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

truzzi.me

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

#141

Post by Popegaf »

As others have suggested, have you considered joining an opensource project?

- https://github-help-wanted.com/

- https://up-for-grabs.net/

- https://www.codetriage.com/

- https://opencollective.com/discover

I'm sure there are organisations that would love to have some technical volunteers. Maybe try and find NGOs you believe in and send them a private or public message?

Or, if you want to get politically involved in your country, you could try and find yourself a political party you believe in, ask them if they have any technical tasks, and see from there.

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

#142

Post by 1123581321 »

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…

If the organization or the product has any amount of complexity, all of those have communication roadblocks. While it’s technically possible to always be learning or practicing something, much of the effort will be wasted by either a focused or a bureaucratic organization. Repeatedly doing work just to give the company an unlikely option on it is counter-productive as it leads to burnout. It’s better to stop work when enough is done for the day or week to stay focused on the efforts that matter.

Probably the best way to apply the “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” mindset, if it must assert itself, is to actually let developers stuff packages or weed the grounds or something else that can clear their minds. :)

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

#144

Post by kenoph »

azhenley wrote: post #10

My advice: pursue a PhD. If you can find the right advisor, then you will have almost complete creative freedom to pursue interesting projects while getting paid to do it.

I see that kind of advice thrown around a lot, but that's just the sales pitch of PhDs, not the reality.

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

#146

Post by johncessna »

defaultname wrote: post #129
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 emp…

> This industry would be far more robust if it hired quickly and fired fast

Agreed 100%. Maybe the fail fast movements in the SDLC, devops, marketing, and product management will start reaching into HR.

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

#147

Post by beaconstudios »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #113
beaconstudios wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you don't care about pay and you want to work on interesting projects, why not start your own? people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun. If you are in a position where you don't need to pay the bills with work, then you're in a great position and can have fun all day long - so why not just do that? If you work on something that also turns out to be marketable then you might ev…

> people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun. If a position across the street becomes available which allows you to pursue a personal goal you aspire and afford your current lifestyle, would you remain at your current "non-fun" job or give it a shot and apply? Many people don't just get job because they have bills to pay, they get jobs that they don't like because there is no alter…

obviously there's such a thing as better or worse jobs, but OP suggested that they were willing to work on whatever, as long as it's fun, for any arbitrary amount of pay.

So OP is in a position where money is not important to them. So why have a job at all? Have a fun or meaningful hobby instead, or start a personal project.

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

#148

Post by pwned1 »

decafninja wrote: post #4

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…

Minimum wage makes it illegal to bring you on for zero pay just to get experience.

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

#149

Post by KptMarchewa »

Tade0 wrote: post #117

The project I was working on was moved from Milan to Poland in what was most likely an effort to downsize the project and cut costs. Odd choice of location given that hailing from Poland and having lived in Italy I had an opportunity to compare costs of employment and generally they're not that different. Perhaps Milan is exceptional - can anyone from that location tell me whether €60k annual costs of employment are…

I was just going to comment on that.

Not sure how reliable is this info, but Glassdoor suggests that salary in Milan could be slightly lower than what I would expect from average software engineer in Poland.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/milan-software-engineer-s...

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

#150

Post by freetime2 »

azhenley wrote: post #10

My advice: pursue a PhD. If you can find the right advisor, then you will have almost complete creative freedom to pursue interesting projects while getting paid to do it.

I have considered retiring from software development and pursuing a PhD. But I have heard some scary things about the culture and competitiveness in academia. Are there “laid back” PhD programs for people for people who don’t really have an interest in tenure track, but just want to learn and apply themselves to some novel problem?
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