tl:dr; "I want to be a postdoc"
Rarely met a postdoc doing interesting work; it's more about "earning your way" (i.e. to be abused for all kinds of tasks) with various professors in hopes of having your own academic career.
Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
151–160 of 418 posts
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#152My 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.
It was my reality and my current grad students seem to agree. Do you have evidence or are you just “throwing advice around”?
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#153This 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 did something like this in the mid-1990s (looking for Unix sysadmin work - or something similar) and then again about four years ago (programming work).
Both times it worked, although I had to cast a wide net and wait a little bit. Both were very, very small underfunded companies. I didn't say I'd work for free, but said I was working for the experience and job recommendation more than the money.
Honestly for the second one it was more about the recommendation, of having something to put on my resume other than my own S-corp and what have you. I could get most of the small scale experience myself (although they pushed me into NoSQL, GCP/EC2 and other things I wouldn't have ventured into - and turning mockups into code too). I was very up front with them too - I promised them I would do cheap work for them for a month and would then be open to offers, and if someone wanted to hire me for six figures I would probably take it. Oddly enough at both companies (1996 and the more recent one) I spent about 18 months working for the company before being hired by a company actually willing to pay.
In the recent situation, I also was fixated on a niche which made things a little more difficult for me initially, although now I am better off it took a little longer to get going in terms of getting paid. Small tech companies are generally looking for people who known HTML, CSS, Javascript and web frameworks like React. If you look like, without needing that much help, you can do tickets/stories to implement features on a web site that uses React, and can pass the standard interview gauntlet for that type of job, I think you will find a job fairly quickly.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#154So 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'd also add that interesting or meaningful work itself is a scarce resource. One has to work on finding such work, instead of waiting for someone to give that work. One also has to compete for such work. Salary is a small factor in the equation. Indeed, salary sometimes is a signal in this case instead of a barrier. For a meaningful project, free is probably more expensive than an above-market pay.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
> if you start refactoring the codebase while waiting for a new task you are likely to break something
The risk of this is in proportion to the lack of test coverage. If you are afraid to refactor, this should be an indication that you need to apply more test coverage, so do that first.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their GitHub profile has more than 3 projects - you might have only looked at the pinned ones. But overall, I somewhat agree with Francesco. I used to work at a large corporation where majority of the work was minor config changes and rolling out deployments for handsome pay (somewhat KTLO work). I left because I wasn't growing my career. As companies get bigger the money gets bigger as well but the interesting work…
But if the work becomes smaller, and they pay bigger, doesn't that mean you now have more time on your hands and more financial security to do something that piques your interest? I understand that one would like to switch from a boring but well paid job, in order to grow their career, but I feel this is for people who need to be told what to do. If you're not that type of person, you have so many opportunities for g…
> But if the work becomes smaller, and they pay bigger, doesn't that mean you now have more time on your hands and more financial security to do something that piques your interest?
Depends on the environment I suppose. If its a classic but-in-seat, locked down, corporate environment, you're probably still constrained for a similar amount of time.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#157This is written by a child who won't take responsibility for helping build and guide the company and do the "boring" work required by all jobs to keep things running smoothly, and leave when they get "bored."
Please make your substantive points without putdowns or swipes. Those degrade discussion quality and are not what this site is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to warn you about this multiple times in the past. Fortunately it looks like you've mostly fixed this. If you'd please stay on the desired side of the line, we'd be grateful.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I agree with your overall sentiment, but: > If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer. Don't we already have enough gatekeeping in software development? I don't particularly enjoy writing documentation, despite how important I know it to be. That doesn't make me "not a developer." If I were lazy and simply chose not to do the things that bored me (despite their…
People are better at what they enjoy, but I know very few people who enjoy documentation. I have apent most of my career as what the gp would call a hacker. My redeeming quality is probably my love of testing. I despise formal methodologies and processes, and people who fall in love with tools or languages or language features are hard for me to work with.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#159rattle 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.
Yea i feel like a job in research would be best fit, but that probably also requires a certain level of graduation.
It doesn't, necessarily.
I've hired people to work helping support academic projects without ever looking at what their degree is in.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#160So there are two issues with this:
1. If I were looking to hire someone and read this, I would immediately be turned off. Why? Because part of being an engineer (or any employee really) is doing a bunch of stuff people don't enjoy doing. This includes:
- Writing documentation
- Writing tests
- Fixing bugs
- Talking to partners about a change/launch
- Talking to lawyers
- etc
So I would be wondering: if you're signaling you don't want to do those things, that means someone else will need to do all that for your code, which is not great for them and tends to be much worse.
Like you're basically saying you want to cherrypick the parts you enjoy and not give a damn about anything else. You might say you're only costing $1/hour but the risk of a bad engineer can mean you're still expensive or a loss.
2. You don't factor in the time cost of me or my team in onboarding you, dealing with you, dealing with your code and so on. That's a big part of the filtering in hiring. People are deciding if they can justify that time investment and the opportunity cost involved.