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

#161

Post by dkasper » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

asjdflakjsdf wrote: post #128

onion2k wrote: post #99

Earlier 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…

That’s pretty sad and disempowering. For what it’s worth at companies like Facebook it’s completely the opposite. If you aren’t taking any initiative you will not meet expectations at performance review.

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

#162

Post by vajrabum » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #118

farhadhf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some similar experiences. Especially with people saying "let me do what I love" or "give me a position where I can learn new things". People like variety - the initial love doesn't last long. After a few weeks/months it gets boring and repetitive. Learning the shiny new tech is only fun until you you've figured out how it works, but the project doesn't end there and you have to deliver a product in the end. Bu…

I feel like this is me with side projects sometimes. Do you have any tips for staying on target? I generally don’t have this issue in my actual job.

Here's a couple of thoughts. Sometimes not following through might not be about feelings or at least not directly. If you do a project to learn some new tech then the project is not about what it does but about how to do it. So make sure you pick side projects that you think need doing. Find a partner or a group to do the project with or create some way that you make yourself accountable for it's completion. Who are your projects for? If it's for yourself, then is it something you really want or maybe just an idea? If it's for somebody else or some group then create a connection to that group or some people so that you know who you're making it for and include them in the project. That way you have someone to deliver it to and to continue to support. Lastly, maybe it's a decision issue. Maybe you just never really completely decided to do it. How do you know when you've decided to do something?

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

#163

Post by ghaff » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

pwned1 wrote: post #148

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.

I don't know what the limitations are but unpaid internships are not uncommon in certain industries.

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

#164

Post by munk-a » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:59 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…

> 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.

The only times this ever happened to me was while I worked in the gaming industry and I absolutely still had work available - but we had some pretty rough overtime expectations that lead to constant overtime even if a different department was behind.

On principle I would just sit there and relax as best as I could in the office if my team wasn't behind. But, keep in mind, that this was also all unpaid overtime at the employee's expense because thank you EA lobbying and a terrible industry. I occasionally lost money on these evenings since transit would shut down and I'd need to cab home.

Now that I've left the gaming industry I doubt I'll ever be in that position again and I continue to have oodles of work in front of me, though, due to ADD and such - I often have trouble with motivating myself to do the boring bits they are part of the job and go with the good.

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

#165

Post by jorvi » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #71

agentultra wrote: post #21

If you expect the interesting work to land in your lap you are either one of those people that redefine (maybe invent) entire fields of research or you're incredibly lucky. In other words, your work speaks for itself and people want to give you more of it. For most people we need a job in order to keep up with the rising costs of living. If, however, you're like 99.99% of people and are good at what you do then you'l…

Random idle/curious question: "a factory" doesn't describe the roughness of the working conditions, but assuming a baseline of a mildly industrial context, how did you mitigate the risk of dropped or damaged iPads? (As an aside, it's kind of a pity that there isn't a standard drop-proof tablet out there that can be deployed without thought in these kinds of situations.)

Probably iPads encased in rugged cases / mounts.

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

#166

Post by azhenley » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

freetime2 wrote: post #150

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?

Only a minority of CS PhDs pursue a tenure-track position. I have found academia to be more laid back than big tech companies, but you are still expected to produce (e.g., a paper or two a year). The top programs probably have a more competitive culture than state schools. If you don’t want to produce research, then I don’t see the point in enrolling.

I [luckily] haven’t experienced the scary stuff that people talk about, but a major barrier for students is that PhDs are largely unstructured and require you to take the initiative. Not everyone does well in that environment.

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

#167

Post by brunojppb » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

Sounds like Gumroad would be a good match for what you are looking for.

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

#168

Post by folkrav » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:02 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…

> that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid.

The boring bits _are_ part of the job.

> 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.

The part about "in an office" is a fair goal, but if you want to avoid docs/tests/support/refactoring work, don't do this job. Writing code is just one part of it, any way you take it, and avoiding the rest is cutting corners. Even our consultants have to write tests and update docs.

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

#169

Post by pmarreck » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:02 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…

> and I just don’t want to be paid to “stay around and do the boring bits”

I’m a little ADD, so my most hated work is paperwork and administrivia. Nevertheless, I recognize that it is sometimes necessary (documentation, performance evals, collecting metrics, etc.) and I just get my favorite coffee and suck it up (the work, but also the coffee).

Programmers have arguably the least boring jobs in the world (we can literally automate all the most boring bits except for certain types of paperwork/administrivia) so to hear a developer complain about doing a little bit of boring work smacks of a special brand of entitlement to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> 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.

This only happens at terrible, un-enlightened companies who are more willing to waste both of your time and pay you a little less than they are to either give you meaningful work or let you go to the beach but stay on-call. Bosses should not be babysitters.

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

#170

Post by Fomite » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #3

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.

A couple notes:

1) You needn't necessarily restrict this to tenured professors. Indeed, plenty of new tenure-track professors have both the need and startup resources to potentially hire you if you're likely to boost their group's productivity.

2) It's hard to fund people with grant money who weren't written into the grant in the first place. So while grants might be interesting as an indicator of interest, they don't necessarily ensure you'll be hirable. Which means either patience, or hoping they have a small slush fund somewhere - which is more likely for a tenured professor, but not exclusively so.