rattle your network until you find a tenured professor who has interesting-to-you grants, and talk them into letting you join the lab as a visiting researcher.
if you do it right they’ll be overjoyed to have technical staff who aren’t degree candidates and you’ll get something tasty to intellectually munch on.
I don´t know for all the eu nations, but for those that I know staff researcher positions still require degrees (and there is a lot of competition to get those because they are even more limited in number than tenure track positions, just with far less requirements)
In mine in particular everyone has at least a Master Degree with some publications. One of two even got a PHD.
I understand degrees being a requirement for medicine or hard engineering, but for research and topics of the mind it's just an expensive, multi-year hazing ritual into academia.
Plenty of good people go straight into industry after getting their BCs. (or avoid degrees entirely) because of this.
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 the possibility of going back to do a part-time PhD.
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.
> In UK you can be associate professor without a degree?
Yes, in rare occasions! More frequently without say a higher degree. One that springs to mind is the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford University who read classics for their undergrad but with no further education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Oswald
I know there are other examples but I'd need to google a bit to find them. Notable people who got a PhD without a Bachelors or Masters in the US include Wolfram, so it's not just in the UK where rules get a little bent.
> How can you do a master without a bachelors?
Experience in industry counts if its highly related. I was offered or interviewed for postgraduate courses at the University of Leeds, Oxford University, University of Leicester, and a few others. All in Software Engineering and I eventually accepted a part-time position on an MSc in Computer Science. A bit of rigmarole but not that much - I started the course at 25 with 6 years experience in tech. After some pestering I was able to help with some lecturers papers which led to the whole PhD discussion but dropped the MSc because it wasn't as rigorous as I hoped it'd be (I'm interested in the foundations of computer science and this was more applied). If it helps I've been to doctoral summer schools in both the EU and US without any credentials either!
Maybe the UK is the only place with such ways, I emailed Stanford a while back (I'm moving there this Summer, my partners a postdoc, and wanted to try audit some of their postgraduate CS courses) and got shot down pretty quickly!
My lab actually did this for a bit. They hired a programmer who was retired but bored and just wanted to do something for far less than market rate. She was great and got a lot done but two problems:
1) It took my boss significant effort keeping her busy with things to do: explaining the problems we needed solved, etc. is non-trivial
2) Since she was working for so little, she could basically dictate what she was or wasn't doing. The very fact that she wasn't on a real salary meant it was actually harder to work with her in some sense.
1) You needn't necessarily restrict this to tenured professors. Indeed, plenty of new tenure-track professors have both the need and startup resources to potentially hire you if you're likely to boost their group's productivity.
2) It's hard to fund people with grant money who weren't written into the grant in the first place. So while grants might be interesting as an indicator of interest, they don't necessarily ensure you'll be hirable. Which means either patience, or hoping they have a small slush fund somewhere - which is more likely for a tenured professor, but not exclusively so.
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 saw me as more of a liability than an asset, or that onboarding costs still wouldn't be worth having free labor. It was an interesting eyeopener.
But since you're experienced, your story is different from mine.
"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.
Such roles still exist and a bunch of people like it. Instead of sitting in front of their own computer and hacking code and a amazing problems there it's finding problems in an application with communication with a different person. Depending on organisation and level this can be quite technical as well.
But when hiring I look for other skills and other interests depending on the role and a key qualification is interest in the kind of role.
For me personally, if I were going to go into some other IT fields tomorrow, I’d skip the expensive ass degree period. A lot of IT feels closer to a modern trade than anything.
A lot of jobs require a degree just to get past the HR filter though. In fact, I distinctly remember seeing a even a lot of helpdesk jobs requiring "degree in computer science or related technical major". Again, this is 10 years ago, not sure what the landscape is like today.
This might sound crazy but free may be worse than offering to charge. "Free" is saying my work offers no value and may even cost more through your time.
it’s not that free labor isn’t worth it, it’s that it’s a lemons problem. that is, (the signaling indicates) uncertainty is high, which is what makes it expensive (or if lucky, a fantastic deal). most people are rather risk-averse and therefore prefer safe choices, with the commensurate relinquishment of potential greater gains (and greater losses).
the lesson should be to value your labor correctly, as large deviations in perceptions of value mean that transactions won’t happen. a more astute approach would be to communicate your (accurate) understanding of your own value and your willingness to negotiate alternate dimensions of value in exchange, like getting experience faster or doing more interesting work in exchange for less money.
tl;dr: establish a common understanding of value, then negotiate.
Of course this was communicated clearly - that the reason I would be willing to work for no pay was because my objective was to gain experience. I also mentioned that if they considered me valuable and worthwhile enough, to feel free to take me on as a "real" employee down the road.
that's not clear at all. you essentially keep say you'd "work for free", rather than "my work is worth x, let's exchange". the latter puts you on equal footing psychologically, while the former puts you at a distinct disadvantage.
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"
Basically an internship has to benefit the intern and not the employer. It's akin to taking a class.
Any HR rep looking at these standards would not permit someone to come on for free in these circumstances at the risk of being penalized for violating federal labor law.
I did something like this in the mid-1990s (looking for Unix sysadmin work - or something similar) and then again about four years ago (programming work).
Both times it worked, although I had to cast a wide net and wait a little bit. Both were very, very small underfunded companies. I didn't say I'd work for free, but said I was working for the experience and job recommendation more than the money.
Honestly for the second one it was more about the recommendation, of having something to put on my resume other than my own S-corp and what have you. I could get most of the small scale experience myself (although they pushed me into NoSQL, GCP/EC2 and other things I wouldn't have ventured into - and turning mockups into code too). I was very up front with them too - I promised them I would do cheap work for them for a month and would then be open to offers, and if someone wanted to hire me for six figures I would probably take it. Oddly enough at both companies (1996 and the more recent one) I spent about 18 months working for the company before being hired by a company actually willing to pay.
In the recent situation, I also was fixated on a niche which made things a little more difficult for me initially, although now I am better off it took a little longer to get going in terms of getting paid. Small tech companies are generally looking for people who known HTML, CSS, Javascript and web frameworks like React. If you look like, without needing that much help, you can do tickets/stories to implement features on a web site that uses React, and can pass the standard interview gauntlet for that type of job, I think you will find a job fairly quickly.
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 hire is my time, not money.
The author seems to not understand how key money is for the relationship between manager and employee. I have plenty of employee's who'll work on interesting stuff in their own hours, but I pay them so they stay around and do the boring bits like docs, DR, testing, support, bus-factoring.
Everyone I've ever worked with just does the tasks they want they way they want and if you twist their arm they will do things that advance the mission and benefit paying customers grudgingly.
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 gets much smaller. At the end of the day, once you have a solid product in place you need a lot more people to just keep it running vs. work on some very interesting technical work. I think applied research is the best way to go for very interesting technical work but I think the bar is pretty high for that.
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]
> 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?
Depends on the environment I suppose. If its a classic but-in-seat, locked down, corporate environment, you're probably still constrained for a similar amount of time.
> 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 actually used to think similarly. I might have worded it badly but when I mean the work becomes smaller I am talking about scope and impact - not necessarily the effort required. The example I can give is what I described above: config changes. At a high level it sounds pretty simple but when you delve deeper into how your company/team works with such technologies then there are many barriers in place which hinder you from getting work done efficiently. And processes are slow. In my old team it used to take ~a month to deploy our software world-wide.
You are correct about financial security. At least for me, I am not comfortable enough taking a risk to start something on my own or make a big career change.
I think the overall goal is that you SHOULD be told what to do - up to a certain extent. I am a software engineer so an example for me would sound like "design me a system that does this" or "a customer is asking for this feature request" and that's it. Everything else can and should be left upon the engineers to figure out. Good engineers will design a good system with respect to time for delivery and feature request compatibility.
> They argue that's fine though because they'd work for £1/hr, but the real cost of an upfront hire is my time, not money.
Well if it's freelance work there are situations where the upfront time cost is not massive, especially if it's a task with a limited scope. I know this because I hire freelancers.
But yea, I don't have a bag of small-scope, interesting and meaningful tasks lying around...
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 be happy doing that kind of work part-time and remotely (almost nobody offers part time work) or I might want to do that later in life.
I read a post about Gumroad here on HN, and that's how I want to work. The way Gitlab does it is also very interesting.
There must be other people who feel and think the same, and the post is just a way to try to reach them.
Of course, but if it's part-time and full remote then it doesn't take away most of your day/life and I would have no problem with that. I also do translation work which can be tedious at times but I really enjoy it because I can do it from anywhere and just a few hours per week.
The "needs to be interesting" part is more tied to the "pay what you want" thing.
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.
> The way it is worded, it would sound to me, as a hiring manager, that you might not finish the work
You read that correctly. The OP said clearly he has no intention to do documentation or testing, meetings, or much of anything other than just write code for about 40 hours and then quit.
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!
if you don't care about pay and you want to work on interesting projects, why not start your own?
people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun. If you are in a position where you don't need to pay the bills with work, then you're in a great position and can have fun all day long - so why not just do that?
If you work on something that also turns out to be marketable then you might even end up with a viable business that you love working on.
> people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun.
If a position across the street becomes available which allows you to pursue a personal goal you aspire and afford your current lifestyle, would you remain at your current "non-fun" job or give it a shot and apply?
Many people don't just get job because they have bills to pay, they get jobs that they don't like because there is no alternative available to them which meshes with their lives.
To an extent, you could argue "that's personal responsibility, everyone makes tough choices".
Then again, the author tacitly references to the fact they were still obligated to physically attend an office space, even though they could their work remotely. Now expand that to the millions of workers who are forced to make long commutes.
obviously there's such a thing as better or worse jobs, but OP suggested that they were willing to work on whatever, as long as it's fun, for any arbitrary amount of pay.
So OP is in a position where money is not important to them. So why have a job at all? Have a fun or meaningful hobby instead, or start a personal project.
The author doesn't ask so much for a job, as reflects about something more profound: meaningful, purposeful relationships with others which enables them to manifest their morals, values, identity,...
Interesting work isn't interesting for the sake of spending 8+ hours a day "doing" something. It only becomes interesting when it has an impact on the world which one feels is meaningful.
For sure, a novelist could write books for no other reason then deriving enjoyment of the sheer act of committing words to paper or a screen. But the vast majority of people feel that the things they do in life truly become meaningful when they are seen, used, enjoyed,... by others.
One could argue that one could do so by volunteering, taking initiative, or starting one's own business. However, the vast majorities of opportunities to enter meaningful professional relationships still involve signing a dotted line and a salary.
> work on interesting projects, why not start your own?
For what it's worth, many people who don't need the paycheck, or don't need a particular paycheck still go to a "real" job just because the scope of what they can do on their own doesn't match what they want to achieve.
People also join projects to learn things that are harder/less efficient to learn on your own.
I'm certainly not saying you can't do an interesting project on your own, just that many people are interested in projects they can't practically do on their own. Some might scratch that itch with an open source project or whatever, but especially if it requires hardware development, it may not be practical for many individuals.
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.
> 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.
After 20+ years I've both been in such a position FULL TIME, as have others (eg: Many devs at ServiceNow) - hired on to work on cool things at an old small company and then literally sat around every day with no tasks and no responsibilities while everyone around me either didn't show up or watched TV on their monitors (open-plan btw).
I've seen big company devs do the same, making up busy-work tasks and literally not committing any code for months at a time playing the priority-game of "wait until something more important comes up, someone else will make a workaround" which was surprisingly effective.
The reality that a developer shows up and have nothing to do happens OFTEN in all sorts of organizations - eg last day of sprint, how many times have you pulled in a new multi-day ticket? Developer accountability is at an all-time low when software developers (across many sub-disciplines) can't make accurate estimates, can't meet anyone's estimates anyway, and are at an all-time-high demand. Managers are in a different boat, but same result. Perverse incentives and lack of a consensus (or willpower) on what constitutes value makes for do-nothing-and-get-paid while someone else does the work.
In my experience, it is not like that at all. The not having anything to do simply does not happen. What happens is "not being under pressure". But I was always able to find useful stuff to do, not including learning.
I do learning in work time. Learning could be backup for when there is truly nothing to do, like when git is down or something. But those chances are so rare, that I have to learn while there is stuff to do.
> eg last day of sprint, how many times have you pulled in a new multi-day ticket?
I was in exactly one team where you would wait on this situation. In literally all other teams, it was 100% normal to work on something multiday for next sprint. And that one team was dysfunctional in more then one way.
There will always be times when you don't have anything that you've been told to work on.
That is not the same as having nothing to do.
At a certain "senior" level (in terms of attitude rather than job title) you're expected to be a self-starter and think of things to do for yourself. Once you can do that you have no excuse for having nothing to do.
eh, that's not really the case in a lot of developer jobs these days. A lot of agile/scrum adoption/bastardization has meant that all work done has to be decided by the team and pretty much every piece of work has to be approved by a product manager. This can often lead to some demoralising meetings where you can either lie about the effort/risk/goal or you can give a true value estimate that gets shot down. If you lie, you can end up spending your own free time working on that refactor or documentation etc. For most devs working on a codebase, its not theirs, and they don't determine what has priority.
In reality, for a lot of people, if you start refactoring the codebase while waiting for a new task you are likely to break something and its just not worth the hassle for the developer or the company.
Learning new tools is always great ofc but it can be very hard to find the motivation in such a role, where unless you are a senior developer, you probably won't have much say on adoption, and you will likley just develop a half baked understanding of a new library that you will never get to use in production. Its much better to have some real free time where you can focus on your own projects and learn that way.
So in short, maybe it should never be the case that devs are in that position, but it often is. Especially for devs with less experience
> if you start refactoring the codebase while waiting for a new task you are likely to break something
The risk of this is in proportion to the lack of test coverage. If you are afraid to refactor, this should be an indication that you need to apply more test coverage, so do that first.
That’s pretty sad and disempowering. For what it’s worth at companies like Facebook it’s completely the opposite. If you aren’t taking any initiative you will not meet expectations at performance review.
I just had a good chuckle at this. I’m skeptical, to say the least. I don’t have direct experience. But I do work at a company that has poached several FAANG employees this past year and whose thoughts...differ from yours.
I can second dkasper's observations -- the PSC cycle is engineered to reward initiative. That said, depending on the team, the practice does not always follow the theory, so it makes sense that the FB employees your company could poach may have been the ones unsatisfied with the way their team rewarded initiative.
Kent Beck became a former Facebook employee because he wasn't in to proving he was moving the needle on Facebook's key metrics. He was only giving world class mentoring to young Facebook engineers and improving the development culture.
Likely you were able to poach them since they didn't thrive in that environment. Or you got them from the more traditional top-down Microsoft, Apple or Amazon.
That sounds like academia, where people are also expected to be constantly innovative on demand and, when the majority just can't pull it off, they invent BS research and produce worthless papers which clog the system.
> If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer.
Don't we already have enough gatekeeping in software development? I don't particularly enjoy writing documentation, despite how important I know it to be. That doesn't make me "not a developer." If I were lazy and simply chose not to do the things that bored me (despite their importance), it might make me a bad developer (or more accurately a developer of bad software).
I design and implement software. That makes me a software developer. The pieces of that process that I find boring or exciting are tangentially related at best.
People are better at what they enjoy, but I know very few people who enjoy documentation. I have apent most of my career as what the gp would call a hacker. My redeeming quality is probably my love of testing. I despise formal methodologies and processes, and people who fall in love with tools or languages or language features are hard for me to work with.
I don’t understand that general lack of love for writing documentation. It’s a part I like very much in a project: explaining how it works, why some things are done a certain way, the limitations of the software, the possible configuration options... It’s funto write.
I definitely don't begrudge anyone who likes documentation - but we all have different parts of the dev cycle that we like - some folks love to architect solutions and hate implementation because of the fiddly bits and details - other people dislike the stress of having to come up with overarching approaches and get analysis paralysis but when it comes to splatting out the vision into code it's meditative. Still other folks love to break things and enjoy needling edge cases in unit tests (if you find one of these or are one of these - know their value, they are a hot commodity). Then other folks love the teaching/explaining part that comes with documentation.
I think that there is a way we can improve as an industry to let more people specialize into their niches (which would move us closer to a factory/assembly line sort of setup) but right now most developers are artisans that receive some vague ticket and produce code and everything for it as a result.
I appreciate the validation, as much as I like to see things eork, I also love to break things. Pathological unit tests are fun, but the real low hanging fruit is in finding how two services implemented the same service contract with different assumptions.
> Don't we already have enough gatekeeping in software development?
No. In fact I hope anyone who's actually worked in the software industry would see that we don't have nearly enough!
Look I'll agree with you about the evils of gatekeeping if we're talking about who gets to call themselves an artist or a writer. Those kinds of distinctions rarely create life or death consequences.
But software can. Not all the time, but certainly in medical, airplane control, banking and financial, and many many more areas.
I wish software would take notes from other engineering fields like structural or architectural. Can you imagine an engineer building a bridge who was like "I don't want to do the boring stuff like stress analysis or geological surveys, I just want to make cool shapes and build them!" Can you imagine trusting your life to a bridge built like that?
Software increasingly runs our world and real software engineers who work on things that really actually matter know they have a responsibility to "do all the boring things" because those things are essential to doing their job right. Hearing about major hacks and exploits every day like SolarWinds, Experian, Facebook that expose our personal information and put us at risk makes me feel like we desperately need more gatekeeping in our field to keep cowboys and hackers from getting the chance to get anywhere near these systems.
I've been in this career for 20 years and the thing I learn more and more is that writing code is perhaps the most trivial aspect of what we do. It's everything around it -- the process, the testing, the security, the collaboration and how teams and organizations operate that are the real challenges to be solved. Anyone can hack together some working code. The hard part is the systems and organizational structures in which it operates.
There are plenty of things to work on in software which are of no real consequence, but as the OP is finding it's pretty difficult to find someone who wants to pay you to work on something which has no value. That's called a hobby not a profession.
As important as those things feel after 20 years you must remember you are hired to write code. As easy as code is to write without none of the other processes are required.
If they wanted someone to just write documentation you wouldn't be hired. A technical writer would be.
If they wanted someone to just test you wouldn't be hired. A QA person would.
Same for whatever processes you create. They would hire a process specialist.
Same for project management. They would hire a pmp certified person first.
Same for business analysis and business requirement gathering.
As a developer there are better people to do all of those jobs at better rates. None of them can code. That's why you are hired. If you couldn't do that than your qa abilities don't matter.
Things have changed over 20 years. Not every company has a qa team or bas or support team. So these tasks end up being picked up by the developer. Often if this slows development teams are created of non-developer specialists. Some developers end up doing very little coding because your job is to go to meetings about projects that never start. But you are still hired to code they just need you on standby.
Anyone cannot hack together something that works. Only a developer can. A hacker would find ways to use an existing system in an unintended ways.
Gatekeeping over this makes you more management than developer.
The tao of programming has a different understanding of what a developer is and isn't
> 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.
Well put. Professional software is only a mean for business not an end by itself. I recommend not deriving your satisfaction from code only if you work for a company otherwise you risk to both spoil your hobby and always be unhappy at work.
If the organization or the product has any amount of complexity, all of those have communication roadblocks. While it’s technically possible to always be learning or practicing something, much of the effort will be wasted by either a focused or a bureaucratic organization. Repeatedly doing work just to give the company an unlikely option on it is counter-productive as it leads to burnout. It’s better to stop work when enough is done for the day or week to stay focused on the efforts that matter.
Probably the best way to apply the “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” mindset, if it must assert itself, is to actually let developers stuff packages or weed the grounds or something else that can clear their minds. :)
> 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.
This point parallels the distinction made in the Software Engineering at Google flamingo book between programming and engineering. Engineering comprises the tools and processes to maintain software over time (this is a rough paraphrase), of which docs, for example, is essential.
So to use their language with your point: this sounds purely like programming and perhaps not engineering.
Don't want to stay around to do the boring bits required to make a working product that serves a real world use case? Go into academia! Not making a generalization about academics, it's just that academia is one of the few places you can carve out a place to just work on interesting things and get paid for it.
I retired close to 7 years ago, and I have a similar set of guidelines for doing part time work. However I have another stipulation which is that if I don't personally know you, I'm not interested, at least for paid work. I've done some volunteer work where I've had introductions from someone I know and that's worked great. And for any given paid job the max I will work is 20 hours/month. That is I might work more than that, but I will only bill that. That allows me the flexibility to put the effort in I think is needed to do what I think is acceptable quality, without imposing my standards on someone who just wants something that will solve a problem immediately in front of them. Good luck!
I created a part-time jobs board, ParttimeCareers (https://parttime.careers). I collect remote and part-time jobs (mostly engineering jobs, but sometimes marketing jobs).
Yeah, I can see where you are coming from. Some people want to look for part-time jobs because they want to spend more time with their passions, kids, parents, or friends.
> having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me
Maybe nothing you want to do, but I doubt there was nothing to do. Improving docs, tests, small refactoring to old code to make it more readable are a few examples.
Have you considered just coming up with your own projects? Set some arbitrary, useless goal that will be an interesting engineering challenge, and have at it. Nobody will force you to write docs or do any other "boring bits". It's a great outlet in my experience.
I think the solution needs to live on both fronts.
IMO the boring bits are boring because there's no time spent to make them not boring.
On all layers of society there are tasks that are under-tooled and under-organized and if you make them worth doing, people will enjoy doing them 24/7.
There are plenty of people who feel and think the same.
Many people find it very difficult to understand that money is not always a motivator. This is a particularly difficult concept for managers to deal with.
If an employee is not motivated by additional remuneration, or in the case where they do not require an income, the relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally different.
> 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.
The only times this ever happened to me was while I worked in the gaming industry and I absolutely still had work available - but we had some pretty rough overtime expectations that lead to constant overtime even if a different department was behind.
On principle I would just sit there and relax as best as I could in the office if my team wasn't behind. But, keep in mind, that this was also all unpaid overtime at the employee's expense because thank you EA lobbying and a terrible industry. I occasionally lost money on these evenings since transit would shut down and I'd need to cab home.
Now that I've left the gaming industry I doubt I'll ever be in that position again and I continue to have oodles of work in front of me, though, due to ADD and such - I often have trouble with motivating myself to do the boring bits they are part of the job and go with the good.
> that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid.
The boring bits _are_ part of the job.
> 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.
The part about "in an office" is a fair goal, but if you want to avoid docs/tests/support/refactoring work, don't do this job. Writing code is just one part of it, any way you take it, and avoiding the rest is cutting corners. Even our consultants have to write tests and update docs.
> and I just don’t want to be paid to “stay around and do the boring bits”
I’m a little ADD, so my most hated work is paperwork and administrivia. Nevertheless, I recognize that it is sometimes necessary (documentation, performance evals, collecting metrics, etc.) and I just get my favorite coffee and suck it up (the work, but also the coffee).
Programmers have arguably the least boring jobs in the world (we can literally automate all the most boring bits except for certain types of paperwork/administrivia) so to hear a developer complain about doing a little bit of boring work smacks of a special brand of entitlement to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> 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.
This only happens at terrible, un-enlightened companies who are more willing to waste both of your time and pay you a little less than they are to either give you meaningful work or let you go to the beach but stay on-call. Bosses should not be babysitters.
I think you'd really like Jason Fried's writing. You can find some short posts [here](https://m.signalvnoise.com/author/jason-fried/), but his book It doesn't have to be crazy at work is really great too.
The way you talk about the work culture you want to avoid makes me think you might be interested in "opale" companies and the way they operate. Check "Reinventing Organisations" by Frederic Laloux, there are a couple of software and none software company examples which might be of interest to you.
A lot of people on this thread seem to think that boring work provides job security. Based on your experience it sounds like you have reached a different conclusion. I believe you have the right intuition, that you find valuable work interesting.
That depends on your job title and where it falls on the explore-exploit spectrum.
If your job is to keep the gold mine running all your underlings are working on the mine. If they go do something else its a waste of your time and resources.
If your job is to explore the jungle for new mines, then the story is very different. Its more about finding as many curious cheap chimps as you can and sending them out in every direction. In such cases imaginative managers use all the chimps they can find.
The ATX breakout board looks great, thanks for pointing it out! I think that's a good example of an interesting/fulfilling project, since those generally don't exist and the author talks about how it was a direct request from regular people, not some corporate directive.
"but the real cost of an upfront hire is my time, not money"
The most arduous hiring processes are often little more than an illusion of selection, yielding a process that is more the rolling of dice. Most hiring processes hire based upon interview skills that have extraordinarily little correlation with job performance.
Google has such a famous interview process that everyone tries to clone it. For that they get employees with an average tenure of 3.2 years, made worse that internal project-to-project migration is endemic. They have a tiny core of institutional knowledge, and then a passing army of travelers.
This industry would be far more robust if it hired quickly and fired fast, because the only way you know how someone will do in the role/team/org is by actually having them in the role/team/org. Everything else is just loose proxies that do little. Iterate through people and just punt out the ones that don't work. That shouldn't be a big deal.
Onboarding is expensive at dysfunctional organizations. Further, the reality that churn is high among better employees [1] offsets the concern.
But regardless, going through an extensive vetting process is an illusion. It has extraordinarily little correlation with actual work fit or productivity, but the more "rigorous" the process, the more likely you are to stick with a poor fit.
[1] - low performers will hang around forever. The fundamental of the hire slow/fire slow reality is that eventually every organization is 80% dead weight. If you want to avoid onboarding costs (versus dealing with the issues that make onboarding expensive, which is almost always institutional liabilities), hire the worst candidates and they'll be with you forever.
I'd also add that interesting or meaningful work itself is a scarce resource. One has to work on finding such work, instead of waiting for someone to give that work. One also has to compete for such work. Salary is a small factor in the equation. Indeed, salary sometimes is a signal in this case instead of a barrier. For a meaningful project, free is probably more expensive than an above-market pay.
Don't hire a developer if you want a tester or a support agent or a document writer. Developers cost so much more why not target your task to an expert in that area?
My advice: pursue a PhD. If you can find the right advisor, then you will have almost complete creative freedom to pursue interesting projects while getting paid to do it.
I have considered retiring from software development and pursuing a PhD. But I have heard some scary things about the culture and competitiveness in academia.
Are there “laid back” PhD programs for people for people who don’t really have an interest in tenure track, but just want to learn and apply themselves to some novel problem?
Only a minority of CS PhDs pursue a tenure-track position. I have found academia to be more laid back than big tech companies, but you are still expected to produce (e.g., a paper or two a year). The top programs probably have a more competitive culture than state schools. If you don’t want to produce research, then I don’t see the point in enrolling.
I [luckily] haven’t experienced the scary stuff that people talk about, but a major barrier for students is that PhDs are largely unstructured and require you to take the initiative. Not everyone does well in that environment.
How about teaching undergraduates? I seem to recall from my undergrad days that a lot of my TAs were pursuing PhDs. Is that something that PhD students are expected to do?
Some work as TAs. It is done part-time for funding (tuition waiver, monthly stipend, and insurance). It is not usually a requirement in US schools, although I recommend my students do it for at least a semester to get the experience. Otherwise they are funded as RAs.
There are plenty of programs that think about things like quality of life, etc. Culture and competitiveness is a function of the school itself and the PI specifically.
I have pretty much retired (i.e. suck at interviews and can't deal with the nonsense in industry anymore and am not one for management) and am thinking of going to get a PhD just because these days, I like doing research for the hell of it. Someday I will finish writing my first paper.... If I ever get a full time job again, it will have to be some sort of researchy sort of thing, so a PhD will be useful to get past HR etc.
Your PhD program is what you make of it. If you are not interested in going into full time academia, the uni will still take your money if you look like a good candidate and can get through the program. I suppose you have to worry about competing with other students if you both are trying to get the one open position with a professor... So make sure you can pay your own way and then you won't be dependent on being a wage slave for the university and all that industry-lite crap.
But really, ask yourself over and over "why do I want a PhD?" until you're sure of the answer - it is 3+ years of your life doing only that and it could be brutal due to the workload etc.
Engineering/CS programs are probably more laid back or less 'political' (i.e. those scary stories) than humanities or other STEM degrees. I have noticed some interpersonal drama in some sense just hanging around the uni these last few years, e.g. students and dealing with them, a general sense of the academic environment. But I make sure to stay out of it.
How easy is it for someone to go back and just get a PhD. After recently being rejected from a handful of schools (albeit undergrad, not graduate) I’m starting to feel like academia only wants people who played into their game from the start.
His requirement is basically volunteer style job? For example: run an app that track or take in abandon pets for an animal rescue/shelter.
1. interesting work, checked.
2. part time, remote and probably asynchronous, checked.
3. no interviews, just build the web app or iOS app, checked.
4. probably minimum wage, checked.
I have nice boring job. Few years ago I was upset with the boring part. But with kids and mortgage I don’t really care anymore. I am very happy to be paid more than a manager in a small company being only individual contributor in big Corp. I also have approval to sell my hardware from big Corp. So I can explore new things with commercial potential without a fear. Life is good.
Yeah, personally having a large chunk of the day be simple tedious tasks I don't have any control over makes me depressed and every day becomes a fight to keep the mental breakdown just out of reach. I envy people who can stay sane in such environments, makes life a lot easier.
I'll take a boring stable 40 hour a week job over a fun job that somewhat frequently requires 50+ hours. Time is the only thing I cant get back. Money really is just a number after a certain point.
Why do you still work for others if money is just a number at this point? I worked for Google for a while and quit to do my own projects once I had enough money that I felt it didn't matter any more.
I'm not exactly at that level yet. I couldnt stop working forever. But I realized that making money isnt all that difficult and its really a make believe number after a certain point.
For me, interesting and fulfilling work is hardly work at all. 50 hours of fulfilling work essentially kills two birds with one stone (intellectually fulfilling, and pays my income), as opposed 40 hours at a job that I don't care for, but at least it's only 40 hours and pays alright, and then I have to try and sate my mind alongside everything else I want to do outside my working hours.
There's nothing worse than being stuck in a job where you're watch the clock, waiting for it to strike 5 PM.
Right. I guess I'd be in the same boat if I found something truly interesting. I've had interesting projects but I find that the fun parts of most projects are short. Worse most companies are not going to be able to provide you with something fulfilling for very long.
not OP, but at that point I imagine the equation changes: stability becomes less important when you aren't the sole provider for a pile of people, and/or once cost-of-living goes down (e.g., paid off mortgage).
I was able to pay off my mortgage about a year ago (I am in my late 30s), and work has taken on a new aspect for me. I feel a bit more comfortable challenging the status quo and trying to take on more "interesting work". With that in mind, I am still attentive to the fact I need to maintain a sustainable career for another 25/30 years.
Many people in my circle are proud of paying off mortgages, so I kind of assumed by default that it is a worthwhile thing. But looking at the numbers I'm not so sure: it seems much better in current market to cash out as much as possible and let that money sit in an index fund. I guess the main issues are some risks with downturns and/or liquidity.
That reality is a property primarily of the present-moment.
Index funds don't always rise and property values sometimes fall. Interest rates are rarely this low. Leverage multiplies both the upside and the downside.
While this is true in the short term, except for very rare exceptions, you'd be hard pressed to find a property in the United States that is worth less now than 30 years ago (which is the standard length of a mortgage). I don't know about other countries, but I suspect it's the same in any modern economy. Land is scarce, and no one is making more of it.
You're right. None of those people account for the time value of money. If I could get an interest only mortgage I would (where I literally pay to rent the money). There are so many better things I can do with a few hundred thousand dollars now.
If you have the money to pay off your mortgage, why not buy a second house with it and rent that out? Let someone pay your mortgage while you get the appreciation? Or invest it in something else?
If you do the math, renting almost always comes out ahead of owning, as long as you invest the difference in something that gains in value.
The main reason to own is for psychological reasons. It's great if you have kids and want a place for them, or yourself, to call home.
I think the part that needs to be factored into your analysis is the volatility/risk aspect. A mortgage may be relatively low ROI but it’s also relatively low risk compared to the market. E.g., maybe somebody has a certain percentage invested into low risk bonds. Maybe it makes sense to pare back some of that and put it towards their mortgage during a period when bonds are being crushed. Neither bonds or the mortgage return will compete with a general index fund in terms of return over a long period of time, but the index fund is in a different (higher) risk category
The 'mortgage return' will compete very well over a long period of time, especially if you ensure the comparison is fair. For instance, 15 years in, when your mortgage note is 60 to 70% of prevailing rent or lease, consider the return on that savings as part of the 'mortgage return' - because this is part of the return in the form of inflation hedge.
I think this statement is a bit strong. The price/rent ratio varies greatly between places and times. Around here it's between 30 and 40 years, that makes it very difficult to make money by borrowing to buy a place to rent out.
In such markets, the bulk of the ROI is not the rent checks, but tax savings and appreciation of the underlying asset.
Real estate looks a lot like the stock market anymore. People value companies on metrics beyond simple revenue, profits, and dividends. With RE, investors understand that wage growth in a region flows into housing at a compounding rate due to leverage and are capitalizing on it.
So long as Seattle or LA have companies that pay above average wages to enough employees, housing prices in those regions should continue to grow at a a rate somewhat relative to differences in wages. What constitutes "enough employees" seems to be relative to how constrained housing growth is. In LA, housing prices are driven by probably the top 20-30% of earners.
One thing to keep in mind is that mortgage is the cheapest money you'll ever borrow. Low rates vs. other kinds of loans, and the interest is often the biggest tax deduction most middle class people have access to.
I completely agree that it wasn't the right financial decision, but I don't regret it at all. I grew up working poor and watched multiple people lose their houses (some crash related, others not). This gave me a fairly conservative risk tolerance regarding debt. I feel "lighter" without debt hanging over me.
The question that ultimately convinced me to just pay off my mortgage was "If someone gave you a house, free and clear, would you mortgage it to buy investments?". My gut reaction was "no, I would really like to have a free and clear house."
I have considered buying a second home to rent, but I have some moral qualms about exacerbating the housing crisis where I live. Furthermore, the stress of tenants isn't something I really want to deal with.
Everyone here has great points about maximizing returns, and I know I will have less money in the long run because of my decision. With that in mind, I am investing about half of my old mortgage payment, and the rest goes to the family vacation fund.
Just wanted to thank you for the comment and clarify I didn't mean to criticize your choices - my background is very similar and it's just a realization I've had after stepping back and trying to think without those constraints/influences. I also know many people who lost houses or struggled, some which actually did cash-out refinances but then unwisely spent the money on unnecessary luxuries. Those seem easy to avoid. Some may be harder to avoid, like when someone has unforeseen costs such as medical related bills. But in cases such as ours, it seems we are well enough off to have cash on hand to eliminate the mortgage; the question just becomes whether that is the best use for the money. It certainly seems a bad idea to just keep the cash on hand. The index fund returns have been very good for long periods of time now, so seem like a good low-risk option, given that they are liquid and can be redirected to a mortgage payoff at any time.
Edit: having said that the difference is not that large (3-4% for the 30 year note, vs. 5-10% for the market return). Also, while I didn't pay off my mortgage, I probably won't put even more money where my mouth is and refinance in order to invest the cash-out into a fund.
No criticism or offense taken at all! I think these discussions are incredibly valuable for the participants and observers to help them decide what they want to do if/when they have a pile of money in front of them.
Right, the best financial decision is usually to take advantage of low interest rates, carry the debt, and keep the money in diversified investments.
Yes, there's always the risk of a downturn or recession/depression that ruins that plan. And beyond that, there is often a great psychological benefit to being debt-free, even if that's not the best financial decision.
My first experiment with this certainly hasn't yielded the focused directed effort I was hoping to apply. I've worked permanent positions which felt a lot more like contract positions. At this point the main thing is for similar money I'm having to put a lot more effort into keeping track of my taxes.
Work balance, and some reasonable freedom to self determine is pretty nice and likely more important for the stability in a long term working engagement than being "interesting" work.
I may be conflating 'boring' with 'rote', but how do you think the nature of your work may affect your job security? This is something I worry about sometimes, because I find that the work I'm doing could eventually be de-valued or automated. Still, I very much appreciate your position as I'm in a similar boat.
Big Corp lost a big project few months ago. Big Corp will loose another one soon. I hope, I can get senior title before shit hits the fan. Contribution does not matter for the title, only employment duration is important.
However I am consulting a cool startup for free, do code reviews for them for free and could start immediately there with ~8% lower salary but 100% home office. That’s my plan C. Plan B is my own small hardware business selling Raspberry Pi based lidar and radar. I am not far away from the first product. I love these topics and compensate boredom at day job this way. As I mentioned, big Corp does not see interest conflict and I may sell these cool gadgets for wide Raspberry Pi community.
I spent 20 years in the Marine Corps because they continued to challenge me and test my abilities. Some days the work wasn't interesting other days it was really interesting. But it was always challenging.
They always told me what I was going to get paid, but I think they owe a few hours for some overtime I did back in 2005.
Having been consistently unemployed in the past, some experience and advice:
How people value you – and treat you – is directly reflected in how they pay you. Working free or cheap actually encourages employers to micromanage and committee review things because inexpensive things/people are seen as less reliable or professional.
If you want interesting work, my advice is to make it yourself. Find a problem you're passionate about and make something beautiful of it.
You'll improve your own skills, have more fun, and eventually employers will be coming to you.
Nice visually appealing CV. Is that using a public template as the base? I'm currently using the deedy XeLaTeX one as a base, but it doesn't seem to scale out to multiple pages well.
Best of luck with your goals by the way. Avoiding the full time grind in favor of lower time commitments with interesting projects is a great objective.
Open Source volunteer contributions are like this taken to the extreme - where the two main motivations are interesting work, and making a change in something you (want to) use.
I'm curious if the lessons learned from OSS projects would apply to work output from this person.
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'll have to find what is interesting about the job. I've worked at a company that replaced clipboards with iPads in a factory. If all it was to me was a form-builder application and the technology under it I would have been turned off ages ago. But I was incredibly curious as to why the product as successful and growing, what our customers liked about it, and I pushed for developers to visit the factories and see how people used the app. The results were quite surprising and it fed out team with dozens of ideas.
Technology for technology's sake is fun for a while but will eventually bore you. It helps to have a reason to work on what you do. Which I think is part of what OP is saying but I think you can find the reason in a "boring" job as well. You just have to be curious and look for it.
Although avoiding working at feature factories where the developers are just cogs in a Kafka-esque Agile Machine is a whole other can of worms. The OP's strategy seems like an interesting way to avoid it. Best of luck!
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.)
Funny, the comment reminded me of a slightly different piece of advice which goes like this: Decide not what passion you should follow or what goals you want to achieve but what problems you want in your life.
So you were able to find something interesting in (somewhat meaningful but still) boring work. that speaks to you in a positive light but it doesn't change the overall point that the OP was trying to make
It doesn't have to be interesting in a field defining level always. Purely technical problems interests some people too, it really depends on the person finds finds interesting and boring as your examples describe. You can find it, or as OP is trying it can find you .
I am not sure I agree with premise that most of us have put up with the dullest job to keep up with cost of living. There are plenty of tech jobs out there beyond the valley, in other parts of the world which are definitely interesting and pay reasonably above cost of living requirements.
It is not so clear cut to me that mpst don't have some freedom in choosing what kind of work to do without going to the highest paying boring one, tech is not minimum wage sector where we have little to no choice and limited in mobility. The cost of living is not that high that we have zero choice, other sectors don't pay as much in the same areas and they are able to manage after all.
Anyone here want to make a job board for “interesting” work? There are lots of retired software engineers (and managers who miss coding) who would love to work a few hours a week.
Anything is interesting if you engage with it. And being bored is a state of mind. It's a fallacy to say "that's boring". The bored-ness is in your head, not in the task.
This is certainly true. Being bored to a large extent is a personal choice. Things can be as interesting as you make them, but it requires looking at things from different perspectives sometimes.
Some mechanical menial jobs can be satisfying. At least when you can get in the zone, and see what you've accomplished at the end of the day.
I grew up on a farm. There was a lot of that. It took mental discipline, which most folks may not have an opportunity to develop in this hypercharged media world.
I didnt grow up on a farm but grew up on a good bit of land with a lot of yard work that needed to be done. I agree that some jobs like that can be satisfying but its very different from a computer based role.
At the end of the day when you have taken a large tree branch and turned it into a stacked pile of chopped wood you feel a sense of accomplishment. It doesnt feel quite the same when you've cleared 4 QA UI tickets.
For me if something is super boring, I will try to perceive it as a "free zen meditation session". Just do the boring stuff, but also try to work on my posture, breathing and so on, and engage.
I'm far from perfect with it, but it has changed the way I perceive work forever.
Can give some practical advice or pointers about how to become interested in something? What do you practically mean by "engage"?
Second point: even though something is "only" in your head, it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to change.
The question then becomes not whether it's possible to become interested in something, but whether it's worthwhile to put your time and energy into doing so as opposed to doing something you find interesting from the start.
I was just replying to a flagged comment [1] and it became impossible to respond to,
> Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the intersection of "interesting" work and "valuable" work is pretty small.
Your comment was flagged/dead, but I absolutely think you are right.
Look at most of the jobs today. Laborer, factory worker, package sorter, delivery driver, fast food worker, government process worker, ... These aren't particularly interesting or fulfilling.
Apply that lens to our industry, and what do you see? Plumbing grunt work, glue code maintainer, migration work, form collection CRUD. There are so many jobs that don't do anything particularly novel or exciting. You might even be building something you hate, like ad tech.
I don't think the comment is too off base. Maybe the scale and tone is wrong, but there's certainly plenty of boring work.
At this point why not do some research across HN, for example do lookup Show HN or on indiehackers and team up with other solo-devs on project they started for a minimum hourly rate and then just grow with them and eventually make higher returns
This attitude comes across as a little arrogant, and I'm not sure whether it's warranted without a host of achievements to back it up. Nevertheless, I hope the best for the author, who seems to know what they want.
I think they would have better success by actively seeking what they want, though, rather than expecting it to turn up at their doorstep.
Because no one owes you a job you like? It's great if what you're good at is what others are looking for. But outside of tech and math that's often a rare proposition.
I agree but for many the freedom of choice falls short when facing bills. Then one has to work on whatever pays their bills and it's exhausting enough to make the dream even harder.
I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be able to work mostly in greenfield projects. I worked really hard to get here and keep working hard to stay here.
You do owe labor in return for money though, unless you're an entitled tech or crypto bro who has grown up in a bubble without any understanding of how the other 99% of people live their lives (by just scraping by).
It's so good to hear someone else put into words what I feel. Having fulfilling work has been absolutely my #1 goal for as long as I can remember, like since I was 12 or 13 years old, and by that I mean it's more important than getting married, saving for retirement, traveling, having fun. It is a constant thought every waking moment in my life, the same way when you're hungry it's on the forefront of everything you do.
I was always deathly afraid of this, in fact I was never really interested in wage labor period. For some years my ideal was doing independent consulting where I had control, I could pick what I worked on and could get a ton of exposure both to technical issues and wider business experience.
Well it quickly became apparent that that really wasn’t an option for some dumb kid. I had tried freelancing for a few years but got sick of the overwhelming amount of people who just wanted me to update their WP site. After humming around for a year or so I gave up trying for anything greater and just accepted a string of low paying, “boring” development jobs.
> I genuinely believe that for those of us who feel this way, there is nothing else to do but pursue it.
Yeah I’m starting to feel this way again, so fuck it, might as well. I haven’t been nearly as productive as I should have been the past years though. I have a better idea of what I want and there’s really only two choices. One of continuing stagnation or one of putting in the work and attempting to pursue something better. We’ll see though, I’m not betting on anything working out.
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.)
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.
Great interview w a 3-person (didn't meet other 2) startup. On-the-spot offer.#? No paperwork yet, handshake/verbal offer.# Met in-person the same-day. Didn't want to grab lunch or do anything celebratory.# Acted very impersonal and rushed.# He was overly focused on raising money.# He just wanted to know a bunch of immediate solutions without looking at any systems or code.# Never heard from the other people, which may not even exist.# Cap table was 70% him and everyone else was an employee with a pittance.# After that meeting, the dude makes a snide remark by text and ghosts me.####
Someone official at YC told me such a story was intellectually-uninteresting, it sucks/too bad, and HN/YC has zero responsibility.
That's certainly not a world I want to be part of. Seeking pleasure 100% of the time is quite depressing the same way trying to survive 100% of the time is.
Exactly and it would be much easier than finding a company willing to pay you that way. Also considering that currency exchange rates are pretty low these days too.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadif you do it right they’ll be overjoyed to have technical staff who aren’t degree candidates and you’ll get something tasty to intellectually munch on.
In mine in particular everyone has at least a Master Degree with some publications. One of two even got a PHD.
Plenty of good people go straight into industry after getting their BCs. (or avoid degrees entirely) because of this.
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.
Yes, in rare occasions! More frequently without say a higher degree. One that springs to mind is the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford University who read classics for their undergrad but with no further education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Oswald
I know there are other examples but I'd need to google a bit to find them. Notable people who got a PhD without a Bachelors or Masters in the US include Wolfram, so it's not just in the UK where rules get a little bent.
> How can you do a master without a bachelors?
Experience in industry counts if its highly related. I was offered or interviewed for postgraduate courses at the University of Leeds, Oxford University, University of Leicester, and a few others. All in Software Engineering and I eventually accepted a part-time position on an MSc in Computer Science. A bit of rigmarole but not that much - I started the course at 25 with 6 years experience in tech. After some pestering I was able to help with some lecturers papers which led to the whole PhD discussion but dropped the MSc because it wasn't as rigorous as I hoped it'd be (I'm interested in the foundations of computer science and this was more applied). If it helps I've been to doctoral summer schools in both the EU and US without any credentials either!
Maybe the UK is the only place with such ways, I emailed Stanford a while back (I'm moving there this Summer, my partners a postdoc, and wanted to try audit some of their postgraduate CS courses) and got shot down pretty quickly!
I've hired people to work helping support academic projects without ever looking at what their degree is in.
1) It took my boss significant effort keeping her busy with things to do: explaining the problems we needed solved, etc. is non-trivial
2) Since she was working for so little, she could basically dictate what she was or wasn't doing. The very fact that she wasn't on a real salary meant it was actually harder to work with her in some sense.
1) You needn't necessarily restrict this to tenured professors. Indeed, plenty of new tenure-track professors have both the need and startup resources to potentially hire you if you're likely to boost their group's productivity.
2) It's hard to fund people with grant money who weren't written into the grant in the first place. So while grants might be interesting as an indicator of interest, they don't necessarily ensure you'll be hirable. Which means either patience, or hoping they have a small slush fund somewhere - which is more likely for a tenured professor, but not exclusively so.
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 saw me as more of a liability than an asset, or that onboarding costs still wouldn't be worth having free labor. It was an interesting eyeopener.
But since you're experienced, your story is different from mine.
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.
But when hiring I look for other skills and other interests depending on the role and a key qualification is interest in the kind of role.
For me personally, if I were going to go into some other IT fields tomorrow, I’d skip the expensive ass degree period. A lot of IT feels closer to a modern trade than anything.
the lesson should be to value your labor correctly, as large deviations in perceptions of value mean that transactions won’t happen. a more astute approach would be to communicate your (accurate) understanding of your own value and your willingness to negotiate alternate dimensions of value in exchange, like getting experience faster or doing more interesting work in exchange for less money.
tl;dr: establish a common understanding of value, then negotiate.
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"
An engineer needs to be capable of earning their keep. Even if they are a novice.
Basically an internship has to benefit the intern and not the employer. It's akin to taking a class.
Any HR rep looking at these standards would not permit someone to come on for free in these circumstances at the risk of being penalized for violating federal labor law.
Both times it worked, although I had to cast a wide net and wait a little bit. Both were very, very small underfunded companies. I didn't say I'd work for free, but said I was working for the experience and job recommendation more than the money.
Honestly for the second one it was more about the recommendation, of having something to put on my resume other than my own S-corp and what have you. I could get most of the small scale experience myself (although they pushed me into NoSQL, GCP/EC2 and other things I wouldn't have ventured into - and turning mockups into code too). I was very up front with them too - I promised them I would do cheap work for them for a month and would then be open to offers, and if someone wanted to hire me for six figures I would probably take it. Oddly enough at both companies (1996 and the more recent one) I spent about 18 months working for the company before being hired by a company actually willing to pay.
In the recent situation, I also was fixated on a niche which made things a little more difficult for me initially, although now I am better off it took a little longer to get going in terms of getting paid. Small tech companies are generally looking for people who known HTML, CSS, Javascript and web frameworks like React. If you look like, without needing that much help, you can do tickets/stories to implement features on a web site that uses React, and can pass the standard interview gauntlet for that type of job, I think you will find a job fairly quickly.
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 hire is my time, not money.
The author seems to not understand how key money is for the relationship between manager and employee. I have plenty of employee's who'll work on interesting stuff in their own hours, but I pay them so they stay around and do the boring bits like docs, DR, testing, support, bus-factoring.
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 gets much smaller. At the end of the day, once you have a solid product in place you need a lot more people to just keep it running vs. work on some very interesting technical work. I think applied research is the best way to go for very interesting technical work but I think the bar is pretty high for that.
[Disclaimer: by using "you" I am not addressing you personally]
Depends on the environment I suppose. If its a classic but-in-seat, locked down, corporate environment, you're probably still constrained for a similar amount of time.
I actually used to think similarly. I might have worded it badly but when I mean the work becomes smaller I am talking about scope and impact - not necessarily the effort required. The example I can give is what I described above: config changes. At a high level it sounds pretty simple but when you delve deeper into how your company/team works with such technologies then there are many barriers in place which hinder you from getting work done efficiently. And processes are slow. In my old team it used to take ~a month to deploy our software world-wide.
You are correct about financial security. At least for me, I am not comfortable enough taking a risk to start something on my own or make a big career change.
I think the overall goal is that you SHOULD be told what to do - up to a certain extent. I am a software engineer so an example for me would sound like "design me a system that does this" or "a customer is asking for this feature request" and that's it. Everything else can and should be left upon the engineers to figure out. Good engineers will design a good system with respect to time for delivery and feature request compatibility.
Basically just barebones maintenance to keep a product running.
Well if it's freelance work there are situations where the upfront time cost is not massive, especially if it's a task with a limited scope. I know this because I hire freelancers.
But yea, I don't have a bag of small-scope, interesting and meaningful tasks lying around...
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 be happy doing that kind of work part-time and remotely (almost nobody offers part time work) or I might want to do that later in life.
I read a post about Gumroad here on HN, and that's how I want to work. The way Gitlab does it is also very interesting.
There must be other people who feel and think the same, and the post is just a way to try to reach them.
But surely they do a lot of boring work at those companies too, as in all tech companies?
The "needs to be interesting" part is more tied to the "pay what you want" thing.
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.
You read that correctly. The OP said clearly he has no intention to do documentation or testing, meetings, or much of anything other than just write code for about 40 hours and then quit.
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!
people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun. If you are in a position where you don't need to pay the bills with work, then you're in a great position and can have fun all day long - so why not just do that?
If you work on something that also turns out to be marketable then you might even end up with a viable business that you love working on.
If a position across the street becomes available which allows you to pursue a personal goal you aspire and afford your current lifestyle, would you remain at your current "non-fun" job or give it a shot and apply?
Many people don't just get job because they have bills to pay, they get jobs that they don't like because there is no alternative available to them which meshes with their lives.
To an extent, you could argue "that's personal responsibility, everyone makes tough choices".
Then again, the author tacitly references to the fact they were still obligated to physically attend an office space, even though they could their work remotely. Now expand that to the millions of workers who are forced to make long commutes.
So OP is in a position where money is not important to them. So why have a job at all? Have a fun or meaningful hobby instead, or start a personal project.
The author doesn't ask so much for a job, as reflects about something more profound: meaningful, purposeful relationships with others which enables them to manifest their morals, values, identity,...
Interesting work isn't interesting for the sake of spending 8+ hours a day "doing" something. It only becomes interesting when it has an impact on the world which one feels is meaningful.
For sure, a novelist could write books for no other reason then deriving enjoyment of the sheer act of committing words to paper or a screen. But the vast majority of people feel that the things they do in life truly become meaningful when they are seen, used, enjoyed,... by others.
One could argue that one could do so by volunteering, taking initiative, or starting one's own business. However, the vast majorities of opportunities to enter meaningful professional relationships still involve signing a dotted line and a salary.
For what it's worth, many people who don't need the paycheck, or don't need a particular paycheck still go to a "real" job just because the scope of what they can do on their own doesn't match what they want to achieve.
People also join projects to learn things that are harder/less efficient to learn on your own.
I'm certainly not saying you can't do an interesting project on your own, just that many people are interested in projects they can't practically do on their own. Some might scratch that itch with an open source project or whatever, but especially if it requires hardware development, it may not be practical for many individuals.
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.
> That should literally never be the case for a developer though.
After 20+ years I've both been in such a position FULL TIME, as have others (eg: Many devs at ServiceNow) - hired on to work on cool things at an old small company and then literally sat around every day with no tasks and no responsibilities while everyone around me either didn't show up or watched TV on their monitors (open-plan btw).
I've seen big company devs do the same, making up busy-work tasks and literally not committing any code for months at a time playing the priority-game of "wait until something more important comes up, someone else will make a workaround" which was surprisingly effective.
The reality that a developer shows up and have nothing to do happens OFTEN in all sorts of organizations - eg last day of sprint, how many times have you pulled in a new multi-day ticket? Developer accountability is at an all-time low when software developers (across many sub-disciplines) can't make accurate estimates, can't meet anyone's estimates anyway, and are at an all-time-high demand. Managers are in a different boat, but same result. Perverse incentives and lack of a consensus (or willpower) on what constitutes value makes for do-nothing-and-get-paid while someone else does the work.
I do learning in work time. Learning could be backup for when there is truly nothing to do, like when git is down or something. But those chances are so rare, that I have to learn while there is stuff to do.
> eg last day of sprint, how many times have you pulled in a new multi-day ticket?
I was in exactly one team where you would wait on this situation. In literally all other teams, it was 100% normal to work on something multiday for next sprint. And that one team was dysfunctional in more then one way.
That is not the same as having nothing to do.
At a certain "senior" level (in terms of attitude rather than job title) you're expected to be a self-starter and think of things to do for yourself. Once you can do that you have no excuse for having nothing to do.
In reality, for a lot of people, if you start refactoring the codebase while waiting for a new task you are likely to break something and its just not worth the hassle for the developer or the company.
Learning new tools is always great ofc but it can be very hard to find the motivation in such a role, where unless you are a senior developer, you probably won't have much say on adoption, and you will likley just develop a half baked understanding of a new library that you will never get to use in production. Its much better to have some real free time where you can focus on your own projects and learn that way.
So in short, maybe it should never be the case that devs are in that position, but it often is. Especially for devs with less experience
The risk of this is in proportion to the lack of test coverage. If you are afraid to refactor, this should be an indication that you need to apply more test coverage, so do that first.
> If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer.
Don't we already have enough gatekeeping in software development? I don't particularly enjoy writing documentation, despite how important I know it to be. That doesn't make me "not a developer." If I were lazy and simply chose not to do the things that bored me (despite their importance), it might make me a bad developer (or more accurately a developer of bad software).
I design and implement software. That makes me a software developer. The pieces of that process that I find boring or exciting are tangentially related at best.
I think that there is a way we can improve as an industry to let more people specialize into their niches (which would move us closer to a factory/assembly line sort of setup) but right now most developers are artisans that receive some vague ticket and produce code and everything for it as a result.
No. In fact I hope anyone who's actually worked in the software industry would see that we don't have nearly enough!
Look I'll agree with you about the evils of gatekeeping if we're talking about who gets to call themselves an artist or a writer. Those kinds of distinctions rarely create life or death consequences.
But software can. Not all the time, but certainly in medical, airplane control, banking and financial, and many many more areas.
I wish software would take notes from other engineering fields like structural or architectural. Can you imagine an engineer building a bridge who was like "I don't want to do the boring stuff like stress analysis or geological surveys, I just want to make cool shapes and build them!" Can you imagine trusting your life to a bridge built like that?
Software increasingly runs our world and real software engineers who work on things that really actually matter know they have a responsibility to "do all the boring things" because those things are essential to doing their job right. Hearing about major hacks and exploits every day like SolarWinds, Experian, Facebook that expose our personal information and put us at risk makes me feel like we desperately need more gatekeeping in our field to keep cowboys and hackers from getting the chance to get anywhere near these systems.
I've been in this career for 20 years and the thing I learn more and more is that writing code is perhaps the most trivial aspect of what we do. It's everything around it -- the process, the testing, the security, the collaboration and how teams and organizations operate that are the real challenges to be solved. Anyone can hack together some working code. The hard part is the systems and organizational structures in which it operates.
There are plenty of things to work on in software which are of no real consequence, but as the OP is finding it's pretty difficult to find someone who wants to pay you to work on something which has no value. That's called a hobby not a profession.
If they wanted someone to just write documentation you wouldn't be hired. A technical writer would be.
If they wanted someone to just test you wouldn't be hired. A QA person would.
Same for whatever processes you create. They would hire a process specialist.
Same for project management. They would hire a pmp certified person first.
Same for business analysis and business requirement gathering.
As a developer there are better people to do all of those jobs at better rates. None of them can code. That's why you are hired. If you couldn't do that than your qa abilities don't matter.
Things have changed over 20 years. Not every company has a qa team or bas or support team. So these tasks end up being picked up by the developer. Often if this slows development teams are created of non-developer specialists. Some developers end up doing very little coding because your job is to go to meetings about projects that never start. But you are still hired to code they just need you on standby.
Anyone cannot hack together something that works. Only a developer can. A hacker would find ways to use an existing system in an unintended ways.
Gatekeeping over this makes you more management than developer.
The tao of programming has a different understanding of what a developer is and isn't
https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
Well put. Professional software is only a mean for business not an end by itself. I recommend not deriving your satisfaction from code only if you work for a company otherwise you risk to both spoil your hobby and always be unhappy at work.
Probably the best way to apply the “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” mindset, if it must assert itself, is to actually let developers stuff packages or weed the grounds or something else that can clear their minds. :)
This point parallels the distinction made in the Software Engineering at Google flamingo book between programming and engineering. Engineering comprises the tools and processes to maintain software over time (this is a rough paraphrase), of which docs, for example, is essential.
So to use their language with your point: this sounds purely like programming and perhaps not engineering.
Yeah, I can see where you are coming from. Some people want to look for part-time jobs because they want to spend more time with their passions, kids, parents, or friends.
Maybe nothing you want to do, but I doubt there was nothing to do. Improving docs, tests, small refactoring to old code to make it more readable are a few examples.
IMO the boring bits are boring because there's no time spent to make them not boring.
On all layers of society there are tasks that are under-tooled and under-organized and if you make them worth doing, people will enjoy doing them 24/7.
Many people find it very difficult to understand that money is not always a motivator. This is a particularly difficult concept for managers to deal with.
If an employee is not motivated by additional remuneration, or in the case where they do not require an income, the relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally different.
The only times this ever happened to me was while I worked in the gaming industry and I absolutely still had work available - but we had some pretty rough overtime expectations that lead to constant overtime even if a different department was behind.
On principle I would just sit there and relax as best as I could in the office if my team wasn't behind. But, keep in mind, that this was also all unpaid overtime at the employee's expense because thank you EA lobbying and a terrible industry. I occasionally lost money on these evenings since transit would shut down and I'd need to cab home.
Now that I've left the gaming industry I doubt I'll ever be in that position again and I continue to have oodles of work in front of me, though, due to ADD and such - I often have trouble with motivating myself to do the boring bits they are part of the job and go with the good.
The boring bits _are_ part of the job.
> 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.
The part about "in an office" is a fair goal, but if you want to avoid docs/tests/support/refactoring work, don't do this job. Writing code is just one part of it, any way you take it, and avoiding the rest is cutting corners. Even our consultants have to write tests and update docs.
I’m a little ADD, so my most hated work is paperwork and administrivia. Nevertheless, I recognize that it is sometimes necessary (documentation, performance evals, collecting metrics, etc.) and I just get my favorite coffee and suck it up (the work, but also the coffee).
Programmers have arguably the least boring jobs in the world (we can literally automate all the most boring bits except for certain types of paperwork/administrivia) so to hear a developer complain about doing a little bit of boring work smacks of a special brand of entitlement to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> 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.
This only happens at terrible, un-enlightened companies who are more willing to waste both of your time and pay you a little less than they are to either give you meaningful work or let you go to the beach but stay on-call. Bosses should not be babysitters.
If your job is to keep the gold mine running all your underlings are working on the mine. If they go do something else its a waste of your time and resources.
If your job is to explore the jungle for new mines, then the story is very different. Its more about finding as many curious cheap chimps as you can and sending them out in every direction. In such cases imaginative managers use all the chimps they can find.
:)
The most arduous hiring processes are often little more than an illusion of selection, yielding a process that is more the rolling of dice. Most hiring processes hire based upon interview skills that have extraordinarily little correlation with job performance.
Google has such a famous interview process that everyone tries to clone it. For that they get employees with an average tenure of 3.2 years, made worse that internal project-to-project migration is endemic. They have a tiny core of institutional knowledge, and then a passing army of travelers.
This industry would be far more robust if it hired quickly and fired fast, because the only way you know how someone will do in the role/team/org is by actually having them in the role/team/org. Everything else is just loose proxies that do little. Iterate through people and just punt out the ones that don't work. That shouldn't be a big deal.
Agreed 100%. Maybe the fail fast movements in the SDLC, devops, marketing, and product management will start reaching into HR.
But regardless, going through an extensive vetting process is an illusion. It has extraordinarily little correlation with actual work fit or productivity, but the more "rigorous" the process, the more likely you are to stick with a poor fit.
[1] - low performers will hang around forever. The fundamental of the hire slow/fire slow reality is that eventually every organization is 80% dead weight. If you want to avoid onboarding costs (versus dealing with the issues that make onboarding expensive, which is almost always institutional liabilities), hire the worst candidates and they'll be with you forever.
I [luckily] haven’t experienced the scary stuff that people talk about, but a major barrier for students is that PhDs are largely unstructured and require you to take the initiative. Not everyone does well in that environment.
A PhD is about doing research.
Your PhD program is what you make of it. If you are not interested in going into full time academia, the uni will still take your money if you look like a good candidate and can get through the program. I suppose you have to worry about competing with other students if you both are trying to get the one open position with a professor... So make sure you can pay your own way and then you won't be dependent on being a wage slave for the university and all that industry-lite crap.
But really, ask yourself over and over "why do I want a PhD?" until you're sure of the answer - it is 3+ years of your life doing only that and it could be brutal due to the workload etc.
Engineering/CS programs are probably more laid back or less 'political' (i.e. those scary stories) than humanities or other STEM degrees. I have noticed some interpersonal drama in some sense just hanging around the uni these last few years, e.g. students and dealing with them, a general sense of the academic environment. But I make sure to stay out of it.
1. interesting work, checked. 2. part time, remote and probably asynchronous, checked. 3. no interviews, just build the web app or iOS app, checked. 4. probably minimum wage, checked.
There's nothing worse than being stuck in a job where you're watch the clock, waiting for it to strike 5 PM.
Index funds don't always rise and property values sometimes fall. Interest rates are rarely this low. Leverage multiplies both the upside and the downside.
While this is true in the short term, except for very rare exceptions, you'd be hard pressed to find a property in the United States that is worth less now than 30 years ago (which is the standard length of a mortgage). I don't know about other countries, but I suspect it's the same in any modern economy. Land is scarce, and no one is making more of it.
If you have the money to pay off your mortgage, why not buy a second house with it and rent that out? Let someone pay your mortgage while you get the appreciation? Or invest it in something else?
If you do the math, renting almost always comes out ahead of owning, as long as you invest the difference in something that gains in value.
The main reason to own is for psychological reasons. It's great if you have kids and want a place for them, or yourself, to call home.
Real estate looks a lot like the stock market anymore. People value companies on metrics beyond simple revenue, profits, and dividends. With RE, investors understand that wage growth in a region flows into housing at a compounding rate due to leverage and are capitalizing on it.
So long as Seattle or LA have companies that pay above average wages to enough employees, housing prices in those regions should continue to grow at a a rate somewhat relative to differences in wages. What constitutes "enough employees" seems to be relative to how constrained housing growth is. In LA, housing prices are driven by probably the top 20-30% of earners.
The question that ultimately convinced me to just pay off my mortgage was "If someone gave you a house, free and clear, would you mortgage it to buy investments?". My gut reaction was "no, I would really like to have a free and clear house."
I have considered buying a second home to rent, but I have some moral qualms about exacerbating the housing crisis where I live. Furthermore, the stress of tenants isn't something I really want to deal with.
Everyone here has great points about maximizing returns, and I know I will have less money in the long run because of my decision. With that in mind, I am investing about half of my old mortgage payment, and the rest goes to the family vacation fund.
Edit: having said that the difference is not that large (3-4% for the 30 year note, vs. 5-10% for the market return). Also, while I didn't pay off my mortgage, I probably won't put even more money where my mouth is and refinance in order to invest the cash-out into a fund.
Yes, there's always the risk of a downturn or recession/depression that ruins that plan. And beyond that, there is often a great psychological benefit to being debt-free, even if that's not the best financial decision.
However I am consulting a cool startup for free, do code reviews for them for free and could start immediately there with ~8% lower salary but 100% home office. That’s my plan C. Plan B is my own small hardware business selling Raspberry Pi based lidar and radar. I am not far away from the first product. I love these topics and compensate boredom at day job this way. As I mentioned, big Corp does not see interest conflict and I may sell these cool gadgets for wide Raspberry Pi community.
I spent 20 years in the Marine Corps because they continued to challenge me and test my abilities. Some days the work wasn't interesting other days it was really interesting. But it was always challenging.
They always told me what I was going to get paid, but I think they owe a few hours for some overtime I did back in 2005.
How people value you – and treat you – is directly reflected in how they pay you. Working free or cheap actually encourages employers to micromanage and committee review things because inexpensive things/people are seen as less reliable or professional.
If you want interesting work, my advice is to make it yourself. Find a problem you're passionate about and make something beautiful of it.
You'll improve your own skills, have more fun, and eventually employers will be coming to you.
Best of luck with your goals by the way. Avoiding the full time grind in favor of lower time commitments with interesting projects is a great objective.
I'm curious if the lessons learned from OSS projects would apply to work output from this person.
If, however, you're like 99.99% of people and are good at what you do then you'll have to find what is interesting about the job. I've worked at a company that replaced clipboards with iPads in a factory. If all it was to me was a form-builder application and the technology under it I would have been turned off ages ago. But I was incredibly curious as to why the product as successful and growing, what our customers liked about it, and I pushed for developers to visit the factories and see how people used the app. The results were quite surprising and it fed out team with dozens of ideas.
Technology for technology's sake is fun for a while but will eventually bore you. It helps to have a reason to work on what you do. Which I think is part of what OP is saying but I think you can find the reason in a "boring" job as well. You just have to be curious and look for it.
Although avoiding working at feature factories where the developers are just cogs in a Kafka-esque Agile Machine is a whole other can of worms. The OP's strategy seems like an interesting way to avoid it. Best of luck!
(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.)
Header image: stock photo showing tablet running Windows XP and Java application
Article relevance to market: 101%
In all fairness, this is *closes ad popup* an interesting page, thanks.
They would also use mounted TVs and have their scrum around our app's dashboard page which was something none of the developers had thought of.
This reminds me of the advice that one needs to cultivate their passion rather than expect to stumble upon it.
I think the first time I read about this idea was in this article by Mark Manson: https://markmanson.net/question
I am not sure I agree with premise that most of us have put up with the dullest job to keep up with cost of living. There are plenty of tech jobs out there beyond the valley, in other parts of the world which are definitely interesting and pay reasonably above cost of living requirements.
It is not so clear cut to me that mpst don't have some freedom in choosing what kind of work to do without going to the highest paying boring one, tech is not minimum wage sector where we have little to no choice and limited in mobility. The cost of living is not that high that we have zero choice, other sectors don't pay as much in the same areas and they are able to manage after all.
One of my past manager told me that the trick of making a boring job interesting is to introduce a layer of abstraction to the task.
For example, if you have to right a lot of boiler plate code then write a code generator.
Edit: your example seems like a good instance of applying this _well_, but I would not tell anybody this as general advice.
I grew up on a farm. There was a lot of that. It took mental discipline, which most folks may not have an opportunity to develop in this hypercharged media world.
At the end of the day when you have taken a large tree branch and turned it into a stacked pile of chopped wood you feel a sense of accomplishment. It doesnt feel quite the same when you've cleared 4 QA UI tickets.
I'm far from perfect with it, but it has changed the way I perceive work forever.
Can give some practical advice or pointers about how to become interested in something? What do you practically mean by "engage"?
Second point: even though something is "only" in your head, it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to change.
The question then becomes not whether it's possible to become interested in something, but whether it's worthwhile to put your time and energy into doing so as opposed to doing something you find interesting from the start.
Engaging is pretty well understood. Its putting your full consistent attention on a task, and attempting to perform it better.
I find some things interesting at some point, and not interesting at others. The thing doesn't of course change. Its all me.
> Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the intersection of "interesting" work and "valuable" work is pretty small.
Your comment was flagged/dead, but I absolutely think you are right.
Look at most of the jobs today. Laborer, factory worker, package sorter, delivery driver, fast food worker, government process worker, ... These aren't particularly interesting or fulfilling.
Apply that lens to our industry, and what do you see? Plumbing grunt work, glue code maintainer, migration work, form collection CRUD. There are so many jobs that don't do anything particularly novel or exciting. You might even be building something you hate, like ad tech.
I don't think the comment is too off base. Maybe the scale and tone is wrong, but there's certainly plenty of boring work.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26863367
I think they would have better success by actively seeking what they want, though, rather than expecting it to turn up at their doorstep.
Why should we make any compromises on the activity that we'll spend the majority of our lives doing?
I suppose that's the beauty of having the freedom of choice.
I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be able to work mostly in greenfield projects. I worked really hard to get here and keep working hard to stay here.
Interesting is subjective, you can't make every job interesting to every person.
Well it quickly became apparent that that really wasn’t an option for some dumb kid. I had tried freelancing for a few years but got sick of the overwhelming amount of people who just wanted me to update their WP site. After humming around for a year or so I gave up trying for anything greater and just accepted a string of low paying, “boring” development jobs.
> I genuinely believe that for those of us who feel this way, there is nothing else to do but pursue it.
Yeah I’m starting to feel this way again, so fuck it, might as well. I haven’t been nearly as productive as I should have been the past years though. I have a better idea of what I want and there’s really only two choices. One of continuing stagnation or one of putting in the work and attempting to pursue something better. We’ll see though, I’m not betting on anything working out.
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.
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.)
Someone official at YC told me such a story was intellectually-uninteresting, it sucks/too bad, and HN/YC has zero responsibility.
# Red flag