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

truzzi.me

21–30 of 418 posts

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

#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'll have to find what is interesting about the job. I've worked at a company that replaced clipboards with iPads in a factory. If all it was to me was a form-builder application and the technology under it I would have been turned off ages ago. But I was incredibly curious as to why the product as successful and growing, what our customers liked about it, and I pushed for developers to visit the factories and see how people used the app. The results were quite surprising and it fed out team with dozens of ideas.

Technology for technology's sake is fun for a while but will eventually bore you. It helps to have a reason to work on what you do. Which I think is part of what OP is saying but I think you can find the reason in a "boring" job as well. You just have to be curious and look for it.

Although avoiding working at feature factories where the developers are just cogs in a Kafka-esque Agile Machine is a whole other can of worms. The OP's strategy seems like an interesting way to avoid it. Best of luck!

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

#22

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…

This might sound crazy but free may be worse than offering to charge. "Free" is saying my work offers no value and may even cost more through your time.

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

#23
post #13

I have nice boring job. Few years ago I was upset with the boring part. But with kids and mortgage I don’t really care anymore. I am very happy to be paid more than a manager in a small company being only individual contributor in big Corp. I also have approval to sell my hardware from big Corp. So I can explore new things with commercial potential without a fear. Life is good.

Stability and work life balance are terribly underrated.

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

#26
I was just replying to a flagged comment [1] and it became impossible to respond to,

> Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the intersection of "interesting" work and "valuable" work is pretty small.

Your comment was flagged/dead, but I absolutely think you are right.

Look at most of the jobs today. Laborer, factory worker, package sorter, delivery driver, fast food worker, government process worker, ... These aren't particularly interesting or fulfilling.

Apply that lens to our industry, and what do you see? Plumbing grunt work, glue code maintainer, migration work, form collection CRUD. There are so many jobs that don't do anything particularly novel or exciting. You might even be building something you hate, like ad tech.

I don't think the comment is too off base. Maybe the scale and tone is wrong, but there's certainly plenty of boring work.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26863367

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

#28
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did not graduate so he is not eligible for any work as a researcher inside any eu university.

Couldn't he be hired as an engineer or technical staff?

I don´t know for all the eu nations, but for those that I know staff researcher positions still require degrees (and there is a lot of competition to get those because they are even more limited in number than tenure track positions, just with far less requirements)

In mine in particular everyone has at least a Master Degree with some publications. One of two even got a PHD.

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

#29
This attitude comes across as a little arrogant, and I'm not sure whether it's warranted without a host of achievements to back it up. Nevertheless, I hope the best for the author, who seems to know what they want.

I think they would have better success by actively seeking what they want, though, rather than expecting it to turn up at their doorstep.

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

#30
post #13

I have nice boring job. Few years ago I was upset with the boring part. But with kids and mortgage I don’t really care anymore. I am very happy to be paid more than a manager in a small company being only individual contributor in big Corp. I also have approval to sell my hardware from big Corp. So I can explore new things with commercial potential without a fear. Life is good.

After kids and mortage, you will be upset with the boring part again :(
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