831–840 of 1001 posts
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…
Or find a company you are really excited about and engaged with and then it won't feel like work
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What are ‘the proms’? And why would anyone want to sit through royal weddings
Major cultural event And as for weddings about a million people lined the streets of London when Kate + William got married. Might not be your cup of tea, but horses for courses.
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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…
You should never tell anyone they 'should not ask such questions', but I will absolutely tell you 'hey, go read this code / documentation and it will help you understand'. Mainly, I just want you to show me that you've at least attempted to solve or research the problem yourself. If you've done that I'm happy to help. Unfortunately a lot of Jrs straight out of school seem to expect to be spoon fed answers, and it makes me wonder if college has changed since I graduated.
The US Federal Government is where you want to be, if goofing off all day is your goal. I know, I worked there. I supervised a guy who explicitly refused to do his job. He said so in emails that he sent to me. I, and my supervisors, started giving him bad annual reviews. He sued, claiming racial discrimination. From that point on, every time he refused to do his job and we tried to pressure him into doing it, he amen…
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…
I'm still not sure if you were joking or not.
get really good at sysops/dev for legacy mainframes: AIX, etc. get an IT job at a hospital or financial institution that has this legacy system. Install a remote access serial device. Write automations that cover most failure cases. profit (time)
How do you get good at legacy mainframes without owning one?
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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 s…
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…
If you want my advice, it is simply this: look for dysfunctional companies. They're easy to recognize, because they look like pretty much the opposite of those companies everybody really want to work at. Take everything you see from a website like Elastic[1] for example and invert it: - It should NOT be clear what the value proposition is. - The website should NOT adhere to modern design standards, or at least do so…
> look for dysfunctional companies This theme is common in the thread and is wildly wrong. First I recommend reading Bullshit Jobs to get some perspective on how others have fulfilled your goals. Big, rich, process-driven companies and institutions are the easiest to do the least work in for the longest time . Process is the toxin low-effort thrives on. An admin role at Google pays more and works much less than an en…
You kinda need to weasel in there first. When I worked at Intel (& to a lesser extent, Microsoft and IBM) there were literally hundreds of little 5-10 person b.s. boondoggles that did nothing of value but had management that could spin like Rumpelstiltskin, just took the company for a ride. Get several levels of that management going and no one has to really produce anything, they just need a manager to create paper-thin goals and hit those. Why? Because managers want to retire on the job and with enough nepotism it is entirely possible to scratch each other's backs. Problem is, they are very defensive about bringing in anyone that could upset the applecart. If you find one and burrow in, enjoy it!