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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

#391

Post by XorNot »

FalconSensei wrote: post #135
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think at that moment, what could work is contract work. A 6month~1 year contract. Finish the project, then take a vacation to travel

My first experiment with this certainly hasn't yielded the focused directed effort I was hoping to apply. I've worked permanent positions which felt a lot more like contract positions. At this point the main thing is for similar money I'm having to put a lot more effort into keeping track of my taxes.

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

#392

Post by manquer »

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…

It doesn't have to be interesting in a field defining level always. Purely technical problems interests some people too, it really depends on the person finds finds interesting and boring as your examples describe. You can find it, or as OP is trying it can find you .

I am not sure I agree with premise that most of us have put up with the dullest job to keep up with cost of living. There are plenty of tech jobs out there beyond the valley, in other parts of the world which are definitely interesting and pay reasonably above cost of living requirements.

It is not so clear cut to me that mpst don't have some freedom in choosing what kind of work to do without going to the highest paying boring one, tech is not minimum wage sector where we have little to no choice and limited in mobility. The cost of living is not that high that we have zero choice, other sectors don't pay as much in the same areas and they are able to manage after all.

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

#393

Post by fsckboy »

wpietri wrote: post #257
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 don't read this as a signal he won't do the work. From his talk about the stuff he enjoys doing, I don't doubt it includes things that feel work-like. He just wants the work to be meaningful. That seems reasonable to me, and that's how I am. As long as there's some point to the work, I'm happy to do the tedious stuff all day long. I recently user-tested a job posting for a high-meaning job. [1] Some people were ver…

> He just wants the work to be meaningful.

well, he just slid down to "more unreasonable" with that clarification :) I can understand a "great coder doesn't want to write documentation" broadcast message, but if you want meaningful work to your standards, it's really on you to find the companies doing it and apply to them.

I would extend the common good advice to employees to this applicant: Offer to your manager solutions to problems, rather than just complaining about problems; managers have enough headaches, what they ache for are helpful employees; this also applies to hiring managers, so find a hiring manager who will want you, don't make him find you.

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

#394

Post by toomanybeersies »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #285
toomuchtodo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stability and work life balance are terribly underrated.

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.

For me, interesting and fulfilling work is hardly work at all. 50 hours of fulfilling work essentially kills two birds with one stone (intellectually fulfilling, and pays my income), as opposed 40 hours at a job that I don't care for, but at least it's only 40 hours and pays alright, and then I have to try and sate my mind alongside everything else I want to do outside my working hours.

There's nothing worse than being stuck in a job where you're watch the clock, waiting for it to strike 5 PM.

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

#395

Post by toomanybeersies »

wjdp wrote: post #322
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.

There is a UI problem on GH with forks. (From my limited experience) most profiles that are full of forks the person just uses forks like they would stars. No branches or PRs made. I'd guess, cynically, this is to fill out their profile. On the other hand a profile of meaningful contributions looks the same on the surface.

I've made a habit of deleting my forks after the PR has been merged upstream to the main repo.

So I'm actually in the position where I do have meaningful contributions to open source projects, but my Github profile doesn't show it (unless you look at my contribution activity).

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

#396

Post by itronitron »

ftruzzi wrote: post #49
moritonal wrote: post #7

So Francesco says they refuse to do technical interviews and says their CV and Github are proof enough. The CV shows experience as a freelance engineer at Apple for a bit, then an engineer for Samsung which they were made redundant from. Their GitHub is 3 projects, a python script, a breakout board and then a beta libary. They argue that's fine though because they'd work for £1/hr, but the real cost of an upfront hir…

I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might b…

A lot of people on this thread seem to think that boring work provides job security. Based on your experience it sounds like you have reached a different conclusion. I believe you have the right intuition, that you find valuable work interesting.

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

#397

Post by exikyut »

falcor84 wrote: post #92
exikyut wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random idle/curious question: "a factory" doesn't describe the roughness of the working conditions, but assuming a baseline of a mildly industrial context, how did you mitigate the risk of dropped or damaged iPads? (As an aside, it's kind of a pity that there isn't a standard drop-proof tablet out there that can be deployed without thought in these kinds of situations.)

I'll just put this here: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-rugged-tablets

Date: Dec 2020

Header image: stock photo showing tablet running Windows XP and Java application

Article relevance to market: 101%

In all fairness, this is *closes ad popup* an interesting page, thanks.

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

#398

Post by dorkwood »

yongjik wrote: post #260

A generic advice: 15 years ago I might have felt similarly, but now I think it's the other way. If you want interesting work, demand higher pays and try to get into such positions. When you're highly paid you will get more interesting work, because the company will see you as a valuable asset that should be working on "hard" things. When you're being paid a penny, the company will think you're worth a penny and will…

In my experience it's more to do with whether you've proven you can do a particular type of task, and do it well. Project managers will then give you that type of work because you're a safe bet.

I've worked with people in the past who felt like they weren't getting any of the interesting jobs. Their solution was to go to their manager and complain that they were being passed over. But if you're not proven at a task, then you're a risky bet, and you'll only be picked if there's no other option.

My advice to those people (and this won't necessarily work in all industries) is to make yourself less risky. Share a weekend project with the team where you worked on the sort of problem you find interesting, and make sure it's good enough that it gets people's attention. If you can make some important people say "wow, I didn't know you could do that sort of thing!" you'll probably notice you start getting more interesting jobs after that.

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

#399

Post by actinium226 »

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.

What??

I look at it like this: explaining how you did the thing is part of doing the thing, so it's not complete until it's explained well enough for whoever your audience is. Not writing documentation cuts into time for doing the thing, i.e. cutting corners.

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

#400

Post by actinium226 »

emrah wrote: post #334
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…

Writing just tests is not ideal, but writing tests in general can be very challenging and interesting given that you need to understand what the code under test does and figure out (edge)cases to exercise/break it.

This is why you write the tests first!
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