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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?

#631

Post by dmitriid »

hnarn wrote: post #545
CamelCaseName wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's very common for employment contracts to explicitly forbid you from working on things during your employment that is not directly related to your employment. An expectation of "loyalty" is also often even included in labor law, even in very left leaning countries in Europe.

As I said in a sibling comment, bill by the hour, and they start calling you a consultant, and suddenly this isn't an issue anymore :)

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

#632

Post by jcpst »

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.

My experience- I had my first kid when I was totally broke. Working multiple minimum wage jobs. Everything was thrift store, hand-me-down, government assistance. Instead of child care, I worked every day and night so our kids could be with their mother.

As I built my career, my lifestyle inflated, and so did the kid’s expenses. We make in 3 days what used to take us a month.

The kids get to share our lifestyle with us. It’s probably different for us because we’ve never been well off + not have kids.

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

#633

Post by hnarn »

zepolen wrote: post #627
hnarn wrote: post #415

If you want my advice, it is simply this: look for dysfunctional companies. They're easy to recognize, because they look like pretty much the opposite of those companies everybody really want to work at. Take everything you see from a website like Elastic[1] for example and invert it: - It should NOT be clear what the value proposition is. - The website should NOT adhere to modern design standards, or at least do so…

The funny thing about this is that all the people I know who work or worked at Elastic say it's one of the most dysfunctional and toxic environments.

I wasn't in any way trying to say Elastic must be a great place to work, only that the type of places I'm talking about normally have web sites that look like the opposite of theirs.

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

#634

Post by toomuchredbull »

giantg2 wrote: post #455
lifeslogit wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many years my partner and I operated in the same way. I paid our rent, utilities and food while she spent on her hobbies and saved. I was not unhappy during this time because I didn't want much. A few years ago though, I became a bit more financially aware after having my first soul crushing job and realizing I couldn't rely on work to produce income in the same "easy" way I had when I was younger. The emotional…

"...having my first soul crushing job and realizing I couldn't rely on work to produce income in the same "easy" way I had when I was younger. The emotional cost had become too high." I feel exactly like this. My wife has basically changed what she wants (or stopped hiding it) now that we are married. She wants a big fancy house and she wants to live in an suburbanized and expensive area. She originally told me she w…

Feel this comment in my bones bro. Right there with you.

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

#635

Post by msarrel »

The secret here isn't picking the right title or job description. Pay attention during the interview. Some hiring managers will straight up tell you that they're just filling headcount. Ask you future coworkers if they work hard. There are plenty of jobs where you don't have to work at plenty of companies that aren't going anywhere. You can do it!

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

#636

Post by 0x5345414e »

jypepin wrote: post #612

I haven't seen anyone mention freelancing, but sounds like a good solution for you. From my experience there are 2 approaches to freelancing. 1. work hard and hustle, get larger and larger contracts and eventually make a lot of money (>faang level). 2. work little, use freelancing websites, make a little money paid hourly but with low stress, work when you want, stop when you want etc. This might work for you if you…

The ideal way to less work with freelancing is to get retainer contracts. Build an application for a business then charge a quarterly fee for maintenance. Maintenance is usually about an hour or two of work a month. Though I'm more in lane #1 now, I did do this for a while. I travelled a lot and probably worked 3 months/yr.

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

#637

Post by smithza »

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.

A large emotional/spiritual investment... And financially as well, especially considering the cost of child care nowadays. Tax breaks help (in US), but not that much.

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

#638

Post by nickelcitymario »

dboreham wrote: post #536
robertakarobin wrote: post #519

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, zonin…

This can be automated. My new startup will provide "self-driving management", or MaaS, and will be called pointy.com.

This is the premise of Manna by Marshall Brain. The results in the story were mixed.

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

#640

Post by brightball »

At one stop in my career I was at a waterfall enterprise company in production deployment support.

We literally took hand written change requests, manually deployed them step by step after taking careful backups and ensuring that at any point we could revert...and that was pretty much it.

We had to check the paperwork to make sure there was a rollback plan. We had to investigate if there were weird server issues happening. We did the deployments in the middle of the night, 2-3am and were required to be on call.

Because of the after hours and on call schedule, we were really just twiddling our thumbs when we weren’t hunting down an actual issue.

I used the spare time to keep learning new stuff, automating monitoring that I used personally, etc. You needed enough experience to know how to put out fires in a lot of legacy environments but other than that it was probably the easiest job I’ve ever had.

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