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

> I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week.

Same here! Scrum masters are secretaries on managers' salaries. They're the true winners of the corporate game.

Look for teams that have no business being as big as they are. On a over-staffed team, the devs take one piece of work and divide it up (sometimes it’s laughable even to us, but we have to fill up Jira with stories). So long as no one on the team is pretentious, you guys should be able to have very piecemeal amounts of work and a dependable squad to pick up slack as needed.

It sounds like I’m describing a normal company with healthy redundancy, but apparently in tech you can end up on unhealthy lean teams. Your boss also needs to be a long timer who ‘gets’ that all of you divided up the simplest task evenly, and that ‘this is the way’. If he/she scrutinizes it, then it’s no good because the lie must be believed by all (with the underlying acceptance that this is better for everyone versus having heroes and rockstars).

Wait for the pandemic to die down and the froth to return in hiring, where companies will define ‘growth’ by building out more teams. No reason not to stay a developer since you already invested the time to do the work in your sleep.

The hard part is you will have to find a company that is successful enough that they can afford it.

Places like this can actually bring back some sanity if you have a life outside of work. You’ll die if work is your identity though, as others have mentioned (super unfulfilling, no one will be allowed to architect or go nuts, since predictability is paramount).

Last thing I’ll say is, absolutely under no circumstance should you lower your salary expectations. The companies that pay developers lower expect more. They seem to not believe the cost is worth it, and that you are lucky to even be getting as much as you are getting. You’ll be pushed much much harder at those places. The 10k luxury purse only gets taken out on special nights. The $200 one gets taken everywhere.

Become the luxury item and find wealthier buyers.

>pick a role where you're constantly blocked by other people

Excellent advice.

I love how HN still ends up thriving for perfection. If I compile all the comments in this thread I'll have the best optimized way to become the ultimate do-nothing slacker piece of crap.

I 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 that let people swipe in and out with a smart card. For some reason they needed a dev on staff full time just in case anything went wrong. That was the whole scope of the job. Apparently most of the IT people there had other personal gigs they worked on most of the day, and it was super flexible. I didn't take it because I wanted a job that would push me and force me to learn things, but I reckon there would be a few jobs like that in government that would give you what you want.

The other way isn't exactly what you asked for, but might appeal to you anyway. Recently I've been working as a software contractor, mostly doing 3-to-6 month contracts, mostly for companies that need extra resource to hit some looming deadline. It's intensive work for the duration of the contract, but the money is a lot better than being a permanent employee, and I've been finding that over the course of each contract you can save up so much money that you could happily take a few months off in-between roles if you wanted to do what you like. I'm using the time off (just starting what I envisage to be a 4 month break minimum) to try to build side projects, but you could spend 4-5 months playing sport or whatever just as easily. You might even find the contract route gives you the time to do your hobbies, and professional fulfilment too, because each is timeboxed into several month long stints. Personally I love it.

The difference with a hobbyist and the entrepreneur is that the entrepreneur is motivated to follow the market, whereas the hobbyist is motivated by their inner passion for their hobby and hopes the market finds them.

If the hobbyist and the market should meet?

There is a very good but also complex set of reasons why creative professionals stereotypically are not very well off and have poor labor conditions.

Agree it's not impossible to create something out of nothing when you are not motivated by following the market, but also very unusual.