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

Assuming you are on salary, if you can legitimately do something in half the time, great, you should then move on to doing something else that contributes to the company.

If you are on salary you are paid for your time and talent, not by the task.

The right thing for management to do would be to reward you for being efficient (doesn't just have to be simple monetary, people are motivated by all kinds of things), and then reallocate those resources that we saved to some other need.

This of course changes if you are on some kind of contract work.

I moonlight as a consultant, and I generally work for whatever the going rate is for a decent hourly hire in the space. I do web-apps as it is my specialty, and select projects with familiar tech / business logic so that I'm productive quickly.

What I do differently then most is that I invest time up front to understand the company, and understand the why behind the projects I have to do. It allows me to spend a lot of time shaping my work instead of implementing. I'll try to find better alternatives, question requirements, etc. I do it in good faith, trying to uncover unsound specs and find 80/20 solutions, which in the context of companies outsourcing dev work to random shops has a ton value.

It doesn't make the projects themselves more interesting, but this approach is challenging in itself and it keeps me on my toes.

Once I've figured the how, I get grinding. I do long, 8-12h crunch sessions, fasting and fully in the zone. During each of those I can do an amount of work that is perceived to take about a week.

I do most of those up front (avoid last minute surprises), take some notes on some of the roadblocks I encounter in case someone asks for an update at any point, and set the project aside. I then turn it in a bit before the expected deadline (which is sometimes explicit, sometimes not).

Ethics are hard but truth is I'm not even ashamed of it and have on multiple occasions admitted to doing that to managers / execs when I felt they were open-minded people. They still get excellent value for their money and I get paid incredibly well for my time. Win-win.

The alternative would be to try to charge 200-300$ an hour, but companies generally don't want to deal with the perceived risk and are very reluctant to pay consultants higher than their most expensive employees .

As such I found this discussion an interesting diversion. Slightly awkward comic relief perhaps.

There is a lot to of work in industries which have a predominantly negative effect on the world around us. Slacking off while working in one of those companies might even be a net positive.