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Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

truzzi.me

11–20 of 418 posts

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#11

This is interesting! My own anecdote: when I graduated from college I had zero experience aside from one internship at a small noname company. No one would hire me. I started reaching out to local companies big and small saying I would work for free if they'd use me. Not just programming jobs, but also general IT or even helpdesk jobs - anything remotely computer related. None took me up on my offer. I suppose they s…

"I would do anything" moves quickly to the bottom of the stack. In there I see (maybe wrongly, but when hiring first impression matters) no motivation. I look for people passionate about the work, who have skills and interest on using those. But help desk or programming require very different skills and are quite broad.

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#12
His requirement is basically volunteer style job? For example: run an app that track or take in abandon pets for an animal rescue/shelter.

1. interesting work, checked. 2. part time, remote and probably asynchronous, checked. 3. no interviews, just build the web app or iOS app, checked. 4. probably minimum wage, checked.

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#13
I have nice boring job. Few years ago I was upset with the boring part. But with kids and mortgage I don’t really care anymore. I am very happy to be paid more than a manager in a small company being only individual contributor in big Corp. I also have approval to sell my hardware from big Corp. So I can explore new things with commercial potential without a fear. Life is good.

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#14

rattle your network until you find a tenured professor who has interesting-to-you grants, and talk them into letting you join the lab as a visiting researcher. if you do it right they’ll be overjoyed to have technical staff who aren’t degree candidates and you’ll get something tasty to intellectually munch on.

My lab actually did this for a bit. They hired a programmer who was retired but bored and just wanted to do something for far less than market rate. She was great and got a lot done but two problems:

1) It took my boss significant effort keeping her busy with things to do: explaining the problems we needed solved, etc. is non-trivial

2) Since she was working for so little, she could basically dictate what she was or wasn't doing. The very fact that she wasn't on a real salary meant it was actually harder to work with her in some sense.

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#15

So Francesco says they refuse to do technical interviews and says their CV and Github are proof enough. The CV shows experience as a freelance engineer at Apple for a bit, then an engineer for Samsung which they were made redundant from. Their GitHub is 3 projects, a python script, a breakout board and then a beta libary. They argue that's fine though because they'd work for £1/hr, but the real cost of an upfront hir…

Everyone I've ever worked with just does the tasks they want they way they want and if you twist their arm they will do things that advance the mission and benefit paying customers grudgingly.

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#16
This is really funny.

I spent 20 years in the Marine Corps because they continued to challenge me and test my abilities. Some days the work wasn't interesting other days it was really interesting. But it was always challenging.

They always told me what I was going to get paid, but I think they owe a few hours for some overtime I did back in 2005.

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#17
post #5

rattle your network until you find a tenured professor who has interesting-to-you grants, and talk them into letting you join the lab as a visiting researcher. if you do it right they’ll be overjoyed to have technical staff who aren’t degree candidates and you’ll get something tasty to intellectually munch on.

He did not graduate so he is not eligible for any work as a researcher inside any eu university.

I understand degrees being a requirement for medicine or hard engineering, but for research and topics of the mind it's just an expensive, multi-year hazing ritual into academia.

Plenty of good people go straight into industry after getting their BCs. (or avoid degrees entirely) because of this.

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#18
Having been consistently unemployed in the past, some experience and advice:

How people value you – and treat you – is directly reflected in how they pay you. Working free or cheap actually encourages employers to micromanage and committee review things because inexpensive things/people are seen as less reliable or professional.

If you want interesting work, my advice is to make it yourself. Find a problem you're passionate about and make something beautiful of it.

You'll improve your own skills, have more fun, and eventually employers will be coming to you.

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#19
Nice visually appealing CV. Is that using a public template as the base? I'm currently using the deedy XeLaTeX one as a base, but it doesn't seem to scale out to multiple pages well.

Best of luck with your goals by the way. Avoiding the full time grind in favor of lower time commitments with interesting projects is a great objective.

Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

#20
Open Source volunteer contributions are like this taken to the extreme - where the two main motivations are interesting work, and making a change in something you (want to) use.

I'm curious if the lessons learned from OSS projects would apply to work output from this person.

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