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

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

#121

Post by j10c »

throwaway12504 wrote: post #84

Honestly, I think this is somewhat of a crapshoot/hard to tell from the job description and the reason I say this is the job I'm currently in functions exactly how you describe but the job description/everything else from the outside gave me no clue before I actually started the job. "Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect" -- in fact, for me, often it's 2 hours on a Monday mornin…

Yes I have seen same productivity patterns. In one company I applied, the most senior developer's average skills were less than my junior skills. I can say I have junior skills but better productivity. Most of the times I had under-performed to save my ass from undeserving workload.

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

#122

Post by benjaminwootton »

Working for a big company maintaining a legacy system can be like this.

You can get by outputting 3 lines of code per week between meetings, filling in tickets, clearing disk space occasionally when the monitoring alerts and doing mandatory upgrades.

Nobody really cares as you are a cost centre but they need to keep people around for support.

There are a lot of people in banks still making reasonable money doing this type of work.

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

#123

Post by iso1631 »

fsloth wrote: post #16

This is an awesome question. I hope someone has good strategies for you. Life should be spent doing the things you find worthwhile, and the fact is, not all of those things are monetizable. Given how esteem- and success driven HN as a platform is... you might not get too many ideas since I suppose people want to maintain their "hireable" status. Success and "loving your job" are more or less empty phrases unless you…

My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons.

Colleagues have spent days in jungles building bridges to drive cars over them, have got to know people living in random villages from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and share in their culture, have met and quizzed world leaders, have been to Antarctic bases, and have exposed and brought down criminal networks making lives miserable for thousands of people.

I guess you'd define that as "glorious toiling", but I could have 10m in the bank and never have to work again, but get to do very little of that.

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

#124

Post by magicroot75 »

zikduruqe wrote: post #100

Just think. If your ability to get good quality health insurance/coverage wasn’t directly tied to having to be employed for those benefits, we all could pursue our passions and desires.

This is a common concern. But public health care really isn't THAT expensive. Something like $300/month.

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

#127

Post by GordonS »

ethbr0 wrote: post #91
apexalpha wrote: post #75

I don't know about putting in the least amount of effort for 5 days a week. But what I do know is that in my country, the Netherlands, part-time work is more and more becoming the standard. Already, 75% of women and 30% of men work 32 hours a week or less. In many sectors the fulltime standard has been lowered to 36 hours, which means every other Friday off. I myself started on 40 and will move to 32 hours somewhere…

I'm extremely curious about this from a practical perspective. (Disclaimer: American, so probably not the best work-life perspective) As far as company / coworker expectations, how does this work? Are responsibilities / work adjusted to fit the hours provided? What about being on-call? It seems like something a lot of companies should be taking advantage of, but the desire to own souls fights against it.

I work in the UK as a remote architect for a megacorp, working a 4-day week, 7.5h per day Mon-Thu. I work on projects all across Europe and Scandinavian. I moved to a 4-day week a long time back - something like 7 years, I guess.

Honestly, I get as much done in 4 days as I did in 5 - I really think it's a sweet spot, where you are forced to focus more for a shorter time.

Anyways, in terms of team working, obviously some meetings need to be either held without me, or not held on Fridays. Otherwise, it's simply never been an issue.

I've worked before with developers who work similar hours, and again it's never been a problem - we just adjust our sprint capacity/staffing accordingly.

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

#128

Post by fergie »

killtimeatwork wrote: post #28

I 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…

+1 for scrum master. Their mere existence is a strong signal that you are in an environment with a high tolerance for bureaucracy and low expectations for delivery.

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

#129

Post by ddelt »

gorpomon wrote: post #115

I love this question for its honesty. Frankly if I had a job I just needed technical competence on without much thought, I'd probably hire you. Our 1-on-1's would be brief and probably just be you demoing whatever hobby it is you alluded to. As long as you can crank out some decent code, I don't see a reason why a person who needs some quality work done shouldn't at least give your desired arrangement a chance. Unfor…

I came here to respond to your #1 and tell you I worked in that position, and you are 100% spot-on. I chose to do more and grow/learn, and obviously there were times when you had full weeks and overtime, but by and large, I’d say 50% of people on my team were phoning it in and only putting in 2-3 hours per day. The rest was team meetings, corporate meetings, lunch hour, miscellaneous slack chatter, etc

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

#130

Post by beastman82 »

DougN7 wrote: post #98
throwaway12504 wrote: post #84

Honestly, I think this is somewhat of a crapshoot/hard to tell from the job description and the reason I say this is the job I'm currently in functions exactly how you describe but the job description/everything else from the outside gave me no clue before I actually started the job. "Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect" -- in fact, for me, often it's 2 hours on a Monday mornin…

This sounds like a job a friend has in city government (in the midwest US). They have to look busy but in the end it sounds like they really don’t do a whole lot (he’s the manager and knows they don’t have much to do but has to maintain head count).

This was my experience with government work and is why I'm now an advocate for small government.
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