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

You could be right. I don't know what particular example you're thinking about, so I can't really debate you on the substance of the matter.

However, I've seen people monetize the craziest things (and quite well at that). The more niche, the more money even. People pay good money for the most unbelievable things. The biggest issue is more likely to be market inefficiencies, i.e. bringing buyers and sellers together. But I almost guarantee you that somewhere out there is someone willing to pay a ton of money for that one weird problem you can solve for him with your niche skill or interest.

Apart from the difficulties of finding that person or audience though, I'd be curious to hear what things you've been thinking of that are dangerous or impossible to monetize in a way that allows you to humanly subsist at least.

Senior DevOps Engineer at a mid-sized, stagnant californian “startup”, roughly $150k salary.

Seriously. My last three jobs were at companies which were 10-15 years old, had burned through $75m-$150m in VC and had flat revenues of $12-$15m for years.

These are my bread and butter. I “work” remotely from utc+2. Theoretically I am working from home, but pre-covid 60% of my time I was “working” from cafes around Europe/the middle-east 1-3 hours per day.

The rest of my time I was being a tourist, getting stoned, having flings or mm-transit to my next destination.

The thing about companies this size is either you have a good sized team managing a medium worklod and very low expectations.

The long timers are milking it to make up for their worthless stock options. The executive positions are revolving doors (all 3 companies saw at least 2 ceo turnovers during my term).

At my last job all real work was done in Belarus and Russia. As the team lead, my entire job was ended up being tidying up / linting / deduplicating our terraform code base while giving the actual engineers encouragement and architectural advice. It even gave me a reason to party in minsk and make more friends.

I get fired every 1.5 - 2 years, but I spend like a poor homeless backpacker and my home base is in the 3rd world, so at age 40 I already have enough saved to retire.

I used to be a hard workimg, diligent, ambitious engineer working startups I believed in, but getting screwed over by 2 consecutive YC startups made me look at employers as nothing more than a short-term atm.

These positions are easy to get if you use the right search criteria, actually know your shit enough to project confidence, and if you’re extroverted enough to have built anreally large network of colleagues who like you.

Look over YC’s list of companies from ‘11-14. Specifically look for the companies which are still around, aren’t unicorns but haven’t failed, and use the tech stack you know best.

Don’t be afraid to shamelessly inflate your resume to do this. Your employers will lie to you, their customers and their investors with a sociopathic calm demeanor. There’s no reason not to do the same.

This is a bit off topic, but I like to add an observation. You assume in your post that someone could go all out on something the person doesn't care about. For me, that is not possible. Most likely also not for OP. But the possibility seems self evident, giving your post. I assume you are a person high in consciousness IRL? In any case, people are truly different from time to time.

My ex-roommate works at Google and this was her approach to work even pre-pandemic.

Totally reasonable thing to want IMO.

Try searching for stuff to do with managing ETL/integrations. Some of these jobs will require loads of product involvement, others will be some not terribly interesting data munging. At your target salary level which you mentioned elsewhere (30k EUR), there should be plenty of positions where you'll exceed expectations with 2 hours of focused, intelligent work per day. Not sure how many will be remote though, sorry!