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Unicorn Jobs

pgbovine.net

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51–60 of 99 posts

Re: Unicorn Jobs

#51

Post by derefr »

smoyer wrote: post #35

I think the question is completely wrong ... the question you should be asking is "how do I turn my current job into a unicorn job?". I've done this for almost 30 years and, with the exception of the times I was forced into management roles, I've loved engineering. The key is that you have to be doing something your employer feels provides value, and ultimately you want to tailor the work towards something you're ent…

> ultimately you want to tailor the work towards something you're enthusiastic about

This depends on being passionate about a how (e.g. a technology, a language, a development methodology) instead of a what. An employer will not frequently let you turn the project of building their food-reviews website into an automatic musical-accompaniment AI.

Re: Unicorn Jobs

#52

Post by overgard »

was_hellbanned wrote: post #14

The rather unethical alternative is to find a job in a fairly incompetent group at a company that's not extremely tech focused, then spend most of your time working on whatever you want to. I've had jobs (and spoken to many people with similar jobs) where I could accomplish all my tasks within a couple hours of actual, focused effort, leaving the rest of the work week for personal projects, side business, etc.

I don't know if it's that unethical -- I think there are a lot of jobs where if you made a graph of the worload it would look rather spiky -- IE, sometimes you're very busy, but with long idle times in between. Those downtimes are a good opportunity to work on pet projects or learn a new skill for career development. I think most good employers will recognize that if you're otherwise good at what you were hired for.

Re: Unicorn Jobs

#53

Post by jenius »

chops wrote: post #31

Whenever I give a talk about Erlang-related stuff, I almost inevitably get asked "do you do this for fun or for your job?" And I can genuinely answer "both, really". While I'm the project lead for one of the more popular Erlang web frameworks ( http://nitrogenproject.com ), my main focus is on my sports league management system[1] ( http://bracketpal.com ), which runs on Nitrogen. As a result, I can justify spending…

I'm in a similar situation -- right now I have what I guess would be called a unicorn job, I work on open source stuff that I have 90% or more of the commits on full time and am paid for it. But it's not really a fluke or that someone is 'vouching' for me -- the stuff I work on is essential to my company's workflow, and pays off very directly as our work becomes faster and better, so I don't see it as a job that will go away soon (although I could certainly be wrong).

I work at an agency, and we crank through a lot of smaller sites very quickly. My role at this point is to spend most of my time working on the tools that we use to build on top of, researching and evaluating other tools, and generally improving workflow and making it more efficient. I'll take a couple months to put in work on tools and workflow, then come back and lead a client project with the new/updated flow. When the project is wrapped up, I take what I learned from working on the project and use it to make further improvements to the tools/workflow I spend most of my time on, and that's generally the cycle.

Topics that I have sunk a significant amount of time into recently include using git/github more efficiently, researching and working with a variety of client-side MVCs, static site build tools, deployment tools, new project templating tools, sysops monitoring and provisioning (docker), requirejs and browserify comparsion and benchmarking in various situations, focusing on svgs and perfecting illustrator svg workflow, etc. It seems to me like there is an endless supply of cool things to work on at the moment, and I enjoy my work and do the same stuff whether I'm on or off the clock, which is nice for my company because I probably work a lot more hours than anyone else (although voluntarily, because I enjoy it).

I tend to span across the stack pretty widely, from design to ops and everything in between, which I like, and am also involved in a few new business accounts that are more dev-heavy. I absolutely love my job and would never give it up. Not sure if this is interesting to anyone or if anyone has perspectives on it, but I definitely am in a unique position and am curious to hear whatever it is that people think about all this!

Re: Unicorn Jobs

#54

Post by derefr »

seivan wrote: post #37

I thought this post would be about jobs for 'unicorns' designer + developers positions conjoined. That's what I want. A job where I won't be dictated by designers who can't implement their bullshit photoshop mockups. I'm not an entrepreneur, but I like to create things. I am OK with a paycheck (where eating out on McDonalds is a luxury) with no equity, hell that's my current situation - sans creative freedom. Right n…

> 'unicorns' designer + developers positions conjoined

I've always found the resistance to this so strange.

My CV has Erlang, Haskell, IA32 assembler, and HTML5/CSS3 on it in various places. The first question any company inevitably asks me, when I send it in, is "what position are you applying for?" (Even though I answer this in the cover letter. Good evidence that they don't bother to read it.)

I should probably just start answering "development factotum."

Re: Unicorn Jobs

#56

Post by derefr »

pgbovine wrote: post #48
loomio wrote: post #40

For those of us whose "core dream" is exactly the kind of logistical problem solving and organizational coordination the author describes as "overhead", starting your own company is a unicorn job. Feeling lucky, I suppose :)

totally! if you love building businesses, managing organizations and logistics, and figuring out monetization and growth, then starting a company might be your unicorn job.

My unicorn job would be getting a steady salary to start businesses (multiple)--riding the highs and the lows, without risking my own money.

Maybe I should join a VC firm?

Re: Unicorn Jobs

#58

Post by rplnt »

overgard wrote: post #52
was_hellbanned wrote: post #14

The rather unethical alternative is to find a job in a fairly incompetent group at a company that's not extremely tech focused, then spend most of your time working on whatever you want to. I've had jobs (and spoken to many people with similar jobs) where I could accomplish all my tasks within a couple hours of actual, focused effort, leaving the rest of the work week for personal projects, side business, etc.

I don't know if it's that unethical -- I think there are a lot of jobs where if you made a graph of the worload it would look rather spiky -- IE, sometimes you're very busy, but with long idle times in between. Those downtimes are a good opportunity to work on pet projects or learn a new skill for career development. I think most good employers will recognize that if you're otherwise good at what you were hired for.

Sometimes they don't know what they hired you for. As in have no idea how the task should be done and how much time it can possibly take. That can be unethical.

If you have spiky workload and work on fun projects or just learn, I believe that to be fine.

Re: Unicorn Jobs

#60

Post by [deleted] »

pgbovine wrote: post #39
tway9999 wrote: post #33

I think this is why some people go into Finance. Spend 10 years in some miserable high stress job, but hopefully gather enough wealth to retire in your early 30s and work on whatever you want. Also why people work part time and spend their off time painting or playing music. Be poor but have time to work on what you care about. Edit: Grammar

I think this is why some people go into Finance. Spend 10 years in some miserable high stress job, but hopefully gather enough wealth to retire in your early 30s and work on whatever you want. Some of my college classmates went down this route, and while the numbers can theoretically work out (these are uber-smart math/science/engineering folks), I've never seen a single person exit successfully from this game and th…

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