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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?

#451

I have no interest in telling you what to do as an individual but this thread and all of the people that seem on board with this is what drives me crazy about most of the places I've worked. I have the hardest time getting anything done because of the sea of people trying to find ways not to do any work. Is this not abuse of privilege? Do you all not hear the stories of people working multiple jobs and still not bein…

Bless your heart!

People measure "progress" differently. Almost none of what anybody in the software industry is working on, is working towards any meaningful progress in my view. It's mostly electron shuffling to display ads or funnel people into paying for baubles and other transient happiness-boosters (which feed the need for the next hit, mostly).

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

#452
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids are not that expensive. You do not have to send them to college, you just have to love them, teach them, care for them. Sure you will have to buy more food, and you might need a bigger house/apartment.

More food+bigger house probably adds $400-$1000/month to your budget. Also, kids need doctors, interests (books or toys), durable goods (clothes and furniture) and more to thrive.

Funny you mention this. I live near Houston, Texas, soon to be, if not already, the 3rd largest city in America. What I'm seeing around me in north Houston burbs is somewhat disturbing, namely two things: 1. An outbreak of RV parks (6 near me in less than two years) 2. An outbreak of tiny home parks (Several in my area). What pains me is driving by the RV parks, where entire families are living in an RV not much larger than my kitchen and I see kids boarding the school bus. Some of you may disagree, but that is no way for a child to grow up. While I don't have anything against this per se, the stigma of that lifestyle can damage children. The rotten-ass kids at school make terrible fun of children who live in trailer parks, RV parks, tiny homes. Of course this is no fault of the children in those conditions, as they have no say in how they live, only in how they perform at school. This area lives and dies by oil and gas jobs. It's likely no accident that in the last couple of years, those jobs have bottomed out and many people have lost their jobs. I don't know if there is a correlation between the job losses (tens of thousands) and the number of cheaper housing accommodations springing up, but it's real and it's somewhat disturbing to see so many people in a down-and-out state.

Editing to say that these are not the $500,000 RVs that retired people holiday in. They are kitchen-sized campers (for lack of a better term) that may be the size of 6-8 cubicles. They need outside water connections which many don't have, and they almost always need propane attachments. Many have composting toilets which the owner needs to clean out, as they cannot connect to the sewer lines.

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

#453
post #121

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.

>Most of the times I had under-performed to save my ass from undeserving workload.

Sounds like you're on their trajectory already

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

#454
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids are not that expensive. You do not have to send them to college, you just have to love them, teach them, care for them. Sure you will have to buy more food, and you might need a bigger house/apartment.

My opinion only- For the middle class going to college is not seen as optional. Doing the same expensive activities as the other middle class kids is not seen as optional. There are millions of working class people in the US with good lives, but most middle class people would never seriously consider not following middle class norms. So raising a kid who's middle or upper class is actually quite expensive, and that's…

Not paying for your kid's college doesn't mean they don't go to college. I went to a very respectable state university with loans that I paid off within 3 years after graduating. I've worked at some of the top companies in the world. It's very attainable and not unreasonable.

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

#455

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.

For many years my partner and I operated in the same way. I paid our rent, utilities and food while she spent on her hobbies and saved. I was not unhappy during this time because I didn't want much. A few years ago though, I became a bit more financially aware after having my first soul crushing job and realizing I couldn't rely on work to produce income in the same "easy" way I had when I was younger. The emotional…

"...having my first soul crushing job and realizing I couldn't rely on work to produce income in the same "easy" way I had when I was younger. The emotional cost had become too high."

I feel exactly like this.

My wife has basically changed what she wants (or stopped hiding it) now that we are married. She wants a big fancy house and she wants to live in an suburbanized and expensive area. She originally told me she wants to live in the country and own land. This area isn't the country and we can't afford land around here.

She doesn't care about her spending. She has never been required to support herself or even live alone. She would rather spend a lot on a her expensive horse hobby than contribute to our kid's college or our shared bills. By expensive I mean she spends as much or more each month than I do on the mortgage. One month of her hobby expenses equals what I spend in an entire year on hobbies, and many of my hobbies have a return on investment (like foraging/cultivating mushrooms, growing a garden, etc).

I've come to accept that I will be stuck here and miserable. I don't see myself living past 50 in this condition, so I just have to endure this until then. I don't really see much reason to try extending that either.

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

#457

DevOps/IT at a small company can be a good one. While you will be expected to work off-hours. So much of the job is about keeping things humming along nicely, and when that's happening, nobody has much expectation from you. You can slowly automate the time-consuming segments of your job. And most of the time, the automation isn't necessarily difficult to do, as most platforms have API endpoints designed for programma…

"devops" is really hit or miss. I used to do devops consulting and all I saw were people who had no idea what they were doing and so they constantly had fires to put out. There is no time to fix and automate when you are putting out fires all day.

Yeah, the "small company" aspect is pretty key here. Their requirements tend to be much more modest as they can't really afford to be moving fast and breaking things. So once you have a solid environment stood up, it is unlikely to change meaningfully for a while.

Think a job that requires maintaining a LAMP built in the mid 00s. Once you write scripts to install the product on a VM, get database backups automated, and set up alerting, you're basically done. Every once in a while, you do some security updates on VMs, maybe perform the migration from Ubuntu x.04LTS to x.04LTS once every few years.

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be naive but why would you hire someone who repeatedly says "I don't care". I have no problem hiring someone who just wants to get their shit done and get the f out and if that means, they only work 2 hours, so be it as long as expectations are clear BUT they still have to care when they are working those 2 hours. May be I am too simplistic but when someone tells me "I don't care", I generally won't hire them r…

If they do good work why do they need to give a shit about your product?

Yes, exactly this. Plus at least they're being up front an honest about where they place value in their life.

At the end of the day a lot of us are working as "brains for hire" I don't know why I'm supposed to invent some lie about how i'm so passionate for the product in order to have gainful employment.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you all not hear the stories of people working multiple jobs and still not being able to pay their bills. Is this entitlement? Except paying the bills and achieving something are only weakly correlated concepts in many cases, especially when salaried. If you don't care about the particular ethics/concerns for humanity, what OP wants is definitely possible. A lot of it also comes down to incentives. What percenta…

>Except paying the bills and achieving something are only weakly correlated concepts in many cases, especially when salaried. This seems like an extremely short-sighted view. If you have a string of successful projects, your salary will go up over time (you may have to switch jobs a few times though). >If you don't care about the particular ethics/concerns for humanity, what OP wants is definitely possible. If someon…

> If you have a string of successful projects, your salary will go up over time (you may have to switch jobs a few times though).

Lot to unpack here. Switching jobs doesn't require successful projects, only self-marketing to make projects seem successful and important. You're basically suggesting we have a merit-based industry, when in reality it's just as much subject to social networking as any other.

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

#460

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…

Fine if you're single with low rent. If you have a family and a mortgage I can't see how this is an option.
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