Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

truzzi.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 418 posts

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

#371

Post by vmception »

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…

A lot of "flat organizations" have the issue you describe too: the engineers lack leadership and don't choose the unsexy work.

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

#372

Post by patcon »

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…

I feel you've misunderstood his point. The stuff you (or anyone) perhaps doesn't like is stuff that someone else LOVES. I absolutely love writing docs and tests and fixing bugs, and would be willing to get paid less to work on public code that allowed me to spend what I consider the right amount of time tending to those things :)

Putting this call-for-employers out there signals (at least to me) that he can be a a really good deal if the employer takes it to task to find his complement, instead of creating a scenario where the employer gets to delegate it all wholesale to one person, regardless of their goals for growth and enjoyment. It's upstreaming the concern, and just getting to work on the things he loves at a pay cut for the inconvenience of matchmaking

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

#374

Post by bawolff »

If you want to do only what you find interesting with no pay, make an open source project.

If you want some pay, start your own business. Yes some parts are sucky, but you can freely choose between doing them or letting your business fail.

If you're working for someone else, why would they hire you to do just the interesting work? If it was all interesting they would just get free labour.

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

#375

Post by devtosales »

tasuki wrote: post #352
brightball wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t talk about it in detail yet. Short version, the rest of the team had to pick up all of the things that he wasn’t willing to do. It shifted more burden to everyone else for his benefit and created a terrible team environment.

> I can’t talk about it in detail yet. So... don't? Are you saying ftruzzi is like a person on your team in your last company and should be avoided? I don't see why you think he'd be "like that", what that'd mean, or really what value your comment is providing. I personally would love to work with ftruzzi!

His post comes across as arrogant / maybe even a little choosing beggar.

He lists his very specific requirements for working with him which makes me think he wouldn’t fit into an existing system, he’s want the system to bend to his will and that might be at the expense of others.

He comes across as thinking he is shit hot and that I’d be lucky if I were to hire him.

Based on his blog post alone, I would not hire him.

Two short stints as a dev and he thinks the world should bend around him... lol

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

#376

Post by codethief »

bumby wrote: post #199
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.

Funny, the comment reminded me of a slightly different piece of advice which goes like this: Decide not what passion you should follow or what goals you want to achieve but what problems you want in your life.

I think the first time I read about this idea was in this article by Mark Manson: https://markmanson.net/question

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

#378

Post by nyanpasu64 »

caffeine wrote: post #297
plutonorm wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

You have to do your own thing ... usually that's bad advice but for people with the temperament you describe I think it's reasonable. Also a lot depends on expectations and finding good partners. In a previous job I worked with another guy as a team. I would start projects and get an MVP out and delivering value - then move on to the next thing. He would go through and essentially rewrite them to be high quality, sol…

i have the unmet rambling dreams of the first person, and the anxiety-driven perfectionism and revulsion to poorly written code of the second person... so i'm unhappy thinking about unfulfilled ideas, unhappy writing new programs, and unhappy fixing old programs.

"i can only do so much and of course it's never enough"

i want the perfect programming language, the perfect gui library api and theme, the perfect program, the perfect ide... and i can't accomplish a single one

and of course C++ is an all-devouring Cthulhic monster that does everything but poorly, Rust has immature gui libraries and doesn't fully align with my values and desired features (I want linear typing, strong typedefs/subclasses of integer types, polymorphic variants/anonymous unions, prioritizing iterator generators over async), qt is basically legacy code and Qt Widgets is mostly unmaintained but difficult to fork (to build, create Windows installers, and convince Linux distributions to accept behavior-changing bug fixes), and my personal dream project (https://gitlab.com/exotracker/exotracker-cpp) is vaporware no matter how much i burn myself out making it (trying to both explore new ideas, and engineer them well, at the same time).

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

#379

Post by OJFord »

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…

I'm reading your comment before TFA, but in doing so my reaction is Uh what? Interesting can include docs, tests, bugs, partners, lawyers - it's whatever the topic is that all that is the work around. Again, I haven't yet read TFA but I don't tend to think that people seeking 'interesting work' are looking (and I don't personally want) to just crank out code.

In fact, can't we go further? Is there anything interesting about it if you can just crank it out?

The interesting work in my recent memory has been about reading, learning, thinking; not cranking.

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

#380

Post by icedchai »

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…

Yep. I've been in tech for 20+ years, everything from a junior engineer to CTO and founder of a small company. A lot of the work is pure drudgery. I'd say 10% to 15% is "interesting." Usually that doesn't last for long.
Post reply on HN