Ask HN: Sources of remote dev work with minimal human interaction?

You get what you put out?

If you keep quiet, but regularly update your tickets and/or PRs with just the facts, do people still bother you?

Not gonna lie, you're not going to find a job that requires zero human interaction.

I understand the "interacting" with humans can be tough. But as humans, interacting is what we do.

I am not saying there is no jobs like that, or you won't be able to find a job where you could do that. But there will always always always be some sort of corporate "crap" to put up with.

This sounds like an ideal working arrangement, in contrast with the likes of Upwork where you have to sell your soul to the client, and the marketplace.

Also interested to know if such jobs exist.

With my current colleagues, we actually started with more frequent Zoom calls and standups, but as we built trust, we got rid of these. (Sometimes however I think it's still necessary, even if we don't rationally understand why, just to see someone else's face periodically).

Now we just communicate over Slack, close tickets in Asana and document everything in Nuclino. Generally, if we're feeling anything ("Hmm this process seems inefficient or useless"), we simply express it, and change it. If that meant more bureaucracy, we'd do it. If it meant less, we'd do it too.

The most important thing is to communicate how you feel and why. I feel encouraging this culture really comes down to good organizational management and good product management (especially when it comes to feature requirements), not any kind of engineering process.

I definitely appreciate this perspective and plan to keep it in the back of my mind - this is probably what some developers are thinking even if they don't say it!

So if I keep this handy, people will say: "Oh, it's already been said, and that's okay! Now what? We can figure this out."

"What I want is a remote dev job where I close tickets. That is, one where the gig really is cash for functioning solution that meets spec, code standards, and QA. My ideal world would be where I log in somewhere, pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life. Does anyone know of any remote work where the hassle is just engineering related? I will specify that I am not interested in simply transitioning the interpersonal bullshit to a Skype-based model, so team-intensive remote work won't suit this requirement. My greatest thanks for any insightful thoughts or resources you guys can provide."

I have been contracting for the last 10 years and I have a contract like this now. It's great, I've been completing tons of work for the company, but it's not the norm.

I report directly to the CTO of the company and talk to him almost daily. I have no daily standups and almost no meetings. Everything is as needed. IE: If we need to meet with someone in the company. we schedule a short meeting. Everything else is through our main ticketing system.

"pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life"

If you want a better quality of life, choose companies that don't rely on software as their main source of income and have been in business at least 5 years. I usually only choose companies that utilize software, but the main product is not the software itself.

My motive is that I have side businesses that I also run during the day.

Consulting companies are probably the worst in terms of work/life balance. I worked for a consulting company that had hundreds of clients and multiple projects all going on at the same time. The pressure was crazy.

They originally hired me to get a project done in 3 months (down from the original estimate of 1 year). When I started working on it, they told me I had 7 weeks and pushed me every day until it was done. Luckily, I was able to figure out some better ways of completing the required tasks and got it done in time.

As far as pull a "respectably specified ticket" goes, this might be difficult. Most of the time, people don't know exactly what they want and part of your job (unless it's a very large company with a layer in between you) is to decode someone's request and translate it to software. It will almost never be as easy as seeing a ticket with perfect requirements.

But it really does sound like you should be contracting. You won't need to be part of any gatherings or useless meetings, because a company is paying you hourly.

AFAIK building software is a collaborative event. What I mean by that is, most of the time, we learn what works better as we get into the process of building it. So, the ideal world you are expecting is not practical. Even if some work can be specified to that level of clarity and details, it is better to build a tool that takes in this structured spec and build the feature.

But, I hear your concern about working in a setup which feels ineffective. My suggestion would be to pick teams that are small (2 - 3 devs) with a well defined goal. Keep your interactions effective and short with this small group.

Standups and iteration planning meetings have value. Unfortunately many follow it as just rituals instead of seeing the real reason behind doing them and the value it provides. You don't need to call them as standup or IPM as long as what they are achieving are met in your project. That is the whole point of being agile.

Minimal interpersonal skills are a workplace requirement. I would either try to learn those skills or see a medical professional to see if there is an appropriate diagnosis that can help you seek out a role that accommodates accordingly. I promise you that the other people in the office aren’t there because they love you or each other. They are practicing social skills that they have learned, some so well that they do so unconsciously.

I've had subcontracting roles like this in the past. Still not zero interaction, but if you build a network of strong people and you're known for getting shit done, what I've found is other developers that know and trust you are more than happy to subcontract work out to you, and that tends to be very low-overhead from an interaction perspective. The last time I did this, I had zero contact with the actual customer (which can be a downside to be honest sometimes); the dev with the contract and I would just sync up so I knew what I was supposed to be doing and I would just go off on my own and get it done, then we'd sync up for the next thing, rinse and repeat. In my experience, as long as you get along really well with the other dev(s), this is pretty close to what it sounds like you're looking for. But this does require building up a network of people who are willing to subcontract you out work, which isn't always easy.

This is almost exactly the specification of offshore workers. I pay anywhere from $5/hr-$100/hr, depending on skillset.

I'm not sure if this gets you a modest quality of life where you live.

I recommend learning how to put up with these things. Just stop caring about them. Treat it like laundry or dishes. You don't have to enjoy it, and there's no reason to get emotional over it. Just do it and move on. In particular, the job that you describe doesn't exist and where it does is exactly the type of development that's ripe for outsourcing.

If you can't find a way to play the game without emotional investment, then perhaps look for jobs in lower-paying sectors where you're less likely to encounter ambition and bullshit.

For example, have you looked for development jobs in the nonprofit and/or public sectors?

Nonprofit/gov't work in general can attract bad personalities, but IME the software development shops within those organizations tend to have very few of the types of people you want to avoid. The pay/prestige is low enough relative to other development work that you mostly get "true believers".

Universities (software development departments, not research groups!) are also typically nice laid back work environments.

Medium-sized non-software companies with small development groups (5-10 people) can also be good.

However, do realize that in all of those situations you are trading standups and TPS reports for daily interactions with non-technical end users, which come with their own set of frustrations.

Have you considered becoming an independent developer and creating a small but sustainable product. Examples like Pinboard or perhaps Overcast and similar one-man businesses come to mind.

If you distill your benefit to your work as

* Open ticket

* Write code for ticket

* Submit to QA / release

You basically described how many places outsource development. So you are now competing with $5 an hour body shops overseas.

The reason I and many others hire local people, or at least people who want to contribute is to brainstorm and solve problems together with. Just turning specs into code is not worth paying someone 10x the overseas wage.

Now all your problems I understand. Perhaps try working at a smaller shop somewhere? Maybe a company < 20 total people, especially one that isn't 100% developers. Tons of little companies need a dev or two, but they don't have any of the standup and paperwork type stuff. Just some problems to solve, and a reasonable pace of life. Basically "boring backoff" type jobs.

I am currently transitioning to sustaining myself as a full time cryptocurrency trader. It is definitely not for everyone, and extremely risky to say the least, but it fits my personality and one of the very few possibilities of earning one’s living without any human interaction. It’s just you and the market.

I recently moved from a job that was onsite, had a management component, and was nearly 100% human-oriented to one something like what you're asking about. I'm now fully remote with few close co-workers on an essentially self-driven project.

It's wonderful for me, but I have to caution you that it is both a career limiting move and that you still have to do what corporate asks (and they will). That will include status updates, presentations, design review meetings, meetings with legal, required training, etc etc etc. I spend about 1 day out of 5 on this and still occasionally deal with "what have you done for us lately" style concerns.

Part of this is probably due to it being early days, but you should be aware that even in these very flexible, very remote jobs people still have to justify your headcount. And that means you will need to spend time telling those people how to do that.

I'm one of the founders of a company that fosters a network of coders and this was one of its main ideas when we founded it - minimize the amount of communication overhead and allow coders to focus just on coding. Practically, you're getting assigned with Asana tasks that you tackle one after the other. Naturally, you can't avoid communication at at all but if you want, you can limit it to communicating pull-requests/scoping/QA etc.

Normally I wouldn't solicit people to sign up on HN, but since you asked for sources I figured I'll take the opportunity to help fulfill your search: https://www.codersclan.com/, if you sign up, mention you are the poster from HN and I'll make sure to speed the process up for you. Do note that the hourly rates start from $30/hour and that right now we're mostly looking for WordPress or front-end devs.

Another source you might want to look at is https://remote.co/ I think we even advertised there in the past, but naturally the type of work you'll get will depend on the contract you land.

I did that work for a while. Basically, they were outsourcing to me because they can't fill their local position. I did charge higher than the local rate though (London). But you'll need to go through the client acquisition first and there will be emails, payments, etc... You know: freelance bullshit.

There are ways to avoid corporate bullshit:

- Start your own product. But you might face some government bullshit.

- Trading. Probably the best if you want to avoid any human interaction. While you are at it, move to a tax-friendly jurisdiction and pay 0 in taxes.

Well-paying jobs like this exist (I have one), but you need to be lucky to get one. You need to find a remote-friendly/first workplace with a good manager who knows you and trusts you, and then you need to push some more for those additional freedoms you desire. Simply say you're not doing stand-ups anymore. Chances are if they're already remote-friendly, then they can be nudged to give up even more control as long as you deliver.

Good luck and don't give up, it's worth it.

I think the issues you describe are a function of company size. If you find one that is under 50 (or even under 20) people, there will be basically zero corporate fluff.

you have to learn office politics

With respect, are you sure you're in the right industry? You like to code however you don't enjoy the human issues associated with the job. Every job has those in tech and many outside of tech do too.

First, the practical answer: you sound like you have been unlucky enough to work only in pretty awful corporate environments. Stand reassured: all companies are not like that. Simple rules to vastly increase your chances of working within better environments:

Rule #1:Avoid big companies.

Big companies seem to attract and promote more sociopaths. Or maybe they are just more visible because of the larger population? Possible explanations include: sociopaths are focused on their carrier path within an organisation rather than on accomplishing something, which attitude is only possible within a big organisation where many layers of hierarchy and processes offer shelter from the hard realities of customer (dis)satisfaction and competition.

Rule #2: Avoid the web.

The technical culture is just too bad there. Ideally you should look for a development job in a company that also employs other kind of engineers (telcos, construction, industrial equipment...) The culture will be more grounded in science (and the economy), and the objectives less vaguely defined.

Rule #3: As a last resort, consider leaving the USA and emigrate to Europe, where the corporate culture encourages less openly hypocrisy. Note, though, that this "fake it until you make it" attitude that tends to make American coworkers creepy to us Europeans has been shown to have a positive influence.

Now, I also wanted to address you depiction of the ideal engineering work as closing well defined tickets.

You are certainly already aware that explaining to a computer how to solve a well understood problem is a very simple task, compared to the work required to explain to a bug tracker what a problem actually is and what its solution should be.

The first task consists merely of translating a specification into a program, while the other task requires to understand a complex system, what it does, how and why, its history and to anticipate its possible futures, plan its evolutions, etc. This is so much harder, especially because to reach this point where you understand enough the problem that you can write the specifications (or directly the program) you have to collect information and ideas from many human sources and to also fight human incompetence, lazyness, malevolence and conflicting interests. To do this efficiently you need a lot of knowledge, not only technical but also about the industry, the internal working of the social organisations you are part of, etc. That's being an engineer in IT here and now, and very few jobs will match what you are looking for.

And if you ever find one, chances are that you will then just play a role in some managerial intrigue and nobody will actually care about what you are doing.

...pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria.

  1) respectably specified
  2) clear acceptance criteria

That's where 95% of the work is. That's what generates all of the interpersonal crap. I hate to be quite so blunt, but you're asking something like "why can't I just do the easy part?"

You can but you'll likely collect proportional pay. (ie the below mentioned $5/hour overseas outsourcing).

On a completely unrelated note, most outsourcing projects fail because they hope they can magically skip 1 & 2 and the outsourced labor will just genie up a working product.

Don't act like you want to act and be proactive.

People will use you as you act. If you are someone who is always quite, never has time for team events, never interact much but works on tickets in good quality, your team lead or manager will learn to use this for them.

I like to have a team with everyone engaged but if i have someone on my team i can give a ticket and they just do it in good quality or don't mind if i tell them how they have to rework it, great.

Make sure you are not in a start up. There is stress and direct communication needed. Look for something less edgy, less modern. Something which works but is not that interesting and good defined.

Hi, I think we can be a good fit.

I would like to receive your application here: https://ideatostartup.org/join

You re either looking for freelance-type work, or why don't you start your own thing? You can look at indiehackers for some inspiration.