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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?

#801

Post by totalminimalist »

tj0 wrote: post #755
totalminimalist wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of Texas? Almost the worst state in the union for workers. This is a right-to-work or at-will employment state. This means employers can, and often do, treat workers like slaves with little oversight. Texas law says an employer can fire a worker without "cause or condition". They could fire anyone for almost anything and they do. This state is absolutely hostile to unions, worker rights, and higher pay…

I worked in Texas for a stint, and completely understand what you describe here. However, don't look to the PNW as a place it's any better. Both Oregon and Washington are at-will states, and have the same laws with the same kind of work cultures -- you're a cog in a system, and if you start grinding or upsetting the status quo in some way, the candidate pool in this region is strong enough, they'll replace you. Howev…

Thank you for the information. I am looking at smaller cities rather than Seattle or Portland. I don't care for major conurbations. My wife can work anywhere with her job and I'm starting to edge out of IT myself after 20 years for something a little less stressful like woodworking or arts/crafts. I'm handy with these things and I need to pursue this angle while I'm young enough to do so and still make money.

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

#802

Post by iso1631 »

manitowoc wrote: post #718
iso1631 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons. Colleagues have spent days in jungles building bridges to drive cars over them, have got to know people living in random villages from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and share in their culture, have m…

What are ‘the proms’? And why would anyone want to sit through royal weddings

Major cultural event

And as for weddings about a million people lined the streets of London when Kate + William got married. Might not be your cup of tea, but horses for courses.

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

#804

Post by syntheticnature »

tw04 wrote: post #745
kelp wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of advice I got from the VP of Eng at my first real full time tech job. This was back around late 1999 / early 2000. Peak of the dot com era. He told me what most people think of as job security is totally wrong. If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. But if you're constantly teaching and sharing that knowledge you become incredibly valuable to the organization. That's…

>He told me what most people think of as job security is totally wrong. If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. But if you're constantly teaching and sharing that knowledge you become incredibly valuable to the organization. That's when you have job security. Sounds like the VP of engineering was doing his job quite well. Set up new hires to share everything so when their salary becomes…

That's not necessarily the case.

Any personal notes are, by their very nature, shorn of the full context you have. They are always data, sometimes information, but never knowledge.

I once left a job where I had taken pains to document everything, to regularly teach what I'd worked on, and to help everyone, even beyond strict software functions, familiarize themselves with the systems in play as needed.

Were they glad I was relieving them of the cost of my salary? No, they were mournful. I would not be there to continue to draw connections between disparate items and serve as a voice of organizational experience. No amount of notes would replace my ability to, mid-meeting, say "That won't work" and explain why. Someone who had invested real time in internalizing those notes might -- might -- get there, but it would be difficult.

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

#805

Post by tombert »

imbnwa wrote: post #764
tombert wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Process is the toxin low-effort thrives on. I'd argue it's even more sinister than that; too much process can very quickly cause engineers to burn out, and since they aren't reprimanded in any serious way for not doing much work, they can sit and feel depressed without anyone even addressing it.

You've just described my reality

I think it's a reality of most of the giant, brand-name companies. Near the end of my time at Apple, I was certainly underachieving (hence why I quit), largely because I became incredibly burnt out from the process.

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

#806

Post by totalminimalist »

prewett wrote: post #770
totalminimalist wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of Texas? Almost the worst state in the union for workers. This is a right-to-work or at-will employment state. This means employers can, and often do, treat workers like slaves with little oversight. Texas law says an employer can fire a worker without "cause or condition". They could fire anyone for almost anything and they do. This state is absolutely hostile to unions, worker rights, and higher pay…

At lot of states are at-will, including Washington and Oregon. So if you think at-will employment produces slavery like working conditions (which seems rather overstated), moving the the Pacific Northwest isn't going to help much. Also, when I was considering moving to the Seattle area, I got the feeling that non-compete clauses were fairly standard, although, that is entirely subjective and might be incorrect.

Thank you for the info. The chances are high that if/when we move, I will be leaving IT after 20 years, so the non-compete angle will not apply. I may still do some consulting on SaaS/PaaS and small automation tasks to help if I can, but I've long desired to get out of IT. The grind is starting to take its toll on me and I want to take on new adventures in things I like to do on the side like crafts and similar. With my daughter off doing her thing, I'll have spare money to set up shop and do other things. My wife wants to work until she cannot stand up, which is just like her dad.

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

#807

Post by benja123 »

gopalv wrote: post #487
fsloth wrote: post #16

This is an awesome question. I hope someone has good strategies for you. Life should be spent doing the things you find worthwhile, and the fact is, not all of those things are monetizable. Given how esteem- and success driven HN as a platform is... you might not get too many ideas since I suppose people want to maintain their "hireable" status. Success and "loving your job" are more or less empty phrases unless you…

> I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work There's a class of "crystallized intelligence" jobs which are about what happened before rather than what you do today. There's an intersection between that sort of knowledge and a certain fluid intelligence to slot it in where things fit. I'm in one of those jobs right now, where the…

Before I was a manager I used to always try and automate my job away. I was of course never able to completely do this and the result was never actually less work. Once you were able to automate away one task a new one would magically appear.

Of course to my surprise me trying to automate away my tasks only increased my value to the companies I worked for and now I, as a manager, try to encourage my reports to do the same thing so that they can focus on more important projects and personal growth.

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

#808

Post by codethief »

This reminds me of this old crazy internet legend about a guy who accidentally ended up in a position where the company he worked for literally forgot about him while still paying him. It's a rather long story but totally worth it:

https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/blob/master/Stories/Ameri...

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

#809

Post by chinchilla2020 »

Tarsul wrote: post #311
busymom0 wrote: post #145

Earlier 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…

e.g. you like to play a lot of chess. So you COULD theoretically monetize it by making content about chess (youtube, ebooks etc.), maybe even do some events but still.. that's not the same as playing chess which is what is your hobby is about. Thus, making money with your hobby would then indeed not relate (much) to the actually fun part about the hobby. (although you can argue that working as a writer on your hobby…

Making a positive income on youtube is incredibly difficult. The competition is very high, the pay is pretty subpar, and the hours are long. You also need to take a few (yes, a few, not a couple) years off of your day job to work entirely on content and marketing to get your channel off the ground.

A topic like chess might take 60 hours a week of video editing over the course of years just to get to 4k/month in income IF you beat the nearest 10,000 competitors who are trying to make similar channels.

Really not a realistic option for most people.

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

#810

Post by Coryodaniel »

koheripbal wrote: post #473
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…

Specifically, stay away from the tech industry. 1. Look for a smaller antiquated company or department that doesn't understand IT, and has few if any in-house IT professionals. Make sure the role doesn't include user support. Look for "Operations" jobs. 2. Look for positions that have a TON of manual work. Search for "prepare daily/weekly/etc... reports." and similar job functions. 3. Automate as much of it as possib…

Items three and four I did at my first job (non-technical).

I had been screwing around with software through my teenage years building AOL chat tools and little mods for games - I never considered it for a career.

I was hired as a data entry clerk when I was 18 at a large hospital. The billing department would work in excel and print hundreds of pages a day for data entry clerks to enter into our insurance billing system.

It took me about two weeks before I realized that if I could get them to bring me the spreadsheets on diskettes I could write a program to input the data into the system for me.

It took me a few days to figure it out and then I completely automated my job for about six weeks.

I was busted reading the Dungeon Masters guide in the middle of the day by my boss.

She asked what I was doing and I explained “I am reading the dungeon Masters guide.”

I explained that I had written a tool to automate my job.

I had not signed a PIIA form and I wrote the software at home on my own computer. I guess the company had no legal right to take it, so she offered me $2000 and a promotion to the IT department to give the company the rights to my software.

I was making $7 an hour, so I was very excited at the 2k.

I took it and they fired 15 clerks :(

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