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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?

#751

Post by cupcake-unicorn »

This is a great post. I just posted an Ask HN about part time tech jobs, especially jobs with extremely low hours requirements. From time to time I find that local businesses sometimes need some in house tech stuff and will pay you on an ongoing basis for coming in a couple of times a week or remoting in to fix problems, etc. And this kind of mirrors what other people are saying - finding places that are using tech tangentially but don't really know what they're doing. The stress is way less. The issue I've run into with this is that a lot of these places are basically Stockholm Syndrome'd into using MS Office suite and various old school products that honestly have so many crazy bugs at the end of the day, and have changed so much over the years they're not really getting out of it what they did to begin with. It can be frustrating to have a place that is so locked into these tools and not open to growing, so in my experience even if it's low hours/minimal work, if you're maintaining something that's broken and hard to automate (MS Office bugging out) it gets really frustrating and less personally satisfying.

One thing that I had some minimal success with is reaching out randomly to non profits and asking them if they need any help, say with Word Press or something like that. Non profits are really big on the lower salary stuff and will probably be super grateful that you're able to do anything VS the janky/expensive setup they have currently. The cool thing about this too is you can look up non profits that you support and so it's more personal meaning than fixing some cursed CSS bug on Random Big Tech SAAS startup. I figure you may be able to work part time at a couple of these and have it add up?

Another thing is checking craiglist computer gigs. I've found interesting stuff there, most people don't think to look.

My hours have to be really limited so these options work for me less, but maybe they help you!

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

#752

Post by wayoutthere »

axguscbklp wrote: post #722
wayoutthere wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that’s not what it’s about; it’s about having a diverse leadership that more closely resembles the makeup of our nation and communities. Cis white men make up only about 30% of our population but account for probably 80% (and that’s being generous) of positions above middle management. It’s the cultural homogeneity that’s the business problem, and that doesn’t get solved without the right optics. Most of thes…

Jewish people are significantly overrepresented in positions of power relative to their population size. Should companies treat this is a cultural homogeneity problem and try to make it so that Jewish people are represented more closely in line to their actual numbers? Or how about Asian-Americans in tech? Asian-Americans are only a tiny fraction of Americans but make up a substantial part of the tech industry. Is th…

Uh, yes actually. To both. That said, this situation almost never happens beyond an individual contributor level — where diversity is already less of a problem because diverse candidates hit a glass ceiling and move no further.

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

#753

Post by nfrankel »

The bigger the company, the easiest it is to get away by doing nothing. Find a Big Corp, be nice to your boss and your colleagues, don't make waves and you can basically have an above-average-pay while being able to slack most of the time. Just look busy and work when your boss tells you so.

How do I know? Well, I've been in such a spot. I've deeply considered whether to stay until retirement being paid a lot to be bored or be less paid in a more fun job. I chose the latter but I do not judge you.

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

#754

Post by fsloth »

chad_strategic wrote: post #741
kelp wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability." So I had that philosophy when I was in the Marine Corps, well because I wanted my Marines and myself to survive and carry out the mission. Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job.

"Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job."

I think that depends on the role and the organization.

Generally organizations do not like to loose valued individual contributors unless the organization is somehow pathological (I know those exists).

A programmer that delivers value is always worth more than his or her paycheck. If you can dump his load to a more junior dev then that's great, there are other, more important things always that need doing. That is, if the business is growing.

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

#755

Post by tj0 »

totalminimalist wrote: post #476
Someone wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM... : “Part-time workers cannot be treated less favourably than comparable full-time workers solely because they work part-time, unless it can be objectively justified.” So, employers can deny requests for shorter working hours, but only if that can be objectively justified. In general, that’s fairly hard to do, given the amount of part-time workers and the…

Have you heard of Texas? Almost the worst state in the union for workers. This is a right-to-work or at-will employment state. This means employers can, and often do, treat workers like slaves with little oversight. Texas law says an employer can fire a worker without "cause or condition". They could fire anyone for almost anything and they do. This state is absolutely hostile to unions, worker rights, and higher pay…

I worked in Texas for a stint, and completely understand what you describe here. However, don't look to the PNW as a place it's any better.

Both Oregon and Washington are at-will states, and have the same laws with the same kind of work cultures -- you're a cog in a system, and if you start grinding or upsetting the status quo in some way, the candidate pool in this region is strong enough, they'll replace you. However, the expectation still remains that when you choose to exercise your same rights under at-will that you give two weeks notice. Can't say any employer is going to give an employee that same courtesy when letting them go. Not to mention if you're salaried, you might as well accept that your role is nothing more than indentured servitude branded as capitalism (to clarify, this may not be at all companies, but definitely is a strong cultural trait I've seen at the ones I've worked at).

All that being said, the PNW is much prettier than many areas of Texas, and while natives are hostile towards transplants, the quality of life is leaps and bounds better than that horrendous mass of land called the Lone Star State.

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

#756

Post by gitowiec »

My friend found an IT job in a manufacturing company. That is his way to stay a little productive and to not to stress too much. He told me to not to choose software house without its own product, because it is the worst, most stressful and full of "very important" tasks. Instead he found a job as a PHP developer in a company that produces hearts. He just do simple stuff with CSS, WordPress, PHP. He is so lazy he even did not set him self a git repository or CD pipeline. He just codes inside browser and if it works he copies it into putty in midnight commander's mcedit. For his 44 years it is a dream job.

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

#757

Post by CTmystery »

kelp wrote: post #538
gopalv wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Agree! Bringing up those around you is the real way to be seen as a 10Xer. The alternative story of one hacker solving all of the business's problems on their own is a fairy tale.

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

#758

Post by rijoja »

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…

"Beyond that you are toiling, and if you like your job, it's glorious toiling like gardening (pleasing, but not important, but you love it, so it's great) or terrible toiling for living that eats your soul."

How beautifully put.

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

#759

Post by raincom »

kelp wrote: post #538
gopalv wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

At one of my old gigs, I asked my then-colleague a bunch of questions about the codebase for a task I was assigned. He was always like "you are a senior resource, you should not ask such questions; if you want to find answers, look into the code itself." This is how he keeps his status and job at that company, and he is still there now. When I enquired around about how he got that tribal knowledge of that codebase, I got a fascinating answer: he asked his ex-colleagues at the same company, the same kind of questions I asked.

Unless one joins as an intern at some company, there are gatekeepers in most of the companies, who don't want to train you at all. Instead, they criticize any attempt to find answers as "hand-holding, fake, inexperienced, etc."

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

#760

Post by lotsofpulp »

User23 wrote: post #577
nautilus12 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, could you be more specific?

Well I'm not going to name specific companies, but you know those international calling cards that are sold basically everywhere in areas with a large migrant work force? Those cards tend to use these discount VOIP networks.

I assumed WhatsApp audio and FaceTime audio killed that market years ago.
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