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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?

#881

I can think of two possible routes that would fulfil this criteria in different ways. The first is to get an IT job at a government organisation that isn't heavily IT focussed, but needs someone on staff "just in case". I once interviewed for a job at a National Library for a 35,000 GBP/year role (with 20% pension). They had a system where someone could book a room to read old manuscripts, and there was a C# program…

The second route sounds like something that would be perfect for me. I assume you are in the UK, how does IR35 affect that nowadays?

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

#882
post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 weeks' work in 2 hours seems borderline unbelievable. Do you just radically overestimate the amount of effort every ticket will take? How do your coworkers/manager not push back? I can see accomplishing that much work in 1/2 the time, or maybe even less, but you're talking about spending 1/40 the amount of time as estimated. Many people here debate the existence of the 10x developer, and you're claiming to be a 40x…

To be clear: I'm definitely not claiming to be a 10x, 40x or 100x developer. I'm not claiming I could do the same amount of work as you or anyone else any faster than you or anyone else could. It's more like my managers and product management radically overestimate the amount of time things take. Those are the people choosing how much work they think I should be able to accomplish each sprint and I don't do anything…

curious, do you find leetcode easy/mediums atleast somewhat challenging? or is the stuff you are doing like... connecting plumbing / CRUD stuff together in CLOUD

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

#883
post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the better advice here, and fits with some comments I left elsewhere in this thread about people I know working at MSFT and putting in only a handful of hours a week and still getting raises and promotions. It's easy to do little when everyone expects everything to take forever because of how heavy the processes are in the organization.

Is THIS why Satya Nadella is so keen on getting everyone back in their cubicles. It makes everyone look like they're banging on their keyboards, nevermind that they're sending pictures on .... Teams? Can you do that on Teams? We use Slack. I was curious why he thought, "So much work gets done around the watercooler." I just thought he was a holdover from an earlier time. He's a smart dude, I'm not denying that. And I…

I think what he meant was that by being together and discussing problems we solve them a lot faster. This is absolutely true in my job. If I didn't know my team loved being remote so much, we would have been back in the office as soon as was safe.

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

#884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. Sorry, this is just wrong. You are a liability if someone thinks about you that way. Fortunately, not that many people are like that. In Contrary, if you are the only one to know something then you are regarded very highly and almost untouchable.

If you know something no one else does... sometimes the management is kinda aware that it's a problem, but they are too busy doing something else, so you can keep your job for decades with minimum work. And sometimes you know something no one else does, and you want to share the knowledge, but management says no, because having you talk to someone else feels like a loss of time when both of you could be developing a…

> Sometimes it seems to me that the perception of your importance is proportional to the number of bugs in your code.

That's incredible, isn't it? it's one of the many possible manifestations of "worse is better", I fear.

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

#885
> I'm an average developer looking for ways to work as little as humanely possible.

You can halfway do this by being a 90th percentile developer. The problem is you get there by putting in the work and having the sort of mindset where you put in the work and keep putting in the work when they don't have to.

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

#886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 are a senior resource, you should not ask such questions; if you want to find answers, look into the code itself. 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…

Most work knowledge now is google deep, but even back to the 80’s I encountered a lot of college grads who did not want to read the code.

A lot of it is intimidation, they’d never seen a printout stack of 50 or 100K eslocs. Kids today never start with monolithics like that but they do get swamped by the fifty layers/packages that change every year.

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

#887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find jobs that don't require that nonsense. They do exist. I don't have weekly meetings, and haven't seen my co-workers either physically or on a screen in over a year.

What role exactly is that?

Gumroad offers that

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

#888

Step 1 - Get a remote contracting job where you are the sole engineer on a specific part of the product, like a mobile app or web service. Step 2 - Work real hard on building a large undocumented code base. Get a reputation for speed and responsiveness. Step 3 - Gradually do less and less while billing the same hours. Truthfully tell them that the code base has gotten so complex changes take a lot longer. Rely on you…

Basically my current contract at a startup funded by a bank. Though I started off doing fast work only to realize that the CEO/PM has a fetish for feature bloat, and entire sections of the app get changed by the designers within 2-3 weeks of the previous changes. So the code base is naturally a complicated mess.

I learned quite quickly that to maintain sanity the key was to do the work as quickly as possible, and then sit on the commit for a few days while I work on my own projects.

I'm still delivering at an expected speed but probably average 2 hours/day of real work with the occasional full days leading up to prod release. I keep Slack open throughout the day to give the illusion of 9-5, but then there's the context switching issue if you get pinged at 3pm.

Capitalism is such a joke. This system no longer functions for human life.

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

#889
post #156

Just get some remote/freelance programming work with long-term potential and then hire someone else to do all of it for you and keep the difference. Make sure to pick a client who is in a very lucrative high-margin industry, so that even once the work dries up they will want to keep you on payroll incase something goes wrong. They might literally pay you a salary to do nothing just for the one day a year things break…

What are these lucrative high-margin industries?

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

#890
I've worked in a few different capacities and have seen this happen, and seen previously excellent developers decide they simply couldn't take the pressure and head out for something easier. I can respect the latter and provided your interest isn't in attempting to "get away with pretending to work[0]", desiring a less demanding role somewhere else isn't something worthy of "flak".

Onto advice: I had a friend who worked at a shop that did high-end bespoke software centered around compliance management automation/assistance software for complex manufacturing operations. The company didn't have a product, but wrote a ton of software tying various things together, along with a 25% solution that they'd customize out for each customer. This guy wasn't the original author, but had become the SME for nearly the entire solution over about 8 years. He was a bit older than me; I think 45 at the time, had an unexpected fourth child, and effectively started looking like a train was hitting him every day.

I was working for a large telecom, at the time. I was not on their development team but was a full time developer[1]. Backend-only dev definitely exists depending on the languages you're writing in (though you'll probably have to write a line or two of JavaScript from time to time). Sysadmin work definitely exists at large companies; I know we had a large team (referred to as "Infrastructure") in various capacities (nix was broken into a few teams, CDN was its own group). I had worked with two of the Unix teams at various times -- by God, you'd be amazed* at how many things are done a command at a time. No scripts. I assumed it was some policy/fear/craziness. Nope, the manager of the team was a good friend so I asked him: entirely skillset.

There isn't enough background about your current job, so I'm not sure how close my recommendations will be to what you are already doing, however, I'd strongly recommend looking into the largest companies in semi- or non-tech sectors. Check they're IT ops/dev organization; note whether they're using a third-party[2]. If you want that "back-end only job", look no further. Our 7 or 8 most important systems served only massive global multi-nationals[3].

You'd be surprised how many organizations have large DBA teams. I'm not knocking DBA work; I've worked with great DBAs, but at a past job, all but one of the 6 member team did much more than run a commercial profiling tool, and add indexes from time to time. Bear in mind that every infrastructure job at the company I worked at had an on-call requirement which involved being willing to be awoken at any hour of the night for a week to remote-in for emergencies. It's pretty common to have an on-call requirement.

But let me tell you how I hope it turns out. My buddy took my advice and ended up getting an "Easy Corporate Job" -- in office, but with a promise of 3-days remote in 6 weeks. I remember him telling me that the job was so boring he finished all of his "daily to-dos" for the week in the first couple of hours on Monday, scripted half of them out his life and had the other down to a set of commands he could run to reduce the time required to complete.

He said "Duuuuude, this job is so easy. I work as hard in a week in this job as I did in a day in my last and my boss has never seen someone work so hard!" His burnout ended in a couple of weeks. His boss let him work from home "anytime he wants" at week 3. He never returned to working "his ass off" like he did at the last job, and he has been in the same position for years. He's made new friends on the team, who respect him for his abilities and his boss loves him -- I think partly because he's not using the team to step-stone into a better role. There really is a place for people who are OK staying where they are. That's not me, but I count several among my friends and I have enjoyed working with many who "handle their piece of the puzzle with expected results -- no more, no less"

It's been a decade, but I used to interview developers at big-corp. We used get the bottom of the barrel of the resumes. Nobody wanted to work for BigCorp "process-driven-agile-buzzword development shop". The thing of it is, I observed that the development shop[1] basically did everything that I've done at every dev shop I've worked at, since. But the "reason" they do the things (stand-up/retrospective/back-log and on and on) but instead of being used in support of Agile's goals, they're basically used as a kludge to reduce the amount of change that applications experience. Guess what that means for a large dev shop? They're all pretty bored.

I was under infrastructure in my role at at BigCorp (various levels, including under the CIO at once; it's not as cool as it sounds but it's fun to say). I saw how little was expected of those employees and steadfastly refused all attempts to move me there. I eventually left the company because I wanted to work on things that were more difficult/interesting and 90% of my co-workers "just showed up every day". And BigCorp will let you work remotely, even pre-pandemic, but it can be tricky and pulled out from under you from higher up, so the risk of a "Yahoo!" happening is pretty easy.

[0] Too often I've been on the receiving end of this individual, and because "at the end of the day the job has to get done", if your job is to pretend your job is important and pretend you're working hard, history has shown that I'll get the work, and you'll get in my way.

[1] There's a comment in my history explaining -- probably several -- but I was part of a small team developing software for internal infrastructure with full autonomy with regard to the technologies/choices I made, but had to write what was needed in the priority the company wanted it. I wanted nothing to do with the development shop for reasons that will become apparent.

[2] This isn't necessarily a bad thing; might even be good depending on how the arrangement is. I know of one support person at a large company who works through, I think, HP (maybe IBM?) supporting servers at a few datacenters. He's technically required to be at the DC in a few very limited circumstances (one of which is not "first-time setup", they're installed by another group), but he was working remotely well before the pandemic.

[3] Meaning, basically no e-commerce. You're managing an important ticketing system/status reporting service and a million custom internal apps for managing the business that were written a decade ago and Walter retired last year. We had a two-node web site running a Sybase back-end for our most important apps most of the time I was there.

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