any form of management
Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
581–590 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything *agile related bullshit job will do, really. Scrum master, agile coach, what have you. SM certs are easy to get with minimal investment. A meeting here, some buzzwords there and compile the results regularly in lengthy confluence pages nobody will ever read. Automate much of it and maybe generate a graph or two to present during reviews. OP will have to organise retros, groomings, etc. Invent ever changing f…
> Bonus points for regularly posting obnoxious agile methodology articles on your companies intranet or Linkedin. To truely leave a legacy, it would be great, if you could also miss what the original intentions and benefits of agile are and go on to raise a few teamleads and middle managers to use your buzzwords in the wrong context. A true master craftsman in this area makes the right people feel more, but the whole…
Truly this fulfills the destiny of a Thought Leader.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IME the more they talk about D&I, the more annoying the company will be about brainwashing everyone to drink the corporate koolaid. Expect this to only ramp up given how diverse and queer Gen Z is. What passes for diversity among the Gen X / Boomer bosses isn’t good enough, and they have enough options that D&I has quickly become a competitive advantage. Every client I have is going in hard on DEI (diversity, equit…
This is a real shame. I wish we could do something to stop this insanity. Their dogmatic approach to D&I is really scary honestly. On top of that, you are marked if you are a "cis white male". It doesn't matter if you are an immigrant. It doesn't matter if you are jewish (less than 0.003% of the global population, so one of most minority minorities), doesn't matter if you have a rich ethnic background with white skin…
Because that’s not what it’s about; it’s about having a diverse leadership that more closely resembles the makeup of our nation and communities. Cis white men make up only about 30% of our population but account for probably 80% (and that’s being generous) of positions above middle management. It’s the cultural homogeneity that’s the business problem, and that doesn’t get solved without the right optics. Most of these jobs are not so hard that a person who is appropriately trained / supported couldn’t do them.
Again, gen Z is the most diverse generation in history. If you want to hire talent over the next decade, your company’s leadership needs to resemble your prospective employees because they take it as a hiring signal.
The problem isn’t cis white men; it’s the sense of entitlement that cis white men often walk around with. I have plenty of coworkers who are white men and great allies because they recognize that others are not entitled to the same things based on pretty arbitrary criteria. But the entitlement (“you’re gonna take the job I’ve been working towards for years and give it to a new ‘diversity’ hire!?”) is the problem, especially in the upper ranks.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#584You 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…
My buddy worked IT infrastructure at a major public university and would work 3 days a week but spread out his deployments for the write-ups that were used to evaluate his performance. The pay wasn't great so he left, but it was a great gig for a while.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#585I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I've actually tried to hire dispassionate people before. One was an assembly line style UI job with no future - the API was solid, the UI was designed by someone else. It just needed someone who could glue the parts, and repeat the same job forever, with minor API updates every now and then. Another was a teaching job. Beginner HTML/CSS/Node.js. Come in 35 hours a week, act…
The positive side of dispassionate people is that they won't write a new framework just to solve some tiny little task.
I was never the type of person to try to write a framework to solve a tiny little task, but I am probably 50% more effective with my time since I stopped caring about my job. I am not stressed out at all and that makes a massive difference.
That being said I probably work about 75% less (~10 - 15 hours a week if I'm being honest) so the joke is still on my employer.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#586I've been down this path. I won't tell you not to do it, because that wouldn't be genuine.
I will just say that apathy is a symptom of some kind of underlying issue that isn't being resolved.
Work, and service to humanity is a joy. Devotion is the path to the only true joy there is in life. It gives you life satisfaction.
It can be more fun to work 4 hours on something meaningful than 1 hour on something that is a chore.
Without devotion to something bigger than ourselves, life is nothing more than chasing pleasure which is fleeting.
You can look up jordan peterson or kapil gupta's writing to go in depth on this, if you'd like.
I took many easy jobs in my career. I always got depressed and got fired.
I stopped being depressed the moment i found something meaningful to work on (self driving cars and computer graphics).
"You are entitled to the work, not the fruit of it"
"I slept and dreamt life was joy. i awoke and saw life was service. I acted and behold service was joy."
The biggest components of happiness according to a study are
0. mental and physical health and mindset 1. our relationships romantic and social 2. The work we do in service to humanity
Now, it may be that some are meant to do service in other ways, and the job is just there to pay the bills.
But personally i have found the leverage and multiplier effect of technology makes it so you can gain real satisfaction by contributing to a mission.
You will not hear these words now. For I have said them too easily.
But someday, after many years, I can almost guarantee that you will make a change on this decision.
Work for works sake is bullshit. But within devotion and service lies the true way in which humans were meant to live.
Deep inside the human heart is an emptiness. A void. Our society lies and tells us to fill this void with external things. If you fill it with objects that becomes addiction. if you fill it with a person, that becomes codependence.
But if you listen to the void closely, it is really an open expansive immeasurable sky. It is a calling to create meaning. It is a possibility to be connected and immersed to a grand mission.
Life is suffering. That is undeniable. Rather than avoiding that fact, it is far more reliable to create meaning that makes the suffering irrelevant.
You are important. You can make a difference. You have a role to play in the unfolding destiny of this world.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#587A 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…
Just make sure it is only internal software you'll be working on. Otherwise those small companies will have you doing customer support on the phone too.
That might not be a big deal if the goal is low effort work.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#588Earlier 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…
there are also a lot of endeavors that at core are not compatible with profit/capitalism. meaning that as soon as you start monetizing them, that inevitably perverts the core incentive of said project on the long run and restrain the possible trajectories of evolution.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#589There is no free lunch. This is the underpinning of our human society and of economics.
Even if you are able to find a job where you are "free riding" for some time - eventually market forces will make you redundant.
If you need time+money for hobbies, I would recommend turning your hobbies into money-making activities.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#590A friend basically had exactly this for a while. He was an analyst at a big company who primary needed to run manual analysis on excel spreadsheets. He learned a bit of programming and found a way to automate it almost it entirely. He enjoyed the extra free time for a few months before feeling guilty telling management. They ended giving him a small promotion and cutting the team by 1/2. Maybe you should try to find…
> ...before feeling guilty telling management. They ended giving him a small promotion...
Ah, a sane/responsible work environment that appropriately values people.
I'd be much the same in terms of not being able to hide the automation I'd done. I truly wonder how to filter for environments that would respond similarly to this story...