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Ask HN: How do you find a "boring" tech job?

119 points by afflicted ↗ HN
I've worked at startups as an engineer for several years now and I'm sick of it. The stress vs. what I get out of it isn't worth it anymore, and it significantly impacted my health in the process. I want a boring job with boring tech at a larger boring company with stability and predictability. I just don't know where to begin looking. How do I figure this out?

59 comments

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WarOnPrivacy
I'm self employed as an on-call IT guy. I like it well enough. It's not data-entry but it's down there.
hilux
Just apply to a big company. Any big company should do, but to be on the safe side, apply to an IT job where the employer is not a "tech company."

Government and university jobs are boring too!

WarOnPrivacy
> apply to an IT job where the employer is not a "tech company."

Seriously. Yes. This.

Being an IT guy for Med/Auto/Pharma/Law/etc, I wasn't fodder for management. Even in more techy industries (GeoThermal, web retailer) everyone was nice to the IT guy.

hutattedonmyarm
Can confirm. I started working in IT for the university in town and it's boring (in a good way)
pknomad
Seconded on gov.

I work for an R&D company associated with DoE. I don't work more than 40 hours a week and occasionally as few as 20 hours a week. Every now and then I get an itch to apply to a startup and then I remember those 80-hour weeks I used to work at startups.

I think startups are just bad value proposition for most employees. You might work similar hours in IB, but at least you get comped in cash...

oldpersonintx
Apply to Cisco. Not a joke.

But be forewarned they layoff a lot of people (but never for individual performance reasons). But so do most of the boring companies these days.

yieldcrv
Public sector, public sector contracting
washadjeffmad
Makes a great second career to pad retirement, if you can stand it.
pipes
Financial services. Been in this for a few years now and the pension, benefits etc are just way better than anything I've seen at my level in the uk. Great for having kids, 6 months paid parental leave. Sensible people. Older developers. Also the domain knowledge is directly transferable to my own life (understanding financial instruments). I doubt I'll leave this sector now.
happymellon
Seconded. Been working in various parts of banking software for almost 20 years, sometimes startup, sometimes enterprise.

As long as your fine with Java, then there's nothing that terrible with the enterprise stuff, and you'll get more free time due to other people blocking your work.

laylower
Just to highlight this:

  > and you'll get more free time due to other people blocking your work.
It's the single most important part of working in finance. You will have 10 ideas and work you'd want your teams to follow through on and if you are lucky and the stars align, you'll get to work on 3 and 2 of them will be credited to others.
happymellon
Yep, and I have to finish at 5:30 because that's when Jenkins becomes unusable.

It's fine with me. You'll burn yourself out trying to get everything complete and I like have a fixed point where the system becomes too slow and reminds me to log off. And it's really not my fault, I wouldn't do half the things they want us to do, because it terrible "Enterprise Architecture". But they require it, everything is slow and it's not my fault as I've already made suggestions on how to improve it. But I'm not Enterprise Architecture, so what do I know?

CrimsonCape
What does your employment agreement look like? I'm curious if you can obtain a boring engineering job while asserting that "you (employer) will not, nor ever try to assert ownership or claims over code written when not-on-the-clock."

If the job is boring but the employment agreement puts your hobby projects at risk, because they can assert ownership is it worth it?

I'm guessing it's totally boring until you invent a novel algorithm as a hobby, at which point they are suddenly highly interested in being cutting edge and taking your creation.

GaryNumanVevo
+1000 I've advised for a couple of FinTech companies and it's some of the most boring but stable work. Lots of compliance and paperwork, but if you can carve out a niche, you're set for life.
pwb25
shhhh dont tell them
gaws
The barrier of entry is way higher compared to tech, though.
pipes
Barrier of entry to financial services? Wasn't for me!
sneed_chucker
Apply to any SWE/DevOps/SysAdmin/IT role at a Fortune 500 company that isn't a tech company.
al_borland
This could be luck of the draw. I'm at a Fortune 500 company, that isn't a "tech company", and for many years it was pretty boring. However, over the last several years certain people internally have been claiming we are now and tech company and started doing things they think tech companies do. This has resulted in a lot of work and stress, that ultimately doesn't seem to get us anywhere. They keep making us rebuild the same thing over and over again on new platforms. No one actually cares what platform it's on (it's an internal tool, and our internal customers just want reliability and consistency). But each new tech leader comes in, has us re-write on their platform/stack of choice, then they turn that "success" into a new position somewhere else, so we then get a new person that tells us to do it all again. We also have layoffs or re-orgs every 3-9 months, just to keep everyone on their toes.

I assume to escape this I need to go to a smaller non-tech company, but I assume I'd be exchanging one problem for another unknown one.

muzani
Haha I interviewed at one of those. Big corp, wanted to become bigger than Google. They took out all the old boring furniture and cubicles, replaced them with beanbags and uncomfortable tables and chairs. Drab walls were replaced with colorful offices. Suits were replaced with t-shirts and sneakers. Benefits of the lowest level was set equal to the highest (this was probably what increased productivity).

I asked them if they offered a company laptop, they thought the idea was absurd. Some are still writing blogs on how Agile worked for them.

I didn't get a second interview; the first wasn't even technical. I guess I wasn't a cultural fit, compensation fit, or they didn't know what to make of my CV at the time.

octokatt
Consider moving to a different internal department if you haven't; sometimes, a silo of a company gets stuck in chainsaw mode, and the best way to deal (as an IC) is to find a different silo.
skeuomorphism
This is a good piece of info. I work in a fortune 50 with this, but I do some modernizing for the company, to get them away from mainframe
thorin
Problem with big companies is that they are now constantly trying to layoff / outsource IT where-ever possible. They prefer to outsource staff to save costs and cut overhead for accounting reasons. This mean that projects can be quite aggressive and there seems to be a desire to be way more agile and aspire to have more of a startup culture. You can see this in the UK in parts of the government and NHS and also with the big utilities. This means that there can still be a bit of stress depending on the role you are in. Enterprise companies tend to retain high level architecture and governance roles but then they are so removed from what is going on they have little control of what actually gets built, which must be frustrating too!
allkindsof
This must be why there are so many failures in tech across so many industries.

Apply to X for a coasting job where you're sort of prepared when it's slow, but absolutely unequipped to handle situations if the pace accelerates.

pavel_lishin
> I've worked at startups as an engineer for several years now and I'm sick of it.

> a larger boring company with stability and predictability.

I mean, it sounds like you've got it already figured out - don't apply to startups, apply to large companies. Most of them are rather boring, although many have internal politics and other issues that are unfortunately rather exciting.

Frummy
Mainframe is as boring and stable as it gets Have fun or rather have boredom
GianFabien
There's a shortage of COBOL programmers. IBM are running courses to re-skill people in order to keep legacy systems running. Most stress in those environments comes from needing to interface to web-based "modern" systems.
aitchnyu
And of course Indian consultancies separate some of their big "freshers intake" and make them mainframe developers and they dream of leaving in year 2 since its a low paying deadend job.
austin-cheney
Banks, government, military, insurance, and so on.
lupire
I think subby's asking how to find these jobs, not ask about the existence of non-start up companies.
afflicted
Yes, exactly. I know these companies exist, but from looking for the last few days, a lot of them seem to not believe so much in remote work. This makes it challenging for me, as I have a disability (degenerative nerve condition) that makes it physically quite difficult to get into an office. This constraint around remote work is what had me working for startups in the first place
kradeelav
also somebody who's worked remote for the last 5 years partially due to disabilities; there's lots of us out there. like somebody else said, go to the linkedin profiles of the fortune 500 (maybe 1000?) companies and start applying to the ones that filter out only-in-office.

also honestly sometimes even if the profile doesn't explicitly say 100% remote, it can be if they want you bad enough. i got an exemption in my current place that's technically "hybrid only" ... wishing you best of luck.

GianFabien
Boring companies tend to be conservative so would tend to want warm bodies in the office every single day. Perhaps you could benefit from HR needing to provide for people like yourself.
bicx
Large insurance companies have a lot of tech jobs and they are boring as hell.
azemetre
The best is when you join in the middle of a modernization initiative and find out that the only thing accomplished after 5 years was the frontend was rewritten in react but missing 90% of the previous features, every team is using k8s for applications that barely get 20k users a month, and they fired all the QA staff because they are “dev ops” now.
ldjkfkdsjnv
and a bunch of the staff are secretly still using the old tool that was supposed to get replaced
superb_dev
Or a whole new team gets made to create “new tool”, but no one is given time to switch to “new tool”
bionsystem
They are the worst, been there a few times, even as "the devops" you get sucked into while(true) loops of tech changes and everybody rewrites everything all the time to be "cloud ready" and nothing ever gets to production and everybody burns out and leave.

I just dodged a bullet recently interviewing with an old boss of mine who wanted to use container orchestration for a perfectly working set of 40+ apps. They use docker in VMs as of now already, but they absolutely want kube or swarm, the reason being that "it's too complicated to manage the capacity planning for the VMs". Yeah let's add an extra layer of clustering and complexity for internal apps that will never scale just so that you feel good about having "an orchestrator", because you don't want to take a couple days to look at CPU/RAM usage and resize your infra.

bicx
You and I must have worked at the same insurance company. Except my time was before k8s. They had a multi-million-dollar data pipeline rewrite that somehow turned out to be slower than the old one.
jujube3
Big doesn't automatically mean stable. Also, the company can be successful, and yet you may not be successful within it.

Ultimately, you just have to take a look at what you are good at, and what companies are likely to value that.

oigursh
Science & Research Institutes
Mountain_Skies
Keep in mind that when you become an expense rather than a source of revenue, the company is always looking for ways to cut costs and thus your position. Abuse by management and other employees is going to be given little attention. Boring "safe" jobs are often full of managers who wish to be somewhere else but cannot be, either due to skills or personality. In job roles where you're generating revenue, these types of managers get weeded out often as they're bad for retaining the company's revenue generating resources. Those same managers are tolerated and even seen somewhat positively in companies where the roles they supervise are expenses.
taffronaut
This is good advice. There are many boring jobs in 'cost side' departments of big companies and the only attention they get from upper management is a continuous focus on reducing costs. Even the most inoffensive manager can get ground down by having to do more with less every year. IMHO, a sweet spot is rather where you can trace that you contribute to revenue but you are not on the critical path.
listenallyall
Look for job postings seeking .NET skills and technologies. A sure sign the company is on a steady path without tossing everything out for new and shiny, is comfortable paying for stuff, not looking to do anything bleeding edge, little to no open source, and most everything is "enterprise" focused.
leonroy
Could it be the language and framework determines the industry and planning/release cadence too?

I’ve worked in Java most of my career and anecdotally the Java projects were the most well run and unexciting.

The PHP/Laravel and JavaScript projects by contrast were on almost unreasonably tight deadlines, somewhat chaotic (the PHP ones anyways) and high stress.

n1c
Doubt it. For many years now I've had really great PHP/Laravel jobs.
dzhiurgis
Depends what boring is for you.

My perfect boring job was remotely developing a product with solid CI, but otherwise minimal process, which was kinda like a startup.

My most hated job was just like others mentioned - consulting at non-tech company, tons of process, very little done, tons of meetings, hybrid in-person/commute, horrible codebase. It was the most boring time ever because I had to sit countless meetings, gather requirements, fight tons of stakeholders. Whereas with product it was always pretty clear - features were well defined, I could cleanly deliver them in hours or days and just keep ever improving it.

Edit: wonder if you could buy someone's boring business via seller financing.

tonfreed
I got into a bank first as a contractor and then just hanging tight until an internal full time spot opened up. Maybe see if there's some managed services agencies hiring that can get you in somewhere
nullwriter
As most have mentioned, join a big company that is not a Tech Company.

Most of my 10 years has been working for startup size companies. It was fun at times, then it became stressing, too much work, too much time etc. Specially when I worked in a digital agency, working for clients tech products is horrible and stressing.

I finally changed job to a huge company B2B, non tech, but needs tech for their customers. They move SLOW, Steady, and with structure. They work for their own product.

I find that I work on tickets that, in my old job (startup) I would've had to do in a few hours, and here I can take a couple days and open a PR that has been battle tested, done with time, and no stress. Much much better quality.

I love my job now. And I feel I'm actually gaining such a valuable experience! I'm never going back to how I worked for 10 years

kalaka
Why not start your own startup based on your experience working with startups.

Delegate your work so you be stress free, plus you move towards growth

ensocode
From my view this is neither predictable nor stable as mentioned by OP. I can't imagine how this can be "boring". I think boring also means not making decisions with impact
LordHeini
The lazy way: Get on xing LinkedIn and the like. Respond to all the recruiters and let them put you on their lists.

Watit and pick the one offering a boring job at something like an insurance company.

jonathan_h
To clarify, xing is a Hamburg-based LinkedIn competitor.

And here I thought "crossing" LinkedIn was a new slang.

bitwize
Work for a boring company: big insurance, big health care, banks, the government.

Brush up on your Java skills, esp. Java EE and Spring Framework. If you know COBOL, doors may open for you.

smorgasboard
Depends on what you think is boring and if that’s a good thing. I couldn’t go back to endless meetings about what it is I’m doing. I worked at a startup that started employing work-shy middle management types and it destroyed my enjoyment of the job. Just created noise where it wasn’t needed. I can’t do a boring job. Don’t see the point