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

#181

Post by christophergs » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

blentz wrote: post #55

I’ve been on the receiving end of similar requests before. “I’ll work for free or nothing if you let me do what I love under the umbrella of your organization because I love it so much.” I did one or two agreements like this and then stopped altogether. The individual would start their work, others would start to depend on its existence and the individual would leave in a matter or weeks or months because something e…

Same, sometimes people volunteer to help me code https://coursemaker.org for free because they like the idea. In one case this has worked out well. But in a couple of others the engineers have vanished quite fast. Sometimes I wonder if I made a much more serious effort to onboard/document/give ownership then would they stick with it. What do you reckon - how was the onboarding in your case?

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

#182

Post by sidlls » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

dkasper wrote: post #161

asjdflakjsdf wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just had a good chuckle at this. I’m skeptical, to say the least. I don’t have direct experience. But I do work at a company that has poached several FAANG employees this past year and whose thoughts...differ from yours.

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

#183

Post by ruraljuror » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:10 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…

> If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer. You're a hacker.

This point parallels the distinction made in the Software Engineering at Google flamingo book between programming and engineering. Engineering comprises the tools and processes to maintain software over time (this is a rough paraphrase), of which docs, for example, is essential.

So to use their language with your point: this sounds purely like programming and perhaps not engineering.

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

#184

Post by pwned1 » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #163

pwned1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are rules under federal law: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/71-flsa-interns...

Basically an internship has to benefit the intern and not the employer. It's akin to taking a class.

Any HR rep looking at these standards would not permit someone to come on for free in these circumstances at the risk of being penalized for violating federal labor law.

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

#185

Post by wvenable » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:11 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.

For side projects, I think there is some value in not being concerned about finishing them. If you're doing them for enjoyment then they shouldn't feel like a job.

But I find defining exactly what done will be on a personal project helps a lot to get completed. I define features are the minimum necessary and once I reach those features I immediately switch to trying to release it. Releasing is always a lot of work so it's easy to put it off forever while constantly iterating on a product. But actually releasing gives a good feeling of accomplishment.

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

#186

Post by slackfan » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

No.

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

#187

Post by regularemployee » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #160

So 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 signali…

> is doing a bunch of stuff people don't enjoy

I enjoy writing documentation and writing tests. To me, writing documentation is like teaching others about the awesome product / features we have built, and also the different technical tradeoff decisions we had to make.

I can't grasp the mindset where an engineer builds something really cool that they are proud of, but don't enjoy talking about it / teaching people how to use it.

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

#188

Post by johannes1234321 » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

decafninja wrote: post #100

johannes1234321 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I would do anything" moves quickly to the bottom of the stack. In there I see (maybe wrongly, but when hiring first impression matters) no motivation. I look for people passionate about the work, who have skills and interest on using those. But help desk or programming require very different skills and are quite broad.

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at least back then (10+ years ago), quite a few people working helpdesk and IT (system admin, network admin, etc.) were CS majors. Or at least it seemed so from my own network. CS was seen as the gateway degree to any kind of computer related career, not just SWE. Are things different now? I am actually not a CS major - I'm an information systems major. Funny enough, anothe…

Such roles still exist and a bunch of people like it. Instead of sitting in front of their own computer and hacking code and a amazing problems there it's finding problems in an application with communication with a different person. Depending on organisation and level this can be quite technical as well.

But when hiring I look for other skills and other interests depending on the role and a key qualification is interest in the kind of role.

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

#189

Post by tasogare » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

galangalalgol wrote: post #158

ketzo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t understand that general lack of love for writing documentation. It’s a part I like very much in a project: explaining how it works, why some things are done a certain way, the limitations of the software, the possible configuration options... It’s funto write.

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

#190

Post by UncleOxidant » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

I'm in the same situation Francesco is in. Other than a short gig in the Fall (for some people who knew my capabilities, hence no interview required) I haven't worked for pay in over a year. Fortunately I'm in a position to be able to not work as my spouse has a job with health insurance and we've got a decent amount of retirement savings.

> Work takes up such a big part of your life that what you do is terribly important. I’ve been contacted by many companies and recruiters during this time, but the idea of going back to full-time work doing something I don’t care about or is not technically interesting just scares me.

Yeah, scares is a good word here - I feel the same. I get contacted by recruiters and they describe the job and I get that dread in the pit of my stomach. I've been in tech for 30+ years, I've seen all kinds of companies, situations, bosses, coworkers. It's all a roll of the dice and from my experience the odds aren't on your side.

> 1. You will give me interesting or meaningful work

I tend to think that there's just not a lot of funding out there for the most interesting and meaningful. I had a job doing software development for an alternative energy company. They never got to stable funding and folded. That was interesting, meaningful work, but they couldn't get money to keep it going.

> 3. No technical interviews or coding challenges

I have reached this point as well. I'm tired of the interview game. Just done. Can't do it anymore. The thought of interviewing makes me physically ill. I like to say that I'm retired form interviewing not software development.

> 4. You pay what you want, per hour

I'd work for $50K/year if the work was interesting and the people were nice. Heck, maybe even less than that in the right situation.

In the meantime I'll be over here working on stuff that I find interesting in languages that I like (and aren't necessarily in demand). And gardening. And baking bread.