Industries that actually run the world and won't be disrupted by whatever VC-funded "Uber of X" whose business model is ultimately a Ponzi scheme. Think banking, engineering firms like Schneider/ABB, tools that are actually used in hospitals, etc. Look for major industry players that provide the backbone of basic infrastructure that you probably never heard of because they're too busy growing at a clip of 2% per year at $2B profit and don't need to crow. And of course the companies that support them
Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
31–40 of 224 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#32Small design studios. They still exist and they often need developers to develop “regular” websites using very down to earth stacks. There’s a ton of business that simply need basic websites and those still need to be developed by someone.
This is a great answer. At a small studio you'll absolutely see some LAMP servers being run in a corner of the office and some deploy pipelines that boil down to "FTP into the server and then copy and paste the files into the www directory."
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#33Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#34The 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 y…
I disagree that coolness of tech has any relation at all to job security. You're implying pure tech companies will always use cool tech. But there are plenty of pure tech companies outside of major cities that primarily use PHP and Rails and Django and ASP.NET and Perl and JQuery and maybe colo servers and haven't seriously changed their stack in 5-10 years if not longer.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#35My 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…
Don't confuse Docker with K8s. Docker is more for solving dependency management problems than scaling and redundancy which are the problems k8s solves. I highly recommend some sort dependency management solution like Docker or Nix - it makes changing hardware or OSes down the road much easier.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#36They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech.
Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#37Non-boring tech within reason is fine with me.
What is off putting is all this hyper growth series F funding impending exit nonsense.
An independent and profitable company that wants to sray below 50 or so people sounds like a dream to me.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#38Industries that actually run the world and won't be disrupted by whatever VC-funded "Uber of X" whose business model is ultimately a Ponzi scheme. Think banking, engineering firms like Schneider/ABB, tools that are actually used in hospitals, etc. Look for major industry players that provide the backbone of basic infrastructure that you probably never heard of because they're too busy growing at a clip of 2% per year…
Medical hardware is great. Boring time tested technology and good profits.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#39My 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.
OP probably referring to all the YAML files that deploy services. Many projects share something like "just kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/...".
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#40Keep in mind that organizations like you've described may treat IT and other such investments as necessary evils.