Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by freetime2 » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

I feel like you would be better off finding companies that interest you, and inquiring if they would be willing to hire you as a part time contractor.

What you’re proposing here feels like such a deviation from the typical hiring process that I just can’t imagine many companies going to the effort of making you a personalized proposal just for you to turn it down as not interesting.

Being unable to find anything that interests you also comes across as a bit of a motivational problem that could scare companies off from investing in you (if not with money than with time).

Just my two cents. I don’t consider myself an expert on interviewing or hiring, so I could be wrong!

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

#122

Post by Supermancho » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #99

ftruzzi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might b…

Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. That should literally never be the case for a developer though. You can always be improving the documentation, increasing the test coverage, optimizing for speed/bandwidth/complexity/some other metric you've measured, working out how to measure something, learning new tools or tech that coul…

> Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me.

> That should literally never be the case for a developer though.

After 20+ years I've both been in such a position FULL TIME, as have others (eg: Many devs at ServiceNow) - hired on to work on cool things at an old small company and then literally sat around every day with no tasks and no responsibilities while everyone around me either didn't show up or watched TV on their monitors (open-plan btw).

I've seen big company devs do the same, making up busy-work tasks and literally not committing any code for months at a time playing the priority-game of "wait until something more important comes up, someone else will make a workaround" which was surprisingly effective.

The reality that a developer shows up and have nothing to do happens OFTEN in all sorts of organizations - eg last day of sprint, how many times have you pulled in a new multi-day ticket? Developer accountability is at an all-time low when software developers (across many sub-disciplines) can't make accurate estimates, can't meet anyone's estimates anyway, and are at an all-time-high demand. Managers are in a different boat, but same result. Perverse incentives and lack of a consensus (or willpower) on what constitutes value makes for do-nothing-and-get-paid while someone else does the work.

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

#123

Post by amelius » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

If more people do this, then this will put a negative pressure on my salary.

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

#124

Post by jrockway » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

Kreotiko wrote: post #50

Pay me what you want but possibly in cryptocurrency so I can commit tax evasion should be the title

You can pay people in cryptocurrency and still report their income to the IRS. I certainly would.

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

#125

Post by FalconSensei » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

ftruzzi wrote: post #49

moritonal wrote: post #7

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…

I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might b…

> having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me

Maybe nothing you want to do, but I doubt there was nothing to do. Improving docs, tests, small refactoring to old code to make it more readable are a few examples.

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

#126

Post by brundolf » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

ftruzzi wrote: post #49

moritonal wrote: post #7

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…

I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might b…

Have you considered just coming up with your own projects? Set some arbitrary, useless goal that will be an interesting engineering challenge, and have at it. Nobody will force you to write docs or do any other "boring bits". It's a great outlet in my experience.

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

#127

Post by csours » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

What does 'developer experience' entail to you, and how does your company express this for prospective and new hires?

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

#128

Post by asjdflakjsdf » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #99

ftruzzi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might b…

Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. That should literally never be the case for a developer though. You can always be improving the documentation, increasing the test coverage, optimizing for speed/bandwidth/complexity/some other metric you've measured, working out how to measure something, learning new tools or tech that coul…

eh, that's not really the case in a lot of developer jobs these days. A lot of agile/scrum adoption/bastardization has meant that all work done has to be decided by the team and pretty much every piece of work has to be approved by a product manager. This can often lead to some demoralising meetings where you can either lie about the effort/risk/goal or you can give a true value estimate that gets shot down. If you lie, you can end up spending your own free time working on that refactor or documentation etc. For most devs working on a codebase, its not theirs, and they don't determine what has priority.

In reality, for a lot of people, if you start refactoring the codebase while waiting for a new task you are likely to break something and its just not worth the hassle for the developer or the company.

Learning new tools is always great ofc but it can be very hard to find the motivation in such a role, where unless you are a senior developer, you probably won't have much say on adoption, and you will likley just develop a half baked understanding of a new library that you will never get to use in production. Its much better to have some real free time where you can focus on your own projects and learn that way.

So in short, maybe it should never be the case that devs are in that position, but it often is. Especially for devs with less experience

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

#129

Post by defaultname » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

moritonal wrote: post #7

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…

"but the real cost of an upfront hire is my time, not money"

The most arduous hiring processes are often little more than an illusion of selection, yielding a process that is more the rolling of dice. Most hiring processes hire based upon interview skills that have extraordinarily little correlation with job performance.

Google has such a famous interview process that everyone tries to clone it. For that they get employees with an average tenure of 3.2 years, made worse that internal project-to-project migration is endemic. They have a tiny core of institutional knowledge, and then a passing army of travelers.

This industry would be far more robust if it hired quickly and fired fast, because the only way you know how someone will do in the role/team/org is by actually having them in the role/team/org. Everything else is just loose proxies that do little. Iterate through people and just punt out the ones that don't work. That shouldn't be a big deal.

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

#130

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

ftruzzi wrote: post #49

moritonal wrote: post #7

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…

I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might b…

I think the solution needs to live on both fronts.

IMO the boring bits are boring because there's no time spent to make them not boring.

On all layers of society there are tasks that are under-tooled and under-organized and if you make them worth doing, people will enjoy doing them 24/7.