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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?

#111

Post by JackFr »

ectopod wrote: post #108
bio4m wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the case; I work at a bank and we have widescale adoption of Kubernetes and cloud products (in fact most of the major banks do at this point) If you happen to be looking for a DevOps or SRE role, check a large banks job boards, you'll be surprised how many open roles are available.

My (rather out-of-date) experience with banks is that they have no problem adopting new tech but they don't retire the old tech. Add in a bunch of mergers and you get an unholy mess.

Yes! See my sibling comment . . .

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

#112

Post by giantg2 »

westonplatter0 wrote: post #85
giantg2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially banks on that list. They're slow to adopt new tech due to risk aversion.

+1 to this. I've worked in tech but never enjoyed the "upgrade the system every 2 years approach." Banks and financial services are now regulated to be slow, methodical, and dependable post 2008. I found a manager I respect in a group that does work I'm curious about (options/futures) so it's a good fit.

Well, I work in finance and we do a lot of upgrades. We rarely touch the old COBOL systems. But we rewrite plenty of JSF and even AngularJS front ends. In fact, I created a system about 2 years ago that is currently being rewritten by a different team. So it does still change. I have never worked at a true tech company so I'm just assuming the change is slower.

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

#113

Post by jstx1 »

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 somewhere, they have tonnes of other software too, most of it much more up to date.

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

#115

Post by CraigJPerry »

brimble wrote: post #107
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.

> 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 suspect that there's a fair amount of overlap—not total, but quite a bit—between companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and…

>> companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and well-documented, repeatable, largely scripted configuration

Are there any examples of this? I’m coming up on 20 years into my career and i’ve genuinely never seen a large company that had their IT function ticking over sweetly. Every single one had aspirations and had some things nailed to a greater or lesser extent but none were “done”.

If anything, things are a LOT better today. The old mis-configured MS Exhange host hanging off the office DSL line is gone these days. The MD / CEO’s password is unlikely to be Password1 nowadays.

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

#116

Post by giantg2 »

bio4m wrote: post #79
giantg2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially banks on that list. They're slow to adopt new tech due to risk aversion.

Not the case; I work at a bank and we have widescale adoption of Kubernetes and cloud products (in fact most of the major banks do at this point) If you happen to be looking for a DevOps or SRE role, check a large banks job boards, you'll be surprised how many open roles are available.

I work in finance. My point was basically that the industry is usually slower to adopt the new stuff. Of course they will adopt cloud, but are the the first ones or are they 5 years behind the leaders. It seems they also tend to not change COBOL code often and are just adding new stuff in the new tech. So change still happens, but the scope and rate may be different than other industries.

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

#117

Post by zozbot234 »

AlbertoGP wrote: post #93
anonymouse008 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot wanted Facebook for $500. Mind explaining what this means? Did they want content generation for posts? Or did they actually just want someone to post what they had on file? Or did they just want advertising help? My family has small businesses and I've thought about helping others, but the asks seem too all over the place.

>> A lot wanted Facebook for $500. > Mind explaining what this means? As a freelancer, what I’ve seen is requests for building a Facebook-scale social network with all the scalable infrastructure and other bells and whistles, mobile app integration, etc., sometimes for a specific community (lawyers, doctors, or some such), that offer $500 as total budget.

Mastodon is perfect for this use case, though.

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

#118

Post by Aeolun »

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 do not think you’ll find “straightforward and makes sense” anywhere inside the fortune 500.

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

#119

Post by anonymouse008 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #117
AlbertoGP wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> A lot wanted Facebook for $500. > Mind explaining what this means? As a freelancer, what I’ve seen is requests for building a Facebook-scale social network with all the scalable infrastructure and other bells and whistles, mobile app integration, etc., sometimes for a specific community (lawyers, doctors, or some such), that offer $500 as total budget.

Mastodon is perfect for this use case, though.

See that’s the way I like to think — sure $500, and I’ll spin up an instance for you. Then $50/mo for server uptime.

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

#120

Post by exdsq »

I'm not old - 28 years old, worked in tech since I left school at 19, and my first job was still wiring routers and building servers (like, physically ordering the parts and building them in a lab). I really miss that sort of tech now I'm a "senior software engineer" and it's all remote, all abstractions, and all in a chair.
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