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Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
41–50 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#42One of the things that springs to mind is coding emails.
Once you have a template that works in 99% of email readers you've done the majority of the work.
The downside is getting clients that need emails coded. This means you need to do some work to connect with people and get the ball rolling.
I used to do this kind of thing many years ago for an advertising agency/publishing house. They had 5 magazine brands they ran and each of them would need a bi-weekly email to be sent to their newsletter subscribers. Their designer would send through a psd, I'd code it up and load it into their mailing list software.
At the same time I was doing wordpress based "catalog" websites for them, also minimal interfacing with the client and the same "psd => html" workflow.
If you can get the energy to talk to an advertising agency or publishing house there may be something minimal that you can do for them.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#43What salary on the 'lower side' would you deem reasonable?
30k€/year would be more than enough.
I am sorry but from what I know, 30k€/year is more than the average wage (net) in most European countries, for a full-time job, mind you. In many countries, like Italy or Spain, it's even more like just 20k€/year. To US citizens that is often surprising but you obviously can't discount the social safety net, universal health care and generally lower cost of living, better public transport etc. in many countries. In that case, 20k€ year can definitely be enough to live on (at least until you have kids).
So I fear it is unlikely that you will find a part-time job that pays that much in most of Europe... But again, correct me if I'm wrong.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#44My ex-roommate works at Google and this was her approach to work even pre-pandemic.
Nice. Sloths can be spirit animals too.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
30k€/year would be more than enough.
I am sorry but from what I know, 30k€/year is more than the average wage (net) in most European countries, for a full-time job, mind you. In many countries, like Italy or Spain, it's even more like just 20k€/year. To US citizens that is often surprising but you obviously can't discount the social safety net, universal health care and generally lower cost of living, better public transport etc. in many countries. In t…
It's a bit higher for devs. As a full stack web dev (woop dee doo) with 10 years exp I'm currently earning 45k€/year.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#46Hey, at least you're honest.
Is the problem that your work has no meaning? There are plenty of nonprofits that are slugging away using inefficient processes that could benefit from a developer that makes them custom software. Maybe there's one out there that aligns with your hobbies?
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#47Find a medium-sized company with a local monopoly. - They are not competing in their market / has had dominance for more than a decade. - Their business model does not depend on innovation or moving fast. - The ambitious people are all located in sales/marketing. - The development dept. is known for saying "good things take time" because they can afford to. - Career advancement typically isn't possible unless a tech…
> During stand-ups when you have to explain what you did, you can say that you worked on your own thing, and that you helped the other person.
Also, pick a role where you're constantly blocked by other people. So, working in a big company, where every function (renting a VM, setting up a DB schema, adding an AD group etc.) is centralized in one team, possibly overloaded and not too competent, possibly outsourced for cheap to India. These folks can take months to complete simple tasks and you can always say you can't move forward until they deliver.
Also, working in integration-heavy project. If your codebase calls 8 different systems in your company, they will all fail, have incomplete documentation, unresponsive teams etc. and will result in a lot of waiting and lost time on your end (which is what you're after).
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#48> The software I build is useless. Isn't this up to you?
If you're a developer in a big/mid company (or a consultant regardless of company size) your input to the product will be minimum to non-existant. And even if it wasn't, maybe the problem at the base is something you don't believe is worth solving or being solved properly.
I've worked on client projects where I think the project is an utter waste of time and money, and other times worked on promising projects but led by terrible people who'd never manage to make it work. At the end of the day, work is work…
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#49I think it's probably fairly random. I.e. you're just as likely to have a "do nothing" job in a FAANG as in some other random corps. But I don't think you can start doing nothing right after being hired - usually people are hired because there's more work in a team that the existing headcount can handle. So, you have to work for some time and then count on "falling into the cracks" - landing in a place where there's…
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 tasks, if you don't might dealing with the Agile bullshit full time it's a doss.
Re: Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
#50Senior 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/t…
Nice, living the dream. You're an inspiration. I find devops related jobs the most interesting. I do feel good helping fellow devs and setting up robust infrastructure but don't care about the companies themselves or the useless apps.