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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?

#511

Post by bazooka_penguin »

glitchc wrote: post #483
koheripbal wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, stay away from the tech industry. 1. Look for a smaller antiquated company or department that doesn't understand IT, and has few if any in-house IT professionals. Make sure the role doesn't include user support. Look for "Operations" jobs. 2. Look for positions that have a TON of manual work. Search for "prepare daily/weekly/etc... reports." and similar job functions. 3. Automate as much of it as possib…

Excellent points except (5) Usually immoral and often illegal

Why is it immoral? As long as the asked work gets done there's nothing wrong with splitting your time. How it any different from spending that time slacking off and working on hobbies, which could be monetized (ie art)

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

#512

Post by busterarm »

gopalv wrote: post #487
fsloth wrote: 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…

> I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work There's a class of "crystallized intelligence" jobs which are about what happened before rather than what you do today. There's an intersection between that sort of knowledge and a certain fluid intelligence to slot it in where things fit. I'm in one of those jobs right now, where the…

I feel like I'm in a similar position on the automation side.

I've automated so much of what I'm responsible for that it mostly runs itself without issue. There are certainly stretches of time where I work my ass off, but mostly it's days of a couple of hours of light work and then being available to help people via Slack the rest of the day.

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

#513

Post by paul_f »

glitchc wrote: post #483
koheripbal wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, stay away from the tech industry. 1. Look for a smaller antiquated company or department that doesn't understand IT, and has few if any in-house IT professionals. Make sure the role doesn't include user support. Look for "Operations" jobs. 2. Look for positions that have a TON of manual work. Search for "prepare daily/weekly/etc... reports." and similar job functions. 3. Automate as much of it as possib…

Excellent points except (5) Usually immoral and often illegal

Simply insist on being paid by 1099 and don't live in California.

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

#514

Post by paul_f »

tluyben2 wrote: post #384

A start would be to ignore a lot of things said about tech on HN. It is a solid source of pain, suffering and time wasting (I like it, but that's another story). Forget about all this modern tech stuff no-one is asking for. You can work for companies / clients who need stuff automated; they don't care about k8s, jamstack, react, docker, service mesh, etc etc. You can hack shit together with php + mysql, put in on a v…

>You can hack shit together with php + mysql, put in on a vps and you'll be treated like a sorcerer.

This times 1,000,000

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

#515

Post by gen220 »

gopalv wrote: post #487
fsloth wrote: 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…

> I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work There's a class of "crystallized intelligence" jobs which are about what happened before rather than what you do today. There's an intersection between that sort of knowledge and a certain fluid intelligence to slot it in where things fit. I'm in one of those jobs right now, where the…

> I'm the guy with the picture that's on puzzle box, rather than having to place each puzzle piece.

This is such a great phrase! It so succinctly captures a situation I think we've all observed many times, but I've always struggled to encode it in words.

> I've tried really hard to make myself obsolete and do something else, but it has backfired spectacularly.

How has this backfired, I'm curious?

I'm imagining that the future-you's fail to seamlessly slot-in, and management types don't have an appetite for broken eggs on the way to an omelette, when they already have an omelette in you?

> I'm useful and in essence acting as "an elder" store of information about the past & a slightly clearer view of the future.

I wonder, do you feel any anxiety about this?

As in, you're valuable at $COMPANY_X, but you're not challenged to better yourself beyond what you already are. Much of your value to $COMPANY_X derives from skills and knowledge that are specific to $COMPANY_X / $INDUSTRY.

For me, the anxiety would come from the question "sure, I have this here and now, but would I be able to reproduce this elsewhere, or what this a fluke?", and it would increase with tenure. :)

Curious to hear your thoughts on this, too.

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

#516

Post by CamelCaseName »

glitchc wrote: post #483
koheripbal wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, stay away from the tech industry. 1. Look for a smaller antiquated company or department that doesn't understand IT, and has few if any in-house IT professionals. Make sure the role doesn't include user support. Look for "Operations" jobs. 2. Look for positions that have a TON of manual work. Search for "prepare daily/weekly/etc... reports." and similar job functions. 3. Automate as much of it as possib…

Excellent points except (5) Usually immoral and often illegal

> and often illegal

Source? As long as it's not explicitly stated, and in my experience, it never is, then there should be no issue with this.

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

#518

Post by jaywalk »

koheripbal wrote: post #372
jaywalk wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find jobs that don't require that nonsense. They do exist. I don't have weekly meetings, and haven't seen my co-workers either physically or on a screen in over a year.

What role exactly is that?

Senior developer on a smaller team.

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

#519

Post by robertakarobin »

Try being a product manager of a web service at a big corporation. I stopped and went back to programming because of how little there was to do. You said you don't want to manage people, but in my experience all I had to do was:

- E-mail calendar invites for a meeting

- Show up to said meeting

- State the topic, point to an engineer at random and say, "What do you think?"

- Zone out for the rest of the meeting, zoning back in only if it sounds like the conversation is starting to get off track

- 5 minutes before time is up, say, "OK, it sounds like we're agreed that we're going to do X?"

- Go back to coding side-projects

It's a funny job, because even though it's very easy to coast, it's also fairly high-visibility and in my opinion very necessary. Without a dedicated person to spend 30 minutes a day watching over meetings, things seem to very quickly go off the rails.

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

#520

Post by joelbluminator »

foxhop wrote: post #325
elyobo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Kids are not that expensive. You do not have to send them to college, you just have to love them, teach them, care for them. Sure you will have to buy more food, and you might need a bigger house/apartment.

Kindergartens are quite pricey all over the world, so that's 3-4 years of approximately double rent / mortgage
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