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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?

#171

Post by Melatonic »

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…

Who says you can't use Kubernetes and all of your running water tech running your own hardware? Plenty of places do it.

Sounds like you just have worked at places who sucked at updating, maintaining, and setting up their own hardware unfortunately. Which I agree can be a huge pain in the ass if done incorrectly.

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

#172

Post by uoaei »

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 see you have no health issues, no teeth, and no family to speak of, and very much enjoy car-first public infrastructure. You also have no idea that cultures (people, food, entertainment, experiences) in different countries can be different.

QoL is not only measured in "dollars of income".

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

#173

Post by mstipetic »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #103

Pittsburgh, PA. Every big company here - PNC, UPMC, Highmark, Fedex, Norfolk Southern, Duquesne Light - will pay you $65-70k/year at most. I met an IT director at one of these companies who told me that open source is a communist movement and so he's banned it. The dress code is very relaxed - if you stay late all week you can earn jeans Fridays! At all of these companies you will be forced to use Internet Explorer 1…

I’ve always wondered how do they find people to work there, especially young people. Do you know their profile?

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

#174

Post by runekaagaard »

I totally agree, the range in number of servers/services/technologies different companies use to solve similar problems are SO wide.

After 12 years of growth we are still happily on:

  - 1 Ubuntu server
  - 1 MySQL db
  - 1 Django framework
  - Ansible for deployment
And thats mostly it. Due to Hetzner missing the 27002 certification we moved from metal to Amazon EC2 instances which was pretty uneventful. We also moved to Aurora and the point-in-time restores actually makes me sleep better at night. Relative to Hetzner it's a lot more expensive. Not at all a problem in the absolute sense.

Some years back I had a chance to talk with the CTO of a company very similar to ours, and their landscape was 400+ microservices, 50 servers managed by k8s on Azure Cloud, Service bridges, Workflow engines, 5 different DB engines, etc. It sounded very fascinating, but also quite complicated.

Some of my worst decisions over the years has been not having the balls to say no to current best-practices. I've learned the hard way that even though the pressure of using shining-new-thingTM can be immense it's so important to realise that everything always has pros and cons. The most important thing is trying to really understand _my_ specific problem and _then_ using the simplest and most obvious solution that can work.

Obligatory "Programmers are also human" link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk

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

#175

Post by Melatonic »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #153
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…

In the last 4 years I have yet to wakeup once running everything on my own servers - all of that has gotten more reliable and easier as well.

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

#176

Post by Melatonic »

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…

You must have been running some damn cheap or old or faulty hardware because that is an insane amount of hardware maintenance.

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

#177

Post by Melatonic »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #49
dotancohen wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

As a software engineer you should not ever have had to be responsible for those things - that would be the job of network engineers and system engineers. For a small company that is only rolling one rack then I agree it makes sense to cloud host a lot of it (especially variable workloads). But keep in mind you can also roll your own hardware and have "the cloud" as your magic machine that pops up if your rack (or the connection to that datacenter) dies.

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

#178

Post by Melatonic »

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.

Just find medium sized businesses in any major city - many will still be using these stacks. Just avoid the ones that do not invest or see IT as a cost center (there are many of those). Any decently profitable medium sized business that is willing to invest in reliable IT AND knows that they should be involving in IT in many of their normal day to day processes in order to drive further innovation / optimization is probably a decent place to work.

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

#179

Post by Melatonic »

paxys wrote: post #139

Most tech jobs in the country are exactly the kind you describe. Of course if you are expecting a silicon valley salary to go with it then you will be disappointed. Look up any $50-60K IT job in a mid sized city on Indeed.

With the IT shortage it has actually shot up quite a bit - when no one will work your 50-60k job because everyone is chomping at the bit the salaries have risen quite a bit. Medium to large city will not be paying top end tech salary of course but you should be able to make between 100-200k depending on experience and the job.

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

#180

Post by gavinray »

apohn wrote: post #166
isx726552 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syste…

I have never worked at FAANG but have had coworkers + have friends that have.

I'm under the impression that gRPC is popular, and in some places GraphQL.

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