Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

951–960 of 1001 posts

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

#951

Post by stopyellingatme »

notesinthefield wrote: post #461
SamuelAdams wrote: post #151

You just described my job to a T. I'm a systems analyst at a university. This was a big, demanding job when I first started. But after being here for 2 years, I've automated a lot of the complicated stuff. So now most routine tasks that took the other guy a week takes me about 15 minutes. To be fair though, the other guy was *really bad*. Like, couldn't even open IIS manager and restart a single website, bad. The pay…

Ill echo this, (am also a SA at a mid-size US university) I am completely content with how slow my job moves. We have real, actual deadlines a few times a year. The bare minimum earns you praise, I think Ive done a month's worth of work since last march which has been wonderful for my physical health. Nearly every 4-year offers unconditional tuition remission. You will be underpaid. Id stay in this position forever i…

Geez this sounds exactly like my job.

Senior SE at a large southern university. Nice and slow, but underpaid.

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

#952

Post by tomaskafka »

allendoerfer wrote: post #239
gherkinnn wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Bonus points for regularly posting obnoxious agile methodology articles on your companies intranet or Linkedin. To truely leave a legacy, it would be great, if you could also miss what the original intentions and benefits of agile are and go on to raise a few teamleads and middle managers to use your buzzwords in the wrong context. A true master craftsman in this area makes the right people feel more, but the whole…

Definitely - in a last job, I wast told to not make waves (about how we could cooperate in a better way) and follow the agile process.

I resisted sending that scrum master a first sentence of agile manifesto and left promptly.

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

#953

Post by jds117 »

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…

As a married woman, I’d say leave ASAP. Your mental health is most important to a fulfilling life. People marry the wrong person every day. Divorce is the way out of this situation. Judges are more realistic today about women and their plots. Write down and document everything. Find a couples therapist so you have on record you are trying to make the marriage work for everyone. The therapy will either make your wife “grow up” and perhaps better your relationship or it will show her inability to deal with reality of marriage as a working relationship. Don’t be the guy that hates his life. There is the right person for you out there. Take that first step for your own sanity. Her parents can help her out financially. She knows this too!

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

#954

Post by cosmodisk »

j333t wrote: post #928
cosmodisk wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I assumed my current position,the first thing I told the owners of the business is that the biggest risk in the business is me and that the company should work towards getting someone in, who could partially cover some aspects of my job. They understood it well,but probably not too well, however some attempts were made to address the issue.

Can I ask why did you do that? Was it so you could divide & delegate your work to underlings? Or was it so you could be totally free from the position one day?

The position I assumed is pretty senior- I report directly to the CEO. As part of the change,I still retained some of my previous responsibilities+ gained a whole lot more. I did it for two reasons:

1) it was the right thing to do,considering the situation. My approach is always to be open about issues within the business, even if it's my own department. This isn't university liked by my colleagues but appreciated by the CEO, as he knows I'll tell the real situation rather than that with a pink filter.

2) I will move on, sooner or later, and I'd rather have someone in place before that happens. I want the company to be successful in the same way as they've given me tons of opportunities that I successfully used.

3) There's a considerable backlog of things I need to do at any given time,so having more resources would free up my day+ speedup certain developments in the business.

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

#957

Post by agent_simon »

j333t wrote: post #929
kiliantics wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it says a lot about our society, that this comment is the most highly upvoted in a forum such as this. It's clear that if we decided to let everyone's basic needs of food, shelter, healthcare, and transport be met unconditionally, the world would look very different. It would not cost us much, maybe even less than we pay in taxes now, but I feel certain it would make everyone's lives significantly better. The…

This situation seems ideal, but how would you get people to do the grunt work? This is one thing the current system takes care of with threats, for lack of better words.

Automation should take care of that

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

#958

Post by ofrzeta »

rmac wrote: post #837
ofrzeta wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get good at legacy mainframes without owning one?

https://famicoman.com/2018/06/28/emulating-a-z-os-mainframe-...

I heard about Hercules but I doubt you would get a job with just Hercules experience on your resume.

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

#960

Post by julienreszka »

PakistaniDenzel wrote: post #889
55555 wrote: post #156

Just get some remote/freelance programming work with long-term potential and then hire someone else to do all of it for you and keep the difference. Make sure to pick a client who is in a very lucrative high-margin industry, so that even once the work dries up they will want to keep you on payroll incase something goes wrong. They might literally pay you a salary to do nothing just for the one day a year things break…

What are these lucrative high-margin industries?

banking, real estate
Post reply on HN