I am high priest of God's temple.
It would please me if God's temple was famous.
Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
#12Not a utopia (no idea what that would look like). This is my bare minimum I set myself as I'm now on the market.
No open plan spaces or sharing. I want an office to myself or at least my own cubicle with full-height walls.
No mandatory overtime or hints at "we all work really hard." I expect to come in at 9 and leave at 5.
No waterfall process (yeah, it still exists)
SCM, reasonably recent toolset, clueful managers. The actual language or technology isn't that important as long as it's not trending towards obsolescence.
Market pay and benefits. I currently have 4+ weeks vacation and I just turned down a job where they said "everybody starts out at 2 weeks." F' that!
Re: Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
#13- Wiliness to sit down and define requirements
- Clear strategic goals
- Continuous improvement
- Feasible deadlines
- Remote work
- Payment proportional to value added
This is the perfect project to me.
PS: An employee might be more interested in perks like iMac and free food. To me it's bull to keep people overworked and underpaid, hence why I consult.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
#14A place where I can keep innovating, keep creating things that ship and get used. Where, if I know somebody who can help us, I can get them hired on.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
#15I need a place where if I really have something on my mind I'm free to take a day and explore it. If I think I can improve the quality and codebase I should be free to do so provided I dont break anything or I make all the changes required to implement it fully.
Example: I wanted to start to implement std::thread and use of auto. It required us to start using c++11. I should be free to do this, fix anything, make sure devs are set to compile correctly and start implementing. I can do it locally, demo it and then get the green light to merge.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
#16I will only work at companies where I am peers with everyone, from the bottom to the top. Everyone makes good decisions and everyone makes bad decisions. If you're hiring someone you don't trust to make decisions or question yours then it's probably a bad sign.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
#17I'd recommend getting a bit more specific. Your question is so open ended as to be unanswerable in any practical way.
First figure out which areas of "work environment" you actually care about. * location / commute time / remote? * if onsite then physical workspace ? * develpment environment (mac/windows/linux)? * technology stack? * personality of company? * social value (if any) of the company? * etc. etc.
Until you know what aspects of "working environment" you can't really define what the min requirements are. Also, everyone's idea of "utopia" is different. We all have different values.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
#18I freelance but often a startup client will ask if they can hire me. To me it's not about lunches and big monitors, nor git and agile. These are my requirements:
- I want to keep working remotely.
- The salary should be competitive with what I'm making now.
- There should be proof the company is an ongoing concern.
- The company should have a good answer to how it can help me progress in my career, preferably without moving into management. (As far as I can tell most startups have never been asked about career advancement before.)
- There should be some upside beyond the salary, because owning my own consulting business already has upside from side projects and potential to grow into a development firm.
Those are probably unrealistic, so I'm still freelancing. :-)
Re: Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
#19If it's the right product and the right people I'll work in a sewer pipe...at night...in COBOL...
The creature-comforts only start to matter to me when I'm fundamentally unhappy with the job in some other way (not rewarding, incompatible culture, etc).
So my utopia is: A product I believe in, co-workers I love to be around. That simple.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers, what are your min requirements? What is your utopia?
#20Give me a product I believe in and a team that I respect and enjoy working with. After that everything else doesn't matter much to me. Because, with the right team and project it doesn't even feel like a job anymore.
When work starts feeling like work, that's when I start looking for a change. That's why I've always been drawn to start ups. It's usually a small group of talented and smart people looking to make a dent in the world.