https://careers.walmart.com/technology perhaps?
Walmart are big Azure users... including Kubernetes, CosmosDB etc.
Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
91–100 of 224 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't confuse faulty hardware with software abstractions of perfect hardware. Those cloud VMs are still running on some hardware somewhere, even it's been abstracted away from your control. And that hardware can and does fail.
But with an autoscaling group a new one magically pops up in the same AZ if an old one dies. You don't get that by rolling your own rack (without having hot spares on hand, in multiple racks or data centers). Not to mention getting a managed SAN basically for free (EBS) and backup/restore, and managed DBs... I'm a pretty good engineer, but I'm not good enough to be an expert at managing racks of hosts, switches, rout…
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Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#93Earlier 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.
>> A lot wanted Facebook for $500.
> Mind explaining what this means?
As a freelancer, what I’ve seen is requests for building a Facebook-scale social network with all the scalable infrastructure and other bells and whistles, mobile app integration, etc., sometimes for a specific community (lawyers, doctors, or some such), that offer $500 as total budget.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#94Disclaimer: I own a boring consultancy. Boring, however, is contextual. We have flex hours. We have unlimited PTO (and frequent reminders to take personal time - I already know the data related to offering unlim PTO and how often people then take PTO, thank you very much). We make over $1 million in revenue a year with 6 people and no plans to have exponential growth, coupled with high margins so that we aren't rugpu…
Looking for a remote part-timer? I'm looking to expand my working hours.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#95They’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.
I used to work in a Customer facing role at a Enterprise Software Company that sold up and down the Fortune 500. I got to see a lot of different tech stacks.
Many use a lot of proprietary software, which can be a type of hell nobody understands till you end up as an expert in a niche area and spend your day dealing with vendors and tech support to fix anything. After 5 years you are an expert on "EnterpriseSoftwareCorpA On-Prem Elastic Scaling Stack and Integration to EnterpriseSoftwareCorpB On-Prem Data Stack" which nobody really sees as valuable, so you are now trapped in your career.
I know a bunch of people who wisely let go of 10+ years of their experience in some aging software so they could start again as an AWS solution architect. I'm sure it's was brutal doing that in their 40s/50s, with family, etc. It was tough, but 2 years later they are in a far better career position than those who are still praying for something to happen with those Enterprise stacks.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#96They’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.
Fair warning, many non-tech F500 may be less of “places running their setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter grandfathered into an affordable Edgecast plan running a LAMP stack on Debian using borg for backups?”
And more of “places running near archaic .NET/JVM versions that somehow manage to combine bureaucracy with lack of organization”.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#97They’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.
> under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not
I'll second this. Strongly.
It is not so much boring as more of an amalgam of scar tissue and duct tape that accumulates over time and is a maintenance nightmare. You might run into the rare place that does things "right" with old technology but those are rare.
I do think some new things are "crazy" but I'll take "crazy new" before "crazy old" most days of the week.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#98I run a high double digit YoY growth company. We use boring tech as much as possible. Sure we lean into some automation, etc, but only when it really makes sense. Your example is probably too much risk for us. We do most of our work as monolithic docker images running in DO App Platform with managed PostgreSQL. Deploys, CI/CD, etc are all in GH Actions. Most code is Typescript to keep it simple and accessible. A lot of the dev work is also tracked in GH Issues. Dev is done Kanban so you finish your work, pull the next item from the list, and keep pushing on. Very few meetings, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#99I 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…
> I also love, love, love plain Fargate.
Same goes for the HashiStack. I really don't want to work with Kubernetes anymore simply to deploy some containers.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#100They’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.
I used to work in a Customer facing role at a Enterprise Software Company that sold up and down the Fortune 500. I got to see a lot of different tech stacks. Many use a lot of proprietary software, which can be a type of hell nobody understands till you end up as an expert in a niche area and spend your day dealing with vendors and tech support to fix anything. After 5 years you are an expert on "EnterpriseSoftwareCo…
You are describing my positions today. FML