collect remote and part-time
| jobs (mostly engineering jobs, but sometimes marketing jobs).
|
| Yeah, I can see where you are coming from. Some people want
| to look for part-time jobs because they want to spend more
| time with their passions, kids, parents, or friends.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| if you don't care about pay and you want to work on
| interesting projects, why not start your own?
|
| people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not
| because it's fun. If you are in a position where you don't
| need to pay the bills with work, then you're in a great
| position and can have fun all day long - so why not just do
| that?
|
| If you work on something that _also_ turns out to be
| marketable then you might even end up with a viable business
| that you love working on.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay,
| not because it's fun.
|
| If a position across the street becomes available which
| allows you to pursue a personal goal you aspire and afford
| your current lifestyle, would you remain at your current
| "non-fun" job or give it a shot and apply?
|
| Many people don't just get job because they have bills to
| pay, they get jobs that they don't like because there is no
| alternative available to them which meshes with their
| lives.
|
| To an extent, you could argue "that's personal
| responsibility, everyone makes tough choices".
|
| Then again, the author tacitly references to the fact they
| were still obligated to physically attend an office space,
| even though they could their work remotely. Now expand that
| to the millions of workers who are forced to make long
| commutes.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| obviously there's such a thing as better or worse jobs,
| but OP suggested that they were willing to work on
| whatever, as long as it's fun, for any arbitrary amount
| of pay.
|
| So OP is in a position where money is not important to
| them. So why have a job at all? Have a fun or meaningful
| hobby instead, or start a personal project.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > So why have a job at all?
|
| The author doesn't ask so much for a job, as reflects
| about something more profound: meaningful, purposeful
| relationships with others which enables them to manifest
| their morals, values, identity,...
|
| Interesting work isn't interesting for the sake of
| spending 8+ hours a day "doing" something. It only
| becomes interesting when it has an impact on the world
| which one feels is meaningful.
|
| For sure, a novelist could write books for no other
| reason then deriving enjoyment of the sheer act of
| committing words to paper or a screen. But the vast
| majority of people feel that the things they do in life
| truly become meaningful when they are seen, used,
| enjoyed,... by others.
|
| One could argue that one could do so by volunteering,
| taking initiative, or starting one's own business.
| However, the vast majorities of opportunities to enter
| meaningful professional relationships still involve
| signing a dotted line and a salary.
| ska wrote:
| > work on interesting projects, why not start your own?
|
| For what it's worth, many people who don't need the
| paycheck, or don't need a particular paycheck still go to a
| "real" job just because the scope of what they can do on
| their own doesn't match what they want to achieve.
|
| People also join projects to learn things that are
| harder/less efficient to learn on your own.
|
| I'm certainly not saying you can't do an interesting
| project on your own, just that many people are interested
| in projects they can't practically do on their own. Some
| might scratch that itch with an open source project or
| whatever, but especially if it requires hardware
| development, it may not be practical for many individuals.
| PH01 wrote:
| There are plenty of people who feel and think the same.
|
| Many people find it very difficult to understand that money
| is not always a motivator. This is a particularly difficult
| concept for managers to deal with.
|
| If an employee is not motivated by additional remuneration,
| or in the case where they do not require an income, the
| relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally
| different.
| munk-a wrote:
| > Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's
| nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing
| for me.
|
| The only times this ever happened to me was while I worked in
| the gaming industry and I absolutely still had work available
| - but we had some pretty rough overtime expectations that
| lead to constant overtime even if a different department was
| behind.
|
| On principle I would just sit there and relax as best as I
| could in the office if my team wasn't behind. But, keep in
| mind, that this was also all unpaid overtime at the
| employee's expense because thank you EA lobbying and a
| terrible industry. I occasionally lost money on these
| evenings since transit would shut down and I'd need to cab
| home.
|
| Now that I've left the gaming industry I doubt I'll ever be
| in that position again and I continue to have oodles of work
| in front of me, though, due to ADD and such - I often have
| trouble with motivating myself to do the boring bits they are
| part of the job and go with the good.
| quentin_dck wrote:
| The way you talk about the work culture you want to avoid
| makes me think you might be interested in "opale" companies
| and the way they operate. Check "Reinventing Organisations"
| by Frederic Laloux, there are a couple of software and none
| software company examples which might be of interest to you.
| harikb wrote:
| You may want to rephrase your proposal a bit. Include the
| part that you are willing to do the boring parts of an
| otherwise interesting project.
|
| The way it is worded, it would sound to me, as a hiring
| manager, that you might not finish the work. Because we all
| know the prototyping / experimentation part of a project is
| the most challenging and rewarding. Taking it live will
| involve dealing with the boring parts.
|
| I am not claiming you _are_ such a person, but you might want
| to make it clear.
| ggggtez wrote:
| > The way it is worded, it would sound to me, as a hiring
| manager, that you might not finish the work
|
| You read that correctly. The OP said clearly he has no
| intention to do documentation or testing, meetings, or much
| of anything other than just write code for about 40 hours
| and then quit.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| I think you'd really like Jason Fried's writing. You can find
| some short posts
| [here](https://m.signalvnoise.com/author/jason-fried/), but
| his book _It doesn 't have to be crazy at work_ is really
| great too.
| humbleMouse wrote:
| You'll keep doing the "interesting work" until it all turns
| into "Boring work", just a matter of time
| onion2k wrote:
| _Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there 's
| nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing
| for me._
|
| That should literally never be the case for a developer
| though.
|
| You can always be improving the documentation, increasing the
| test coverage, optimizing for speed/bandwidth/complexity/some
| other metric you've measured, working out how to measure
| something, learning new tools or tech that could be applied
| to a project, working on a spike for some future feature that
| needs upfront research.
|
| If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't
| want to do then you're not a developer. You're a hacker. You
| want to hack what you see as the fun stuff rather than
| developing complete, robust applications that can ship.
| That's fine, and loads of fun, but no one will pay you to
| that. You don't get a role like that unless you're some sort
| of programming savant on a par with the likes of John Carmack
| or Fabrice Bellard - someone has proven they can invent
| amazing things by being left to their own devices.
| Unfortunately, you really need to prove yourself first before
| you can land a gig like that. If it was easy we'd all have
| done it.
| asjdflakjsdf wrote:
| eh, that's not really the case in a lot of developer jobs
| these days. A lot of agile/scrum adoption/bastardization
| has meant that all work done has to be decided by the team
| and pretty much every piece of work has to be approved by a
| product manager. This can often lead to some demoralising
| meetings where you can either lie about the
| effort/risk/goal or you can give a true value estimate that
| gets shot down. If you lie, you can end up spending your
| own free time working on that refactor or documentation
| etc. For most devs working on a codebase, its not theirs,
| and they don't determine what has priority.
|
| In reality, for a lot of people, if you start refactoring
| the codebase while waiting for a new task you are likely to
| break something and its just not worth the hassle for the
| developer or the company.
|
| Learning new tools is always great ofc but it can be very
| hard to find the motivation in such a role, where unless
| you are a senior developer, you probably won't have much
| say on adoption, and you will likley just develop a half
| baked understanding of a new library that you will never
| get to use in production. Its much better to have some real
| free time where you can focus on your own projects and
| learn that way.
|
| So in short, maybe it should never be the case that devs
| are in that position, but it often is. Especially for devs
| with less experience
| pmarreck wrote:
| > if you start refactoring the codebase while waiting for
| a new task you are likely to break something
|
| The risk of this is in proportion to the lack of test
| coverage. If you are afraid to refactor, this should be
| an indication that you need to apply more test coverage,
| so do that first.
| dkasper wrote:
| That's pretty sad and disempowering. For what it's worth
| at companies like Facebook it's completely the opposite.
| If you aren't taking any initiative you will not meet
| expectations at performance review.
| sidlls wrote:
| I just had a good chuckle at this. I'm skeptical, to say
| the least. I don't have direct experience. But I do work
| at a company that has poached several FAANG employees
| this past year and whose thoughts...differ from yours.
| gfaure wrote:
| I can second dkasper's observations -- the PSC cycle is
| engineered to reward initiative. That said, depending on
| the team, the practice does not always follow the theory,
| so it makes sense that the FB employees your company
| could poach may have been the ones unsatisfied with the
| way their team rewarded initiative.
| tacon wrote:
| Kent Beck became a former Facebook employee because he
| wasn't in to proving he was moving the needle on
| Facebook's key metrics. He was only giving world class
| mentoring to young Facebook engineers and improving the
| development culture.
| username90 wrote:
| Likely you were able to poach them since they didn't
| thrive in that environment. Or you got them from the more
| traditional top-down Microsoft, Apple or Amazon.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Or he paid more, had more interesting work, clear path
| leadership was present, wfh options, family vibe, stock
| options, less corporate culture, etc..
| burntoutfire wrote:
| That sounds like academia, where people are also expected
| to be constantly innovative on demand and, when the
| majority just can't pull it off, they invent BS research
| and produce worthless papers which clog the system.
| ruraljuror wrote:
| > If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you
| don't want to do then you're not a developer. You're a
| hacker.
|
| This point parallels the distinction made in the Software
| Engineering at Google flamingo book between programming and
| engineering. Engineering comprises the tools and processes
| to maintain software over time (this is a rough
| paraphrase), of which docs, for example, is essential.
|
| So to use their language with your point: this sounds
| purely like programming and perhaps not engineering.
| ketzo wrote:
| I agree with your overall sentiment, but:
|
| > If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you
| don't want to do then you're not a developer.
|
| Don't we already have enough gatekeeping in software
| development? I don't particularly enjoy writing
| documentation, despite how important I know it to be. That
| doesn't make me "not a developer." If I were lazy and
| simply chose not to _do_ the things that bored me (despite
| their importance), it might make me a _bad_ developer (or
| more accurately a developer of bad software).
|
| I design and implement software. That makes me a software
| developer. The pieces of that process that I find boring or
| exciting are tangentially related at best.
| gtowey wrote:
| > Don't we already have enough gatekeeping in software
| development?
|
| No. In fact I hope anyone who's actually worked in the
| software industry would see that we _don 't have nearly
| enough!_
|
| Look I'll agree with you about the evils of gatekeeping
| if we're talking about who gets to call themselves an
| artist or a writer. Those kinds of distinctions rarely
| create life or death consequences.
|
| But software can. Not all the time, but certainly in
| medical, airplane control, banking and financial, and
| many many more areas.
|
| I wish software would take notes from other engineering
| fields like structural or architectural. Can you imagine
| an engineer building a bridge who was like "I don't want
| to do the boring stuff like stress analysis or geological
| surveys, I just want to make cool shapes and build them!"
| Can you imagine trusting your life to a bridge built like
| that?
|
| Software increasingly runs our world and real software
| engineers who work on things that really actually matter
| know they have a responsibility to "do all the boring
| things" because those things are _essential_ to doing
| their job right. Hearing about major hacks and exploits
| every day like SolarWinds, Experian, Facebook that expose
| our personal information and put us at risk makes me feel
| like we desperately need more gatekeeping in our field to
| keep cowboys and hackers from getting the chance to get
| anywhere near these systems.
|
| I've been in this career for 20 years and the thing I
| learn more and more is that writing code is perhaps the
| most trivial aspect of what we do. It's everything around
| it -- the process, the testing, the security, the
| collaboration and how teams and organizations operate
| that are the real challenges to be solved. Anyone can
| hack together some working code. The hard part is the
| _systems_ and _organizational structures_ in which it
| operates.
|
| There are plenty of things to work on in software which
| are of no real consequence, but as the OP is finding it's
| pretty difficult to find someone who wants to pay you to
| work on something which has no value. That's called a
| hobby not a profession.
| ketzo wrote:
| Huh. Plus one to you -- you have meaningfully changed my
| opinion.
| ipaddr wrote:
| As important as those things feel after 20 years you must
| remember you are hired to write code. As easy as code is
| to write without none of the other processes are
| required.
|
| If they wanted someone to just write documentation you
| wouldn't be hired. A technical writer would be.
|
| If they wanted someone to just test you wouldn't be
| hired. A QA person would.
|
| Same for whatever processes you create. They would hire a
| process specialist.
|
| Same for project management. They would hire a pmp
| certified person first.
|
| Same for business analysis and business requirement
| gathering.
|
| As a developer there are better people to do all of those
| jobs at better rates. None of them can code. That's why
| you are hired. If you couldn't do that than your qa
| abilities don't matter.
|
| Things have changed over 20 years. Not every company has
| a qa team or bas or support team. So these tasks end up
| being picked up by the developer. Often if this slows
| development teams are created of non-developer
| specialists. Some developers end up doing very little
| coding because your job is to go to meetings about
| projects that never start. But you are still hired to
| code they just need you on standby.
|
| Anyone cannot hack together something that works. Only a
| developer can. A hacker would find ways to use an
| existing system in an unintended ways.
|
| Gatekeeping over this makes you more management than
| developer.
|
| The tao of programming has a different understanding of
| what a developer is and isn't
|
| https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
| galangalalgol wrote:
| People are better at what they enjoy, but I know very few
| people who enjoy documentation. I have apent most of my
| career as what the gp would call a hacker. My redeeming
| quality is probably my love of testing. I despise formal
| methodologies and processes, and people who fall in love
| with tools or languages or language features are hard for
| me to work with.
| tasogare wrote:
| I don't understand that general lack of love for writing
| documentation. It's a part I like very much in a project:
| explaining how it works, why some things are done a
| certain way, the limitations of the software, the
| possible configuration options... It's funto write.
| munk-a wrote:
| I definitely don't begrudge anyone who likes
| documentation - but we all have different parts of the
| dev cycle that we like - some folks love to architect
| solutions and hate implementation because of the fiddly
| bits and details - other people dislike the stress of
| having to come up with overarching approaches and get
| analysis paralysis but when it comes to splatting out the
| vision into code it's meditative. Still other folks love
| to break things and enjoy needling edge cases in unit
| tests (if you find one of these or are one of these -
| know their value, they are a hot commodity). Then other
| folks love the teaching/explaining part that comes with
| documentation.
|
| I _think_ that there is a way we can improve as an
| industry to let more people specialize into their niches
| (which would move us closer to a factory /assembly line
| sort of setup) but right now most developers are artisans
| that receive some vague ticket and produce code and
| everything for it as a result.
| tarsinge wrote:
| > If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you
| don't want to do then you're not a developer. You're a
| hacker.
|
| Well put. Professional software is only a mean for business
| not an end by itself. I recommend not deriving your
| satisfaction from code only if you work for a company
| otherwise you risk to both spoil your hobby and always be
| unhappy at work.
| plutonorm wrote:
| So what do you derive satisfaction from if you don't
| enjoy coding for its own sake?
| aembleton wrote:
| Problem solving
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Just as an example, having to stay in the office if
| there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-
| crushing for me.
|
| > That should literally never be the case for a developer
| though.
|
| After 20+ years I've both been in such a position FULL
| TIME, as have others (eg: Many devs at ServiceNow) - hired
| on to work on cool things at an old small company and then
| literally sat around every day with no tasks and no
| responsibilities while everyone around me either didn't
| show up or watched TV on their monitors (open-plan btw).
|
| I've seen big company devs do the same, making up busy-work
| tasks and literally not committing any code for months at a
| time playing the priority-game of "wait until something
| more important comes up, someone else will make a
| workaround" which was surprisingly effective.
|
| The reality that a developer shows up and have nothing to
| do happens OFTEN in all sorts of organizations - eg last
| day of sprint, how many times have you pulled in a new
| multi-day ticket? Developer accountability is at an all-
| time low when software developers (across many sub-
| disciplines) can't make accurate estimates, can't meet
| anyone's estimates anyway, and are at an all-time-high
| demand. Managers are in a different boat, but same result.
| Perverse incentives and lack of a consensus (or willpower)
| on what constitutes value makes for do-nothing-and-get-paid
| while someone else does the work.
| onion2k wrote:
| There will always be times when you don't have anything
| that you've been told to work on.
|
| That is not the same as having nothing to do.
|
| At a certain "senior" level (in terms of attitude rather
| than job title) you're expected to be a self-starter and
| think of things to do for yourself. Once you can do that
| you have no excuse for having nothing to do.
| watwut wrote:
| In my experience, it is not like that at all. The not
| having anything to do simply does not happen. What
| happens is "not being under pressure". But I was always
| able to find useful stuff to do, not including learning.
|
| I do learning in work time. Learning could be backup for
| when there is truly nothing to do, like when git is down
| or something. But those chances are so rare, that I have
| to learn while there is stuff to do.
|
| > eg last day of sprint, how many times have you pulled
| in a new multi-day ticket?
|
| I was in exactly one team where you would wait on this
| situation. In literally all other teams, it was 100%
| normal to work on something multiday for next sprint. And
| that one team was dysfunctional in more then one way.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| If the organization or the product has any amount of
| complexity, all of those have communication roadblocks.
| While it's technically possible to always be learning or
| practicing something, much of the effort will be wasted by
| either a focused or a bureaucratic organization. Repeatedly
| doing work just to give the company an unlikely option on
| it is counter-productive as it leads to burnout. It's
| better to stop work when enough is done for the day or week
| to stay focused on the efforts that matter.
|
| Probably the best way to apply the "if you have time to
| lean, you have time to clean" mindset, if it must assert
| itself, is to actually let developers stuff packages or
| weed the grounds or something else that can clear their
| minds. :)
| the_only_law wrote:
| I have no problem whatsoever with staying around and doing
| the boring bits. But if those are exclusively the job, that's
| when I take issue.
| folkrav wrote:
| > that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid.
|
| The boring bits _are_ part of the job.
|
| > I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to
| "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-
| time and in an office.
|
| The part about "in an office" is a fair goal, but if you want
| to avoid docs/tests/support/refactoring work, don't do this
| job. Writing code is just one part of it, any way you take
| it, and avoiding the rest is cutting corners. Even our
| consultants have to write tests and update docs.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the
| boring bits"
|
| I'm a little ADD, so my most hated work is paperwork and
| administrivia. Nevertheless, I recognize that it is sometimes
| necessary (documentation, performance evals, collecting
| metrics, etc.) and I just get my favorite coffee and suck it
| up (the work, but also the coffee).
|
| Programmers have arguably the least boring jobs in the world
| (we can literally automate all the most boring bits except
| for certain types of paperwork/administrivia) so to hear a
| developer complain about doing a little bit of boring work
| smacks of a special brand of entitlement to me. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| > Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's
| nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing
| for me.
|
| This only happens at terrible, un-enlightened companies who
| are more willing to waste both of your time and pay you a
| little less than they are to either give you meaningful work
| or let you go to the beach but stay on-call. Bosses should
| not be babysitters.
| flatline wrote:
| Don't want to stay around to do the boring bits required to
| make a working product that serves a real world use case? Go
| into academia! Not making a generalization about academics,
| it's just that academia is one of the few places you can
| carve out a place to just work on interesting things and get
| paid for it.
| eloff wrote:
| Just look for part time positions. You can also try to make
| your own by applying for full time jobs and then springing
| the part time thing on them at the salary negotiation phase.
| Yeah, some will balk, but make a cogent argument about how
| working less hours means your performance per hour should be
| higher. Which is easily supported by current research.
| Provide citations if you want. It's sufficiently hard to find
| good developers, that if you're good enough you can get jobs
| like this.
|
| I've been working part time, fully remote last year and it
| was wonderful. I don't think I'd go back to full time work.
|
| After achieving enough trust with the company, I negotiated
| working alternating weeks. Having a 9 day weekend every 5
| work days is incredible. Yeah, I didn't make much money, but
| I spend that time on my startup, so maybe it will pay off one
| day. Either way it is a lot more fun!
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > I read a post about Gumroad here on HN, and that's how I
| want to work. The way Gitlab does it is also very
| interesting.
|
| But surely they do _a lot_ of boring work at those companies
| too, as in all tech companies?
| ftruzzi wrote:
| Of course, but if it's part-time and full remote then it
| doesn't take away most of your day/life and I would have no
| problem with that. I also do translation work which can be
| tedious at times but I really enjoy it because I can do it
| from anywhere and just a few hours per week.
|
| The "needs to be interesting" part is more tied to the "pay
| what you want" thing.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do
| for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me
|
| Maybe nothing you want to do, but I doubt there was nothing
| to do. Improving docs, tests, small refactoring to old code
| to make it more readable are a few examples.
| brundolf wrote:
| Have you considered just coming up with your own projects?
| Set some arbitrary, useless goal that will be an interesting
| engineering challenge, and have at it. Nobody will force you
| to write docs or do any other "boring bits". It's a great
| outlet in my experience.
| mcshicks wrote:
| I retired close to 7 years ago, and I have a similar set of
| guidelines for doing part time work. However I have another
| stipulation which is that if I don't personally know you, I'm
| not interested, at least for paid work. I've done some
| volunteer work where I've had introductions from someone I
| know and that's worked great. And for any given paid job the
| max I will work is 20 hours/month. That is I might work more
| than that, but I will only bill that. That allows me the
| flexibility to put the effort in I think is needed to do what
| I think is acceptable quality, without imposing my standards
| on someone who just wants something that will solve a problem
| immediately in front of them. Good luck!
| op03 wrote:
| That depends on your job title and where it falls on the
| explore-exploit spectrum.
|
| If your job is to keep the gold mine running all your
| underlings are working on the mine. If they go do something
| else its a waste of your time and resources.
|
| If your job is to explore the jungle for new mines, then the
| story is very different. Its more about finding as many curious
| cheap chimps as you can and sending them out in every
| direction. In such cases imaginative managers use all the
| chimps they can find.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| The ATX breakout board looks great, thanks for pointing it out!
| I think that's a good example of an interesting/fulfilling
| project, since those generally don't exist and the author talks
| about how it was a direct request from regular people, not some
| corporate directive.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Don't hire a developer if you want a tester or a support agent
| or a document writer. Developers cost so much more why not
| target your task to an expert in that area?
| Tade0 wrote:
| _The project I was working on was moved from Milan to Poland in
| what was most likely an effort to downsize the project and cut
| costs._
|
| Odd choice of location given that hailing from Poland and having
| lived in Italy I had an opportunity to compare costs of
| employment and generally they're not that different.
|
| Perhaps Milan is exceptional - can anyone from that location tell
| me whether EUR60k annual costs of employment are considered a lot
| for a senior developer?
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| I was just going to comment on that.
|
| Not sure how reliable is this info, but Glassdoor suggests that
| salary in Milan could be slightly lower than what I would
| expect from average software engineer in Poland.
|
| https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/milan-software-engineer-s...
| pzduniak wrote:
| I'd imagine that what you get for $25k/yr in Poland is way
| better than the ROI on $30k/yr in Italy. Depends on the stack
| though. Most corporate Java people earn peanuts here.
|
| It's also likely that they replaced a well compensated
| engineering firm responsible for setting up the project with
| a cheap team handling maintenance.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| $25k/yr is a junior level pay in Poland (at least in larger
| cities). You can double that with a few years of
| experience, and you'll likely top off at triple that unless
| you work remotely for a US company. Most of the local work
| is the typical satellite office stuff though.
|
| That being said it puts you in a very comfy financial
| position quickly, with very little risk and standard
| working hours.
| slackfan wrote:
| No.
| [deleted]
| guillem_lefait wrote:
| This is an interesting experiment and I suspect this could be a
| very nice way to find co-founders or first employees. Good luck
| stevebmark wrote:
| This is written by a child who won't take responsibility for
| helping build and guide the company and do the "boring" work
| required by all jobs to keep things running smoothly, and leave
| when they get "bored."
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points without putdowns or swipes.
| Those degrade discussion quality and are not what this site is
| for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: we've had to warn you about this multiple times in the
| past. Fortunately it looks like you've mostly fixed this. If
| you'd please stay on the desired side of the line, we'd be
| grateful.
| catonmylap wrote:
| Why not just working on some open source projects? If you do some
| interesting helpful work, some people might even sponsor you.
| alert0 wrote:
| Consider academia. I have a very similar opinion to you about
| interesting work (less so about meaningful). I was working at
| Google doing web development even though I have a security
| specialty, everyday was like pulling teeth. It is just not worth
| it and I'm not sure it is sustainable for me. Academia has always
| been appealing because you dictate research direction. I ended up
| going from part time, to 80% time, to full time over a year and a
| half for a small company. My work here is mostly interesting and
| I'm happier than I've been anywhere else.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| part of my company's long term onboarding of this prospective
| employee will include an intensive course in Buddhism, with the
| purpose of slowly teaching him to find something interesting in
| everything he works on. I believe that within 6 months to a year
| we can have the perfect highly competent employee, willing to
| work for very little and doing whatever asked of them because
| every task, no matter how mundane, is filled with interest.
| azhenley wrote:
| My advice: pursue a PhD. If you can find the right advisor, then
| you will have almost complete creative freedom to pursue
| interesting projects while getting paid to do it.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I have considered retiring from software development and
| pursuing a PhD. But I have heard some scary things about the
| culture and competitiveness in academia. Are there "laid back"
| PhD programs for people for people who don't really have an
| interest in tenure track, but just want to learn and apply
| themselves to some novel problem?
| the_only_law wrote:
| How easy is it for someone to go back and just get a PhD.
| After recently being rejected from a handful of schools
| (albeit undergrad, not graduate) I'm starting to feel like
| academia only wants people who played into their game from
| the start.
| azhenley wrote:
| Only a minority of CS PhDs pursue a tenure-track position. I
| have found academia to be more laid back than big tech
| companies, but you are still expected to produce (e.g., a
| paper or two a year). The top programs probably have a more
| competitive culture than state schools. If you don't want to
| produce research, then I don't see the point in enrolling.
|
| I [luckily] haven't experienced the scary stuff that people
| talk about, but a major barrier for students is that PhDs are
| largely unstructured and require you to take the initiative.
| Not everyone does well in that environment.
| freetime2 wrote:
| How about teaching undergraduates? I seem to recall from my
| undergrad days that a lot of my TAs were pursuing PhDs. Is
| that something that PhD students are expected to do?
| azhenley wrote:
| Some work as TAs. It is done part-time for funding
| (tuition waiver, monthly stipend, and insurance). It is
| not usually a requirement in US schools, although I
| recommend my students do it for at least a semester to
| get the experience. Otherwise they are funded as RAs.
|
| A PhD is about doing research.
| Fomite wrote:
| There are plenty of programs that think about things like
| quality of life, etc. Culture and competitiveness is a
| function of the school itself and the PI specifically.
| dfraser992 wrote:
| I have pretty much retired (i.e. suck at interviews and can't
| deal with the nonsense in industry anymore and am not one for
| management) and am thinking of going to get a PhD just
| because these days, I like doing research for the hell of it.
| Someday I will finish writing my first paper.... If I ever
| get a full time job again, it will have to be some sort of
| researchy sort of thing, so a PhD will be useful to get past
| HR etc.
|
| Your PhD program is what you make of it. If you are not
| interested in going into full time academia, the uni will
| still take your money if you look like a good candidate and
| can get through the program. I suppose you have to worry
| about competing with other students if you both are trying to
| get the one open position with a professor... So make sure
| you can pay your own way and then you won't be dependent on
| being a wage slave for the university and all that industry-
| lite crap.
|
| But really, ask yourself over and over "why do I want a PhD?"
| until you're sure of the answer - it is 3+ years of your life
| doing only that and it could be brutal due to the workload
| etc.
|
| Engineering/CS programs are probably more laid back or less
| 'political' (i.e. those scary stories) than humanities or
| other STEM degrees. I have noticed some interpersonal drama
| in some sense just hanging around the uni these last few
| years, e.g. students and dealing with them, a general sense
| of the academic environment. But I make sure to stay out of
| it.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| IF you find the right advisor, which is a big if. The odds of
| finding an employer that might put up with this person is
| higher.
| kenoph wrote:
| I see that kind of advice thrown around a lot, but that's just
| the sales pitch of PhDs, not the reality.
| azhenley wrote:
| It was my reality and my current grad students seem to agree.
| Do you have evidence or are you just "throwing advice
| around"?
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Be careful. I got brain picked after a via HN startup interview
| and job offer that turned out to be fake.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| What happened? Sounds interesting.
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Great interview w a 3-person (didn't meet other 2) startup.
| On-the-spot offer.#? No paperwork yet, handshake/verbal
| offer.# Met in-person the same-day. Didn't want to grab lunch
| or do anything celebratory.# Acted very impersonal and
| rushed.# He was overly focused on raising money.# He just
| wanted to know a bunch of immediate solutions without looking
| at any systems or code.# Never heard from the other people,
| which may not even exist.# Cap table was 70% him and everyone
| else was an employee with a pittance.# After that meeting,
| the dude makes a snide remark by text and ghosts me.####
|
| Someone official at YC told me such a story was
| intellectually-uninteresting, it sucks/too bad, and HN/YC has
| zero responsibility.
|
| # Red flag
| notjustanymike wrote:
| > No PHP, Java or maintenance work.
|
| Sooner or later, everyone does maintenance work or fixes bugs. It
| comes with the job.
| daemonk wrote:
| Hiring is a lot of the times more about finding someone that'll
| fit in your current team than about an individual with a lot of
| skill/enthusiasm. You don't sound very reliable and that would be
| my main concern. Even if you were working for nothing, it would
| still be a waste of the time invested if you are just going to
| leave in a month or two.
|
| You should go into academia. I think that model is more what you
| are looking for.
| lthornberry wrote:
| I'm an academic, and I do not think it's what he's looking for.
| Most Ph.D. and postdoc-level research involves much less
| flexibility and much more tedium than it sounds like he's
| looking for. The overall project should be very interesting,
| yes, but the day-to-day work usually still requires plenty of
| boring bits. And while I'm sure there are some labs that would
| allow remote work on a flexible schedule, it's not the general
| culture in the places I have experience. CS might be different
| --it's not my field. But I'm skeptical.
| daemonk wrote:
| I have a phd and have postdoc'ed at a couple of places also.
| I am now in industry.
|
| Sure, there are boring bits. But I think what he is more
| looking for is being able to explore the space and more open-
| endedness to projects, which I do think academia affords. It
| might also mean he'll never really produce anything and keep
| going down rabbit-holes. But that can be enjoyable.
| andrewfromx wrote:
| now here we go, I had this exact same feeling after doing a
| contract job recently. I'm going to place this url
| (https://truzzi.me/hire-me-pay-what-you-want-interesting-work...)
| into a db and start a site and also add my own profile and...
| wait, how will this different from linkedin? its like at some
| point, I need a MOTIVATED programmer that will give me that 24/7
| move mountains full effort. Like there is famous James Cameron
| quote while he was filming 1997 Titanic movie, something about
| his top professionals needed to play like it was the superbowl.
| So like how does a company hire that vs. its all on them to make
| US interested in the project? I'm just playing devils advocate. I
| think there is a happy medium somewhere.
| steindavidb wrote:
| tl:dr; "I want to be a postdoc"
| Rochus wrote:
| Rarely met a postdoc doing interesting work; it's more about
| "earning your way" (i.e. to be abused for all kinds of tasks)
| with various professors in hopes of having your own academic
| career.
| ada1981 wrote:
| I like your attitude on this. I'd have a convo with you and we
| can see about something to work on.
| johndoe42377 wrote:
| Doesn't work that way.
|
| They want legal control over you.
| amne wrote:
| This guy built bixby. I think that says everything.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Caro Francesco,
|
| What you propose sounds great but I think your article works
| better to find like minded people who share your thoughts
| (definitely count me in on that) than to find some work offers.
|
| Maybe with HN's reach you would find something, but I think a
| normal contractor's pitch + vetting for interesting jobs would
| work best.
|
| I would also recommend looking into building your own project
|
| My way of dealing with this problem has been: - Do contract work
| and vet the work; worst case scenario, you can drop off with some
| notice and not much will change. I did some employee time but
| that was mainly to get benefits (eg. paternity leave) and some
| fixed money for a period of my life I knew I wouldn't be very
| productive in - Raise the price of my services; this tends to
| filter out the worst jobs, albeit VC funded startup and rich tech
| companies have plenty of money to waste on chair warmers.
| Established mid companies without funding doing something you
| care about and with a remote first culture (pre-COVID and post-
| COVID) work best. - Build your own project, add almost-passive
| revenue streams; outsource the boring bits you don't want to do -
| Save money and try to reduce your expenses so that your passive
| revenue streams need to cover less money (making it easier to
| survive on passive revenue)
|
| Not a recipe for optimising for wealth, but for freedom.
| xwdv wrote:
| A lot of people are saying "I would never hire this man".
|
| You're looking at it wrong. The idea is to find interesting
| problems that have unknown amounts of ROI but should still be
| tackled by someone. Give him some cash and something interesting
| to chew and see what he comes up with. It's kind of like tending
| to a houesplant.
|
| If he produces nothing of value, then fine you know the idea was
| probably a dud anyway, but you didn't have to spend any time on
| it. And if he does spawn something of value, you can take the
| work and have more qualified engineers work on it full time.
|
| Personally, I find the best use case for people like this is to
| throw ethically questionable tasks at them. Stuff you shouldn't
| really have a full time employee doing, but would be perfectly
| fine outsourcing to a contractor who works off the books.
| erdo wrote:
| Given he seems to have a pretty low tolerance for boredom, I'd
| expect any potential employer to worry about this: What if he
| starts working for me, and a few months later (after having
| started some big refactor job for example) he decides it's no
| longer interesting, and leaves for someone else paying 1$ an hour
| cletus wrote:
| So there are two issues with this:
|
| 1. If I were looking to hire someone and read this, I would
| immediately be turned off. Why? Because part of being an engineer
| (or any employee really) is doing a bunch of stuff people don't
| enjoy doing. This includes:
|
| - Writing documentation
|
| - Writing tests
|
| - Fixing bugs
|
| - Talking to partners about a change/launch
|
| - Talking to lawyers
|
| - etc
|
| So I would be wondering: if you're signaling you don't want to do
| those things, that means someone else will need to do all that
| for your code, which is not great for them and tends to be much
| worse.
|
| Like you're basically saying you want to cherrypick the parts you
| enjoy and not give a damn about anything else. You might say
| you're only costing $1/hour but the risk of a bad engineer can
| mean you're still expensive or a loss.
|
| 2. You don't factor in the time cost of me or my team in
| onboarding you, dealing with you, dealing with your code and so
| on. That's a big part of the filtering in hiring. People are
| deciding if they can justify that time investment and the
| opportunity cost involved.
| emrah wrote:
| Writing just tests is not ideal, but writing tests in general
| can be very challenging and interesting given that you need to
| understand what the code under test does _and_ figure out
| (edge)cases to exercise /break it.
| teachingassist wrote:
| 1.
|
| I agree the author hasn't emphasised those things. If I was in
| need of those things, I might not automatically engage with the
| author.
|
| But, you've given a list of what _you_ don 't like doing - that
| isn't a universal list.
|
| Given that the author asks to be deeply involved in a human-
| centred project, it is not obvious to me that they don't like
| or are not prepared to do these things.
| cletus wrote:
| The specific list of things doesn't matter. It'll vary from
| person to person and project to project. The point is,
| there'll always be something.
|
| My point is that if you're signaling from the outset that you
| want to cherrypick those things then I, as your employer,
| don't actually know what you will or won't do. I don't know
| if you'll follow up on tricky-to-reproduce bugs (as an
| example) because that's "boring".
|
| That's just creating work and uncertainty in dealing with
| those issues.
| groby_b wrote:
| If you as an employer are not able to deal with the fact
| that different people have different preferences, you
| either are running a _very_ small shop (2-4 people) which
| just makes that impossible, or you 're probably not an
| employer that will attract people who aren't deliberately
| choosing a "cog in the machine" path.
|
| I want to be very clear: There's nothing wrong with that
| path. There's nothing wrong with wanting to employ people
| who follow that path. But making it clear from the outset
| that he's not going to be a match for you specifically is
| likely a feature, not a bug.
| thebean11 wrote:
| This only makes sense if in aggregate preferences are
| proportional the amount of work in each area, which is
| not the case (documentation is the obvious
| counterexample)
| slingnow wrote:
| I think you're taking a very black and white view of
| this.
|
| For example, ANY shop, of ANY size, is going to have
| issues with tricky-but-hard-to-reproduce bugs. The parent
| comment is highlighting the fact that they can't be sure
| if this sort of prima donna is going to be willing to run
| that issue to ground, or if they'll put up a stink about
| it being "boring".
|
| Additionally, even if this person were working for free,
| there's a definite cost to foisting difficult bugs on
| your teammates.
|
| Do you honestly believe only "cogs in a machine" should
| be / would be interested in fixing that sort of issue?
| plutonorm wrote:
| "Do you honestly believe only "cogs in a machine" should
| be / would be interested in fixing that sort of issue?"
|
| No but there are many types of people for whom it has no
| motivational value. Like they'd rather watch paint dry.
|
| And that's their personality not something that can just
| be worked around.
| bumby wrote:
| I didn't downvote but what I suspect the OP is saying is
| "I want to hire someone who will get done what needs to
| get done whenever it needs to be done, not just when it
| aligns with what they _want_ to do."
|
| Having just re-read Daniel Goleman's book on emotional
| intelligence recently, one important aspect to high EQ
| individuals is having the ability to motivate themselves
| to do work that may be necessary, but not necessarily
| glamorous or fun.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I genuinely think that you are missing the author's point,
| and thus precisely not the target of this article.
|
| In my reading of the article, I did not get the impression
| that the author is opposed to the specific, discrete
| components of the job that he found "lame".
|
| If the demands of the article are truly impossible
| (socially and/or economically), then I believe that is the
| *point*, not a criticism of this post.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Exactly. I hire you (and pay you) to do what I need to be done,
| not what you want to do. Of course we both look for a situation
| where there is a lot of overlap in these things, because that
| means you are a good match for the job I am offering. But it
| will never be 100%.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| How does the experience of a consultant fit into this
| evaluation?
| cranium wrote:
| I don't disagree with your first point but I think much depends
| on a person work ethic and what it means to them to do a good
| job. An engineer worth their salt would understand that success
| is not only writing the fun bits but also: the tests to make
| sure everything works as intended, documentation for their
| failing memory and having other contribute, bug fixes because
| we can't have those laying around, ...
|
| As is, the signal is too weak to know if the person just wants
| a toy to play with (I doubt) or if they are ready for the full
| package because they understand it's how it should be done.
| Definitively a point to check thoroughly before hiring - but it
| would be the same for other candidates, right ?
| spartanliving4u wrote:
| Exactly. Most developers do not seem to understand the cost of
| onboarding, dealing with them, dealing with their code and so
| on
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Those aren't "issues" with his post. They're just reasons that
| you would hypothetically (you're not even hiring someone) be a
| bad match. That's it. Doesn't mean you're bad, doesn't mean
| he's bad, doesn't mean his post needs changing, doesn't mean
| your company needs changing. None of that. He advertised
| himself honestly and it's clear it would be a bad fit.
|
| If your concerns are onboarding process and talking to lawyers,
| you would be absolutely out of your mind to hire someone who
| says "I'll work on stuff that pleases me when I feel like it
| for little money. And no tech screens, please!".
|
| A better match is an owner-run tiny software company. "We have
| an open source Python client library. It needs type hints.
| Sound interesting? Here's a link to the repo and some docs.
| I'll give you $5/hr in ETH up to $100 for whatever you do by
| the end of Friday." Then on Friday afternoon you maybe have
| some type hints and pay out up to $100.
|
| I'm picking on your comment in particular, but it's crazy to me
| how much criticism this guy is getting. He wants to try
| something new, and so many people are telling him what he
| _should_ be doing, or why being on the other side of this trade
| is so terrible. Let 's just let them make up their own minds.
| Let's stop trying to cram each other into little boxes.
| wpietri wrote:
| I don't read this as a signal he won't do the work. From his
| talk about the stuff he enjoys doing, I don't doubt it includes
| things that feel work-like. He just wants the work to be
| meaningful. That seems reasonable to me, and that's how I am.
| As long as there's some point to the work, I'm happy to do the
| tedious stuff all day long.
|
| I recently user-tested a job posting for a high-meaning job.
| [1] Some people were very excited by the meaning, and were
| strongly motivated to apply. Others cared very little or not at
| all about the purpose; they worked because they wanted money
| for other things. Both are perfectly valid ways to approach
| work, I think, but I would handle each kind of employee
| differently.
|
| [1]
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yNITCTtVh5qHPof12cSf5PWh...
| ftruzzi wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| Writing tests and documentation or diving deep into debugging
| hard issues is what I consider part of "good work" (and that
| I have also enjoyed doing), and I can't wait to do good work.
| It just has to be compatible with the rest of life. It's
| mostly the way we work that has to change rather than the
| content of the work.
| monoideism wrote:
| It may be wise to explicitly describe in your post what you
| consider "good work", including tests, clean code, etc.
| jka wrote:
| Thank you for the thought provoking article and discussion.
|
| I like to imagine that there is a virtual priority queue of
| software tasks out there, waiting to be done.
|
| Some of it is feature development, some of it is detailed
| bug investigation, some of it is documentation, and some of
| it is user interface work.
|
| What might be incredible would be to declare your interests
| and skills and start picking from the priority queue, with
| appropriate rewards as you progress, and at your own pace,
| knowing that you're contributing back to important tasks of
| the day. Ideally with a social safety net to allow people
| to enjoy life and adapt to changing circumstances.
| pinky1417 wrote:
| Right. The key passage is under rule 1 from the article: "You
| will give me interesting or meaningful work."
|
| First, the author says interesting OR meaningful work. So
| even if it's true that the developer won't be interested in,
| say, writing documentation for a legacy steel manufacturer,
| this developer might be happy to do so for a good non-profit.
|
| Second, the author never said documentation and the like
| weren't interesting. Perhaps that's true, but Francesco
| merely wrote that he prefers Python over PHP and had a few
| industries he thought were interesting.
|
| We all have skills and industries were interested/not
| interested in. And I think we and Francesco generally
| recognize some unpleasant work must be done in any field.
| regularemployee wrote:
| > is doing a bunch of stuff people don't enjoy
|
| I enjoy writing documentation and writing tests. To me, writing
| documentation is like teaching others about the awesome product
| / features we have built, and also the different technical
| tradeoff decisions we had to make.
|
| I can't grasp the mindset where an engineer builds something
| really cool that they are proud of, but don't enjoy talking
| about it / teaching people how to use it.
| jrockway wrote:
| Explaining how you did the thing that you already did cuts
| into the time for building the next thing. The difficulty
| that people wrestle with isn't whether or not documenting
| something is valuable, but rather whether documenting that
| thing should cut into their sleep, recreational activity, or
| The Next Thing.
| bitboop wrote:
| Personally, I'd rather not immediately jump into building
| the next thing. After having worked on any significant
| project, I find writing documentation helpful on a selfish
| level: I use it to wind down and let my brain idle for a
| while. I don't think it's a good thing to go full tilt from
| building one thing to the next. It's good to pause in
| between, appreciate what's been accomplished, reflect on
| lessons learned, and take a well deserved break. I find
| writing documentation an excellent vehicle for that.
| Kinrany wrote:
| This had nothing to do with the topic: some people don't
| _want_ to write documentation.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Most because translating code to english requires
| changing mindset.
| fnord77 wrote:
| it's almost like a form of solipsistic narcissism (the way
| The Last Psychiatrist describes it). Nobody else exists
| except as a supporting role. Why should they have to explain
| their genius work to anyone...
| plutonorm wrote:
| Or they are stimulated by new ideas and and general
| patterns? To those kinds of people writing how something
| that already exists works is supremely boring. It doesn't
| require narcissism
| watwut wrote:
| The difference is in whether you are willing to do the
| part that is not the most simulating but useful or
| whether you expect others to put up and do it instead of
| you.
|
| And generally z others are as bored by that work as you,
| as simulated by new thing. Pretty often, the difference
| is not in how much you like boring parts, but in whether
| you are willing to do it anyway.
| tolbish wrote:
| Or they just don't like writing? That's quite the leap.
| fnord77 wrote:
| I suspect dealing with this type of person would become a huge
| issue. This work request hints at overblown entitlement. I've
| seen these types in action, the relationship between this
| worker and the manager/other teammates can turn abusive.
|
| Also imagine the impact on morale of the other teammates when
| some primadonna gets the cherry picked work and everyone else
| gets the drudgery. Pay or not.
|
| Run.
| brightball wrote:
| I had a developer on my team at my last company who was like
| this. Avoid at all cost.
| jascii wrote:
| What do you mean by "like this" and why in particular should
| that be avoided at all cost?
| brightball wrote:
| I can't talk about it in detail yet.
|
| Short version, the rest of the team had to pick up all of
| the things that he wasn't willing to do. It shifted more
| burden to everyone else for his benefit and created a
| terrible team environment.
| tasuki wrote:
| > I can't talk about it in detail yet.
|
| So... don't?
|
| Are you saying ftruzzi is like a person on your team in
| your last company and should be avoided? I don't see why
| you think he'd be "like that", what that'd mean, or
| really what value your comment is providing. I personally
| would love to work with ftruzzi!
| MichaelGlass wrote:
| Regarding your first point: I want to do those things if I'm
| convinced they help the "good work". I might not want to clean
| the dishes but I'll do it until I can delegate it.
| steelframe wrote:
| When I found myself with a mandate and a budget in a previous
| company, I set out to hire a team. The health, happiness, and
| productivity of the team overall was my top priority. In terms of
| budget I didn't think in terms of what I got from any one
| individual contributor vs. what I paid. Rather, I assessed the
| cost of the total team vs. what the business was getting from
| that team.
|
| Francesco's experiment seems to rely on an assumption that he can
| bow out of things that teams typically need their members to do
| (such as daily standups) if he accepts less pay, as if the team-
| level work could somehow be parceled out and evaluated in a
| piecemeal basis in terms of budget. The issue with that is that
| there is a level of engagement that is non-negotiable in a team.
| If I thought Francesco would act as a force function for the team
| and help them be more cohesive, faster-moving, and results-
| driven, then I would bring him on-board and pay him comparably to
| what I paid the other members of the team who were producing
| equivalent results. If Francesco decided that he didn't want to
| do the sorts of things that the team required of him to be an
| active and productive participant in the team effort, then to me
| Fencesco's value could very well be negative.
| aynyc wrote:
| His requirement is basically volunteer style job? For example:
| run an app that track or take in abandon pets for an animal
| rescue/shelter.
|
| 1. interesting work, checked. 2. part time, remote and probably
| asynchronous, checked. 3. no interviews, just build the web app
| or iOS app, checked. 4. probably minimum wage, checked.
| lnsru wrote:
| I have nice boring job. Few years ago I was upset with the boring
| part. But with kids and mortgage I don't really care anymore. I
| am very happy to be paid more than a manager in a small company
| being only individual contributor in big Corp. I also have
| approval to sell my hardware from big Corp. So I can explore new
| things with commercial potential without a fear. Life is good.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| After kids and mortage, you will be upset with the boring part
| again :(
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| not OP, but at that point I imagine the equation changes:
| stability becomes less important when you aren't the sole
| provider for a pile of people, and/or once cost-of-living
| goes down (e.g., paid off mortgage).
| bikingbismuth wrote:
| I was able to pay off my mortgage about a year ago (I am in
| my late 30s), and work has taken on a new aspect for me. I
| feel a bit more comfortable challenging the status quo and
| trying to take on more "interesting work". With that in
| mind, I am still attentive to the fact I need to maintain a
| sustainable career for another 25/30 years.
| foobarian wrote:
| Many people in my circle are proud of paying off
| mortgages, so I kind of assumed by default that it is a
| worthwhile thing. But looking at the numbers I'm not so
| sure: it seems much better in current market to cash out
| as much as possible and let that money sit in an index
| fund. I guess the main issues are some risks with
| downturns and/or liquidity.
| ryandrake wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is that mortgage is the
| cheapest money you'll ever borrow. Low rates vs. other
| kinds of loans, and the interest is often the biggest tax
| deduction most middle class people have access to.
| bikingbismuth wrote:
| I completely agree that it wasn't the right financial
| decision, but I don't regret it at all. I grew up working
| poor and watched multiple people lose their houses (some
| crash related, others not). This gave me a fairly
| conservative risk tolerance regarding debt. I feel
| "lighter" without debt hanging over me.
|
| The question that ultimately convinced me to just pay off
| my mortgage was "If someone gave you a house, free and
| clear, would you mortgage it to buy investments?". My gut
| reaction was "no, I would really like to have a free and
| clear house."
|
| I have considered buying a second home to rent, but I
| have some moral qualms about exacerbating the housing
| crisis where I live. Furthermore, the stress of tenants
| isn't something I really want to deal with.
|
| Everyone here has great points about maximizing returns,
| and I know I will have less money in the long run because
| of my decision. With that in mind, I am investing about
| half of my old mortgage payment, and the rest goes to the
| family vacation fund.
| foobarian wrote:
| Just wanted to thank you for the comment and clarify I
| didn't mean to criticize your choices - my background is
| very similar and it's just a realization I've had after
| stepping back and trying to think without those
| constraints/influences. I also know many people who lost
| houses or struggled, some which actually did cash-out
| refinances but then unwisely spent the money on
| unnecessary luxuries. Those seem easy to avoid. Some may
| be harder to avoid, like when someone has unforeseen
| costs such as medical related bills. But in cases such as
| ours, it seems we are well enough off to have cash on
| hand to eliminate the mortgage; the question just becomes
| whether that is the best use for the money. It certainly
| seems a bad idea to just keep the cash on hand. The index
| fund returns have been very good for long periods of time
| now, so seem like a good low-risk option, given that they
| are liquid and can be redirected to a mortgage payoff at
| any time.
|
| Edit: having said that the difference is not that large
| (3-4% for the 30 year note, vs. 5-10% for the market
| return). Also, while I didn't pay off my mortgage, I
| probably won't put even more money where my mouth is and
| refinance in order to invest the cash-out into a fund.
| bikingbismuth wrote:
| No criticism or offense taken at all! I think these
| discussions are incredibly valuable for the participants
| and observers to help them decide what they want to do
| if/when they have a pile of money in front of them.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| A place to live which cannot readily be taken away from
| you carries tremendous practical value and existential
| comfort.
| kelnos wrote:
| Right, the best financial decision is usually to take
| advantage of low interest rates, carry the debt, and keep
| the money in diversified investments.
|
| Yes, there's always the risk of a downturn or
| recession/depression that ruins that plan. And beyond
| that, there is often a great psychological benefit to
| being debt-free, even if that's not the best financial
| decision.
| ISL wrote:
| That reality is a property primarily of the present-
| moment.
|
| Index funds don't always rise and property values
| sometimes fall. Interest rates are rarely this low.
| Leverage multiplies both the upside and the downside.
| jedberg wrote:
| > and property values sometimes fall
|
| While this is true in the short term, except for very
| rare exceptions, you'd be hard pressed to find a property
| in the United States that is worth less now than 30 years
| ago (which is the standard length of a mortgage). I don't
| know about other countries, but I suspect it's the same
| in any modern economy. Land is scarce, and no one is
| making more of it.
| jedberg wrote:
| You're right. None of those people account for the time
| value of money. If I could get an interest only mortgage
| I would (where I literally pay to rent the money). There
| are so many better things I can do with a few hundred
| thousand dollars now.
|
| If you have the money to pay off your mortgage, why not
| buy a second house with it and rent that out? Let someone
| pay your mortgage while you get the appreciation? Or
| invest it in something else?
|
| If you do the math, renting almost always comes out ahead
| of owning, as long as you invest the difference in
| something that gains in value.
|
| The main reason to own is for psychological reasons. It's
| great if you have kids and want a place for them, or
| yourself, to call home.
| bumby wrote:
| I think the part that needs to be factored into your
| analysis is the volatility/risk aspect. A mortgage may be
| relatively low ROI but it's also relatively low risk
| compared to the market. E.g., maybe somebody has a
| certain percentage invested into low risk bonds. Maybe it
| makes sense to pare back some of that and put it towards
| their mortgage during a period when bonds are being
| crushed. Neither bonds or the mortgage return will
| compete with a general index fund in terms of return over
| a long period of time, but the index fund is in a
| different (higher) risk category
| splistud wrote:
| The 'mortgage return' will compete very well over a long
| period of time, especially if you ensure the comparison
| is fair. For instance, 15 years in, when your mortgage
| note is 60 to 70% of prevailing rent or lease, consider
| the return on that savings as part of the 'mortgage
| return' - because this is part of the return in the form
| of inflation hedge.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I think this statement is a bit strong. The price/rent
| ratio varies greatly between places and times. Around
| here it's between 30 and 40 years, that makes it very
| difficult to make money by borrowing to buy a place to
| rent out.
| mywittyname wrote:
| In such markets, the bulk of the ROI is not the rent
| checks, but tax savings and appreciation of the
| underlying asset.
|
| Real estate looks a lot like the stock market anymore.
| People value companies on metrics beyond simple revenue,
| profits, and dividends. With RE, investors understand
| that wage growth in a region flows into housing at a
| compounding rate due to leverage and are capitalizing on
| it.
|
| So long as Seattle or LA have companies that pay above
| average wages to enough employees, housing prices in
| those regions should continue to grow at a a rate
| somewhat relative to differences in wages. What
| constitutes "enough employees" seems to be relative to
| how constrained housing growth is. In LA, housing prices
| are driven by probably the top 20-30% of earners.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I think at that moment, what could work is contract work. A
| 6month~1 year contract. Finish the project, then take a
| vacation to travel
| dv_dt wrote:
| Work balance, and some reasonable freedom to self determine is
| pretty nice and likely more important for the stability in a
| long term working engagement than being "interesting" work.
| sturgeongeneral wrote:
| I may be conflating 'boring' with 'rote', but how do you think
| the nature of your work may affect your job security? This is
| something I worry about sometimes, because I find that the work
| I'm doing could eventually be de-valued or automated. Still, I
| very much appreciate your position as I'm in a similar boat.
| lnsru wrote:
| Big Corp lost a big project few months ago. Big Corp will
| loose another one soon. I hope, I can get senior title before
| shit hits the fan. Contribution does not matter for the
| title, only employment duration is important.
|
| However I am consulting a cool startup for free, do code
| reviews for them for free and could start immediately there
| with ~8% lower salary but 100% home office. That's my plan C.
| Plan B is my own small hardware business selling Raspberry Pi
| based lidar and radar. I am not far away from the first
| product. I love these topics and compensate boredom at day
| job this way. As I mentioned, big Corp does not see interest
| conflict and I may sell these cool gadgets for wide Raspberry
| Pi community.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Stability and work life balance are terribly underrated.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Depends on personality. For some its poison and burnout and
| depression are not far behind.
| username90 wrote:
| Yeah, personally having a large chunk of the day be simple
| tedious tasks I don't have any control over makes me
| depressed and every day becomes a fight to keep the mental
| breakdown just out of reach. I envy people who can stay
| sane in such environments, makes life a lot easier.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I feel that way about meetings. Boring tasks can be
| automated away if they have a pattern.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I'll take a boring stable 40 hour a week job over a fun job
| that somewhat frequently requires 50+ hours. Time is the only
| thing I cant get back. Money really is just a number after a
| certain point.
| username90 wrote:
| Why do you still work for others if money is just a number
| at this point? I worked for Google for a while and quit to
| do my own projects once I had enough money that I felt it
| didn't matter any more.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I'm not exactly at that level yet. I couldnt stop working
| forever. But I realized that making money isnt all that
| difficult and its really a make believe number after a
| certain point.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| There is something in the second paragraph that made me read it
| four times, I think, until I was able to read the rest of the
| post. The author somehow manages to turn around the fact of being
| laid off into freeing themselves from the "golden handcuffs
| finally". No matter how I read that paragraph, I can't help the
| feeling that the author misses the point:
|
| the author did not make that decision, the author had no choice
|
| But what's not landing with me: when the author had the choice,
| because let's face it, nobody cuffed the author to the desk,
| nobody forced anybody to do the boring tedious work - the author
| did not make the decision but rather was prolonging in that, what
| is portrayed, uncomfortable situation.
|
| The rest of the post paints a portrait of a person who doesn't
| know what they want. No commitments, no responsibilities, one
| side wants without being explicit what they can give back.
|
| I think that the key to this post is the paragraph starting with
| "Accepting a job offer is a bit like getting engaged or
| married:". But it should be rewritten like this:
|
| > I know (I) will have to make compromises to make it work, but I
| should not go for it unless I am 100% sure and obviously I should
| not marry someone I don't know. If I do, chances are I will end
| up being unhappy for a long time or staying with them for longer
| than I want, because I will get used to the day-to-day and the
| "rewards" while still getting to know them. When I begin to have
| an understanding of who this person really is, I will already be
| invested and leaving will be hard. Many never leave(, I never
| left and I was hurt because I was laid off while unprepared). For
| a company however, it is much easier to stay with someone who is
| unhappy in their relationship [with the company itself], because
| it's a one-to-many relationship. They have many other employees
| they can rely on, and an underperforming or unhappy employee can
| be easily shadowed by better or happier ones without the company
| suffering. Is it starting to feel dysfunctional?
|
| In that context, the last question could be the writing on the
| wall. I'm sorry if I come across as condescending, this is my
| interpretation: this portrays a person who openly admits is not
| able to make a commitment and is uncertain of their qualities.
|
| The rest of the post suggests the person is looking for a quick
| fix instead of long term solution. Today they may like this,
| tomorrow that, today they do something for someone who pays $1/h,
| tomorrow maybe something better comes through so screw that $1/h.
| "Didn't like it anyway and you knew the rules so it's your
| fault".
|
| I like author's rules. Assuming they stick to them. It might work
| for some companies so good luck.
|
| As a side note: I was hoping to find the info if the person can
| raise invoices. Obviously, paying invoices in cryptocurrency
| might not land well with local tax authorities.
| Tycho wrote:
| Golden handcuffs means to leave would mean giving up too much
| money. I think it's understandable behaviour. It would be
| financially irresponsible to quit a job that pays very well,
| especially if you're not sure of landing another one. Being
| laid off, however, takes you out of the dilemma, so feels like
| a relief.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| That's right. Thank you, I know what the phrase means. Don't
| get attached to me simply using their words to make my point.
|
| The point is: instead of making a change, they waited until
| laid off. So in the end, it's somebody else's fault, like
| this: "I don't want to talk too much about it, but let's say
| my boss didn't care about doing good work and didn't know
| what good work looked like."
|
| Maybe the post leaves too much in the unclear. It's not
| obvious if this is the author reflecting on the past and
| making up with their inner self or if it is simply taking out
| on the world. The post doesn't answer any of that.
| mekal wrote:
| "But what's not landing with me: when the author had the
| choice....nobody cuffed the author to the desk".
|
| Golden handcuffs: a phrase first recorded in 1976, refers to
| financial allurements and benefits that have the objective to
| encourage highly compensated employees to remain within a
| company or organization instead of moving from company to
| company (or organization to organization) (opposite of a golden
| parachute).
|
| Surely you can relate to someone taking a job they might not
| love because it pays more right? I think the main point he's
| trying to make is think twice before doing a job you hate, just
| because it pays more. Life is short, your job takes up a lot of
| your time, so consider doing something you enjoy...even if it
| pays less. That part at least is good advice I think.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > Surely you can relate to someone taking a job they might
| not love because it pays more right? I think the main point
| he's trying to make is think twice before doing a job you
| hate, just because it pays more. Life is short, your job
| takes up a lot of your time, so consider doing something you
| enjoy...even if it pays less. That part at least is good
| advice I think.
|
| That's correct. I can relate to someone. I repeat from the
| sibling comment: Maybe the post leaves too much in the
| unclear. It's not obvious if this is the author reflecting on
| the past and making up with their inner self or if it is
| simply taking out on the world. The post doesn't answer any
| of that.
|
| Because of that, it's not possible to make a judgement why
| the author did not consider their own advice while at that
| previous job. If life's too short, why sticking up for until
| being laid off?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Looks like you're a decent enough coder, you're still young, and
| you want something interesting to do. Why not start one of the
| many startups that people here on this site tend to start?
| codingdave wrote:
| I completely understand wanting a gig like this if you are a dev.
| But it seems to be missing a key truth of hiring - I already know
| a dozen brilliant engineers who would jump at such a gig. If my
| company supported setting this up, I would go with someone I
| already know and love, not risk it with a stranger.
| marcodiego wrote:
| In a post-scarcity world that is how work should be. People
| should for pleasure, comfort or luxury, not for survival or
| dignity.
| wreath wrote:
| That's certainly not a world I want to be part of. Seeking
| pleasure 100% of the time is quite depressing the same way
| trying to survive 100% of the time is.
| bena wrote:
| I want enough money to have shelter, transportation, food, and
| fun without having to sacrifice one for the other.
|
| As for the job itself, let me concern myself with the how and let
| me have enough leeway to do some wool-gathering.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| This is really funny.
|
| I spent 20 years in the Marine Corps because they continued to
| challenge me and test my abilities. Some days the work wasn't
| interesting other days it was really interesting. But it was
| always challenging.
|
| They always told me what I was going to get paid, but I think
| they owe a few hours for some overtime I did back in 2005.
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Yep. Autonomy, purpose, and challenge are what people want to
| stay engaged and keep morale up.
| public_void wrote:
| > You will give me interesting or meaningful work
|
| Have you ever worked on something interesting or meaningful at a
| job? You list a bunch of random topics, none of which are
| inherently interesting or meaningful. I've worked on flashy
| projects - most recently self driving at one of the bigger
| companies doing it. Guess what? In an eng org of hundreds, at
| least half the people were still doing shit work that had nothing
| to do with self driving.
|
| Beyond that, if I want to hire you for interesting work, it falls
| into two buckets: mission critical, or irrelevant. I can't hire
| you for mission critical work because I have no confidence you
| can do the job, so I can only hire you for irrelevant work. If I
| hire you for irrelevant work, it makes me no money, so I pay you
| no money. Why even have this arrangement? Just go start your own
| side project - at least then you own it.
|
| Consider this: join a company doing something you don't like
| (making an absurd amount of money because of the industry),
| demonstrate/develop your expertise, identify the parts of the
| company that are interesting to you, then go work on those.
| People doing interesting satisfying work didn't just get there
| accidentally.
| tyrex2017 wrote:
| I dont understand the OP and others who feel it is soul crushing
| to do stupid tasks.
|
| For one, whats the big deal? I can put in the difficult hours and
| continue. Secondly, often, what is considered inefficient and
| stupid is not, or just cant be done better because organizations
| are not perfect.
|
| Having said that, OP, I have lots of respect for your strength to
| go for what you want.
| pascalxus wrote:
| the point of work is to provide value to someone, in exchange
| they give you cash. That someone, can be anyone in the world or
| any people except for one person, and that's you (the worker).
| the point of work is providing value to someone else, not
| entertainment to yourself: that's called play.
|
| I think it's great that we have a balance between work and play
| or maybe even have a life of just play and work on whatever fun
| stuff you want. You don't need an employer for that. Just know
| the difference. If you're going to have fun programming and
| entertain yourself, just do it on your own.
|
| Employers need people to do boring work: maintaining existing
| legacy systems, fixing bugs, doing the last 20% (which takes 80%
| of the effort), to get things working perfectly for as many
| customers as possible.
| vesche wrote:
| Pie in the sky. Any realistic employer reading this plea should
| be turned off fairly quickly. Typically, it's a red flag when an
| _employee_ gives an _employer_ ultimatums while already in their
| employ (e.g., give me a raise of x amount or I will quit). This
| post is an example of a potential employee giving ultimatums to a
| future employer before they have even been given a job.
| distributedsean wrote:
| Thats a strange way of thinking about things. Why shouldn't the
| employee have power in the relationship. Employers are always
| giving ultimatums, no-remote, remote-only, 40 hours a week,
| $X/hr. But the employee/employer relationship is really only an
| agreement to do X much work for Y money. Everything else is
| secondary. Why shouldn't an employee's secondary concerns be
| just as important as the employer's secondary concerns ?
| Kreotiko wrote:
| Pay me what you want but possibly in cryptocurrency so I can
| commit tax evasion should be the title
| ronyfadel wrote:
| Haha, I thought of the same thing. Otherwise OP could get paid
| in fiat and exchange for cryptocurrencies himself.
| Kreotiko wrote:
| Exactly and it would be much easier than finding a company
| willing to pay you that way. Also considering that currency
| exchange rates are pretty low these days too.
| jrockway wrote:
| You can pay people in cryptocurrency and still report their
| income to the IRS. I certainly would.
| pketh wrote:
| Having been consistently unemployed in the past, some experience
| and advice:
|
| How people value you - and treat you - is directly reflected in
| how they pay you. Working free or cheap actually encourages
| employers to micromanage and committee review things because
| inexpensive things/people are seen as less reliable or
| professional.
|
| If you want interesting work, my advice is to make it yourself.
| Find a problem you're passionate about and make something
| beautiful of it.
|
| You'll improve your own skills, have more fun, and eventually
| employers will be coming to you.
| raspasov wrote:
| If the work is truly meaningful, it is not boring. Even if it's
| doing docs, or support, or refactoring, or responding to emails.
|
| If a member of a team says that what they do is boring that's
| often a sign of poor leadership.
| danans wrote:
| The most interesting thing about this is that the writer is in a
| position to be able to work part-time for only 10 to 20 hours a
| week at a very low rate.
|
| I imagine they are not supporting a family or a mortgage, or if
| they are they must have a significant alternate source of
| financial or housing security, and that's not a bad thing.
|
| I wish more people had the ability to put out such terms for
| their employment without worrying about keeping the roof over
| their head.
|
| They would likely have to drop some of their more naive
| requirements though (i.e. no Java or PHP, only "interesting"
| work). The road to interesting work is paved with the mundane, no
| matter how cool the job or technology is.
| xyst wrote:
| "Pay what you want" sounds like it's ripe for abuse.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I feel like you would be better off finding companies that
| interest you, and inquiring if they would be willing to hire you
| as a part time contractor.
|
| What you're proposing here feels like such a deviation from the
| typical hiring process that I just can't imagine many companies
| going to the effort of making you a personalized proposal just
| for you to turn it down as not interesting.
|
| Being unable to find anything that interests you also comes
| across as a bit of a motivational problem that could scare
| companies off from investing in you (if not with money than with
| time).
|
| Just my two cents. I don't consider myself an expert on
| interviewing or hiring, so I could be wrong!
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| I think there's no really "boring" developer jobs. There are
| strict jobs (where you have very little freedom), and they can be
| more boring, but if you get more freedom, even a repetitive job
| can become interesting, by finding and making the right tools to
| automate more, etc..
| lpapez wrote:
| The author of the blog graduated high school in 2014. I would
| really like to see his blog again in a few years to see if he
| still feels the same way about work. :)
| fundamental wrote:
| Nice visually appealing CV. Is that using a public template as
| the base? I'm currently using the deedy XeLaTeX one as a base,
| but it doesn't seem to scale out to multiple pages well.
|
| Best of luck with your goals by the way. Avoiding the full time
| grind in favor of lower time commitments with interesting
| projects is a great objective.
| slingnow wrote:
| Could you imagine a hiring a general contractor for your home
| renovation business with this sort of attitude? This person would
| be an instant liability. I can't imagine any instance where I
| would want them doing free work for me, bouncing from one half
| finished task to the next when it became boring for them.
|
| Hell, I wouldn't even let them wander around my jobsite for free.
|
| The entitlement in this profession is sometimes truly astounding.
| brunojppb wrote:
| Sounds like Gumroad would be a good match for what you are
| looking for.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Open Source volunteer contributions are like this taken to the
| extreme - where the two main motivations are interesting work,
| and making a change in something you (want to) use.
|
| I'm curious if the lessons learned from OSS projects would apply
| to work output from this person.
| agentultra wrote:
| If you expect the interesting work to land in your lap you are
| either one of those people that redefine (maybe invent) entire
| fields of research or you're incredibly lucky. In other words,
| your work speaks for itself and people want to give you more of
| it. For most people we need a job in order to keep up with the
| rising costs of living.
|
| If, however, you're like 99.99% of people and are good at what
| you do then you'll have to _find_ what is interesting about the
| job. I 've worked at a company that replaced clipboards with
| iPads in a factory. If all it was to me was a form-builder
| application and the technology under it I would have been turned
| off ages ago. But I was incredibly curious as to why the product
| as successful and growing, what our customers liked about it, and
| I pushed for developers to visit the factories and see how people
| used the app. The results were quite surprising and it fed out
| team with dozens of ideas.
|
| Technology for technology's sake is fun for a while but will
| eventually bore you. It helps to have a _reason_ to work on what
| you do. Which I think is part of what OP is saying but I think
| you can find the reason in a "boring" job as well. You just have
| to be curious and look for it.
|
| Although avoiding working at feature factories where the
| developers are just cogs in a Kafka-esque Agile Machine is a
| whole other can of worms. The OP's strategy seems like an
| interesting way to avoid it. Best of luck!
| bumby wrote:
| > _you 'll have to find what is interesting about the job._
|
| This reminds me of the advice that one needs to cultivate their
| passion rather than expect to stumble upon it.
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| So you were able to find something interesting in (somewhat
| meaningful but still) boring work. that speaks to you in a
| positive light but it doesn't change the overall point that the
| OP was trying to make
| exikyut wrote:
| Random idle/curious question: "a factory" doesn't describe the
| roughness of the working conditions, but assuming a baseline of
| a mildly industrial context, how did you mitigate the risk of
| dropped or damaged iPads?
|
| (As an aside, it's kind of a pity that there isn't a standard
| drop-proof tablet out there that can be deployed without
| thought in these kinds of situations.)
| falcor84 wrote:
| I'll just put this here: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-
| best-rugged-tablets
| jorvi wrote:
| Probably iPads encased in rugged cases / mounts.
| agentultra wrote:
| That was what most of our customers did for on-the floor
| tablets.
|
| They would also use mounted TVs and have their scrum around
| our app's dashboard page which was something none of the
| developers had thought of.
| minblaster wrote:
| I think the author is getting stuck in tactics, not strategy.
|
| Problem: OP does not have the freedom to pursue what he finds
| interesting.
|
| Tactic: Given existing work arrangements, attempt to negotiate a
| setup where he can just work on what he wants. If the employer
| changes its mind, OP gets to restart the cycle.
|
| Strategy: Avoid having this problem in the first place.
|
| Pursuing the strategy means taking a high-paying job, saving a
| large fraction (https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-
| shockingly-si...) and having the financial freedom to never worry
| about this problem again.
| Tade0 wrote:
| A sound tactic but there's one issue: high-paying jobs, in
| time, often turn into a sort of "golden cage", which makes you
| unemployable and vulnerable to lay-offs.
|
| Anecdata:
|
| A friend of mine worked in banking where the pay was amazing,
| but the tech used mostly outdated(think Java 6 in 2018). At
| some point he got fed up with all that and tried to switch
| roles, but to no avail, because no one would hire him.
|
| He's still there but should a recession come he'll be in a very
| tough situation.
| Popegaf wrote:
| As others have suggested, have you considered joining an
| opensource project?
|
| - https://github-help-wanted.com/
|
| - https://up-for-grabs.net/
|
| - https://www.codetriage.com/
|
| - https://opencollective.com/discover
|
| I'm sure there are organisations that would love to have some
| technical volunteers. Maybe try and find NGOs you believe in and
| send them a private or public message?
|
| Or, if you want to get politically involved in your country, you
| could try and find yourself a political party you believe in, ask
| them if they have any technical tasks, and see from there.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Yeah I don't know why someone would essentially give away their
| talent and time to a for profit corporation. There are so many
| better alternatives
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Well, money.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I'm in the same situation Francesco is in. Other than a short gig
| in the Fall (for some people who knew my capabilities, hence no
| interview required) I haven't worked for pay in over a year.
| Fortunately I'm in a position to be able to not work as my spouse
| has a job with health insurance and we've got a decent amount of
| retirement savings.
|
| > Work takes up such a big part of your life that what you do is
| terribly important. I've been contacted by many companies and
| recruiters during this time, but the idea of going back to full-
| time work doing something I don't care about or is not
| technically interesting just scares me.
|
| Yeah, scares is a good word here - I feel the same. I get
| contacted by recruiters and they describe the job and I get that
| dread in the pit of my stomach. I've been in tech for 30+ years,
| I've seen all kinds of companies, situations, bosses, coworkers.
| It's all a roll of the dice and from my experience the odds
| aren't on your side.
|
| > 1. You will give me interesting or meaningful work
|
| I tend to think that there's just not a lot of funding out there
| for the most interesting and meaningful. I had a job doing
| software development for an alternative energy company. They
| never got to stable funding and folded. That was interesting,
| meaningful work, but they couldn't get money to keep it going.
|
| > 3. No technical interviews or coding challenges
|
| I have reached this point as well. I'm tired of the interview
| game. Just done. Can't do it anymore. The thought of interviewing
| makes me physically ill. I like to say that I'm retired form
| interviewing not software development.
|
| > 4. You pay what you want, per hour
|
| I'd work for $50K/year if the work was interesting and the people
| were nice. Heck, maybe even less than that in the right
| situation.
|
| In the meantime I'll be over here working on stuff that I find
| interesting in languages that I like (and aren't necessarily in
| demand). And gardening. And baking bread.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| I understand.
|
| I want to be able to have more autonomy on how to do my work.
| Take a piece of code (large or small) and relentlessness make it
| better. I don't want to have to explain my self for every little
| change. I want to be able to deploy my changes every day. I have
| a grand vision on my head and I want to make it happen. Second
| guessing my self of what others think, drains my energy.
| martin_a wrote:
| Good luck finding a company which will pay you in some obscure
| cryptocurrency.
| shubik22 wrote:
| I definitely sympathize with the author's dissatisfactions. It's
| difficult to find meaningful, interesting work that pays well,
| and when you find yourself sacrificing one part of that equation,
| it can be very disheartening.
|
| However, the answer to this is not to just cut out the "pays
| well" part of the equation and assume that the rest will follow
| as a result. As others in the comments here have pointed out,
| interesting work is hard to find, full stop.
|
| I would actually think that the non-conventional nature of the
| author's offer would actually decrease the quality of the work.
| In my experience, work can be enjoyable based on two dimensions:
| the technical aspect of the work (am I learning? is this
| engaging?) and the "organizational" nature of the work (is the
| company well organized and run? are there clear expectations? or
| is there just chaos everywhere?). Even if work you can find from
| this kind of offer is better on the first dimension, I imagine
| it'll be far worse on the second dimension.
|
| That being said, I hope the author proves me wrong and finds a
| work situation which makes them happy. Good luck!
| yongjik wrote:
| A generic advice: 15 years ago I might have felt similarly, but
| now I think it's the other way. If you want interesting work,
| demand higher pays and try to get into such positions.
|
| When you're highly paid you will get more interesting work,
| because the company will see you as a valuable asset that should
| be working on "hard" things. When you're being paid a penny, the
| company will think you're worth a penny and will assign you
| menial tasks.
|
| BTW I didn't really live up to my own advice, either.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| varispeed wrote:
| This is what I found as well. At high pay, you may be getting
| into building MVPs and prototypes - these don't require
| "boring" things like extensive testing or documentation. The
| board will see that their idea works and then only "boring"
| part is hand over to dev teams to "productionise" it.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| It's not just about pay it's also about earning respect (by
| delivering good and making valuable contributions to the team)
| and your relationship with your manager. My manager literally
| asks me, "What do you want to work on?"
| slt2021 wrote:
| if you do interesting, fascinating, groundbreakng stuff, then
| presumably this is something of great value and you should own
| equity.
|
| thats why I think a lot of people become founders.
|
| so if you work for a startup you will literally get paid whatecer
| and work on cool stuff, haha
| amelius wrote:
| If more people do this, then this will put a negative pressure on
| my salary.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| It is interesting how many of the responses to this here say some
| version of "our industry is mostly boring". That has been my
| experience of the industry as well, unfortunately.
| mettamage wrote:
| Request sent, I hope you find it fair since I don't have money to
| spare.
| wdb wrote:
| I wouldn't know how I can pay someone in cryptocurrency.
| blentz wrote:
| I've been on the receiving end of similar requests before.
|
| "I'll work for free or nothing if you let me do what I love under
| the umbrella of your organization because I love it so much."
|
| I did one or two agreements like this and then stopped
| altogether. The individual would start their work, others would
| start to depend on its existence and the individual would leave
| in a matter or weeks or months because something else better came
| along for them. There was no incentive to keep the relationship
| going over a longer term. My organization just wasn't setup to
| see any upside to short lived but high quality team members.
|
| Is there anyone out there who does work agreements like this
| currently and benefits from them? Would love to hear more
| details. Perhaps that feedback could help Franceso with his
| pitch.
|
| Franceso please come back in a week and let us know what kinds of
| offers you received. Will be very interested to see where this
| goes.
| christophergs wrote:
| Same, sometimes people volunteer to help me code
| https://coursemaker.org for free because they like the idea. In
| one case this has worked out well. But in a couple of others
| the engineers have vanished quite fast. Sometimes I wonder if I
| made a much more serious effort to onboard/document/give
| ownership then would they stick with it. What do you reckon -
| how was the onboarding in your case?
| frontiersummit wrote:
| The obvious elephant in the room is how can someone afford food
| and rent while working on $1 or whatever. If I was a hiring
| manager I would assume one of 3 things: 1) He is independently
| wealthy, 2) He lives in a van, or 3) he really expects $50/hour
| and this is some sort of bait-and-switch strategy.
| farhadhf wrote:
| I have some similar experiences. Especially with people saying
| "let me do what I love" or "give me a position where I can
| learn new things".
|
| People like variety - the initial love doesn't last long. After
| a few weeks/months it gets boring and repetitive. Learning the
| shiny new tech is only fun until you you've figured out how it
| works, but the project doesn't end there and you have to
| deliver a product in the end. But for most people who
| exclusively want the "position where they can learn new things"
| fixing the bugs and doing the finishing touches is no longer
| fun once they've figured out how the underlying tech works -
| they leave for the next position where they can learn another
| shiny new tech and you're left with a half-finished project
| (usually with subpar code quality because this was the first
| project they did using the new tech).
| plutonorm wrote:
| But this is my personality. Given repetitive work I become
| depressed quite quickly. I say this as a 40 yo who
| understands themselves well. Yes I can struggle through, but
| this career has brought me to the brink of suicide on two
| occasions. Working to the grind of an agile development cycle
| is poison to me, it drains all color from the world. I'd
| rather break my bones. Where is the space for people of my
| color? Who dry up and die if asked to write boiler plate crud
| code and unit tests for fizz buzz UI elements.
|
| Unless I'm solving a problem that's genuinely intellectualy
| stimulating then I have 0 interest in coding.
|
| Most of us hide the misery because we know that the only
| outcome of airing it is dismissal either in the short or the
| long term.
|
| There is no role for us in this career but having sunk so
| much time into it we have no other option but to keep on
| going.
| caffeine wrote:
| You have to do your own thing ... usually that's bad advice
| but for people with the temperament you describe I think
| it's reasonable.
|
| Also a lot depends on expectations and finding good
| partners. In a previous job I worked with another guy as a
| team. I would start projects and get an MVP out and
| delivering value - then move on to the next thing. He would
| go through and essentially rewrite them to be high quality,
| solidly engineered products, well integrated with the rest
| of the stack.
|
| We both got to do what we enjoyed and were good at: I am
| very fast at breaking new ground and delivering new value,
| and find engineering a bit boring. He was very good at
| improving existing systems, but too slow and plodding to
| try out new ideas effectively.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I feel like this is me with side projects sometimes. Do you
| have any tips for staying on target?
|
| I generally don't have this issue in my actual job.
| wvenable wrote:
| For side projects, I think there is some value in not being
| concerned about finishing them. If you're doing them for
| enjoyment then they shouldn't feel like a job.
|
| But I find defining exactly what _done_ will be on a
| personal project helps a lot to get completed. I define
| features are the minimum necessary and once I reach those
| features I immediately switch to trying to release it.
| Releasing is always a lot of work so it 's easy to put it
| off forever while constantly iterating on a product. But
| actually releasing gives a good feeling of accomplishment.
| vajrabum wrote:
| Here's a couple of thoughts. Sometimes not following
| through might not be about feelings or at least not
| directly. If you do a project to learn some new tech then
| the project is not about what it does but about how to do
| it. So make sure you pick side projects that you think need
| doing. Find a partner or a group to do the project with or
| create some way that you make yourself accountable for it's
| completion. Who are your projects for? If it's for
| yourself, then is it something you really want or maybe
| just an idea? If it's for somebody else or some group then
| create a connection to that group or some people so that
| you know who you're making it for and include them in the
| project. That way you have someone to deliver it to and to
| continue to support. Lastly, maybe it's a decision issue.
| Maybe you just never really completely decided to do it.
| How do you know when you've decided to do something?
| jpe90 wrote:
| When I get stuck on projects that are very meaningful to
| me, I chip away at the pieces I don't want to do and allow
| myself to take as long as I need to complete them.
|
| When I get stuck on projects that are not so meaningful to
| me, I reduce scope.
| augustk wrote:
| Personally I love doing the finishing touches but I'm usually
| not allowed to because the feature or product is considered
| good enough. It's hard to find a job where everyone really
| care about quality.
| christophergs wrote:
| Well said. This is why engineers who know how to finish the
| last 10% are truly valued by good colleagues and managers.
| username90 wrote:
| I don't think so, most teams never do the last 10% on any
| project ever. They pick the low hanging fruit with the
| first 80% and if they are thorough they might bring it up
| to 90%, but 100%? I've never seen such a software project.
| ivanche wrote:
| I'd say that Total Commander is very close to 100%.
| plutonorm wrote:
| And those who aren't like that by nature are much less
| useful I suppose?
| gbear0 wrote:
| I'd also suggest people making these requests to try and expand
| their interests to make themselves more rounded and valuable.
| For example I'm totally the kind of person that likes to jump
| from one thing to another cause I like the challenge and I get
| bored quick otherwise. But instead of jumping ship cause the
| challenge is gone I try to find a different closely related
| challenge.
|
| Here's a couple of techniques for anyone looking to do the
| same:
|
| 1. Look at the 'supply chain' of inputs and outputs from your
| problem area. Are there new inefficiencies somewhere in the
| stack that you can dig into and solve, and leverage your new
| knowledge. This could mean a whole new area of things to learn
| in order to investigate or solve those problems.
|
| 2. Never accept the status quo. Every time you're asked to do
| something else, treat that as an opportunity to find one thing
| that you can improve in the related systems. Here you'll learn
| the new system, but you'll also learn how to pick worthwhile
| areas for improvement.
|
| 3. Be reflective and review what you found interesting and what
| you didn't and dig into the ones you didn't find interesting.
| Ask yourself why you didn't like things; was it cause it was
| too difficult to pick up? was it cause you don't like people
| problems? was it just too big a problem to tackle? Dig in more
| and ask why again (like the Toyota 5 Whys). Eventually you
| should be able to find a problem area that you can clearly
| define and potentially work on to improve.
|
| I realize these 3 techniques won't necessarily lead to 'cool
| tech problems', but that's kinda the point! If you can get
| yourself interested in solving related problem areas, you'll
| find you pick up a lot of useful knowledge and value that you
| can apply in many other areas you wouldn't have first thought
| of, all while always jumping between things and not getting
| bored!
|
| (edit: formatting)
| madog wrote:
| I don't have anything to add to this, only to say thanks -
| that's decent advice. If you do X, you can learn about Y, and
| apply it to Z.
|
| If you have a broad interest there's like a million different
| ways to pivot and branch off to learn different things.
| wsc981 wrote:
| Seems like a weird idea to me anyways, to offer to work for
| very little money or even nothing, as long as the work is
| interesting.
|
| To me it seems that time is much better spent on a fun personal
| (side) project. And who knows ... maybe the side project will
| earn some income in time.
| splistud wrote:
| But that's not the idea is it? The idea is to define the
| terms, and see what the bids are. Perhaps, if the bids are
| too low, the decision would be to 'pay oneself' (spend from
| savings) while working on said side project. But the point is
| simple - an attempt to find a union of two interests at a
| price that makes sense.
| splonk wrote:
| I did something sort of similar. There are limits to what you
| can do with a side project, and joining a company gets you
| access to other people with different skill sets from yours.
|
| In my particular case after finding a good fit with a small
| startup I told the CEO to just pay me as little as he could
| reasonably justify and make up the rest in equity (which I
| was fully aware would likely be worthless). In a different
| framing, I was "spending" my missing salary by "hiring" some
| people to do the work I wouldn't want to do - pitching deals,
| forming business relationships, and negotiating contracts to
| get me the data that I actually wanted to work on.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| You'll never find a job that meets these requirements, but you
| may find a job with good co-workers, a boss who is decent and a
| healthy work environment. To me, that is nirvana. Just like in a
| marriage, there's going to be good and bad times. It's the people
| that make those rough patches bearable.
|
| Sounds to me like you just want flexibility and the opportunity
| to work on things you find engaging. Don't expect 100% of that
| all the time but I do think if you look hard enough, you'll find
| what you seek.
| erdos4d wrote:
| I've asked dev shops to feed me work with no standup or meetings,
| just send the spec and answer my questions. Nobody will take the
| offer, even if I am willing to do 2 guys work for half a guy's
| pay. I have no way to explain this, but it seems like standup
| meetings are more important than anything to most employers. Best
| of luck, please post your results if you actually get work that
| wants output and not hangout time.
| rafael_benatti wrote:
| I don't have any work for you but congratulations for your cv, is
| very good :)
| mrfusion wrote:
| Anyone here want to make a job board for "interesting" work?
| There are lots of retired software engineers (and managers who
| miss coding) who would love to work a few hours a week.
| Rochus wrote:
| If such a well-qualified person wants to work for any wage, it
| will distort the market in the first place (i.e. clients will be
| even less willing to pay decent rates if people with his
| qualifications work for any amount). Why doesn't he work for open
| source projects on his own initiative and at his own discretion
| and try to finance himself via Patreon or similar? Or he could
| solve interesting problems for companies at his own risk, let the
| company check the suitability of the solution (initially as
| closed source), and then sell it for a fixed price "as is"
| (including source code). This way the company can save the
| specification effort, is more willing to outsource the project
| and the consultant can demonstrate its qualification directly
| with the solution and the speed with which it develops it. This
| has worked for me for many years, and I don't have to convince my
| customers with cheap rates.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Cool! 1$ per year and I want you to solve generalized AI voice
| recognition customer service and all the IP will belong to me.
| lhovon wrote:
| You might find some of these to your liking
| https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/opportunities
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Anything is interesting if you engage with it. And being bored is
| a state of mind. It's a fallacy to say "that's boring". The
| bored-ness is in your head, not in the task.
| mlboss wrote:
| Not sure why you were downvoted. I totally agree with you.
|
| One of my past manager told me that the trick of making a
| boring job interesting is to introduce a layer of abstraction
| to the task.
|
| For example, if you have to right a lot of boiler plate code
| then write a code generator.
| pschuegr wrote:
| "The trick to making a boring job interesting is to make it
| more complicated". This is IMO terrible advice for building
| software.
|
| Edit: your example seems like a good instance of applying
| this _well_, but I would not tell anybody this as general
| advice.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I don't know... Have you ever done manual QA as a full time
| job?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Some mechanical menial jobs can be satisfying. At least when
| you can get in the zone, and see what you've accomplished at
| the end of the day.
|
| I grew up on a farm. There was a lot of that. It took mental
| discipline, which most folks may not have an opportunity to
| develop in this hypercharged media world.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I didnt grow up on a farm but grew up on a good bit of land
| with a lot of yard work that needed to be done. I agree
| that some jobs like that can be satisfying but its very
| different from a computer based role.
|
| At the end of the day when you have taken a large tree
| branch and turned it into a stacked pile of chopped wood
| you feel a sense of accomplishment. It doesnt feel quite
| the same when you've cleared 4 QA UI tickets.
| andrewzah wrote:
| This is certainly true. Being bored to a large extent is a
| personal choice. Things can be as interesting as you make them,
| but it requires looking at things from different perspectives
| sometimes.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| I'm guessing you're a manager.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Developer all my life.
| echelon wrote:
| I was just replying to a flagged comment [1] and it became
| impossible to respond to,
|
| > Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the intersection of
| "interesting" work and "valuable" work is pretty small.
|
| Your comment was flagged/dead, but I absolutely think you are
| right.
|
| Look at most of the jobs today. Laborer, factory worker, package
| sorter, delivery driver, fast food worker, government process
| worker, ... These aren't particularly interesting or fulfilling.
|
| Apply that lens to our industry, and what do you see? Plumbing
| grunt work, glue code maintainer, migration work, form collection
| CRUD. There are so many jobs that don't do anything particularly
| novel or exciting. You might even be building something you hate,
| like ad tech.
|
| I don't think the comment is too off base. Maybe the scale and
| tone is wrong, but there's certainly plenty of boring work.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26863367
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Work for yourself, first on finding why it is you want to work.
|
| If the motivation is there, and you're cause is meaningful, then
| all of the problems will become interesting.
| dkyc wrote:
| It's almost funny how this is the polar opposite of what you
| often want when hiring. You're hiring to add manpower to tackle
| the kind of unexciting tasks that you don't naturally find people
| drawn towards from your existing team (and then, people's
| responsibilities expand, or they turn 'boring' work into
| interesting work by redefining the problem or attacking it on a
| deeper level).
|
| When you have a growing business, money is probably not not the
| _primary_ concern, but the last thing you can afford is someone
| on the team being picky about which tasks are beneath them.
|
| No judgment here, I understand OP's sentiment, but I cannot
| remember any situation in my career where 'hire me, I only work
| on what I find interesting but it'll cost you comparatively
| little' would have been an exciting proposition (on the hiring
| side).
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I'd put it a bit differently than the OP - for me interesting
| and meaningful work means that it's actually benefiting society
| in some way. That would mean that even the 'boring' aspects
| would have some kind of meaning ("we're trying to cure X" or
| "We're working to help solve global warming"). Too much work
| now is just trying to sell stuff to other people, get people to
| click links, get people riled up so that they're engaged with
| some social media platform - it's not helping us as a species.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Definetely. Making a rich guy get richer is boring. Helping
| the planet be a better place sounds interesting.
| itronitron wrote:
| If a company is trying to hire people to do the work that
| current employees don't want to do then it sounds like they
| have already hired the wrong people.
| freetime2 wrote:
| As a company grows, all sorts of new problems open up that
| your current employees might not be a great fit for. For
| example, you might not need a DBA when just starting out, but
| when your database reaches a certain size it might make sense
| to hire one. Or you might need to hire a middle manager once
| you reach a certain size - but all of your initial hires
| prefer individual contributor roles. Or maybe you need
| someone with a strong background in security to be able to
| pass an audit.
|
| It doesn't mean that you hired the wrong people. Just that
| your needs are changing.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Others have said it but it bears repeating: Entitled
|
| No interviews? No fixed hours? Maximum 10 hours per week? He'll
| refuse to do anything he doesn't think is interesting?
|
| Who would even want to hire someone like this.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| At this point why not do some research across HN, for example do
| lookup Show HN or on indiehackers and team up with other solo-
| devs on project they started for a minimum hourly rate and then
| just grow with them and eventually make higher returns
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> No fixed hours, I will work when I want.
|
| >> no daily stand-ups
|
| >> Meaningful work means work that I care about
|
| >> This whole thing is not about money, so what the work is about
| comes first
|
| There is a profound mismatch between what this person is
| offerring and what anyone would want from a developer, or even
| the core requirements for effective software development. I'll
| pass.
| CleanCoder wrote:
| I am most curious about the "no technical interview" part and
| "my work speaks for my skills" while OP's GitHub is just forks.
|
| This all really reads in an uncomfortable way and I would never
| risk investing into somebody by guessing if whatever I need
| done, as a business, will be interesting enough for this person
| to put genuine effort into.
|
| I feel like OP needs hobbies to get the fun/interesting itch
| scratched and then go back to being a "code monkey" like the
| rest of us, doing "boring" stuff to pay the bills.
|
| I've been there myself before and the most valuable lesson I've
| learned is that motivation != discipline. Motivation comes and
| goes and if you base your productivity solely on that you will
| burn out. Being disciplined though allows to get the "boring"
| out of the way first, leaving lots of time to explore other
| interests.
| qiqitori wrote:
| > I am most curious about the "no technical interview" part
| and "my work speaks for my skills" while OP's GitHub is just
| forks.
|
| On Github you have to fork a project first if you want to
| create a pull request. I randomly opened three of the forks
| and saw that he'd made pull requests for two of them.
| CleanCoder wrote:
| I fully understand the way forks work - what I found
| troubling is that for somebody who is dying to do something
| interesting, for close to no pay, there seems to be little
| indication of them doing things out of pure
| passion/interest as is. For somebody expecting me to hand
| pick things that are super fun to work on there is not
| enough incentive/conviction for me to trust this person
| and/or invest any time into onboarding/managing them.
| That's literally why you get paid "the big bucks" - the
| employer can demand specific things without having to
| depend on your mood and attitude towards task A.
|
| The only thing I can suggest to the author is what others
| have already said - go in to academia/research and
| volunteer your time to selected interests.
|
| One scenario in which the author's attitude and desires
| could work is if he starts his own business and focuses on
| the fun things while paying others to do the boring stuff.
| But then again - building a successful business to achieve
| the luxury of total choice takes a lot of "boring" work
| beforehand.
| ghaff wrote:
| I confess that I have trouble seeing the logic in wanting
| to work for someone for free. _Maybe_ as a short-term
| learning thing if a temporary position can be structured
| that way legally.
|
| But, by and large, if you don't care about being paid,
| why not just work on your own project. Because there's
| pretty much no such thing as a 100% no-BS position
| anywhere.
| wjdp wrote:
| There is a UI problem on GH with forks. (From my limited
| experience) most profiles that are full of forks the person
| just uses forks like they would stars. No branches or PRs
| made. I'd guess, cynically, this is to fill out their
| profile.
|
| On the other hand a profile of meaningful contributions
| looks the same on the surface.
| jrh206 wrote:
| This attitude comes across as a little arrogant, and I'm not sure
| whether it's warranted without a host of achievements to back it
| up. Nevertheless, I hope the best for the author, who seems to
| know what they want.
|
| I think they would have better success by actively seeking what
| they want, though, rather than expecting it to turn up at their
| doorstep.
| tyrex2017 wrote:
| imho this post is pretty much going for what you want! :)
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