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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

#61

Post by corobo »

decafninja wrote: post #4

This is interesting! My own anecdote: when I graduated from college I had zero experience aside from one internship at a small noname company. No one would hire me. I started reaching out to local companies big and small saying I would work for free if they'd use me. Not just programming jobs, but also general IT or even helpdesk jobs - anything remotely computer related. None took me up on my offer. I suppose they s…

Honestly if someone wanted to work for me for free I'd think it's a scam of some sort so wouldn't touch the offer

Sort of a "hmm.. why is this person unhireable elsewhere.. what do those companies know that I don't?" combined with a concern of "this guy's gonna clean out the office when we go home"

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

#62

Post by dragosmocrii »

salil999 wrote: post #40
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…

Their GitHub profile has more than 3 projects - you might have only looked at the pinned ones. But overall, I somewhat agree with Francesco. I used to work at a large corporation where majority of the work was minor config changes and rolling out deployments for handsome pay (somewhat KTLO work). I left because I wasn't growing my career. As companies get bigger the money gets bigger as well but the interesting work…

But if the work becomes smaller, and they pay bigger, doesn't that mean you now have more time on your hands and more financial security to do something that piques your interest? I understand that one would like to switch from a boring but well paid job, in order to grow their career, but I feel this is for people who need to be told what to do. If you're not that type of person, you have so many opportunities for growth: study a new technology, join an open source project, identify a way to optimize/improve a process at your current boring job and convince management to do it... If you have the initiative, you can create the opportunities that you seek. But if you truly are bored of your current job, the people you work with, etc etc then yeah, there's no point staying even if the pay is great (reminds me of Tony Hsieh's Vesting in Peace moment he described in his book, or his job at Oracle)

[Disclaimer: by using "you" I am not addressing you personally]

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

#63

Post by ctvo »

Without a need for money, I need to rely on this person's ability to be a professional out of the goodness of their heart. Nothing in that post or their previous work says I can rely on that. Frankly nothing in the post or their history shows they have the ability to deliver value that outweights the headache of planning, managing, and integrating them into an existing team knowing how fickle the relationship can be.

It's not similar to a contractor relationship, since there there's at least contracts and deliverables that give some clarity to planning.

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

#64

Post by erdo »

Given he seems to have a pretty low tolerance for boredom, I'd expect any potential employer to worry about this: What if he starts working for me, and a few months later (after having started some big refactor job for example) he decides it's no longer interesting, and leaves for someone else paying 1$ an hour

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

#66

Post by harikb »

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…

You may want to rephrase your proposal a bit. Include the part that you are willing to do the boring parts of an otherwise interesting project.

The way it is worded, it would sound to me, as a hiring manager, that you might not finish the work. Because we all know the prototyping / experimentation part of a project is the most challenging and rewarding. Taking it live will involve dealing with the boring parts.

I am not claiming you _are_ such a person, but you might want to make it clear.

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

#67

Post by yulaow »

exdsq wrote: post #44
yulaow wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did not graduate so he is not eligible for any work as a researcher inside any eu university.

This isn't correct. You can work as a researcher without a degree, certainly in the UK. A general example would be an associate professor at a business school with extensive career experience who might contribute to some papers. An anecdotal example is myself; I don't have a bachelors degree but during my masters degree I had some summer research work. I ended up not finishing the masters degree but did chat about th…

I don't understand.

In UK you can be associate professor without a degree?

Then you talk about your time "during a master degree" but you say you had not a bachelors... How can you do a master without a bachelors?

Now I understand why other members of academia, even when UK was part of EU, treated it as a special case for research positions. Btw not judging, just saying it is totally different of what I expected.

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

#68

Post by farhadhf »

blentz wrote: post #55

I’ve been on the receiving end of similar requests before. “I’ll work for free or nothing if you let me do what I love under the umbrella of your organization because I love it so much.” I did one or two agreements like this and then stopped altogether. The individual would start their work, others would start to depend on its existence and the individual would leave in a matter or weeks or months because something e…

I have some similar experiences. Especially with people saying "let me do what I love" or "give me a position where I can learn new things".

People like variety - the initial love doesn't last long. After a few weeks/months it gets boring and repetitive. Learning the shiny new tech is only fun until you you've figured out how it works, but the project doesn't end there and you have to deliver a product in the end. But for most people who exclusively want the "position where they can learn new things" fixing the bugs and doing the finishing touches is no longer fun once they've figured out how the underlying tech works - they leave for the next position where they can learn another shiny new tech and you're left with a half-finished project (usually with subpar code quality because this was the first project they did using the new tech).

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

#69

Post by humbleMouse »

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…

You’ll keep doing the “interesting work” until it all turns into “Boring work”, just a matter of time

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

#70

Post by MrDOS »

mrweasel wrote: post #58

> No PHP, Java or maintenance work. I can understand not wanting do maintenance, but I also wonder: How much is there to be made from dealing with all that legacy stuff from the last 20 years? I suspect it’s a lot.

Ignoring the money for a second, I think for some people (author clearly aside), maintenance work can be the interesting work. As long as there's buy-in from the business side of the house – they understand the goal in its full extent is to reduce technical debt and increase future development agility, and that there will be no visible changes to end users – it can be very rewarding to refactor old code.
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