SEO practitioner, hands down. My brother is one, and all he does is watch Google hangout videos, attends inane company meetings, and occasionally does "real" work in excel.
Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
981–990 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#982I work at Google. Most people here do a lot of work. But maybe 5% do next to nothing, or nothing you couldn't do in 2 hours a day. I imagine this is the case at any sufficiently large corporation. So if you can find a remote job at a BigCo, it might be worth a try! Note that you can't do nothing from Day 1, you have to try for maybe a year and then you can do nothing (based on my observations)
what positions do those 5% typically have? I imagine they're internally facing, but is there any other common patterns to the work they focus on?
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#983Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability." So I had that philosophy when I was in the Marine Corps, well because I wanted my Marines and myself to survive and carry out the mission. Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job.
> Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job. If you're working at a functional organization that rewards growth, never sharing knowledge will ensure you put quite a low ceiling on your advancement. I've written countless promotion justifications. Been on countless promotion review boards at several very successful tech companies. Being the best programmer, or what ever, is only…
Ohh! Promotion hacking.
There was a broad HN discussion about this here on HN late last year [1].
And the top comment [2] is worth repeating here
Here's some of my learnings about getting promoted for those that really want to play that game:
- Only the perception of your work matters
- Attend the social events and get in good with the bosses
- The countability of your major achievements is important. Make the list long, too long to hold in the mind
- At the same time the gravitas of your best achievement is also important since that will be the soundbite that is shared about you behind your back
- Get allies who can proselytize about you behind your back
- Be the best. The difference between one and two is bigger than that between two and three, as far as promotions go
- Take credit for your work (use pronouns I and Me when talking about your work, not We) and do not allow others to take credit for your work
- If it's a teamwork situation with other people on your level, don't do most of the work, because the credit will end up being split 50/50 in the eyes of the bosses even if you did most of it
- Make a very good first impression
- Shape the narrative around the role you played in the success of the mission/team/company
- Get the bosses to make a soft public commitment regarding your competence
- Even if you have a really good boss, all of the above is still important, because they are fallible humans and aren't omniscient
- Actually do good work, it'll make the above easier
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#984Earlier 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…
Learning “on the job” is an anachronism from the days when companies invested in their employees and employees stayed in the same organization for their entire career. We’re moving towards the gig model, even calling programmers “rock stars” to sell it.
Surprisingly a lot of folks on my past and current teams haven't figured this out yet. They still think the manager who promises them a promotion next year is going to be around by then.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#985I work at Google. Most people here do a lot of work. But maybe 5% do next to nothing, or nothing you couldn't do in 2 hours a day. I imagine this is the case at any sufficiently large corporation. So if you can find a remote job at a BigCo, it might be worth a try! Note that you can't do nothing from Day 1, you have to try for maybe a year and then you can do nothing (based on my observations)
what positions do those 5% typically have? I imagine they're internally facing, but is there any other common patterns to the work they focus on?
In my experience it's normally an L4 or L5 software engineer working on a project with a lot of tech debt and no major upcoming launches. So maybe it's some random little-used Cloud product or a piece of internal infrastructure. Or it could be some aimless skunkworks team that leadership forgot about.
They also almost always have a bad manager who is sort of aware that nothing is getting done but doesn't have the management skills to address it.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#986Earlier quoted context omitted.
After 20 years of working and a sense of genuine burnout, I landed a "Dream Job" a few months ago where I'm doing tech leadership at a mid-size non-profit. We have a small familial team, a set of worthwhile and genuinely beloved public services and mission of doing good. There's still politics and revenue issues and all the sorts of stuff that a go along with any company, but it's a lot less aggressive. Work-life bal…
Man I'm so cynical. As soon as I see "I landed a great job a few months ago," my thought is just wait a few more months. I hope the job stays great for you.
Yeah that's cynical ;).
I for example am with my current startup for 5 years now and can hardly find anything to complain about. Previous job was 4 years and was also ok although there it was a bit too much management for me me ;).
Before that I've been freelancing for 10 years where most of the time was also with the same company and also fine (there it was more that I got bored of software dev itself and did my PhD afterwards to get to more special topics than the generic embedded/network development I did back then)
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#987> I think the only possible jobs would be some kind of backend-only dev or devops/sysadmin work.
I thought that as well, so I became a sysadmin instead of a developer after graduating (couldn't help drifting towards DevOps later). Turns out, while Ops have to keep things running 24/7, all the other teams really don't -- so you get lots of unplanned work dumped on you, with no one under you to pass it on. So you do work a lot as an admin.
Luckily I've had the wisdom to choose (and the luck to be chosen) a smaller company to work for, it was not a tech giant by any measure. Few years later, when I demanded a switch to working part-time (and stated my decision to leave if I don't get that), I actually got that deal - and the overtime maintenance duties got passed onto other colleagues who stayed full-time, sadly unfree.
Now, with more weekend days than work days, I've had enough time to read lots of fiction books, play games like back in the childhood times, learn Haskell and some NixOS internals, learn some history and philosophy/epistemology (compensating for a terribly one-sided education), and finally get to work on stuff that makes me feel like a hacker-type dude again.
I can only wish you luck in getting out of the whole "trading away your finite lifetime years for mostly useless money" story. It's not like you can fulfill yourself by paying money for mass-produced goods and services, anyway :)
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#988: subscribes to notifications :
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#989Try being a product manager of a web service at a big corporation. I stopped and went back to programming because of how little there was to do. You said you don't want to manage people, but in my experience all I had to do was: - E-mail calendar invites for a meeting - Show up to said meeting - State the topic, point to an engineer at random and say, "What do you think?" - Zone out for the rest of the meeting, zonin…
If only I had read advice like this earlier, life would have been so much easier.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#990Have you ever thought about creating your own project, which, as you say, will not be "useless". I think this is a good option. But it's up to you to decide what to do. For example, I have a dream to create something like https://audext.com/ but so far there is no time and money.