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Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#101

Post by belmarca »

froggertoaster wrote: post #81

Disclaimer: I own a boring consultancy. Boring, however, is contextual. We have flex hours. We have unlimited PTO (and frequent reminders to take personal time - I already know the data related to offering unlim PTO and how often people then take PTO, thank you very much). We make over $1 million in revenue a year with 6 people and no plans to have exponential growth, coupled with high margins so that we aren't rugpu…

Can you share some more about what you do? Looks interesting! Like sibling comment, I'm also looking for remote part-time work. Such opportunities seem relatively rare.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#102

Post by rib3ye »

the_only_law wrote: post #96
curiousllama wrote: post #36

They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech. Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.

Fair warning, many non-tech F500 may be less of “places running their setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter grandfathered into an affordable Edgecast plan running a LAMP stack on Debian using borg for backups?” And more of “places running near archaic .NET/JVM versions that somehow manage to combine bureaucracy with lack of organization”.

You really nailed it with that last sentence.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#103

Post by PascLeRasc »

Pittsburgh, PA. Every big company here - PNC, UPMC, Highmark, Fedex, Norfolk Southern, Duquesne Light - will pay you $65-70k/year at most. I met an IT director at one of these companies who told me that open source is a communist movement and so he's banned it. The dress code is very relaxed - if you stay late all week you can earn jeans Fridays!

At all of these companies you will be forced to use Internet Explorer 11 and you'll program in a remote desktop Notepad.exe on Windows Server 2012. Doing anything else is explicitly banned. The programming language is a proprietary version of Visual Basic with all the functions renamed and changed slightly so the vendor can control access to the $5k/year documentation, which is still horribly written. You will sign an agreement not to ever ask or answer questions about the language on Stack Overflow too. The vendor of these languages doesn't really exist beyond an email address like "sales@enterprisereadypython.com" - they will gaslight you that this is the real Python and python.org is a scam, "if you're not paying you're the product!". None of your coworkers will know what you're talking about when you mention Git or Linux.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#104

Post by PascLeRasc »

apohn wrote: post #95
curiousllama wrote: post #36

They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech. Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.

I used to work in a Customer facing role at a Enterprise Software Company that sold up and down the Fortune 500. I got to see a lot of different tech stacks. Many use a lot of proprietary software, which can be a type of hell nobody understands till you end up as an expert in a niche area and spend your day dealing with vendors and tech support to fix anything. After 5 years you are an expert on "EnterpriseSoftwareCo…

Thanks, it's so reassuring to hear this.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#105

Post by isx726552 »

apohn wrote: post #95
curiousllama wrote: post #36

They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech. Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.

I used to work in a Customer facing role at a Enterprise Software Company that sold up and down the Fortune 500. I got to see a lot of different tech stacks. Many use a lot of proprietary software, which can be a type of hell nobody understands till you end up as an expert in a niche area and spend your day dealing with vendors and tech support to fix anything. After 5 years you are an expert on "EnterpriseSoftwareCo…

Yeesh I feel that way working at a FAANG (or MAGMA or whatever it’s called this week). I’m an expert at our internal systems and platforms, but that’s not a skill that’s transferable anywhere else.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#106

Post by py_or_dy »

froggertoaster wrote: post #81

Disclaimer: I own a boring consultancy. Boring, however, is contextual. We have flex hours. We have unlimited PTO (and frequent reminders to take personal time - I already know the data related to offering unlim PTO and how often people then take PTO, thank you very much). We make over $1 million in revenue a year with 6 people and no plans to have exponential growth, coupled with high margins so that we aren't rugpu…

uh, you got a careers page? :)

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#107

Post by brimble »

curiousllama wrote: post #36

They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech. Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.

> Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.

I suspect that there's a fair amount of overlap—not total, but quite a bit—between companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and well-documented, repeatable, largely scripted configuration, and companies that are on some of the "sexy" tech now. So it might be even harder than it used to be to find a company doing things the "boring" way but who don't have a horrible, barely-functioning mess on their hands.

I'd think some of the nerdier, niche tech places probably run things OK and not super new-school. Something like Rsync.net, maybe. Possibly places that like BSD in general will tend not to be on the new hotness. Difficulty: those sorts of places tend to have pretty low head counts so it may be hard to land a job at one (go figure, much of the tried and true stuff Just Works and doesn't require a ton of babysitting if you halfway know what you're doing)

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#108

Post by ectopod »

bio4m wrote: post #79
giantg2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially banks on that list. They're slow to adopt new tech due to risk aversion.

Not the case; I work at a bank and we have widescale adoption of Kubernetes and cloud products (in fact most of the major banks do at this point) If you happen to be looking for a DevOps or SRE role, check a large banks job boards, you'll be surprised how many open roles are available.

My (rather out-of-date) experience with banks is that they have no problem adopting new tech but they don't retire the old tech. Add in a bunch of mergers and you get an unholy mess.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#109

Post by rob74 »

the_only_law wrote: post #96
curiousllama wrote: post #36

They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech. Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.

Fair warning, many non-tech F500 may be less of “places running their setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter grandfathered into an affordable Edgecast plan running a LAMP stack on Debian using borg for backups?” And more of “places running near archaic .NET/JVM versions that somehow manage to combine bureaucracy with lack of organization”.

Mind you, it can get even more archaic than .NET/JVM ("hey, never change a running system, plus, even if we wanted, we wouldn't have the money to pay for it")

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#110

Post by JackFr »

bio4m wrote: post #79
giantg2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially banks on that list. They're slow to adopt new tech due to risk aversion.

Not the case; I work at a bank and we have widescale adoption of Kubernetes and cloud products (in fact most of the major banks do at this point) If you happen to be looking for a DevOps or SRE role, check a large banks job boards, you'll be surprised how many open roles are available.

The scope of IT at a JMPC or a BAML is massive, and has grown both through acquisition and organically over decades. Virtually any technology you can think of is most likely being used or (at least being supported) by some unit at the bank. In a recent year JPMC's IT spend was $12 billion. In my personal experience (at JPMC) I knew groups who were using Clojure and Scala (while my manager assured me such technology was not authorized at the bank.) I knew of groups on AWS, on e on Azure and some using an internal Cloud Foundry implementation. (My group was running bond monte carlo's in an abortion of an IBM compute grid system straight out of 1992.) I personally knew of Mongo, Cassandra, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server and KDB installations. Kapital - possibly the most famous commercial use of Smalltalk originated at JPM.

The point is - it's difficult to make generalizations about orgs that big.

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