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Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#41

Post by dcminter »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #29

I don't want to use K8s. But I also don't want to use a manually setup rack in a random DC. Back in the day when we had to hire a guy to go down to the cage every day to repair yet another faulty machine, we would have given our left arm for the ability to magically spin up a new VM of any size with a baked image by just running an API call. It's freakin' magic . I also love, love, love plain Fargate. Not as stupidly…

So much this. I have painful memories of talking a not-very-technical "technical support" guy through the use of `lsof` on Linux (they'd never heard of it) to diagnose a deployment issue. Also of multi-day to multi-week waits to get hardware lined up for our projects.

I miss it not one jot.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#42

Post by bmj »

curiousllama wrote: post #36

They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech. Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.

Small-scale manufacturing is another good spot. I spent some years doing consulting work with a steel processing company. "Boring" tech, but interesting problems to be solved.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#43

Post by gumby »

umvi wrote: post #35
fxtentacle wrote: post #8

My impression is that there's a lot of Kubernetes jobs because all those unnecessary scaling tools come with additional maintenance work. So if you use new & messy technology, you just need more people. My boring deployments (Nginx+Ruby+PostgreSQL on Debian) can be maintained for multiple projects by just one employee, because there isn't that much to do apart from updating Ansible scripts and running them. But on th…

Don't confuse Docker with K8s. Docker is more for solving dependency management problems than scaling and redundancy which are the problems k8s solves. I highly recommend some sort dependency management solution like Docker or Nix - it makes changing hardware or OSes down the road much easier.

> I highly recommend some sort dependency management solution like Docker

Just to clarify: Docker isn’t a dependency management solution, but for most people it’s an important part of the solution.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#44

Post by nolroz »

fxtentacle wrote: post #8

My impression is that there's a lot of Kubernetes jobs because all those unnecessary scaling tools come with additional maintenance work. So if you use new & messy technology, you just need more people. My boring deployments (Nginx+Ruby+PostgreSQL on Debian) can be maintained for multiple projects by just one employee, because there isn't that much to do apart from updating Ansible scripts and running them. But on th…

When I worked for a small web agency, I loved the fact that when you did a website for someone, you'd be introduced to their entire business model and everything within. It was a great opportunity to help them optimize all the things if they were willing. It lead to doing a lot of add on work like spreadsheet-> program work, physical network setup, ads, logos, kiosk applications, Christmas tree databases, etc...

I loved helping those small businesses but a lot of them don't have a lot of money to burn so going with a monthly rate they can plan on is powerful, as is managing expectations. A lot wanted Facebook for $500. There are patterns that emerge and one could build an in house stack to handle most everything I'm sure, just increase your monthly as they add services.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#46

Post by nwellnhof »

fxtentacle wrote: post #8

My impression is that there's a lot of Kubernetes jobs because all those unnecessary scaling tools come with additional maintenance work. So if you use new & messy technology, you just need more people. My boring deployments (Nginx+Ruby+PostgreSQL on Debian) can be maintained for multiple projects by just one employee, because there isn't that much to do apart from updating Ansible scripts and running them. But on th…

> But on the Ruby side, stuff gets deprecated/broken all the time, so we need much more manpower to maintain it.

Maybe you should consider Perl? I'm only half joking. I have a few Perl projects running unchanged for 15 years and hopefully for the next 15 years as well.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#47

Post by dotancohen »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #29

I don't want to use K8s. But I also don't want to use a manually setup rack in a random DC. Back in the day when we had to hire a guy to go down to the cage every day to repair yet another faulty machine, we would have given our left arm for the ability to magically spin up a new VM of any size with a baked image by just running an API call. It's freakin' magic . I also love, love, love plain Fargate. Not as stupidly…

Don't confuse faulty hardware with software abstractions of perfect hardware. Those cloud VMs are still running on some hardware somewhere, even it's been abstracted away from your control. And that hardware can and does fail.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#48

Post by eatonphil »

gherkinnn wrote: post #37

Non-boring tech within reason is fine with me. What is off putting is all this hyper growth series F funding impending exit nonsense. An independent and profitable company that wants to sray below 50 or so people sounds like a dream to me.

That is basically every tech company founded outside the most expensive cities in the US. :)

It's just that lots of people like living in/near the most expensive cities in the US so you don't see these companies as much.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#49

Post by throwaway787544 »

dotancohen wrote: post #47
throwaway787544 wrote: post #29

I don't want to use K8s. But I also don't want to use a manually setup rack in a random DC. Back in the day when we had to hire a guy to go down to the cage every day to repair yet another faulty machine, we would have given our left arm for the ability to magically spin up a new VM of any size with a baked image by just running an API call. It's freakin' magic . I also love, love, love plain Fargate. Not as stupidly…

Don't confuse faulty hardware with software abstractions of perfect hardware. Those cloud VMs are still running on some hardware somewhere, even it's been abstracted away from your control. And that hardware can and does fail.

But with an autoscaling group a new one magically pops up in the same AZ if an old one dies. You don't get that by rolling your own rack (without having hot spares on hand, in multiple racks or data centers). Not to mention getting a managed SAN basically for free (EBS) and backup/restore, and managed DBs... I'm a pretty good engineer, but I'm not good enough to be an expert at managing racks of hosts, switches, routers, storage, tape robots, databases, etc. And I don't have to be with cloud services. I just press a button and it's all there.

Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

#50

Post by olau »

We do, with a slightly charitable interpretation of LAMP.

We did have a brief stint with AWS, but that's thankfully over, partly because their Aurora Postgres-like cloud thing regularly would thrash to death because it doesn't have anywhere to store temporary data so a biggish join means out of memory, partly because the US law that says foreigners have no right to privacy from NSA with judicial review makes it illegal in Europe to use US providers unless data is encrypted client-side (see Schrems II).

I wish someone would start a sysadm contractor company offering setting up and maintaining servers at something like Hetzner. Take a service fee for being ready to respond to emergencies, bill for hours spent, and let Hetzner bill the hardware. Setting up a server isn't that bad, you can do that with a script, but ongoing maintenance and having someone always ready to respond to emergencies (that never occur, almost) is something you wouldn't mind having a competent sysadm take care of, as a developer.

I think there's a huge market for this in Europe with Schrems II, for those that aren't really deeply dependent on the software stack in cloud services. And you can get some beefy machines at Hetzner for pennies compared to Amazon or Google.

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