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

I don't know if you have dependents; that personal fact alone would make a big difference in what you can and should do.

But if you are free to choose, find or expand upon what you enjoy doing, and do it and keep doing it until you're satisfied that you're the best you can be. Whether you're hand-carving figurines (or making any kind of art), exploring the world (or leading local tourist hikes), or hacking the perfect free tier prompt and creating software filters that blow our minds, you can do what you want, and you will, if you focus on what you love to do anyway.

If you would do it even if/when no one pays you, you may have found your way.

> im not challenged well in my job

A leap of faith (in yourself) is often needed; a drastic change in environment can become necessary. Either challenge yourself to squeeze all the skill-growth-juice out of your current position, or go a step further and take all your time back, for an investment in yourself, where you find what you love to do and spend all your time doing it, even if you're not getting paid for a while.

They literally do nothing and don’t even have to help integrate the security fixes. They just give reports. A sweet gig if you can get it. People rarely want to cut “security.”

I have had around 8 jobs and only one of them required a full day's work. Usually they are around 20 hour weeks, and occasionally a job has been 5 hour weeks discounting meetings. My managers usually love me and may even extoll my virtues to the team. I've spent a lot of time wondering how this is possible for me, since I'm not seeking out such jobs, and it seems unusual among my peers, so it must be at least in part what is specific to my own actions. Here's my working theory based on what I've done without meaning to.

First, work in a field that is technically easy, such as React or basic Rails CRUD. There are a lot of developers here and they are mostly terrible. Then, become extremely skilled in that field; learn every aspect of the thing beyond what is typical. Live and breath it.

Now you are by far the most skilled person most managers have ever seen for this role. Don't let them know that. When you start the job, pretend to be approximately average for the team you're on. Complete tasks in an average or slightly below average amount of time. You may be able to knock out the week's tickets on Monday (rewrite your commits before pushes each day to appear spread out).

So now you're not doing much and it's an easy job, but you're just a slightly below average employee, which isn't great. Here's the secret sauce to make your manager love you. You have more bandwidth than anyone else because you're mostly not working. You have to use this bandwidth for two things. One, if your manager asks for something, or points out an issue, you drop everything and immediately do/fix that thing. You'll be able to do it quicker than anyone and your real tasks won't suffer much. Two, in the first 6 months or so, use your extra bandwidth to do high visibility tasks that no one wants or has time to do, such as refactor a gross module, or write detailed documentation. Don't tell anyone you're going to do these, just pull them out fully completed with "I had some spare time." With those two techniques, you look like the employee that is extremely competent and on-the-ball, and you're still barely working.

The problem with this method is that it requires you to actually be highly skilled, which is not possible to fake.