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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?

#271

Post by pc86 »

Honestly I don't think you'll get a lot of hate for this. I would never want a job like what you're describing, but people are different and want different things. The thing you're going to have to square is "being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect" with pretty much any full-time employment.

Despite what a lot of people here will say, the vast majority of FT jobs do not pay you to do a set of tasks, and you're done when you're done. You get paid for (most of the time) 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. So if you're looking for a 10-hour-a-week gig, you're either going to have to be a consultant, find a diamond-studded unicorn willing to pay you a salary for 10h/wk, work part-time, or lie.

If you want to be a consultant, 10 hours a week of billed work will take 20+ hours a week to get, especially at the start. But at software dev rates you could still pull in $50-60k if you billed hourly, more if you could bill at the project level. You also typically need to be much more involved in the end-to-end product than you would if you were sticking to back-end FTE stuff.

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

#272

Post by raphaelj »

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've been working 4d/week for 4 years for a small Belgian company. I'm a software engineer.

I've never got any complain from my manager, employer or colleagues about it.

I'm usually taking my day off on Friday. All my colleagues know it, so we will try to schedule meetings for which I'm required on other days. If that's not possible (it only happens a few times per year), I'm flexible enough to take my time off some other day.

I might be 90% as productive compared to when I was when working full-time. This difference is probably too low to be noticeable by anybody else in the team.

My gross got reduced by 20%. But considering the way taxation works in Belgium, I'm only getting about 10% less on my bank account. I also got promoted to a senior role since then, which entirely offset the difference anyway.

While it has been working extremely well for me (I spent the additional free time doing physical activities and launching my personal project [1]), it might be harder/impossible to get into higher positions (team leader, project manager...) while working part-time.

--

[1] https://noisycamp.com

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

#273

Post by raspasov »

lmueongoqx wrote: post #11
imagine99 wrote: post #6

I do kinda understand where you're coming from but I want to warn you against this approach. These jobs you mention, they DO exist. But they break people and make them intensely miserable. Look into "boreout" (as opposed to burnout) to learn more about this. You will be very happy for the first few months, being able to browse HN, news sites and Reddit all day while nobody cares about what you do, nobody wants your i…

Thank you for your advice. I do not have it in me anymore to get the high paying job and go all-out, unfortunately. I understand the really boring jobs would probably lead to depression and not much else. I think a good alternative path would be to look for real jobs but as a part-timer. I'm not sure if there are any ~20 hours a week dev jobs, but that would most likely be enough. I'm passionate about playing a compe…

Which sport?

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

#275

Post by mtberatwork »

waqasx wrote: post #251

I cant believe this hasnt been said yet: Every job can be converted into this esp in any sort of managerial role, the strategy to do this has only 3 basic steps: # 1 - Hire a great team under you. If you have one person, two person, or more working under you, make sure they know what to do and make sure they understand your expectations. # 2 - Delegate your work. Try to get rid of as much work as possible. There will…

OP said no management positions:

> Only tech, I do not want to manage people.

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

#276

Post by kapilkale »

waqasx wrote: post #251

I cant believe this hasnt been said yet: Every job can be converted into this esp in any sort of managerial role, the strategy to do this has only 3 basic steps: # 1 - Hire a great team under you. If you have one person, two person, or more working under you, make sure they know what to do and make sure they understand your expectations. # 2 - Delegate your work. Try to get rid of as much work as possible. There will…

Yo, this is actually really hard

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

#277

Post by pbronez »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #266

I had a data science position with a large non-tech company. It did B2B sales, and had a giant office for us, done up in brushed nickel and Edison light bulbs. The rest of the company was designed in standard cheap-cubicle format, but they took visitors (i.e. sales targets) through to see the data science team, so we got the fancy layout. After working there a few months, I realized that I was also there as part of t…

> My work didn't matter (it took them 4 months to stand up a server for a project I was working on) and my boss didn't understand what I did. Very cush. Could have gotten away with a few hours a week of real work, though I still had to physically be there most of the time. I left for more money, plus ultimately having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining.

Yup. I've occasionally landed on projects like this and had the same reaction. Sure, you can coast for NOW... but it always makes me feel like I'm rusting, and that the slow pace is undermining my competitiveness for the next position.

My view is that job security is your ability to get your next position. Any given job can blow up on you for reasons beyond your control. You have to continuously push yourself so you can easily pick up the pieces if/when that happens.

But 2008-11 was a formative experience for me, so maybe I'm just bitter.

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

#278

Post by lmilcin »

Work where your perceived value is disconnected from actual real work, where you can hide your actual productivity or where the company has set so low bar that you will be shining example even when actually working 1h a day.

- Providing advice, if you already have experience. Ideally general advice that would not require you to spend a lot of time investigating client-specific situation or do it relatively quickly.

- If you run circles around other developers and want to earn well, DO NOT get paid for time. Your time is much more valuable than other developers but you are most likely going to be paid roughly the same (within a small factor).

- Fixed price rather that time and materials, provided you can choose your own technology and you are good at it (see above). Make sure you are well insulated from any impediments from the company that contracts you. Make sure contract is very, very well specified.

- If you are good developer, get hired well below your ability. Get hired at a shitty company where average productivity is very low. You will be running circles around other developers working 1h a day.

- Spend significant part of your time (say over half of it) learning stuff. Over time you are going to become much better than other developers and be able to do things in fraction of the time. Even if the project doesn't work you are still taking the knowledge with you.

- Contracting. Contracts will make it difficult for you to get promoted but you don't care. You just want to get decent money for little work. In general, you earn more on contract than full time employee, but you can hack the system and earn as much as a regular employee for less work.

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

#279

Post by codegeek »

waqasx wrote: post #251

I cant believe this hasnt been said yet: Every job can be converted into this esp in any sort of managerial role, the strategy to do this has only 3 basic steps: # 1 - Hire a great team under you. If you have one person, two person, or more working under you, make sure they know what to do and make sure they understand your expectations. # 2 - Delegate your work. Try to get rid of as much work as possible. There will…

"Hire a great team" .."Delegate your work"..These are the opposite of easy stuff which OP wants to do. Team building and managing is one of THE hardest things to do. Won't work for OP who is looking for easy stuff. Source: I have built a team of 20+ people and keeping it functioning well is one of the hardest things for me.

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

#280

Post by giantg2 »

tartoran wrote: post #247
giantg2 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be the biggest factor. It can't be understated. For example, my wife won't let me consider relocating and spends basically all her money on hobbies. This limits my job options to locally available ones (not a great area) and that I can't get a less stressful job because it pays less and I need my current salary to pay all the bills.

Aren't you and your wife sharing responsibility equally or proportionally at least? It is unfair for one partner to bear the brunt of stress and the other to thrive. Sounds like some compromises need to be made here.

She feels she is.
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