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

truzzi.me

71–80 of 418 posts

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

#71

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…

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.)

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

#72

What about PHP or Java has anything to do with not "programming at a more advanced level"? These are general-purpose programming languages. Due to their design, some patterns/paradigms might seem more natural to implement, but you can build anything you want with them. For an experienced programmer eschewing conventions with this "resume", I am surprised by this comment.

>For an experienced programmer eschewing conventions with this "resume", I am surprised by this comment.

They only have about a year of full-time engineering experience, so they might not recognize this yet. (Not trying to talk him down; plenty of people without much experience still do valuable work, but it's only natural to have blind spots.)

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

#74
post #49

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…

Just look for part time positions. You can also try to make your own by applying for full time jobs and then springing the part time thing on them at the salary negotiation phase. Yeah, some will balk, but make a cogent argument about how working less hours means your performance per hour should be higher. Which is easily supported by current research. Provide citations if you want. It's sufficiently hard to find good developers, that if you're good enough you can get jobs like this.

I've been working part time, fully remote last year and it was wonderful. I don't think I'd go back to full time work.

After achieving enough trust with the company, I negotiated working alternating weeks. Having a 9 day weekend every 5 work days is incredible. Yeah, I didn't make much money, but I spend that time on my startup, so maybe it will pay off one day. Either way it is a lot more fun!

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

#76

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…

KTLO = "keep the lights on"

Basically just barebones maintenance to keep a product running.

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

#77
Getting paid appropriately to do work that you genuinely enjoy is a privilege. It certainly is nice if it works out that way, but most of the time it does not. A lot of the work that needs to be done in the software world (that pays well) is just not terribly interesting.

My work is not always very exciting, and that's okay. I work normal hours and have purchased my own beautiful home at 24. After work I have freedom to do whatever, and enough money to pursue pretty much any hobby that I want. My employer sponsors books, courses, and conferences, and provides great healthcare.

I would rather have a stable, but boring, job over being broke and working on something interesting.

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

#78

What about PHP or Java has anything to do with not "programming at a more advanced level"? These are general-purpose programming languages. Due to their design, some patterns/paradigms might seem more natural to implement, but you can build anything you want with them. For an experienced programmer eschewing conventions with this "resume", I am surprised by this comment.

It kinda makes him sound like a spoiled junior who only touched the 'hip' stuff and is disgusted by a sign of stability. I remember being in that place as well.

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

#79
I wish you the best of luck. I can relate to where you're at.

One thing that I have been doing, my entire adult life, is shipping product. A lot of "ship" is not fun. There's all kinds of boring stuff, like good design (as opposed to "just enough design to get started"), good coding (as in "code I'll understand when I come back to refactor in three months"), good quality (as opposed to "Who cares? I'll be out of here, before they run out of integer space"), good testing (as opposed to "I'll write a few unit tests that show it handles low-hanging-fruit problems"), accessibility, localization, aesthetic design, supporting documentation for users, administrators and developers, etc. You get the drift. Lots of "not-fun" stuff, there.

For me, I've always enjoyed "finishing" projects, and that means shipping them, so users get their grubby little paws on my work, and start abusing it (and, sometimes, me).

I'm taking on a CTO role (I've actually been doing it for months, but we're formalizing it). I was asked to write my own job description. I used words like "Accountable" and "Responsible" a lot. I got used to that, working for a Japanese corporation for 27 years.

Not fun. But I get to run the whole show, and ship. That's my idea of fun.

Oh, and I totally relate to the thing about LeetCode interviews and whatnot. I have tens of thousands of lines of code, ship-ready projects that people can clone, build, and run, dozens of articles, etc. It has been my experience that these are totally ignored; which I consider...not sane.

I have found the greatest pleasure in writing software that helps people help people. These organizations don't usually get "top-shelf" talent, so they tend to have a great need.

Again, good luck.

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