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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?

#71

Post by tomc1985 »

nwellnhof wrote: post #46
fxtentacle wrote: post #8

My 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…

> But on the Ruby side, stuff gets deprecated/broken all the time, so we need much more manpower to maintain it. Maybe you should consider Perl? I'm only half joking. I have a few Perl projects running unchanged for 15 years and hopefully for the next 15 years as well.

Considering how much Ruby borrows from Perl that is one of the better suggestions I've seen here

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

#72

Post by fxtentacle »

nwellnhof wrote: post #46
fxtentacle wrote: post #8

My 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…

> But on the Ruby side, stuff gets deprecated/broken all the time, so we need much more manpower to maintain it. Maybe you should consider Perl? I'm only half joking. I have a few Perl projects running unchanged for 15 years and hopefully for the next 15 years as well.

I don't have that much Perl experience, but I was positively impressed with Python CGI scripts. And with statically linked things like C/C++/Go. Haven't tried Rust in production yet.

Plus I still use one service in production which was written in C++ in 2009. It's statically linked and as such the binary survived 3 major OS upgrades unmodified. Around 2015 I put it behind Nginx just to be sure with all the OpenSSL issues being discovered. It was designed to be multi-threaded to fully take advantage of a dual-core Athlon with 2GB RAM. Oh wow is that one blazing fast on today's hardware.

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

#73

Post by anonymouse008 »

nolroz wrote: post #44
fxtentacle wrote: post #8

My 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…

When I worked for a small web agency, I loved the fact that when you did a website for someone, you'd be introduced to their entire business model and everything within. It was a great opportunity to help them optimize all the things if they were willing. It lead to doing a lot of add on work like spreadsheet-> program work, physical network setup, ads, logos, kiosk applications, Christmas tree databases, etc... I lo…

> A lot wanted Facebook for $500.

Mind explaining what this means? Did they want content generation for posts? Or did they actually just want someone to post what they had on file? Or did they just want advertising help?

My family has small businesses and I've thought about helping others, but the asks seem too all over the place.

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

#74

Post by bitwize »

Cerium wrote: post #38
qwedf wrote: post #31

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…

Medical hardware is great. Boring time tested technology and good profits.

All of the non-Web GUI development jobs I see are for either military applications or medical devices.

They also pay much lower than even enterprise webshit, despite requiring increasingly more specialized knowledge.

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

#75

Post by hansbo »

giantg2 wrote: post #66
curiousllama wrote: post #36

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.

Not only risk aversion - they were really early in digitizing their baseline services, so many of them have quite old mainframes by now. It's difficult, expensive, and, as you said, risky, to change old code that the whole organization is operating against.

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

#77

Post by lifefeed »

Most jobs aren't sexy. This website focuses on Silicon Valley darlings and FAANGs and unicorn startups, but that's a minority of the available software jobs. There are a lot of good programming jobs available everywhere from banks to intellectual property protection to Domino's.

It can be frustrating working in companies that treat IT as a cost center, but there's still a lot of money to be made there. (And as a bonus, the interviews are ridiculously low-pressure compared to Google.)

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

#78

Post by tinco »

DrammBA wrote: post #61
tinco wrote: 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.

Maybe, but then they're confounding goals. My company isn't web scale, but we still kubernetes-all-the-things, we run two Kubernetes clusters, soon three. One on premise in a "rando datacenter" running both boring old processing pipelines and fancy schmancy machine learning pipelines. And a Kubernetes deployment on GKE in the cloud, that runs a boring old Ruby on Rails + Postgres platform with some satellite microservices, some written in Rust. We're in the boring old sector of real estate maintenance and inspection, but we do it by flying fancy schmancy drones around building 3D models using 100MP photo's and LiDAR scans.

DevOps, DevSecOps, Kubernetes, SRE's, they're all buzzwords because they're powerful ideas that will enable you to run a modern IT company effectively. Whether that company is web scale 100% YoY growth, or "simple" manufacturing automation. If you're going in comparing it to terraforming mars, then you're not opening your mind to what's possible on earth with a little bit of learning new stuff.

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

#79

Post by bio4m »

giantg2 wrote: post #66
curiousllama wrote: post #36

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.

Not the case; I work at a bank and we have widescale adoption of Kubernetes and cloud products (in fact most of the major banks do at this point)

If you happen to be looking for a DevOps or SRE role, check a large banks job boards, you'll be surprised how many open roles are available.

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

#80

Post by aaaaaaaaata »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #73
nolroz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked for a small web agency, I loved the fact that when you did a website for someone, you'd be introduced to their entire business model and everything within. It was a great opportunity to help them optimize all the things if they were willing. It lead to doing a lot of add on work like spreadsheet-> program work, physical network setup, ads, logos, kiosk applications, Christmas tree databases, etc... I lo…

> A lot wanted Facebook for $500. Mind explaining what this means? Did they want content generation for posts? Or did they actually just want someone to post what they had on file? Or did they just want advertising help? My family has small businesses and I've thought about helping others, but the asks seem too all over the place.

They wanted to have a well-cared for FB page for either 500$ upfront or monthly, I'd presume.
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