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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

#91

Post by andrewzah »

MrDOS wrote: post #70
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.

Yes! Maintenance and refactoring is a huge creative opportunity, if management isn't thwarting you. Dismissing languages and maintenance outright makes think the author is just difficult to work with. Even in modern places, maintenance and refactoring simply need to be done every so often. That's part of the job, we can't only work on things that we want on someone else's dime.

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

#92

Post by falcor84 »

exikyut wrote: post #71
agentultra wrote: post #21

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.)

I'll just put this here: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-rugged-tablets

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

#93

Post by public_void »

> You will give me interesting or meaningful work

Have you ever worked on something interesting or meaningful at a job? You list a bunch of random topics, none of which are inherently interesting or meaningful. I've worked on flashy projects - most recently self driving at one of the bigger companies doing it. Guess what? In an eng org of hundreds, at least half the people were still doing shit work that had nothing to do with self driving.

Beyond that, if I want to hire you for interesting work, it falls into two buckets: mission critical, or irrelevant. I can't hire you for mission critical work because I have no confidence you can do the job, so I can only hire you for irrelevant work. If I hire you for irrelevant work, it makes me no money, so I pay you no money. Why even have this arrangement? Just go start your own side project - at least then you own it.

Consider this: join a company doing something you don't like (making an absurd amount of money because of the industry), demonstrate/develop your expertise, identify the parts of the company that are interesting to you, then go work on those. People doing interesting satisfying work didn't just get there accidentally.

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

#95

Post by dontchooseanick »

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…

Your comment reminds me of https://dilbert.com/strip/2016-08-07

:)

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

#96

Post by pascalxus »

the point of work is to provide value to someone, in exchange they give you cash. That someone, can be anyone in the world or any people except for one person, and that's you (the worker). the point of work is providing value to someone else, not entertainment to yourself: that's called play.

I think it's great that we have a balance between work and play or maybe even have a life of just play and work on whatever fun stuff you want. You don't need an employer for that. Just know the difference. If you're going to have fun programming and entertain yourself, just do it on your own.

Employers need people to do boring work: maintaining existing legacy systems, fixing bugs, doing the last 20% (which takes 80% of the effort), to get things working perfectly for as many customers as possible.

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

#98

Post by 11235813213455 »

I think there's no really "boring" developer jobs. There are strict jobs (where you have very little freedom), and they can be more boring, but if you get more freedom, even a repetitive job can become interesting, by finding and making the right tools to automate more, etc..

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

#99

Post by onion2k »

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…

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.

That should literally never be the case for a developer though.

You can always be improving the documentation, increasing the test coverage, optimizing for speed/bandwidth/complexity/some other metric you've measured, working out how to measure something, learning new tools or tech that could be applied to a project, working on a spike for some future feature that needs upfront research.

If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer. You're a hacker. You want to hack what you see as the fun stuff rather than developing complete, robust applications that can ship. That's fine, and loads of fun, but no one will pay you to that. You don't get a role like that unless you're some sort of programming savant on a par with the likes of John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard - someone has proven they can invent amazing things by being left to their own devices. Unfortunately, you really need to prove yourself first before you can land a gig like that. If it was easy we'd all have done it.

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

#100

Post by decafninja »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #11
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…

"I would do anything" moves quickly to the bottom of the stack. In there I see (maybe wrongly, but when hiring first impression matters) no motivation. I look for people passionate about the work, who have skills and interest on using those. But help desk or programming require very different skills and are quite broad.

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at least back then (10+ years ago), quite a few people working helpdesk and IT (system admin, network admin, etc.) were CS majors. Or at least it seemed so from my own network. CS was seen as the gateway degree to any kind of computer related career, not just SWE. Are things different now?

I am actually not a CS major - I'm an information systems major. Funny enough, another IS major friend and I ended up as SWEs (him at a FAANG at that), while a whole bunch of CS major friends are working in IT as system or network admins or helpdesk managers.

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