Earlier quoted context omitted.
> one-man IT department This means you will be on call 24/7/365 though.
Not necessarily. Not everyone are willing to pay for on-call.
How do you take a few weeks off from that job?
Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
691–700 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#692I'm starting to think that being a Wordpress web dev is the ticket.
When I first started in the industry about 6-7 years ago, Wordpress seemed like a total dinosaur. Every instance I worked on was an absolute nightmare -- users installing add-ons that modify the db, introduce security vulnerabilities, etc. I thought WP devs seemed like old fogies -- why would you choose this old, outdated software when you could write beautiful React components and use SSR to deploy your entire blog as a static site?
Well, it turns out that just keeping the dependencies of the fancy React site up-to-date is a full-time job. I have static React sites I made 3-4 years ago that no longer work because they're running a build script on node 10, which Netlify no longer supports.
There's more! clients know Wordpress and are comfortable with it. I've tried every headless CMS under the sun and it pains me to admit that Wordpress's editor interface is better than all of them.
The plugin ecosystem is gigantic. Most likely any feature request a client has can be accomplished by just installing a plugin, if you're feeling lazy.
Will you get paid top dollar by engineering standards? No. Will you implement beautiful innovative designs? No. Will you get to use the flavor-of-the-month new hotness JS tooling? No. Will you get to write elegant functional code? No. Will your site have a perfect Lighthouse score? No. Will your client install idiotic add-ons that pollute the database? Probably.
So there's plenty of downsides. The upside is that you can build out the initial site and then literally set it and forget it.
Sure maybe websites are dying but you wouldn't believe how many people out there still need a basic marketing site for their portfolio, small business, nonprofit, whatever. These type of clients are also not particularly tech-savvy (they could probably just do Squarespace on their own if they were), so you have lots of leverage with your schedule and tech choices. If you give them a good deal and treat them well they'll probably stay with you forever.
Once you're tapped into a network of clients and/or have a couple of bigger clients on retainer, you're on autopilot. If you spend a bit of time developing a custom WP theme and a Dockerized hosting solution that makes your setup easy to repeat, your LOE for the initial build-out will be even lower.
I'm still working with the "flavor of the month new JS hotness" but I'm burning out on it and like OP, feel completely disillusioned with the industry post-COvid. I think the tech world would probably be a better place if more people admitted they were just in it for the money and didn't try to convince themselves they're actually saving the world. Good luck to OP and anybody else trying to claw back their personal time.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#693This thread reminds me of this scene from TED (2012)
https://youtu.be/cjgmreH_d7s?t=58
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#694The US Federal Government is where you want to be, if goofing off all day is your goal. I know, I worked there. I supervised a guy who explicitly refused to do his job. He said so in emails that he sent to me. I, and my supervisors, started giving him bad annual reviews. He sued, claiming racial discrimination. From that point on, every time he refused to do his job and we tried to pressure him into doing it, he amen…
I was going to ask, "wow, how does he live with himself?"
But I suppose he's quite happy.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#695I love this question for its honesty. Frankly if I had a job I just needed technical competence on without much thought, I'd probably hire you. Our 1-on-1's would be brief and probably just be you demoing whatever hobby it is you alluded to. As long as you can crank out some decent code, I don't see a reason why a person who needs some quality work done shouldn't at least give your desired arrangement a chance. Unfor…
I may be naive but why would you hire someone who repeatedly says "I don't care". I have no problem hiring someone who just wants to get their shit done and get the f out and if that means, they only work 2 hours, so be it as long as expectations are clear BUT they still have to care when they are working those 2 hours. May be I am too simplistic but when someone tells me "I don't care", I generally won't hire them r…
There's different things to "not care" about. It sounds like you're thinking "I don't care" means they don't care about the quality of their work output, which I agree is not good.
But the original question I think is saying "I don't care about the big picture, the product's 'strategic goals'". Which in my opinion is totally reasonable. If you hire a stonemason to build a wall in your garden, you don't expect (or even want) them to give a toss about your designs for the herb beds.
Of course there's a difference between full time employment and a one-off craft job. But why does a programmer need to care about the product as a whole? The product people certainly don't care about the quality of the source code itself (just the results it gives).
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#696[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#697Earlier 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…
I agree with the other comments that you need to do something, but I'm going to disagree with that you should jump to divorce as the first step. You haven't said what you have already tried, so I suggest:
1) telling her how you feel, in the form of "I feel X when you do Y". For example, "I feel unvalued when you spend more on your horse than we do on the mortgage. I feel scared for our kid's future when you prioritize your expensive horse over saving for his/her education. I feel trapped when you spend the money I make without deciding together how to spend it." It can be hard to know exactly how these actions make you feel unless you've practiced thinking about it, so you might want to write it down and revise it over a week or two. Also, depending on how your wife takes feedback, you might want to have discussions of just one at a time.
2) marriage counseling.
3) setting boundaries: "my standard of being treated is " and take steps to "enforce" them. The easier levels are along the lines of "I want to be talked to respectfully, so I will leave the room when you do not, but when you are ready to talk respectfully, come and get me." I'm not sure how you communicate "I think our budget should look 25% house, 20% food/clothes, 10% retirement, 10% kids education, etc, which leaves $X for optional things like horse; if you need more than that you'll need to get a job" without being unilateral, though. But you have some financial values/boundaries that are being crossed and you need to communicate / enforce those.
4) It would be a bad sign if your wife didn't respond positively to any of the above. However, even in that case you could get counseling for yourself on how to respond healthily, and you are also likely to get insight into why your wife is behaving this way (the counselor might notice consistent signs of co-dependency, for instance).
5) Read pre-modern stories about how spouses handled toxic behavior. (The quasi-mythic ones that start off "There was once a woman in ... whose husband ...") I've read a few Japanese stories about wives that change the incentives for their husbands and they stop being drunkards and start being productive. (There's fewer stories the other way, but those exist, too.) Some of these stories are quite creative solutions; maybe something like that would work with your wife.
Don't just stay stuck and miserable, though. There are many ways to defeat the giants.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#698I had a data science position with a large non-tech company. It did B2B sales, and had a giant office for us, done up in brushed nickel and Edison light bulbs. The rest of the company was designed in standard cheap-cubicle format, but they took visitors (i.e. sales targets) through to see the data science team, so we got the fancy layout. After working there a few months, I realized that I was also there as part of t…
> My work didn't matter (it took them 4 months to stand up a server for a project I was working on) and my boss didn't understand what I did. Very cush. Could have gotten away with a few hours a week of real work, though I still had to physically be there most of the time. I left for more money, plus ultimately having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining. Yup. I've occasionally land…
My view is that job security is your ability to get your next position. Any given job can blow up on you for reasons beyond your control. You have to continuously push yourself so you can easily pick up the pieces if/when that happens.
But 2008-11 was a formative experience for me, so maybe I'm just bitter.
Same with the dotcom crash. Those with sharp technical skills soon found work with old-skool companies when the dotcoms evaporated. The others struggled for a long time after.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hiring and managing a team is extremely hard, and can get very stressful. The care and nurturing of organizations, while keeping them productive and resilient to constantly changing environments, is probably the hardest job.
Agreed. This comment sounds like it came from either someone who has never been in a management role before or someone who is on track to be the boss everyone hates because they do none of the work but take all of the prestige. Anyone who thinks hiring, managing, and retaining good talent is easy has never done it before. Either that, or they somehow have high enough budgets to hire people at $500K/yr and pay them to…
A manager not doing their job is terrible for the team. It might work for a year but then all the capable devs are going to leave.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Interestingly, for my current role at Salesforce as part of the employment contract it explicitly states I’m not allowed to work on anything else on the side unless I get explicit permission from their legal department. Including nonprofits, hobby projects, consulting, etc. I don’t know to the extent that anyone abides by that, but they drill at home pretty strongly when you start. The language is far above and beyond what most companies insist about not working on anything with a conflict of interest, and I’ve never seen it before at any company, large or small.
Then again, there’s a difference between something being illegal and it being against your employment contract. You’re not going to go to jail for having a secret second job, but you might get fired. But at least you’d have that second job…