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

i suggest you read 'bartleby the scrivener' by herman melville[1]. bartleby is most famous for the scene(s) where he tells his manager 'i'd prefer not to' when asked to do basic parts of his job. the full short story is much richer than its most cited line, however, and it could be helpful for your situation. bartleby works hard at first, but then starts acting more and more eccentric, eventually sleeping overnight at his workplace. his manager is the narrator and the slow transition of his perception of bartleby is fantastically done by melville.

also in this vein, somethingawful had an ancient story about a guy who got reorg'd into a position of no responsibility that was pretty great. i can only seem to find the third installment[2] of the series, though. like bartleby, he begins by doing good work for a while. but where bartleby's abdication of duty is intentional, driven by something like a depressive episode, somethingawful-guy's company slowly just stops asking him to do things as waves of reorgs and mergers leave him 'on the heap, but without any references' as it were. the zany antics of avoiding his hr dept are quite fun and i think the whole thing should be dramatized.

[1] https://www.owleyes.org/text/bartleby-scrivener/read/bartleb... [2] https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=26...

The pandemic caused this realization for a lot of people because much of what really matters in life was taken away: friends, family, food, health, travel, education, recreation. In contrast with these things, nearly all work seems pointless and unfulfilling.

If there is a bright spot to the pandemic, perhaps it is that, having had these realizations, more people will be inclined to create work scenarios that work for them... ala the classic movie 9 to 5.

> I do not care about working anymore

My first reaction to this statement was not kind. Then I read through some of the comments and thought about it a bit. The reality is that, so long as you are OK living within the constraints your choices might impose, sure, why not, work as little as possible.

In my recommendation I'll take the entrepreneurial path. What you are after is what the VC community might call a "lifestyle business" (usually used as a pejorative, in my opinion).

So long as you are not looking to build a massive business you can do quite well ($10K a month gross income?) if you find the right niche.

While I hate to suggest this, Wordpress came to mind, perhaps at the top of my list. It's a massive ecosystem with an equally massive number of opportunities to solve problems with tech. I don't think you have to necessarily be a web designer for hire to make money. Creating an extension could be a rewarding pursuit that could also generate "lifestyle" business. If you are frugal and save your money you might be able to also survive loss of revenue due to competition. Since you don't care about work I am assuming you might not care about doing battle with competing products by making yours better.

As for working two hours a day and getting paid for eight. While I am sure such jobs exist, I would urge you not to think this way. Some might not understand this due to not having business experience. There's nothing worse than an employee who does not care. Business and entrepreneurship is very hard. It is far from the glamorous life some might imagine. If you are paying someone by the hour (rather than by the job) you expect them to devote that many hours per week to help you make things better (whatever that might mean).

If you figured out how to automate your job and get eight hours of work done in two hours. Great. It is fraudulent to then assume it is OK to get paid for eight hours. The expectation would be to use the newly-found time to go find solutions for other problems. In fact, a good manager or business owner would likely give you a raise or a bonus for what you accomplished and encourage you to attack some other area of the business that could benefit from such an approach. I know that's what I would do, no question about it.

Another interesting take, again, around Wordpress, might be to see if your domain knowledge due to your hobby (I don't think you said what it is) could have some value there. For example, if the hobby is entomology, maybe you can develop a plugin that entomology dealers (universities, enthusiasts, whatever) might be willing to pay for due to the domain knowledge that went into it.

The advantage of choosing the lifestyle business path, in my opinion, is that you get to choose just how hard you push and when. You could choose to work very hard for six months to get something off the ground and then coast from there. In general terms, it's hard to live well without effort. And asking others to support you because you are not interested in working isn't an ethically supportable position. That doesn't mean you can't make an investment in your lifestyle by making an effort for six months to a year and come out of it ahead of the game.

In some ways the pandemic was the perfect opportunity to do such work. Sadly some wasted the chance to better themselves. My next door neighbor invested this time playing online games, smoking weed and drinking. He is a winner.

In my case, I decided to hunker down and design a couple of products. One of them was a complete flop. Being hardware/software these experiments can cost real money. The other one is looking like it might make it. We have a customer who might start ordering 1K units per month and has the potential to grow that run rate to 10K and even 20K units per month within twelve months. Other potential buyers could be in the same range...so this could be a product that we could sell at a rate of 50K units per month. To get there I worked 12 to 16 hours per day, pretty much seven days a week for the last year (just me, nobody else, the entire pandemic so far).

Like I said, business and entrepreneurship isn't easy. Find something you might be interested in and invest enough into it to create a nice $100K to $200K a year lifestyle business. It isn't impossible.

Thanks for writting this. This is how I feel for two years and having a random stranger on Internet being able to describe it and says `The world can be a great place with the right view` is reconforting.

> Maybe one exception of Renewable Energy, literally could help our planet. That isn't "tech" though.

without moving the goalposts to "have achieved measurable impact on climate change" let's just ask the following two questions.

Is Tesla working on renewable energy technology? I believe the answer is yes, what do you think?

Is Tesla a technology company hiring software engineers? I believe the answer is yes, what do you think?