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Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#61
post #57

You've got the wrong impression of what is "boring" tech. A setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter isn't boring, it's frustrating. Saying doing things the old way is boring, is like saying sending your wife out to carry water from the well in a jar on her head is boring. We've got running water now, that has nothing to do with double-digit YOY growth, it has to do with actually reliably and comfortably deploying a…

I don't think he's saying he wants to go back to getting water from the well, instead he's saying he's got running water and he's trying to join company that won't expect him to terraform mars with the running water technology.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#63
post #32

Small 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."

That is much more common that people probably realize. I worked with maybe 60 or 70 different clients over my years freelancing and not one of them was using anything more complex than a basic shared hosting to host their sites. That’s just the reality for the vast majority of businesses.

Most businesses don’t need anything complex. It’s just basic sites and emails.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#64
post #56

Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain. I showed someone the models we use to track a customer implementation and they thought we were insane for even thinking this is a good business to be in. Because the problem domain of banking sucks so much, the tooling is necessarily simple and "unsexy". We like things that fit into a single VM/folder…

> Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain

I assume it's mostly because not many decent software developers want to suffer Banking's work environment

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#66

They’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.

Especially banks on that list. They're slow to adopt new tech due to risk aversion.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#67
post #56

Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain. I showed someone the models we use to track a customer implementation and they thought we were insane for even thinking this is a good business to be in. Because the problem domain of banking sucks so much, the tooling is necessarily simple and "unsexy". We like things that fit into a single VM/folder…

You are definitely working at a different bank than I was... Mine had an entire division focused just on internal technology and tooling. Which was actually a bit of a nightmare, because it led to things like building our own cloud with customized versions of off-the-shelf software. Because of course if you ask the internal technology group whether we should build a cloud or buy a cloud, what do you think the answer will be? And of course the publicly-available version is not good enough for our super special needs, so we'll customize it and just ignore the fact that we are now either (a) on a treadmill to keep up with upstream or (b) more likely just ignoring upstream. My company chose b, until eventually years later they realized that those super-special needs weren't so special and had a huge uplift project to get to the publically-available version.

Anyway, the group I worked in was an acquisition with a completely different tech stack. So we were basically completely ignored except for the occasional saber rattling that we should be moving to blessed tech stack. After which we would say, sure give us a project with time and budget reserved and we'll get right on that. Cue the crickets. Also, my group was PCI burdened, so we quickly became exempt from any of the afore-mentioned cloud stuff, because they were afraid we would make the cloud in scope for PCI.

Now, most of the people who I knew were decent have left. But it wasn't about the technology -- the paycheck is enough to get through that. It's mostly around back-to-office mandates. Which is a strange stance, after the company spent who-knows-how-much moving all our machines to be virtual desktops that we could log into from anywhere.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#69
post #64
post #56

Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain. I showed someone the models we use to track a customer implementation and they thought we were insane for even thinking this is a good business to be in. Because the problem domain of banking sucks so much, the tooling is necessarily simple and "unsexy". We like things that fit into a single VM/folder…

> Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain I assume it's mostly because not many decent software developers want to suffer Banking's work environment

What do you mean? you don't enjoy having to cut all the red tape during a pull request to apease the SOC2, PCI, ISO27001, RGPD, CID360, GDPR powers that be?

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#70
post #57

You've got the wrong impression of what is "boring" tech. A setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter isn't boring, it's frustrating. Saying doing things the old way is boring, is like saying sending your wife out to carry water from the well in a jar on her head is boring. We've got running water now, that has nothing to do with double-digit YOY growth, it has to do with actually reliably and comfortably deploying a…

There's plenty of usable middle ground between "rack in a rando datacenter" and doing everything on the cloud. You can leverage VPS hosts, or run the bulk of your workload on prem and use the cloud for infrequent scalability needs.
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