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Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
51–60 of 224 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#52Places like that are around, but, crucially, don’t have much turnaround and don’t do much new hiring.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#53> Everything is double-digit YOY growth with impending exit I'm going to say, on a random job board, this is actually the vast minority of jobs. Most, even at FAANG, have lots of unsexy maintenance that just needs to get done. Even in fancy machine learning land (where I work) 99% of the work is fairly 'boring' in the traditional sense. Also, there is a strong bias to talk about 'sexy' work outside the company. For a…
I had a job with a lot of ML and Data Science a few years back.
I learned that the job really should’ve been called “Data Janitor”. 90-95% if the work was cleaning data sets and making sure that last update in some ML library we used didn’t mess up something.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#54Industries that actually run the world and won't be disrupted by whatever VC-funded "Uber of X" whose business model is ultimately a Ponzi scheme. Think banking, engineering firms like Schneider/ABB, tools that are actually used in hospitals, etc. Look for major industry players that provide the backbone of basic infrastructure that you probably never heard of because they're too busy growing at a clip of 2% per year…
Well Said!
I suspect this where the real "expertise" in Building Software Systems lies. Stable, Steady, Fault-Tolerant, least MTBF etc. characteristics are the name of the Game.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#55My 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…
> And Docker/Kubernetes (where everything depends on access to random GitHub URLs) Where is this true? I'd say this ecosystem is more dependent upon Docker Hub et al.
It isn't. There is helm charts and such that can be hosted on GitHub.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#56Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain. I showed someone the models we use to track a customer implementation and they thought we were insane for even thinking this is a good business to be in.
Because the problem domain of banking sucks so much, the tooling is necessarily simple and "unsexy". We like things that fit into a single VM/folder and can be built in 1 click. Anything more complex than this is almost certainly going to fail by default under the combined weight of unnecessary technical complexity and vast (and necessary) business requirements.
It took us until the 3rd year of integration with one of our banking customers before someone in IT even gave enough of a shit to naturally ask the question "so what language/framework/technique did you write in?" Obviously, we are required to disclose this in legal materials prior to implementing our product, but our customer sees "Microsoft" and rubber-stamps it without much drama. No one else gives a shit about the tech after this phase of the project (which lasts approximately 1 phone call).
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#57You've got the wrong impression of what is "boring" tech. A setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter isn't boring, it's frustrating. Saying doing things the old way is boring, is like saying sending your wife out to carry water from the well in a jar on her head is boring. We've got running water now, that has nothing to do with double-digit YOY growth, it has to do with actually reliably and comfortably deploying and maintaining our infrastructure by leveraging modern technologies like Kubernetes.
I don't know how old you are, but now that I have running water I think to my old and boring setup I cringe at how much work it was to replace or add to an existing cluster, or to replicate it for testing out new features. How out of date the software was, and how easy it would be for an APT to exploit some known-for-years vulnerability in a transitive software dependency.
I wish I could afford an SRE in my current startup, but the fact that we can run a decently reliable setup that's easy to keep up to date, expand and modify is thanks to all of that web scale technology trickling down to us small fish.
And why not use borg for backups? We still do run Debian (or Ubuntu, but same diff), if it's good it's good.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#58Hard in the era of resume driven development.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#59Just leave your SF/VC bubble, move to a medium-sized European city and such jobs will be plentiful. Most likely you'll be maintaining internal business applications on uncool and legacy technology stacks. The value of these applications is mostly for the particular business and your experience wouldn't transfer easily to a new job. The upside is that job security is far greater there. Also, you'll have less opportunities to blog about what you are doing, or to write insightful HN comments because most of what you do is totally uninteresting for the world.
Re: Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?
#60The answer is to talk to recruiters.
The job ads that catch your eye are specifically tailored for those results. They're usually posted from flashy startups who are high on their own supply. I had many an interview with those types of places, and nothing you could say would be good enough for them. That's why those job posting are always open.
What worked for me was happenstance -- I applied to a job that was posted by a recruiter, and once I was in that recruiting company's ecosystem, they started passing opportunities my way. The opportunities were interesting and had "boring" and relatable tech. If I looked up the job ads for those opportunities, the posting itself sucked and lacked the detail I'd expect. I'd have never applied without a recruiter talking to me about it.
There is a massive demand for developers at small and medium sized businesses. Those businesses have no idea how to effectively market their postings, which is why they use recruiters. The startups that know how to effectively market their postings on WeWorkRemotely and such have the applicant pool to be insanely choosy. If you're having trouble landing something, apply to jobs that are close to what you're looking for, but definitely posted by a recruiter. The recruiters will talk to you, and if they like what they hear, the interviews will pour in.