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

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

#721

Post by redisman » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

nathantotten wrote: post #165

Kneecaps07 wrote: post #146

This is unethical, but outsource yourself. Get contractor jobs and then hire cheap overseas workers to do the work and pocket the difference. If you can get a few of these gigs going and can manage your calendar you can probably cut yourself down to 20 hours a week. Just be better at hiding it than the guy we hired who got busted doing this literally within the first hour of his first day. Don't let your boss take ov…

This isn’t unethical. There are entire companies that do exactly this. If done well, this is actually an extremely valuable service. It would be unethical if you are hired as an employee and outsourced your work, but as a contractor this is fair game.

What if you're an LLC or S-Corp or something? You'll be signing corporation to corporation.

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

#722

Post by axguscbklp » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

wayoutthere wrote: post #583

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thes…

Jewish people are significantly overrepresented in positions of power relative to their population size. Should companies treat this is a cultural homogeneity problem and try to make it so that Jewish people are represented more closely in line to their actual numbers?

Or how about Asian-Americans in tech? Asian-Americans are only a tiny fraction of Americans but make up a substantial part of the tech industry. Is that a cultural homogeneity problem that companies should try to solve by working to increase the representation of people who are not Asian-American?

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

#723

Post by kadomony » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

gherkinnn wrote: post #138

killtimeatwork wrote: post #28

I think it's probably fairly random. I.e. you're just as likely to have a "do nothing" job in a FAANG as in some other random corps. But I don't think you can start doing nothing right after being hired - usually people are hired because there's more work in a team that the existing headcount can handle. So, you have to work for some time and then count on "falling into the cracks" - landing in a place where there's…

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…

This is pretty spot-on. I didn't get a lot of face time with stakeholders as an individual on a scrum team until our project manager was fired, and I said "f** it, I'll be the product owner AND scrum master".

I basically dumped our Atlassian suite, set up our Azure DevOps, including our project's processes, boards, and rules. I automated most of our meetings to run asynchronously because we're a remote team.

Takeaways: - The team loves me more than anyone on the team because I don't force arbitrary bullshit on them like holding them to extremely rigid scrum standards meant to create and highlight artificial scarcities of work. - Stakeholders (the ones that will recommend me for promotions) know my name and I get to shoot the shit with them in our weekly touchpoints while I show them the metrics that only matter for my team.

The easiest jobs are typically the mid-tier levels inside a company undergoing a "digital transformation" (unless your new boss would be from Amazon). These companies are rife with dysfunction and boomers that barely understand how to effectively leverage the Microsoft 365 platform. Cue automating everything, blowing the pants off of older folks like your mom when you fixed her iPad, and basically skating by while making good money (not FAANG great) money.

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

#724

Post by jedberg » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

Get a job in academia. The salary is on the lower end, but they only expect you to put in your 39 hours and be done. The "product" is happy students or happy professors, who have such low expectations of school IT actually working that they are fairly easy to keep happy.

I started my career in Academia (as a student) but I worked with a lot of pro staff. Some of them really cared about their quality of work, and thrived because they were so much more productive than everyone else. But the everyone else's were perfectly happy too, because they came, did their work alone, and left, and no one bothered them.

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

#725

Post by chefkoch » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

input_sh wrote: post #217

chefkoch wrote: post #19

> devops/sysadmin While these certainly exist, you would need to know what your doing to not need to do much. And almost impossible to be remote.

> And almost impossible to be remote. On the contrary, I find it quite easy. In the last year or so I've been to the empty office three times: twice to restart local VPN, once to sign a contract because I was switching companies. I'm definitely going to be looking for remote positions in the future.

Are these jobs where you don't have to work more than two hours a day like OP wants? Sure there are remote sysadmin jobs but not these kind of jobs where they just want a warm body in a chair.

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

#726

Post by hereforphone » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

US federal government. I've worked in that sphere and there are so many federal employees out there with no skill at all, doing nothing, that get promoted for time in service or minority status. They earn accolades throughout their careers and finally a retirement check for next to no effort. The downside is that it's a horribly depressing environment.

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

#727

Post by coenhyde » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

I get why you want this. But please do not take advantage of a company & or the manager who hired you. If you're hired in a full time capacity, you should try to deliver on expectations. Maybe seek part-time or contract instead?

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

#728

Post by granshaw » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote: post #397

I can respect this opinion and as I get older I realize how little I actually care about work. I am not really passionate about tech, security, etc, I just know a lot about it. I basically never talk about it with anyone, I have absolutely no interest in meetups, and I don't care about the news (past the minimum needed to keep up to date for my job) The only thing I care about is money, and making more money. I don't…

Some related advice: some management actually LIKEs folks that are primarily money motivated. It makes the picture much simpler for them compared to others who are motivated by vaguer things like “interesting problems”, “career progression” etc

At one job during goal setting with my manager I put it like “I wanna be making $x by next year. Let me know what I need to do to get there, and if that’s too much, how close can we come, and what’s needed for THAT”

Later on he’d tell others how impressed he was by that and how the clarity made life for him easy

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

#729

Post by ghufran_syed » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

I would look at either government jobs, or working for a university, they both tend to pay less but are often low stress, low expectations, and great benefits, from what I hear.

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

#730

Post by NaturalPhallacy » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

This is the best question I've ever seen on HN.

My first two thoughts are:

1. Academia

2. Government

System admin, or IT rather than coding. You might be on call more, but you'll probably have less work to do. The pay probably won't be as good though.