351–360 of 1001 posts
I have no interest in telling you what to do as an individual but this thread and all of the people that seem on board with this is what drives me crazy about most of the places I've worked. I have the hardest time getting anything done because of the sea of people trying to find ways not to do any work. Is this not abuse of privilege? Do you all not hear the stories of people working multiple jobs and still not bein…
I cant believe this hasnt been said yet: Every job can be converted into this esp in any sort of managerial role, the strategy to do this has only 3 basic steps: # 1 - Hire a great team under you. If you have one person, two person, or more working under you, make sure they know what to do and make sure they understand your expectations. # 2 - Delegate your work. Try to get rid of as much work as possible. There will…
Most of the jobs trade your time for money with a varying degree of premium and committment. The full-time lets you calculate how much hobby time you could theoretically expect. This would be interrupted time.
Part-time may allow more hobby-time, but is often limited in span, before you'd need to find another part-time.
Similarly, the consulting service. It may allow more freedom, but requires rather high admin effort, which eats into your hobby time. Also, this depends on your skill and the niche.
Finally, a hybrid approach - work hard in high-paying position (full/part/consult) for a set period of time (years) to accumulate the needed funds. Then embark on a hobby expansion stretch, hopefully, with some noticeable result. At the conclusion (of funds in bank), embark on the next job/money-making phase. You may need to find a way to 'explain the gap'.
At some point in this journey, the solution to the puzzle may just offer itself to you, or may be rather forced (familiy, medical, or economy issues).
Good luck!
Ultimately I got bored and left.
I was a “sysadmin/devops”. If that helps, though usually developers don’t think they need sysadmins anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you question is very sincere and VERY UNIQUE for this community because every other question is asking for the exact opposite. That's why there are a lot of interesting replies as well as a lot of interest in the question itself. Is your hobby/"passions (which are not monetizable)" expensive? And are you 100% certain they are not monetizable? In today's world, I have yet to see something which is not monetiza…
> And are you 100% certain they are not monetizable? I learned that once I try to monetize my hobbies, there’s a very real risk that they become stressful and no longer fun and invigorating. Sometimes it’s best to keep hobbies as just hobbies. Or, at least, make sure you have some hobbies that will only ever stay hobbies. Nothing wrong with trying to do monetize something you love, just don’t let it be the only thing…
- Any type of "analyst" position in a (big) healthcare, banking, or college/university. If not "analyst", then a job description that involves both systems administration + programming (actual app development, not just scripting).
Working in big healthcare/banking is usually very secure and very little work unless you happen to land on an A team (which you won't unless you prove exceptional). I have friends in healthcare who "own" legacy applications. Their job is simply to maintain ancient classic ASP or PHP 3.0 applications that are "critical" to business functions. This amounts to a few hours of work a month (!) when the unicorn server running the app has a hiccup and needs a reboot.
Banking can be the same. I held a remote job for a many-billion-dollar-a-year-US-bank doing ASP.NET development and we would be given something like 2-3 months to fix a vague bug like "this report in the admin takes 15 minutes to run can you make it faster?" Then you would look into it and discover said report was running against a server with 256 MB of RAM running DB/2 off of someone's Raspberry PI duct-taped underneath their desk because they couldn't get their official request for a VM through IT. Oh and they had never written a SQL query before so you just rewrote their abomination of CURSOR hell in 15 minutes and suddenly the report was down to 10 seconds so who cares - time to relax for 2 months and watch videos about growing tomatoes in custom-built built hydroponics tubs (I love you Jeb Gardener).
College/university. Side note here: keep any eye open for any job that requires specialized knowledge of massive legacy/clunky applications, e.g. PeopleSoft (Oracle), SalesForce, SharePoint, etc. I had a gig for a few years at my alma mater helping to migrate their student information systems from a home-grown system that worked (but was legacy DB/2) to an Oracle PeopleSoft system that categorically did not work but had a 50 million dollar budget. They started migrating 3 years before I got there, and to my knowledge, are still migrating/facing issues to this day.
The work was hilariously easy: my task would be to work with the integration team to attempt to get a report of all students in our department meeting x, y, z criteria. Since we were working with Oracle directly, any request took 2-4 weeks and never was fulfilled as they outsourced 100% of their development work and the developers couldn't get anything done.
- SMB consulting, avoiding application development. I think someone mentioned answering tickets already which is usually pretty simple, but inevitably you'll end up getting promoted at most consulting gigs. That said, you can get a nice cushy job just installing servers, racks, desktops, etc. It's a bit of physical work sure, but usually most consulting shops have this stuff down pat - 2-4 hours for an install of , 6 onsite hours for , 2 monthly hours for maintenance, etc.
- Technical writing. This is niche as you need to find a company that actually cares about their documentation, but if you're halfway decent at writing this can be an incredibly low-key easy job. Most people are downright terrible at writing and it shows in their documentation (just take a look at most public API docs!). I know an out-of-work writer who got a gig from UpWork to basically fix grammatical errors for an entire API's documentation that turned into a permanent gig as the company was a startup with zero non-technical folks and they absolutely loved her ability to turn their gibberish into human-readable docs. She got to work directly with consumers who greatly benefited from her work and the job was cake as writing came naturally to her - hardest part was learning what some of the technical lingo was.
can you do tech support for users of the product? It can often be helpful if a tech support person also knows a bit about tech so as to be able to turn the customer's vague bug description into something the developers can actually understand.
I have no interest in telling you what to do as an individual but this thread and all of the people that seem on board with this is what drives me crazy about most of the places I've worked. I have the hardest time getting anything done because of the sea of people trying to find ways not to do any work. Is this not abuse of privilege? Do you all not hear the stories of people working multiple jobs and still not bein…
Except paying the bills and achieving something are only weakly correlated concepts in many cases, especially when salaried.
If you don't care about the particular ethics/concerns for humanity, what OP wants is definitely possible.
A lot of it also comes down to incentives. What percentage of employees have any stake whatsoever in whether their own project succeeds or fails? Or even the company they are with?
So many projects/companies are essentially relying on individual altruism to choose to take action rather than not.
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…
Cool.... so what do you do?
You just described my job to a T. I'm a systems analyst at a university. This was a big, demanding job when I first started. But after being here for 2 years, I've automated a lot of the complicated stuff. So now most routine tasks that took the other guy a week takes me about 15 minutes. To be fair though, the other guy was *really bad*. Like, couldn't even open IIS manager and restart a single website, bad. The pay…
I think the take-away here, which I've also experienced, is to get an IT job in an industry that does not appreciate IT - find a position that seems to involve a TON of manual work - automate all of it - and DO NOT TELL anyone that you have automated those activities. If you are working from home, you could conceivably do this for multiple jobs (in theory, ethical considerations aside).