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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

#201

Post by gfaure »

sidlls wrote: post #182
dkasper wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can second dkasper's observations -- the PSC cycle is engineered to reward initiative. That said, depending on the team, the practice does not always follow the theory, so it makes sense that the FB employees your company could poach may have been the ones unsatisfied with the way their team rewarded initiative.

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

#202

Post by ryandrake »

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.

One thing to keep in mind is that mortgage is the cheapest money you'll ever borrow. Low rates vs. other kinds of loans, and the interest is often the biggest tax deduction most middle class people have access to.

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

#203

Post by jedberg »

ISL wrote: post #191
foobarian wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and property values sometimes fall

While this is true in the short term, except for very rare exceptions, you'd be hard pressed to find a property in the United States that is worth less now than 30 years ago (which is the standard length of a mortgage). I don't know about other countries, but I suspect it's the same in any modern economy. Land is scarce, and no one is making more of it.

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

#205

Post by pzduniak »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #149
Tade0 wrote: post #117

The project I was working on was moved from Milan to Poland in what was most likely an effort to downsize the project and cut costs. Odd choice of location given that hailing from Poland and having lived in Italy I had an opportunity to compare costs of employment and generally they're not that different. Perhaps Milan is exceptional - can anyone from that location tell me whether €60k annual costs of employment are…

I was just going to comment on that. Not sure how reliable is this info, but Glassdoor suggests that salary in Milan could be slightly lower than what I would expect from average software engineer in Poland. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/milan-software-engineer-s...

I'd imagine that what you get for $25k/yr in Poland is way better than the ROI on $30k/yr in Italy. Depends on the stack though. Most corporate Java people earn peanuts here.

It's also likely that they replaced a well compensated engineering firm responsible for setting up the project with a cheap team handling maintenance.

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

#206

Post by jedberg »

> You pay what you want, per hour

Just a technicality, but if he sets the number of hours a week, then he is still somewhat in control of his own paycheck. If I were the employer, I'd want to set the hourly rate as well as a fixed number of hours per week, or at least a max.

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

#207

Post by dv_dt »

lnsru wrote: 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.

Work balance, and some reasonable freedom to self determine is pretty nice and likely more important for the stability in a long term working engagement than being "interesting" work.

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

#208

Post by julianlam »

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.

Tell that to the gaming industry. There are enough people looking to get a foot in the door, and enough companies looking to turn the other way.

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

#209

Post by UncleOxidant »

dkyc wrote: post #195

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, m…

I'd put it a bit differently than the OP - for me interesting and meaningful work means that it's actually benefiting society in some way. That would mean that even the 'boring' aspects would have some kind of meaning ("we're trying to cure X" or "We're working to help solve global warming"). Too much work now is just trying to sell stuff to other people, get people to click links, get people riled up so that they're engaged with some social media platform - it's not helping us as a species.

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

#210

Post by qiqitori »

CleanCoder wrote: post #176
skeeter2020 wrote: post #110

>> No fixed hours, I will work when I want. >> no daily stand-ups >> Meaningful work means work that I care about >> This whole thing is not about money, so what the work is about comes first There is a profound mismatch between what this person is offerring and what anyone would want from a developer, or even the core requirements for effective software development. I'll pass.

I am most curious about the "no technical interview" part and "my work speaks for my skills" while OP's GitHub is just forks. This all really reads in an uncomfortable way and I would never risk investing into somebody by guessing if whatever I need done, as a business, will be interesting enough for this person to put genuine effort into. I feel like OP needs hobbies to get the fun/interesting itch scratched and the…

> I am most curious about the "no technical interview" part and "my work speaks for my skills" while OP's GitHub is just forks.

On Github you have to fork a project first if you want to create a pull request. I randomly opened three of the forks and saw that he'd made pull requests for two of them.

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