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

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

#151

Post by tinco » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:37 PM UTC

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.

It's not Ruby itself that has features being deprecated/broken all the time, it's the libraries they're using that are changing.

If you built an app targeting Ruby 1.8.7 (~15 yrs old now?) with maybe rack and sinatra as your only dependencies using only the bare feature set that was available then, it would easily run on Ruby 3 with no code modifications. It would be a lot nicer than Perl too I bet.

If you rely on industry standard software libraries however, you have to keep in mind that keeping up with the industry standard is in the bargain.

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

#152

Post by m348e912 » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:42 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…

Unlimited PTO to me would only be interesting to me if you had a policy stating the minimum number of days/hours you must take a year. Reminders are nice and all but (written) policy is better.

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

#153

Post by f0e4c2f7 » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

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 try to make this point to people a lot and can never seen to quite get it across.

I really like your running water analogy.

Newer technology is usually easier. Especially if you pick the easy stuff.

I used to do all these tricks to work infra jobs but not be on call. Now - is it in AWS? Is the app in a container? Is it deployed with Kubernetes? Then I don't even care if there is on call!

I've woken up to fix Linux servers in the middle of the night dozens of times. And don't get me wrong - I love Linux. I have yet to have my first "kubernetes broke during the middle of the night" call.

Not to say that new tech doesn't have tradeoffs too. But good lord! It's so much harder with old tech. It's like you're purposely doing it harder to prove a point.

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

#154

Post by froggertoaster » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

alongreyber wrote: post #135

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 would love to hear a bit more about how you built your consultancy firm. I've done some consultancy work for local companies, and I'm looking to focus on similar work (helping local companies with ERP system integrations). If you have some time, I would love to connect and ask you some questions! If you can, please reach out to alon@greyber.org. Thanks!

Basically: I built a network and reputation over years as a tech leader in a specific niche (think Java Spring). This was done with articles, speaking at conferences, and building rapport and reputation with peers at these conferences and with co-workers (including non-technical peers). I was the lead developer at a startup for a long time and spent time building the platforms they still use today, which gave me a lot of credibility amongst my peers.

Those relationships were invaluable. The speaking/articles got me into professional networks that then got me referrals. I kept up with former peers enough such that I was able to get both business and employees from them.

I have done zero advertising and have projected $1.5-2 million in revenue this year. Most of that is profit. I'll personally have a net income of over $1 million this year... and at this point I'm spending a good portion of the day playing FPS. ;)

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

#155

Post by cplanas » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

ParksNet wrote: post #131

bluetomcat wrote: post #59

Just leave your SF/VC bubble, move to a medium-sized European city and such jobs will be plentiful. Most likely you'll be maintaining internal business applications on uncool and legacy technology stacks. The value of these applications is mostly for the particular business and your experience wouldn't transfer easily to a new job. The upside is that job security is far greater there. Also, you'll have less opportuni…

And between income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, you'll be taking a substantial cut in income - for housing which is more expensive, colder weather, and less sunlight.

I'm sorry, but exactly which "medium-sized European city" has more expensive housing than SF?

I'll be moving back to Europe this year, and I find your comment quite funny, given that I am moving to a city with significantly cheaper housing and better weather than where I live now (NYC).

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

#156

Post by phendrenad2 » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

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.

> companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500

And I think companies 500-1000 of the Fortune 1000 would be even more interesting to work for.

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

#157

Post by withinboredom » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

engineeringwoke wrote: post #150

withinboredom wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Me, I didn’t really give a shit then nor would I give a shit now. My job was to lay out the risks/rewards to clients. Sometimes, they choose the dumb thing. You can tell them that’s it unwise, but ultimately it’s their wallets. If they don’t want to pay an extra 20k a month just for redundancy, I totally get it.

They lost about 50k in sales that day, still less than the cost-of-ownership for redundancy.

PS. Please keep conversations civil. You probably don’t know me, but I’m the least “scared of failure” person you’ll ever meet.

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

#158

Post by froggertoaster » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

m348e912 wrote: post #152

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…

Unlimited PTO to me would only be interesting to me if you had a policy stating the minimum number of days/hours you must take a year. Reminders are nice and all but (written) policy is better.

Thanks for your input. Somehow my employees manage to take lots of time on their own as ultimately they have agency, not me. There is no cultural blocker to them taking time (that I'm aware of).

More correctly: I state that I do not have a time-off policy. This is mainly to prevent administrative overhead - something that a minimum number of days would require. I know this won't scale, so I imagine we'll have a "formalized" vacation process long term, but I'm not there yet and don't plan on being there for at least 2-3 more employees.

Illustrating the "no cultural block" point: I had an employee tell me on a Wednesday that he needed the week off the next week to unwind for mental health reasons. I moved a few things around with customers and he happily enjoyed the week. That is signal enough to me that my employees feel fine asking for time off.

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

#159

Post by wnolens » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

Similar: How to get into cool/cutting edge technical roles without on-call duty?

Nothing makes me want to leave this industry more than having to plan evenings and weekends around on-call shifts I didn't volunteer for and get shuffled around less than a month in advance. My expertise is all distributed systems and database engines =\

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

#160

Post by jan6 » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 4:55 PM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #113

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.

This might just be stereotype. As a single data point, I work at a large boring non-tech company - my team's ML runs on Kubernetes just like the cool kids do it. I've seen a lot of modern tech from other large companies too (banks, retailers etc.) - the culture and pace of development might be different but their tech stacks are very up to date. Even if some of those companies have an old mainframe still running some…

I'd think it probably just splits to two groups: 1) IT is critical, therefore we'll use modern tech that makes it more reliable or better, VS 2) Meh, It Works™, so why change it? We've got better things to do than figure out the latest pointless tech...(especially the case at smaller places, where there's less budget for the invisible backend machinery)