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Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

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Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

#191

I think it's probably fairly random. I.e. you're just as likely to have a "do nothing" job in a FAANG as in some other random corps. But I don't think you can start doing nothing right after being hired - usually people are hired because there's more work in a team that the existing headcount can handle. So, you have to work for some time and then count on "falling into the cracks" - landing in a place where there's…

I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week. We have a lot of contracts where we have Scrum Masters just because we do Agile, usually the non-technical types do it. The irony is that Scrum Masters are supposed to not make the team reliant on them but by having a dedicated role for it of course the dev team will make the Scrum Master do menial…

100% Scrum Masters!

If you are actually a good developer and you get a pure Scrum Master role then it's almost impossible to not get endlessly promoted and praised and possibly paid better than a developer role itself whilst actually still doing fuck all work. Imagine, you do a standup, ask in the end if anyone has any blockers, some developer or QA will say something stupid about the CI/CD pipeline or merging a PR and you'll schedule a meeting with the people who need to follow this up and you could actually throw in some suggestions which only a great developer would normally do and the team will look at you as if you're some bloody hero for DeNiro and praise you as "the best Scrum Master they ever had who actually helps the team and lives up to their role". LOL. Then you know you can go to sleep for the rest of the day and nobody will even notice.

The only other thing I can come up with which could be easier than Scrum Master is to apply for a manual QA role. I don't think I have to say more, but essentially, you will look like you've worked around the clock when really you just click a button at the beginning of the day and then go to sleep again.

Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

#192

I've been thinking about starting a co-op with a few people recently (get a front end person, a backend person, maybe someone who knows CMS's and can do website things, someone who knows marketing, a writer, a designer, and an ops person) and taking on freelance work. We wouldn't all be needed for all projects, we'd all try to bring in leads, and it would generate good part time work for everyone. On the side if we d…

I'd be interested. Can you email me (email in my profile)

Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons. I had a similar job once, where I worked in TV coverage of final table of WSOP (World Series of Poker). I was around the poker celebs at the time, preparing talking points for my boss who int…

It seems like this person deeply values what they had the opportunity to do, while you don't care about poker.

in the end, everyones going to just figure out they should be doing yoga

Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

#194
post #16

This is an awesome question. I hope someone has good strategies for you. Life should be spent doing the things you find worthwhile, and the fact is, not all of those things are monetizable. Given how esteem- and success driven HN as a platform is... you might not get too many ideas since I suppose people want to maintain their "hireable" status. Success and "loving your job" are more or less empty phrases unless you…

My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons. Colleagues have spent days in jungles building bridges to drive cars over them, have got to know people living in random villages from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and share in their culture, have m…

My choice of expression was a bit clumsy.

By "toil" I did not mean a thing without a worth - a thing you find worthwhile is intrinsically valuable. I don't believe you can compute economic value to life experiences.

I would call toil anything that does not enable you to rise to the stage of self-actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

But like I said my intent was not to present such a non-self actualizing job as bad, quite contrary.

Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

#195
post #111
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partner choice and choice whether to have children are other critical considerations in cost control.

"Family as the main instrument of cost control" - now that is bleak :D

I think it's only genuinely bleak if your starting position is that family is assumed, rightful, and ineluctable - and electing to not head down that path is purely a fiscal decision.

Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

#196

I don't know about putting in the least amount of effort for 5 days a week. But what I do know is that in my country, the Netherlands, part-time work is more and more becoming the standard. Already, 75% of women and 30% of men work 32 hours a week or less. In many sectors the fulltime standard has been lowered to 36 hours, which means every other Friday off. I myself started on 40 and will move to 32 hours somewhere…

> It's your right by law to reduce your hours for the same pay/hour. Is this actually a thing? There are laws regarding this? How do these laws work if there's a job requirement itself which needs certain number of hours?

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM...:

“Part-time workers cannot be treated less favourably than comparable full-time workers solely because they work part-time, unless it can be objectively justified.”

So, employers can deny requests for shorter working hours, but only if that can be objectively justified.

In general, that’s fairly hard to do, given the amount of part-time workers and the diversity of their jobs already in the market.

Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

#197

I don't know about putting in the least amount of effort for 5 days a week. But what I do know is that in my country, the Netherlands, part-time work is more and more becoming the standard. Already, 75% of women and 30% of men work 32 hours a week or less. In many sectors the fulltime standard has been lowered to 36 hours, which means every other Friday off. I myself started on 40 and will move to 32 hours somewhere…

I created a part-time jobs board: https://parttime.careers/

I hope it will be useful for people in this thread.

Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

#198

Working for a big company maintaining a legacy system can be like this. You can get by outputting 3 lines of code per week between meetings, filling in tickets, clearing disk space occasionally when the monitoring alerts and doing mandatory upgrades. Nobody really cares as you are a cost centre but they need to keep people around for support. There are a lot of people in banks still making reasonable money doing this…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

#200
Have you considered looking for data engineering jobs? Many data-focused companies seem to be looking for people to either set up pipelines and then babysit them, or to babysit pipelines designed by another engineer who has since moved on.

If you were willing to put in the time at the start getting things well designed, implemented and instrumented, I would imagine that in some places you could create the two-hours-per-day situation you're looking for, without anyone really feeling too upset about the deal.

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