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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?

#531

Post by atat7024 »

giantg2 wrote: post #455
lifeslogit wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

If your relationship has you counting the days until you die, you need to hit the eject button for your own safety.

This entire post, if it's anywhere close to objective truth, is wildly alarming!

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

#532

Post by sudosysgen »

beastman82 wrote: post #130
DougN7 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The hilarity is when you realize that with all this inefficiency government still often does a better job that smaller government or private enterprise.

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

#534

Post by louwrentius »

tootie wrote: post #465
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…

After 20 years of working and a sense of genuine burnout, I landed a "Dream Job" a few months ago where I'm doing tech leadership at a mid-size non-profit. We have a small familial team, a set of worthwhile and genuinely beloved public services and mission of doing good. There's still politics and revenue issues and all the sorts of stuff that a go along with any company, but it's a lot less aggressive. Work-life bal…

Congratulations, sounds indeed like a good working environment.

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

#536

Post by dboreham »

robertakarobin wrote: post #519

Try being a product manager of a web service at a big corporation. I stopped and went back to programming because of how little there was to do. You said you don't want to manage people, but in my experience all I had to do was: - E-mail calendar invites for a meeting - Show up to said meeting - State the topic, point to an engineer at random and say, "What do you think?" - Zone out for the rest of the meeting, zonin…

This can be automated. My new startup will provide "self-driving management", or MaaS, and will be called pointy.com.

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

#537

Post by tristor »

I would heavily advise that you don't do a devops/sysadmin job. I think you'll find that your idea (probably as a software developer) of what that work entails is grossly incorrect. It has /higher/ expectations than most developer positions, because your changes has more direct impact on production with less guard rails. Career advancement possibilities and salary may not be there, but the expectations are very high, and it is usually highly involved in the product if the product is something served over a network (SaaS/Cloud).

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

#538

Post by kelp »

gopalv wrote: post #487
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…

> I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work There's a class of "crystallized intelligence" jobs which are about what happened before rather than what you do today. There's an intersection between that sort of knowledge and a certain fluid intelligence to slot it in where things fit. I'm in one of those jobs right now, where the…

This reminds me of advice I got from the VP of Eng at my first real full time tech job. This was back around late 1999 / early 2000. Peak of the dot com era.

He told me what most people think of as job security is totally wrong. If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. But if you're constantly teaching and sharing that knowledge you become incredibly valuable to the organization. That's when you have job security.

Since internalizing that advice, I always try to work myself out of job by ensuring I share anything I know. And I always pass this advice along to others. As you get more seniority in the organization, the way to have more impact and scale is to work through others by sharing your knowledge and helping them get better.

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

#539

Post by xela321 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #384

A start would be to ignore a lot of things said about tech on HN. It is a solid source of pain, suffering and time wasting (I like it, but that's another story). Forget about all this modern tech stuff no-one is asking for. You can work for companies / clients who need stuff automated; they don't care about k8s, jamstack, react, docker, service mesh, etc etc. You can hack shit together with php + mysql, put in on a v…

Medium sized law firms (25+ attorneys) are a good place to look. They have a lot of internal business processes that can be wrangled with some fairly simple apps. Not a single person in the whole firm knows anything about computers. Profit margins are fat. If you automate a couple things the managing partner thinks are a PITA, you'll be treated like a god. Also law firms seems especially fearful of tech talent leaving, so I don't even really think you have to worry about a paycut.

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

#540

Post by theodric »

cutler wrote: post #460
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…

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.

My wife's parents raised 3 kids and paid a mortgage on two part-time salaries. Europe: it's where it's at for work-life balance.
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