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Ask HN: a bad ass jobs market?

3 points by Tichy ↗ HN
I just started reading "Bounce", which seems to be a variant of the "Outliers/10000h to become great" theme. One thing I saw while flipping through the pages: the "winners" don't only put in more hours, they also try harder challenges.

Which reminded me that yes, my day job is probably rotting my brain :-(

In fact, a lack of challenges has been a problem with all of my jobs so far. So I had this thought: would it be possible to create a job market exclusively for challenging jobs?

Thoughts, ideas? In itself, job markets don't seem to exciting to me, on the other hand, the allocation of resources is perhaps the most important economical problem...

6 comments

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mgkimsal
You'd need someone to decide what's "bad ass" to include. Voting/filtering might come in to play, but it's hard to tell, and you usually only have the company's explanation of a job to go on (and those usually aren't accurate).

TheLadders.com has made a nice job of segmenting off and servicing a "100k" jobs market, but salary is one thing that's pretty easy to determine in a job. It may be a horrible job, but if the ad says "$130k", you know what you'll get paid.

"bad ass" is in the eye of the beholder too - your job is rotting your brain. Someone else coming in to the field might consider it a real challenge and growth opp. I don't know your job, so perhaps that's not accurate, but I've seen it myself. Other people have come in to positions I've hated and they've thrived.

On the whole it sounds like a tempting idea, but my thought is that, without some serious time/effort to filter and interview the employers, it'd be really hard to do well.

Now... you could charge the employer a decent fee, but give them a few video slots, with interviews/pitches from various team members you'd be working with - turn the interview process on its head slightly. Companies willing to go through the process of really selling themselves and a particular position beyond just one simple list of bland bullet points might be considered badass just on that point alone.

mgkimsal@gmail.com if you'd like to consider dicussing or pursuing this more.

Rereading your post, I don't think the issue is particular jobs - I think it's you. You're ready for freelancing. The most challenging/particular things (I've found) have come from short term consulting projects. Come in , problem solve, execute, leave before rot sets in. This is the sort of thing we'll be promoting at http://indieconf.com in November :)

Tichy
I was in fact thinking more about a freelancing site, but for special jobs. Not "PHP+MySQL", but more involved stuff. Maybe setting a high minimum rate would already help to filter?

Then again freelancers are usually expected to already know the stuff they are supposed to work on. So it would tend to be "not challenging" by definition :-(

gexla
Some people have the luxury of picking and choosing jobs, some don't. A challenging job is important, but so are a lot of other factors. I think if you are feeling that you would like to make a switch then probably best would be to start your own business.

By the way, I disagree on freelancing not being challenging because you should already know what you are doing. You are always having to learn new things and do things that you aren't expert at. Maybe you need to bust out something you don't have a lot of experience with because there is nobody else on your team to do it. Sure, you could outsource it, but often enough you find you will be tackling that thing yourself.

More importantly, freelance jobs are challenging not because of the technical stuff, but because of dealing with people and running a business. That never gets easier. You get more experienced with it, but it's always a challenge. If you don't feel challenged, then you probably need to up your game.

cathie_stoker
LOL. When your "job is rotting your brain" and you don't feel challenged, you are overlooking a challenge. And perhaps an opportunity.

Most brain-rot inducing jobs are characterized by repetition. Depending upon where your job is mired, try doing the following:

* Making libraries / frameworks to speed up tasks * Making scripts to speed up tasks * Hooking scripts to forms * Making forms user-available ("self serve")

At minimum, building these efficiencies while still doing the boring stuff will be a _slight_ challenge. And when you are done you may actually have tools that you can productitize.

At minimum you will have the experience.

Tichy
I know what you mean and I have thought about that kind of thing. However, I for example would like to do something completely different. I have originally studied maths, so I would like to do stuff that requires a lot of maths.

My current jobs involves things like increasing code coverage of unit tests or fixing CSS stylesheets. Sure, I could come up with a new CSS framework or something, but there is not actually that much time allocated for each task.

hackernewz
The challenging thing about freelancing is trying to convince customers that they're solving the wrong problem. Companies generally don't need another flex/php/.net/python/ruby expert, they fail to understand that they need to adhere to software development standards. The old chestnut, "We're not a software shop" never gets old.

Once you actually define the problem enough to put it into a "challenging" category, it's already been solved. The challenging part anyway. The rest is just doing what's already been set out. Very rarely will you hit upon a company that admits, "you know, if we just scrapped everything and start over with TDD and CI we wouldn't have any problems."