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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?

#161

Post by engineeringwoke »

withinboredom wrote: post #157
engineeringwoke wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ke…

Where is the lack of civility in my comment? It's okay to say that you dislike what someone said without projecting that discomfort onto them. Enjoy your civil discussions with people that aren't me

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

#162

Post by hermitdev »

apohn wrote: post #95
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.

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…

I've worked with such niche enterprise software before. It only pigeon-holes you if you let it. One I worked with was, at the time, a VB6 based application for trading bank debt built on a combination of SQL Server/Access (SQL Server was the source of truth, but entire data sets would be pulled into a local Access database for reporting...). It had no integration points to speak of, not even a reliable report runner (had to run reports manually through a GUI). Over the years, they were doing a piecemeal transition to .Net, but I never saw a .Net only implementation while I worked with it (I left the company in 2012).

A lot of my Python expertise on Windows comes from working with that system. I used Python because 1) I already knew it, 2) I could easily run parts on either Windows or Linux and 3) all of the internal APIs I needed access to had Python wrappers available (or I could easily write one in Boost Python at the time). I forget exactly which Python libraries I used, but there was some Win32 COM going on, some ctypes and other Python based GUI automation, as well as a lot of process management (reports tended to hang quite a bit needing killing/restarting) and ETL work.

I spent roughly 7 of my 9 years at that company working in part on maintaining the integrations of that 3rd party system with our own internal systems. Yes, a significant chunk of my time at the company, but what software it was is just a footnote on my CV. Instead all of the interesting integration work I did and the efficiencies gained are elaborated upon (e.g. with 8 hours of development effort, I was able to automate away a previously 8-hour manual task that had to be done monthly).

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

#163

Post by jan6 »

raverbashing wrote: post #97
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.

> 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…

"crazy old" likely has years and years of people documenting all the workarounds and hacks that need to be done to achieve X while "crazy new" might not have that much cruft, but you'll be stuck trying to figure it out by pretty much alone

but of course it also depends on how clever the people beforehand have been, is it stuff tied to impossible knots that cross over 5 parallel dimensions, where nobody knows what it does or how it's doing it, just that "it somehow works, so we don't touch it, that guy was a wizard", or is it just layers of faith held together with duct tape and rope, where people tried to fix stuff over years, throwing in patches that "probably should help, I think, maybe", which could be condensed into less than a third of the size, when rewritten...

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

#164

Post by lifeplusplus »

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…

What classifies as boring business

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

#166

Post by apohn »

isx726552 wrote: post #105
apohn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeesh I feel that way working at a FAANG (or MAGMA or whatever it’s called this week). I’m an expert at our internal systems and platforms, but that’s not a skill that’s transferable anywhere else.

Question: Are the system you using open standards (e.g. RESTful APIs)? Do they have Data Models that follow some sort of sensible standard that allow for interop with other systems via sensible mechanism systems?

A lot of the hell that is enterprise software is how systems talk to each other. I'll give an example. Project is started to bring data from Vendor A Product into Product from Vendor B. Vendor A claims system is "open" but there is no documentation outside of some cryptic .NET examples. Even when a successful connection is made, the data and data model makes no sense and nearly impossible to map to what users see in UI.

Vendor A gets a call. Vendor A repeats "open" and brings an "SME" to explain data model. SME is really a Sales Engineer who concludes Vendor A has another product that will expose the data in usable way. Start evaluating this product, and it turns there is a lot overlap between features in Vendor A new product and Vendor B's product. Plus, you still need to use .NET and a proprietary connection to get data from A -> B. Plus,Vendor A's new product does data transformations in a black box..nobody knows what exactly.

Vendor A and B are pointing fingers and each trying to make a case for why their product needs to do X features. Nobody understands this .NET library, so a consulting company is used to build data pipeline from Vendor A -> B.

Granted, a lot of the above wouldn't be acceptable today and a lot of these types of systems are going away and being replaced by ones that are actually designed to be interoperable with other systems. This type of story is hopefully going away sooner than later.

I use a lot of proprietary systems in my current job at extra-big company, but at least they use stuff like SQL, RESTful APIs, etc. I can understand our Data and how it maps. Those are transferable skills.

I can only hope that FAANG isn't building systems where everything is proprietary and make no sense to anybody outside of the Eng team that built them.

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

#167

Post by froggertoaster »

lifeplusplus wrote: post #164
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…

What classifies as boring business

My greater point is: beauty (or boring) is in the eye of the beholder.

Some value a high-stress, cutting-edge environment. I don't and my employees largely don't either. Boring == predictable to us.

We are definitely not "move fast and break things" like NPM is. We move appropriately fast while de-risking our customers long-term.

My suggestion: figure out what kind of boring/not boring you like, and find a job that shares those values.

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

#168

Post by fudged71 »

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…

You’re also likely solving very tangible point problems. Dreamy

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

#169

Post by apohn »

seanw444 wrote: post #124
apohn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Manufacturing is in an interesting space right now. There's a lot of hype around Industrial IoT (IIoT) and IoT 4.0. A lot of companies are using that hype to ask for budget to migrate their systems to open source and systems which are more open.

That being said, companies like GE, Siemens, and PTC are trying desperately to capture that space as well with their Saas/PaaS.. I won't say they are crap, but it's just more lock-in under the guide of "open." One of them has already gone the way of Watson.

YMML will vary in manufacturing. If you can jump to one of these companies that is on their journey from legacy systems to more open ones, you can definitely land in a good spot. Just ask the right questions when you interview there.

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

#170

Post by badthingfactory »

the_only_law wrote: post #96
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.

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”.

The non-tech F500 I worked at several years ago is doing everything they can to abandon .NET/Java in favor of low-code tools. Their engineers are jumping ship and they're having a hard time finding replacements.
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