You’d be surprised how much business is still running on paper …
Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
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Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#22Look at industries that typically have a very low level of digitalization.
I think I read once the lowest ones are: Oil and Gas, Agriculture.
And then you pick local smaller companies and then you have you what you look for.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#23I know a social media analytics SaaS company, they're pretty successful at ~200 employees and 100% bootstrapped. All their servers are in the basement of the main office building.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#24The problem is you will also want job security. The answer is to look in a company that is not tech. Lots of companies that have tech in the background, where it’s needed but not driving revenue. However even in that scenario there is a risk that the job could be cut because software wants to eat everything, move everything to a service oriented architecture or automate, or do the same thing using new buzzwords. So you need to look at a lot of parameters score you jump in.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#25A lot of the companies that do/did this potentially no-longer do it themselves.
E.g. years ago a company might have run their own LAMP stack to host a website or a small online store or whatever.
But in this age of SaaS it is easier for these smaller shops to just use something like Wix or Shopify to handle it for them, complete with fancy wysiwyg editors etc.
I used to get requests to "add payments" or something to websites I used to help out with so that they could basically do an online shop. At the time I actively rejected those requests as there were huge headaches around things like PCI compliance and the like. Fast forward a decade or more and with GDPR and Cookie laws etc it is a total non-brainer to use a hosted service where they handle all of this, rather than spin up your own ecommerce solution.
It does not make sense to roll your own unless you have a large engineering team, at which point you move beyond some random thing running in some random data center somewhere.
Of course not everything online is ecommerce or CMS-oriented - there will be niche and custom stuff that is not handled well by SaaS offerings.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#26> Where
On LinkedIn.
This is the best answer that you will get.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#27It also depends on how boring you want to get. Any company with a mainframe will have a large amount of 'boring' tech stack, even if it is paired with newer offerings. The core might be RPG or COBOL, but there's usually a layer of newer languages around it that has had time to crystalize.
For historical reasons, this is also heavily tied to the adoption of EDI. So I'd start looking for boring tech stacks in areas that have EDI documents associated with them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#28Local/regional companies outside of tier 1 cities. Before the pandemic they only hired locally and their salaries were good for the US but 1/3 to 1/2 of salaries in NYC and SF. Companies that were bootstrapped within an hour or two of Philly, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville, Sacramento, you get the picture.
>Local/regional companies outside of tier 1 cities. Before the pandemic they only hired locally and their salaries were good for the US but 1/3 to 1/2 of salaries in NYC and SF. Companies that were bootstrapped within an hour or two of Philly, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville, Sacramento, you get the picture.
This. There are thousands of great "Tier 3" (not FAANG, not Fortune 500, but still large) companies out there in the US that will pay $100k-$200k with great benefits, 9-5 culture, and good job security. The SV startup world is pretty irrelevant at this point with the shift to remote IMO.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#29I don't want to use K8s. But I also don't want to use a manually setup rack in a random DC.
Back in the day when we had to hire a guy to go down to the cage every day to repair yet another faulty machine, we would have given our left arm for the ability to magically spin up a new VM of any size with a baked image by just running an API call. It's freakin' magic.
I also love, love, love plain Fargate. Not as stupidly complicated as K8s, but I can still run containers without ever thinking about managing hosts. Just keep my containers up to date, push new ones, and trigger a deploy. Never have to "upgrade my cluster to keep from using EOL versions" or "migrate ingress to a new API version" or some other ridiculous thing. It just works, and all I have to think about is my app/container.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#30My impression is that there's a lot of Kubernetes jobs because all those unnecessary scaling tools come with additional maintenance work. So if you use new & messy technology, you just need more people. My boring deployments (Nginx+Ruby+PostgreSQL on Debian) can be maintained for multiple projects by just one employee, because there isn't that much to do apart from updating Ansible scripts and running them. But on th…
> And Docker/Kubernetes (where everything depends on access to random GitHub URLs)
Where is this true? I'd say this ecosystem is more dependent upon Docker Hub et al.