Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs? • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by brimble » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:10 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #129

CraigJPerry wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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’

hunter2-2022-Q2

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

#142

Post by lolpython » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

EDA companies, like Cadence and Synopis are consistently unsexy with their tech choices. It's mostly desktop software in C++ or Java.

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

#143

Post by mschuster91 » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

seanw444 wrote: post #127

bmj wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For that you need a small/medium business where the owners realize that IT is fundamental to their business even if it does not appear to be so... and the amount of people open-minded enough to admit that is not exactly large.

Rule of thumb for Germans, if they write a fax phone number on the imprint or the website looks 90s style... don't waste your time, skip them.

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

#144

Post by AlwaysRock » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

Look for companies that got acquired by some big company a 3-5 years ago.

I work at Home Chef. We got acquired by Kroger in 2018. It's pretty chill. They don't pay what FANG+ does but its a nice tech stack, lower stress environment, and the workforce is really diverse. The Kroger corporate overlords pretty much leave us alone which is great.

Generally mid market companies like this are a little bit more relaxed. Large enough to have some structure and orgs in place while still small enough to do some interesting work without too much bullshit to wade through.

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

#145

Post by chadcatlett » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

rob74 wrote: post #109

the_only_law wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

Mind you, it can get even more archaic than .NET/JVM ("hey, never change a running system, plus, even if we wanted, we wouldn't have the money to pay for it")

A friend runs a small consulting business and he recently took on a customer running NetWare and a bunch of server side software. I'd take .NET/JVM over that.

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

#146

Post by orev » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

throwaway787544 wrote: post #29

I 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…

Whatever you were doing with those faulty machines that failed daily was a problem with you, not a problem with running remote hardware. I’ve run remote hardware for 20 years and only have to physically go to the data center a handful of times per year (and never need to use remote hands support). It just sounds like you were using crap quality equipment and/or didn’t have remote access setup correctly.

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

#147

Post by rodolphoarruda » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

froggertoaster wrote: post #81

Disclaimer: 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…

I'm looking at the replies to your comment asking about jobs/career page etc.

Boring is the new sexy.

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

#148

Post by novocantico » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

On the (far) outskirts of major tech cities. Like, 50 miles out.

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

#149

Post by froggertoaster » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #147

froggertoaster wrote: post #81

Disclaimer: 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…

I'm looking at the replies to your comment asking about jobs/career page etc. Boring is the new sexy.

As it should be. I provide stability to both customers and employees. In exchange, we work on stuff that other engineers frequently turn their nose up at AND add value to the companies we work for.

And the best part - we're often able to integrate new technologies into older, legacy systems gradually, which is fun for devs and risky-yet-risk-adverse enough for stakeholders. Win-win!

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

#150

Post by engineeringwoke » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #87

throwaway787544 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except for that one time a new one magically doesn’t reappear… only to find out that the entire region is down. Then you have to explain to the owner that you don’t have multi-region deployments because they didn’t want to pay for it… and you have no idea when it will be back. (based on a true story) At least with more traditional setups, you can have visibility into why/how your entire system is down and can even ha…

How are you going to make money as an entrepreneur if you are afraid to take risks? The risk/reward here is obviously good. You say this because you are scared of failure.