Unsexy sounds fun until you have to deal with horrific undocumented XML interfaces and obscure proprietary protocols. Automattic have the kind of "unsexy" stack you are looking for (maybe a bit more complicated, but not much).
Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
121–130 of 224 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#122Banking 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
The salaries don't suggest that, unless I'm at the wrong locations and/or looking at the wrong banks.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#123Banking 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 The salaries don't suggest that, unless I'm at the wrong locations and/or looking at the wrong banks.
Allow me to clarify - You typically dont work directly for a bank as a software developer. You typically work for some vendor who sells software to the banks. We have many banks as our customers.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#124They’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…
It's kind of funny: I dealt with more garbage proprietary stuff (NetSuite for example) at my previous job at a tech company, but use almost all open-source stuff at my current job at a manufacturing company.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#125Industries 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…
Not sure that financial services (banks) are less likely to be perpetrating a Ponzi scheme than Uber, etc.
Can't argue against that. Although to be fair, the MBAification of the leadership class is turning most places into Ponzis or client-hating Monopolies
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#126Sorry to tell you but a lot of traditional companies, well outside of fortune 500 are using devsecops,sre,k8s and all the other keywords. Their legacy sysadmins are having to adopt.
You don't sound too old but maybe stuck on the past a bit? Nothing boring about a LAMPP stack but there are better ways of doing that, the tool for the job and all.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#127They’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.
Small-scale manufacturing is another good spot. I spent some years doing consulting work with a steel processing company. "Boring" tech, but interesting problems to be solved.
This is it. Currently at a local manufacturing company, and their in-house software runs mostly open-source stuff. No major proprietary headache to deal with, it's not a tech company so I'm not dealing with the obnoxious meetings and calls; and since the software I maintain is internal, I don't have to deal with angry customers. Coworkers let me know if something needs to be better, and I make it so. Simple.
I would recommend anybody this approach.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#128Industries 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…
Not sure that financial services (banks) are less likely to be perpetrating a Ponzi scheme than Uber, etc.
The difference is banks will always be bailed out by the government. It's the Ponzi that keeps on giving.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 suspect that there's a fair amount of overlap—not total, but quite a bit—between companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and…
>> companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and well-documented, repeatable, largely scripted configuration Are there any examples of this? I’m coming up on 20 years into my career and i’ve genuinely never seen a large company that had their IT function ticking over sweetly. Every single one had aspirations and had some things nailed to a grea…
> The MD / CEO’s password is unlikely to be Password1 nowadays.
Well, yeah. It’s been 10 years, and we need to change the password every 3 months, also, you told me not to use ‘Password’, so the password is now ‘CompanyName40’
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#130They’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.
> They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech.
If only it were so... A lot of teams in these companies are heavily into fad-chasing, so your random internal web app that has 1 user per hour will be deployed in fully-scalable manner on the company's k8s cluster (which is shit, because company didn't put nearly enough people into keeping it running).