Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by kyawzazaw » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:00 AM UTC

quijoteuniv wrote: post #235

UncleOxidant wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Definetely. Making a rich guy get richer is boring. Helping the planet be a better place sounds interesting.

Apart from hedge funds and quant trading firms, I think there is a lot of that sentiment be projected onto many software engineer jobs (at least, imo

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

#382

Post by kyawzazaw » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:01 AM UTC

username90 wrote: post #296

AlwaysRock wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a boring stable 40 hour a week job over a fun job that somewhat frequently requires 50+ hours. Time is the only thing I cant get back. Money really is just a number after a certain point.

Why do you still work for others if money is just a number at this point? I worked for Google for a while and quit to do my own projects once I had enough money that I felt it didn't matter any more.

What kind of projects are your own projects?

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

#383

Post by jfim » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:17 AM UTC

ivanche wrote: post #305

username90 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, most teams never do the last 10% on any project ever. They pick the low hanging fruit with the first 80% and if they are thorough they might bring it up to 90%, but 100%? I've never seen such a software project.

I'd say that Total Commander is very close to 100%.

TeX82 as well. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#TeX82:

> Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.141592653; it was last updated in 2021.

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

#384

Post by manquer » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:20 AM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #213

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 suspect dealing with this type of person would become a huge issue. This work request hints at overblown entitlement. I've seen these types in action, the relationship between this worker and the manager/other teammates can turn abusive. Also imagine the impact on morale of the other teammates when some primadonna gets the cherry picked work and everyone else gets the drudgery. Pay or not. Run.

As opposed to the overblown entitlement seen from managers and leadership?

Typically this kind of setup works best when working independently. However in my experience doing similar setup in tech and other industries, many team mates have been grateful to work and learn from someone who otherwise would not work in their org or team.

It works other way around too, I would happily work in a team for much less pay if I can work with people I can learn from even if they do all the cool stuff.

Also I think he meant what kind of project he will work in not what all he will do in that project. Even if he did mean it that way, it is no different than in many regular roles where Senior ICs anyway pick and choose work they wan and junior members get the grunt work .

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

#385

Post by Balgair » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

azhenley wrote: post #152

kenoph wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that kind of advice thrown around a lot, but that's just the sales pitch of PhDs, not the reality.

It was my reality and my current grad students seem to agree. Do you have evidence or are you just “throwing advice around”?

What discipline are you in?

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

#386

Post by xwolfi » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

The CV is fine (I wouldn't put DuoLinguo as a proof of English fluency however, this is borderline) but the attitude is difficult.

I'd prefer a guy who has fun solving hard problems, like say, "how do I convince people more senior than me to follow my advice", rather than someone saying "find me a cheap job where I don't have to deal with snobbish seniors".

Find a way to build an inner child, something that makes you happy to learn in any condition even conflict. I can be insulted by a colleague and still find the experience an interesting challenge: how to make this moron either like me or do what I need him to do. I wouldn't quit, I wouldn't ask the company to fire him.

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

#387

Post by manquer » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

regularemployee wrote: post #187

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…

> is doing a bunch of stuff people don't enjoy I enjoy writing documentation and writing tests. To me, writing documentation is like teaching others about the awesome product / features we have built, and also the different technical tradeoff decisions we had to make. I can't grasp the mindset where an engineer builds something really cool that they are proud of, but don't enjoy talking about it / teaching people how…

I actually like writing tests and documentation however i end up hating doing it for many reasons

- If I am able to focus on code, documentation or tests, I like doing it. Writing tests is sometimes lot more challenging than writing the code it tests. However context switching to difficult. I hate having to switch between the three

- The pressures of delivery makes it quite difficult to allocate meaningful time for either without cutting into scope.

- If your team does not value both to either read docs or maintain tests it become frustrating to be the only person doing it. If no one values it it can be demotivating.

- I have also seen teams either just focus on arbitary metrics like code coverage but not quality of tests or look at metrics like comment coverage/ number of lines of documentation, not whether docs are useful, how quickly someone is picking up by reading the spec, does it reduce bugs etc, quality and simplicity of language etc.

- It is a constant battle to keep both in up sync since i find it difficult to write code, tests and spec together. Once or twice a month I spend few days in trying to update both, which annoys me as they are out of date and I can only spend so much time on them.

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

#388

Post by XorNot » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #212

regularemployee wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is doing a bunch of stuff people don't enjoy I enjoy writing documentation and writing tests. To me, writing documentation is like teaching others about the awesome product / features we have built, and also the different technical tradeoff decisions we had to make. I can't grasp the mindset where an engineer builds something really cool that they are proud of, but don't enjoy talking about it / teaching people how…

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.

The problem is documentation is a different skillset to coding. Spend enough time doing only documentation and suddenly you're no longer a programmer, you're a documentation writer.

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

#389

Post by brightball » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

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!

I was commenting on this part of the post I was replying to. I had a person that fit this profile.

> So I would be wondering: if you're signaling you don't want to do those things, that means someone else will need to do all that for your code, which is not great for them and tends to be much worse. Like you're basically saying you want to cherrypick the parts you enjoy and not give a damn about anything else. You might say you're only costing $1/hour but the risk of a bad engineer can mean you're still expensive or a loss.

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

#390

Post by XorNot » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

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…

Hire me and provide a steady stream of well-defined work is what I'd settle for.

I'm currently about to abandon a 12 month contract about 3 months in because it's become apparent that the company didn't actually want a "DevOps" position, and I was hired as part of some incredible misconceptions about the regulatory environment they operate in by the managers who created the position.

The problem isn't "being bored" for me, it's feeling like time is passing slowly. I don't really care what if at the end of the day it's a surprise that it's all of a sudden 5pm.