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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

#191

Post by ISL »

foobarian wrote: post #179
bikingbismuth wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to pay off my mortgage about a year ago (I am in my late 30s), and work has taken on a new aspect for me. I feel a bit more comfortable challenging the status quo and trying to take on more "interesting work". With that in mind, I am still attentive to the fact I need to maintain a sustainable career for another 25/30 years.

Many people in my circle are proud of paying off mortgages, so I kind of assumed by default that it is a worthwhile thing. But looking at the numbers I'm not so sure: it seems much better in current market to cash out as much as possible and let that money sit in an index fund. I guess the main issues are some risks with downturns and/or liquidity.

That reality is a property primarily of the present-moment.

Index funds don't always rise and property values sometimes fall. Interest rates are rarely this low. Leverage multiplies both the upside and the downside.

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

#193

Post by lthornberry »

daemonk wrote: post #119

Hiring is a lot of the times more about finding someone that'll fit in your current team than about an individual with a lot of skill/enthusiasm. You don't sound very reliable and that would be my main concern. Even if you were working for nothing, it would still be a waste of the time invested if you are just going to leave in a month or two. You should go into academia. I think that model is more what you are looki…

I'm an academic, and I do not think it's what he's looking for. Most Ph.D. and postdoc-level research involves much less flexibility and much more tedium than it sounds like he's looking for. The overall project should be very interesting, yes, but the day-to-day work usually still requires plenty of boring bits. And while I'm sure there are some labs that would allow remote work on a flexible schedule, it's not the general culture in the places I have experience. CS might be different--it's not my field. But I'm skeptical.

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

#194

Post by defaultname »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #175
defaultname wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Interviews aren't the only cost of hiring. Onboarding is very expensive for knowledge workers.

Onboarding is expensive at dysfunctional organizations. Further, the reality that churn is high among better employees [1] offsets the concern.

But regardless, going through an extensive vetting process is an illusion. It has extraordinarily little correlation with actual work fit or productivity, but the more "rigorous" the process, the more likely you are to stick with a poor fit.

[1] - low performers will hang around forever. The fundamental of the hire slow/fire slow reality is that eventually every organization is 80% dead weight. If you want to avoid onboarding costs (versus dealing with the issues that make onboarding expensive, which is almost always institutional liabilities), hire the worst candidates and they'll be with you forever.

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

#195

Post by dkyc »

It's almost funny how this is the polar opposite of what you often want when hiring. You're hiring to add manpower to tackle the kind of unexciting tasks that you don't naturally find people drawn towards from your existing team (and then, people's responsibilities expand, or they turn 'boring' work into interesting work by redefining the problem or attacking it on a deeper level).

When you have a growing business, money is probably not not the primary concern, but the last thing you can afford is someone on the team being picky about which tasks are beneath them.

No judgment here, I understand OP's sentiment, but I cannot remember any situation in my career where 'hire me, I only work on what I find interesting but it'll cost you comparatively little' would have been an exciting proposition (on the hiring side).

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

#196

Post by jedberg »

foobarian wrote: post #179
bikingbismuth wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to pay off my mortgage about a year ago (I am in my late 30s), and work has taken on a new aspect for me. I feel a bit more comfortable challenging the status quo and trying to take on more "interesting work". With that in mind, I am still attentive to the fact I need to maintain a sustainable career for another 25/30 years.

Many people in my circle are proud of paying off mortgages, so I kind of assumed by default that it is a worthwhile thing. But looking at the numbers I'm not so sure: it seems much better in current market to cash out as much as possible and let that money sit in an index fund. I guess the main issues are some risks with downturns and/or liquidity.

You're right. None of those people account for the time value of money. If I could get an interest only mortgage I would (where I literally pay to rent the money). There are so many better things I can do with a few hundred thousand dollars now.

If you have the money to pay off your mortgage, why not buy a second house with it and rent that out? Let someone pay your mortgage while you get the appreciation? Or invest it in something else?

If you do the math, renting almost always comes out ahead of owning, as long as you invest the difference in something that gains in value.

The main reason to own is for psychological reasons. It's great if you have kids and want a place for them, or yourself, to call home.

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

#197

Post by freetime2 »

azhenley wrote: post #166
freetime2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

How about teaching undergraduates? I seem to recall from my undergrad days that a lot of my TAs were pursuing PhDs. Is that something that PhD students are expected to do?

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

#198

Post by gtowey »

ketzo wrote: post #137
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…

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…

> Don't we already have enough gatekeeping in software development?

No. In fact I hope anyone who's actually worked in the software industry would see that we don't have nearly enough!

Look I'll agree with you about the evils of gatekeeping if we're talking about who gets to call themselves an artist or a writer. Those kinds of distinctions rarely create life or death consequences.

But software can. Not all the time, but certainly in medical, airplane control, banking and financial, and many many more areas.

I wish software would take notes from other engineering fields like structural or architectural. Can you imagine an engineer building a bridge who was like "I don't want to do the boring stuff like stress analysis or geological surveys, I just want to make cool shapes and build them!" Can you imagine trusting your life to a bridge built like that?

Software increasingly runs our world and real software engineers who work on things that really actually matter know they have a responsibility to "do all the boring things" because those things are essential to doing their job right. Hearing about major hacks and exploits every day like SolarWinds, Experian, Facebook that expose our personal information and put us at risk makes me feel like we desperately need more gatekeeping in our field to keep cowboys and hackers from getting the chance to get anywhere near these systems.

I've been in this career for 20 years and the thing I learn more and more is that writing code is perhaps the most trivial aspect of what we do. It's everything around it -- the process, the testing, the security, the collaboration and how teams and organizations operate that are the real challenges to be solved. Anyone can hack together some working code. The hard part is the systems and organizational structures in which it operates.

There are plenty of things to work on in software which are of no real consequence, but as the OP is finding it's pretty difficult to find someone who wants to pay you to work on something which has no value. That's called a hobby not a profession.

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

#199

Post by bumby »

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…

>you'll have to find what is interesting about the job.

This reminds me of the advice that one needs to cultivate their passion rather than expect to stumble upon it.

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

#200

Post by clairity »

decafninja wrote: post #104
clairity wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s not that free labor isn’t worth it, it’s that it’s a lemons problem. that is, (the signaling indicates) uncertainty is high, which is what makes it expensive (or if lucky, a fantastic deal). most people are rather risk-averse and therefore prefer safe choices, with the commensurate relinquishment of potential greater gains (and greater losses). the lesson should be to value your labor correctly, as large deviati…

Of course this was communicated clearly - that the reason I would be willing to work for no pay was because my objective was to gain experience. I also mentioned that if they considered me valuable and worthwhile enough, to feel free to take me on as a "real" employee down the road.

that's not clear at all. you essentially keep say you'd "work for free", rather than "my work is worth x, let's exchange". the latter puts you on equal footing psychologically, while the former puts you at a distinct disadvantage.
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