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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

#241

Post by burntoutfire »

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.

That sounds like academia, where people are also expected to be constantly innovative on demand and, when the majority just can't pull it off, they invent BS research and produce worthless papers which clog the system.

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

#242

Post by daemonk »

lthornberry wrote: post #193
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…

I have a phd and have postdoc'ed at a couple of places also. I am now in industry.

Sure, there are boring bits. But I think what he is more looking for is being able to explore the space and more open-endedness to projects, which I do think academia affords. It might also mean he'll never really produce anything and keep going down rabbit-holes. But that can be enjoyable.

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

#243

Post by ipaddr »

Kinrany wrote: post #227
jrockway wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explaining how you did the thing that you already did cuts into the time for building the next thing. The difficulty that people wrestle with isn't whether or not documenting something is valuable, but rather whether documenting that thing should cut into their sleep, recreational activity, or The Next Thing.

This had nothing to do with the topic: some people don't want to write documentation.

Most because translating code to english requires changing mindset.

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

#244

Post by ghaff »

CleanCoder wrote: post #220
qiqitori wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I fully understand the way forks work - what I found troubling is that for somebody who is dying to do something interesting, for close to no pay, there seems to be little indication of them doing things out of pure passion/interest as is. For somebody expecting me to hand pick things that are super fun to work on there is not enough incentive/conviction for me to trust this person and/or invest any time into onboard…

I confess that I have trouble seeing the logic in wanting to work for someone for free. Maybe as a short-term learning thing if a temporary position can be structured that way legally.

But, by and large, if you don't care about being paid, why not just work on your own project. Because there's pretty much no such thing as a 100% no-BS position anywhere.

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

#245

Post by lstodd »

ctvo wrote: post #63

Without a need for money, I need to rely on this person's ability to be a professional out of the goodness of their heart. Nothing in that post or their previous work says I can rely on that. Frankly nothing in the post or their history shows they have the ability to deliver value that outweights the headache of planning, managing, and integrating them into an existing team knowing how fickle the relationship can be.…

As if a craving for money somehow makes professional out of .. whatever.

You completely misunderstand what "professional" means and what the "professional pride" is about.

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

#246

Post by mywittyname »

corobo wrote: post #61
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…

Honestly if someone wanted to work for me for free I'd think it's a scam of some sort so wouldn't touch the offer Sort of a "hmm.. why is this person unhireable elsewhere.. what do those companies know that I don't?" combined with a concern of "this guy's gonna clean out the office when we go home"

Yeah, "i'll work for free" sounds an awful lot like, "you'll pay me with a pound of flesh."

An engineer needs to be capable of earning their keep. Even if they are a novice.

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

#247

Post by reggieband »

So many responses here are of the type: "My org couldn't hire someone like that for legitimate reasons". They then list a series of fears they might have with such an employee. This is typical engineering thought, a pessimism firmly rooted in avoidance of problems. Engineers tend to focus on what can go wrong so that they can avoid negative outcomes. One myopia of our discipline is we don't often consider "what would the world look like if this went better than expected?"

So my advice to the OP is to focus on opportunities and positions that do not require going through engineering gatekeeping. Other disciplines tend to have more optimistic viewpoints and tend to be more willing to accept risk when they feel there is potential for high returns. I would recommend finding small startups that are looking for part-time engineering folks.

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

#248

Post by the_only_law »

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…

> Are things different now?

For me personally, if I were going to go into some other IT fields tomorrow, I’d skip the expensive ass degree period. A lot of IT feels closer to a modern trade than anything.

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

#249

Post by plutonorm »

farhadhf wrote: post #68
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…

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…

But this is my personality. Given repetitive work I become depressed quite quickly. I say this as a 40 yo who understands themselves well. Yes I can struggle through, but this career has brought me to the brink of suicide on two occasions. Working to the grind of an agile development cycle is poison to me, it drains all color from the world. I'd rather break my bones. Where is the space for people of my color? Who dry up and die if asked to write boiler plate crud code and unit tests for fizz buzz UI elements.

Unless I'm solving a problem that's genuinely intellectualy stimulating then I have 0 interest in coding.

Most of us hide the misery because we know that the only outcome of airing it is dismissal either in the short or the long term.

There is no role for us in this career but having sunk so much time into it we have no other option but to keep on going.

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

#250

Post by tayo42 »

Popegaf wrote: post #141

As others have suggested, have you considered joining an opensource project? - https://github-help-wanted.com/ - https://up-for-grabs.net/ - https://www.codetriage.com/ - https://opencollective.com/discover I'm sure there are organisations that would love to have some technical volunteers. Maybe try and find NGOs you believe in and send them a private or public message? Or, if you want to get politically involved in…

Yeah I don't know why someone would essentially give away their talent and time to a for profit corporation. There are so many better alternatives
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