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Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
861–870 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#862Earlier 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…
> If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. Sorry, this is just wrong. You are a liability if someone thinks about you that way. Fortunately, not that many people are like that. In Contrary, if you are the only one to know something then you are regarded very highly and almost untouchable.
If you know something no one else does... sometimes the management is kinda aware that it's a problem, but they are too busy doing something else, so you can keep your job for decades with minimum work.
And sometimes you know something no one else does, and you want to share the knowledge, but management says no, because having you talk to someone else feels like a loss of time when both of you could be developing a new functionality instead... and then one day you leave, no one reads the documentation you wrote, and your successor ends up reimplementing from scratch everything you already did.
Sometimes it seems to me that the perception of your importance is proportional to the number of bugs in your code. If things keep breaking and you keep fixing them, you are a hero, and the company wants to keep you. If things work flawlessly, company assumes that it is easy and that you could be replaced at any moment by a random person who walks in.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#863The Gen X'er dream.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#864> Unfortunately, I require shelter, calories and hobby > materials. Thus the need for some kind of job. Actually, you don't need a job. You need someone to give you hobby materials and then to give you money for doing your hobby. If your hobby happens to be electronics, C++, or grilling hamburgers then this will be much easier than if you have more traditional hobbies. Find a job that you enjoy, and you will never wo…
You have to be lucky enough to have your job align with stuff that makes money.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#865I can think of two possible routes that would fulfil this criteria in different ways. The first is to get an IT job at a government organisation that isn't heavily IT focussed, but needs someone on staff "just in case". I once interviewed for a job at a National Library for a 35,000 GBP/year role (with 20% pension). They had a system where someone could book a room to read old manuscripts, and there was a C# program…
I feel like I wouldn't be able to find good contracts but it might be imposter syndrome? MSFT employee, most of what I need saved up but could use a bit more. I'd love to quit and just do some seasonal work but I imagine competition for the contracts you're talking about is pretty stiff and I don't have a huge professional network
You're in a fantastic company for networking, and Microsoft is a great partner for many small dev shops. Being a more niche Microsoft partner might be a good differentiator based on the Microsoft name on your resume.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#866Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week. We have a lot of contracts where we have Scrum Masters just because we do Agile, usually the non-technical types do it. The irony is that Scrum Masters are supposed to not make the team reliant on them but by having a dedicated role for it of course the dev team will make the Scrum Master do menial…
100% Scrum Masters! If you are actually a good developer and you get a pure Scrum Master role then it's almost impossible to not get endlessly promoted and praised and possibly paid better than a developer role itself whilst actually still doing fuck all work. Imagine, you do a standup, ask in the end if anyone has any blockers, some developer or QA will say something stupid about the CI/CD pipeline or merging a PR a…
> The only other thing I can come up with which could be easier than Scrum Master is to apply for a manual QA role. I don't think I have to say more, but essentially, you will look like you've worked around the clock when really you just click a button at the beginning of the day and then go to sleep again.
Laughed out loud at this hahaha. There is one dedicated manual QA guy in my team that perfectly fits this description. And he probably earns more than I do.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#867Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Family as the main instrument of cost control" - now that is bleak :D
I think it's only genuinely bleak if your starting position is that family is assumed, rightful, and ineluctable - and electing to not head down that path is purely a fiscal decision.
Agreed, and I didn't meant to suggest that it's purely a fiscal decision, just that there _are_ fiscal elements that one should be aware of.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#868Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You can hack shit together with php + mysql, put in on a vps and you'll be treated like a sorcerer. This times 1,000,000
Yes this is one of the most true things I have ever read based on my own experience.. In 2009 I was hired to do mostly helpdesk / IT support for a printer/copier sales company, making $36k By 2012 I was making over $80k, being taken on the annual company trips with the high sales earners (cabo, hawaii), etc.. All basically because I set up a web based dashboard that aggregated numbers that their Sales CRM stored in a…
> None of that mattered though.
After doing this professionally for 20 years I've found that clients don't care what language, framework, hosting provider, etc you use to solve their problems. They don't care about your code quality, they don't care about your CI pipeline or any of that shit. They care if you have solved their problem for them, and that's it.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#869Earlier quoted context omitted.
Partner choice and choice whether to have children are other critical considerations in cost control.
Partner especially, you can always raise children on a budget.
My partner is also a limiting factor on the budget on which our child can be raised :-/
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#870Earlier quoted context omitted.
At one of my old gigs, I asked my then-colleague a bunch of questions about the codebase for a task I was assigned. He was always like "you are a senior resource, you should not ask such questions; if you want to find answers, look into the code itself." This is how he keeps his status and job at that company, and he is still there now. When I enquired around about how he got that tribal knowledge of that codebase, I…
> there are gatekeepers in most of the companies, who don't want to train you at all. This is fear mongering for the juniors. Most people don't help because they don't get asked. Juniors, reach out and I will help. I'm the kind of person that is sociable and helpful anyway though.
It goes both ways,I suppose. I'm more than willing to teach anyone who is willing to listed what I know, but some mutual respect is needed. I remember a meeting, where I got asked to get someone up to speed with some core concepts. I thought,OK, that's fantastic.I prepped the plan, go to him and tell it'd take him about 20h of his own time to go through the stuff.. 'Oh no, I thought we'd be done in 2 hours'.. Sure, I can teach you in 2 hours what took me 5 years to learn..