Earlier quoted context omitted.
That reality is a property primarily of the present-moment. Index funds don't always rise and property values sometimes fall. Interest rates are rarely this low. Leverage multiplies both the upside and the downside.
> and property values sometimes fall While this is true in the short term, except for very rare exceptions, you'd be hard pressed to find a property in the United States that is worth less now than 30 years ago (which is the standard length of a mortgage). I don't know about other countries, but I suspect it's the same in any modern economy. Land is scarce, and no one is making more of it.
Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
411–418 of 418 posts
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#412Anything is interesting if you engage with it. And being bored is a state of mind. It's a fallacy to say "that's boring". The bored-ness is in your head, not in the task.
Can give some practical advice or pointers about how to become interested in something? What do you practically mean by "engage"?
Second point: even though something is "only" in your head, it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to change.
The question then becomes not whether it's possible to become interested in something, but whether it's worthwhile to put your time and energy into doing so as opposed to doing something you find interesting from the start.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#413Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#414So 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…
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thank you. Writing tests and documentation or diving deep into debugging hard issues is what I consider part of "good work" (and that I have also enjoyed doing), and I can't wait to do good work. It just has to be compatible with the rest of life. It's mostly the way we work that has to change rather than the content of the work.
"You will give me interesting or meaningful work"
To be direct: this sounds entitled. Lots of growing companies don't have the resources to babysit and hand feed work to engineers. They need driven, self motivated engineers who can identify problems and help identify solutions, create and drive projects in ambiguous circumstances, that serve the businesss. It sounds like you're disconnecting from the requirements of a business to succeed in a market. I've worked on teams who got the "only give me the interesting programming tasks" engineer and they are a rot to the company. Whether or not you mean it to, that's how this pattern matches for me. Lots of work isn't interesting and is hard to rate the "meaning" of, and successful teams and companies need this work to be done by the whole engineering team.
"I like Python. I don’t like PHP and Java."
I would omit this entirely, as the language isn't related to how meaningful the work is and contradicts your previous paragraph.
"No technical interviews or coding challenges"
Again I think this shows immaturity and not understanding the needs of a business and hiring. Technical interviews do indeed have all sorts of problems, and they're generally the lesser of the evils of technical interview styles. Not every company has the luxury of "let's hire this person to figure out if we like them" and not every engineer has the luxury of "I'll do an unpaid take home that takes up my time instead." Onboarding takes time for lots of teams in a business, and getting up to speed on the domain of the business is an investment for everyone. Who you hire is one of the most important decisions a business has to make. Having a technical interview process of some kind is important, even if it has challenges to be objective with.
"I will prefer payments in cryptocurrency"
Just my personal taste, this one is an irk to me. It's a sort of removed-from-reality "I don't care about your real world taxing and accounting needs, I like crypto." Most companies flat out won't / can't do this, so it's a weird request unless you're specifically looking at a crypto company.
The great irony of this post is it's all just things you want, and not really anything about you or your skillset. The things a hiring manager or recruiter would actually look for are completely absent from this post. There's a hint with contradictions that you're looking for a mission driven company, beyond that I don't understand the point of this article. It smells of "companies, come to me, I'm special" while immediately setting limitations like "I don't like PHP." The hiring managers I know would say "this person doesn't sound like they know what they're looking for in a company, why would I consider them?" It sounds like you've already checked out from your own responsibility of understanding a company and why you might like them.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#416Anything is interesting if you engage with it. And being bored is a state of mind. It's a fallacy to say "that's boring". The bored-ness is in your head, not in the task.
You're probably right. Can give some practical advice or pointers about how to become interested in something? What do you practically mean by "engage"? Second point: even though something is "only" in your head, it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to change. The question then becomes not whether it's possible to become interested in something, but whether it's worthwhile to put your time and energy into doing so a…
Engaging is pretty well understood. Its putting your full consistent attention on a task, and attempting to perform it better.
I find some things interesting at some point, and not interesting at others. The thing doesn't of course change. Its all me.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#417While I think he is a missed opportunity for consensus-workplace-realty in which we live, anyone that sets their own rules and principles and firmly acts from there is worth my esteem, especially if those principles don’t hurt any other being and on the contrary represent an element of novelty in the too constrained way we look at the world of work. Clearly he has to define better what he can offer vs what not, for in every contract or exchange of whatever good the rules have to be well defined on both ends.
What employers often don’t take into account is how costly lack of motivation is. I’d rather find 2 Francescos than hiring 20 standard employees that work just for money and are guaranteed to either stop producing quality work or leaving the company after a few months, years at the best, bringing back the cost of hiring someone new over and over again, or even the cost of keeping a bad hire (especially with the EU regulations)
There’s no price for talent mixed with a clear statement of interest in doing only something exciting, especially when you make the price… you’d have to be a fool not to try out someone so sincere and willing to put on the table their intentions, and then take it from there.
I might be wrong of course, I work for the biggest corporation out there and don’t hire directly, but seems a good deal to me!!
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#418So 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…
My thought was that many responses are of the form "well good craftsmanship is boring and not 'interesting' - that's why we charge money for it" and I'm glad to have found lots of people that I DO NOT want to work with.
Good craftmanship - writing tests, documentation, making sure something works and actually ships and gets out the door - now that's interesting and rewarding. OP is trying to avoid those organizations that get caught in the trap of "we don't know exactly what we're building, so we're going to write some tests" or "well we could ship now, but we should probably add some more features just to be on the safe side." Places like that would be really boring.