1. If I were looking to hire someone and read this, I would immediately be turned off. Why? Because part of being an engineer (or any employee really) is doing a bunch of stuff people don't enjoy doing. This includes:
- Writing documentation
- Writing tests
- Fixing bugs
- Talking to partners about a change/launch
- Talking to lawyers
- etc
So I would be wondering: if you're signaling you don't want to do those things, that means someone else will need to do all that for your code, which is not great for them and tends to be much worse.
Like you're basically saying you want to cherrypick the parts you enjoy and not give a damn about anything else. You might say you're only costing $1/hour but the risk of a bad engineer can mean you're still expensive or a loss.
2. You don't factor in the time cost of me or my team in onboarding you, dealing with you, dealing with your code and so on. That's a big part of the filtering in hiring. People are deciding if they can justify that time investment and the opportunity cost involved.
I don't read this as a signal he won't do the work. From his talk about the stuff he enjoys doing, I don't doubt it includes things that feel work-like. He just wants the work to be meaningful. That seems reasonable to me, and that's how I am. As long as there's some point to the work, I'm happy to do the tedious stuff all day long.
I recently user-tested a job posting for a high-meaning job. [1] Some people were very excited by the meaning, and were strongly motivated to apply. Others cared very little or not at all about the purpose; they worked because they wanted money for other things. Both are perfectly valid ways to approach work, I think, but I would handle each kind of employee differently.
Writing tests and documentation or diving deep into debugging hard issues is what I consider part of "good work" (and that I have also enjoyed doing), and I can't wait to do good work. It just has to be compatible with the rest of life. It's mostly the way we work that has to change rather than the content of the work.
Thank you for the thought provoking article and discussion.
I like to imagine that there is a virtual priority queue of software tasks out there, waiting to be done.
Some of it is feature development, some of it is detailed bug investigation, some of it is documentation, and some of it is user interface work.
What might be incredible would be to declare your interests and skills and start picking from the priority queue, with appropriate rewards as you progress, and at your own pace, knowing that you're contributing back to important tasks of the day. Ideally with a social safety net to allow people to enjoy life and adapt to changing circumstances.
I think I get where you are coming from and am quite tempted to start a discussion.
I'm one of three directors of a small IT company in the UK and I'm feeling more and more compelled to steer it towards more innovative and societally important things. We are very small in the grand scheme of things but you will have heard of some of our customers. I am a pointy headed boss (PHB) who runs Arch Linux on his laptop and has a 3D printer on his desk. I also have a hammer drill and a set of sockets on it at the moment. That's at home.
I could probably find some jobs for you but frankly I suggest you start your own firm/organisation, do your thing and get all the rewards in whatever form that means - may not be financial. You sound very close to having a vision. Focus on what you really want to achieve and do it.
He is 26yo, he clearly states he needs a job, he seems desperate or untenably bored. Not uncommon, to be fair, but this ad is sort of a Hail Mary... so I would NOT suggest him to start his own firm right now... hopefully, next year.
Then I would very carefully reconsider the wording of your article. This article would discourage most recruiters and hiring managers I know.
"You will give me interesting or meaningful work"
To be direct: this sounds entitled. Lots of growing companies don't have the resources to babysit and hand feed work to engineers. They need driven, self motivated engineers who can identify problems and help identify solutions, create and drive projects in ambiguous circumstances, that serve the businesss. It sounds like you're disconnecting from the requirements of a business to succeed in a market. I've worked on teams who got the "only give me the interesting programming tasks" engineer and they are a rot to the company. Whether or not you mean it to, that's how this pattern matches for me. Lots of work isn't interesting and is hard to rate the "meaning" of, and successful teams and companies need this work to be done by the whole engineering team.
"I like Python. I don’t like PHP and Java."
I would omit this entirely, as the language isn't related to how meaningful the work is and contradicts your previous paragraph.
"No technical interviews or coding challenges"
Again I think this shows immaturity and not understanding the needs of a business and hiring. Technical interviews do indeed have all sorts of problems, and they're generally the lesser of the evils of technical interview styles. Not every company has the luxury of "let's hire this person to figure out if we like them" and not every engineer has the luxury of "I'll do an unpaid take home that takes up my time instead." Onboarding takes time for lots of teams in a business, and getting up to speed on the domain of the business is an investment for everyone. Who you hire is one of the most important decisions a business has to make. Having a technical interview process of some kind is important, even if it has challenges to be objective with.
"I will prefer payments in cryptocurrency"
Just my personal taste, this one is an irk to me. It's a sort of removed-from-reality "I don't care about your real world taxing and accounting needs, I like crypto." Most companies flat out won't / can't do this, so it's a weird request unless you're specifically looking at a crypto company.
The great irony of this post is it's all just things you want, and not really anything about you or your skillset. The things a hiring manager or recruiter would actually look for are completely absent from this post. There's a hint with contradictions that you're looking for a mission driven company, beyond that I don't understand the point of this article. It smells of "companies, come to me, I'm special" while immediately setting limitations like "I don't like PHP." The hiring managers I know would say "this person doesn't sound like they know what they're looking for in a company, why would I consider them?" It sounds like you've already checked out from your own responsibility of understanding a company and why you might like them.
Right. The key passage is under rule 1 from the article: “You will give me interesting or meaningful work.”
First, the author says interesting OR meaningful work. So even if it’s true that the developer won’t be interested in, say, writing documentation for a legacy steel manufacturer, this developer might be happy to do so for a good non-profit.
Second, the author never said documentation and the like weren’t interesting. Perhaps that’s true, but Francesco merely wrote that he prefers Python over PHP and had a few industries he thought were interesting.
We all have skills and industries were interested/not interested in. And I think we and Francesco generally recognize some unpleasant work must be done in any field.
well, he just slid down to "more unreasonable" with that clarification :) I can understand a "great coder doesn't want to write documentation" broadcast message, but if you want meaningful work to your standards, it's really on you to find the companies doing it and apply to them.
I would extend the common good advice to employees to this applicant: Offer to your manager solutions to problems, rather than just complaining about problems; managers have enough headaches, what they ache for are helpful employees; this also applies to hiring managers, so find a hiring manager who will want you, don't make him find you.
Then it sounds like you're in the second category I describe above, not the first.
Personally, I'd be unlikely to hire somebody in the "great coder who won't write documentation" category. But I'm happy to help a mission-oriented person find the right thing for them, even if it's not with me. Right now I'm also going to a great deal of effort to find the right people for a role.
And I don't particularly ache for helpful employees. What I want are people who care enough about the problems to think deeply about them and find approaches to solving them that I might never have come up with. And then are intrinsically motivated to see them through. If in that process they come to me with problems, that's great. Solving employee problems so they can get stuff done? That's my job.
Those aren't "issues" with his post. They're just reasons that you would hypothetically (you're not even hiring someone) be a bad match. That's it. Doesn't mean you're bad, doesn't mean he's bad, doesn't mean his post needs changing, doesn't mean your company needs changing. None of that. He advertised himself honestly and it's clear it would be a bad fit.
If your concerns are onboarding process and talking to lawyers, you would be absolutely out of your mind to hire someone who says "I'll work on stuff that pleases me when I feel like it for little money. And no tech screens, please!".
A better match is an owner-run tiny software company. "We have an open source Python client library. It needs type hints. Sound interesting? Here's a link to the repo and some docs. I'll give you $5/hr in ETH up to $100 for whatever you do by the end of Friday." Then on Friday afternoon you maybe have some type hints and pay out up to $100.
I'm picking on your comment in particular, but it's crazy to me how much criticism this guy is getting. He wants to try something new, and so many people are telling him what he should be doing, or why being on the other side of this trade is so terrible. Let's just let them make up their own minds. Let's stop trying to cram each other into little boxes.
> Those aren't "issues" with his post. They're just reasons that you would hypothetically (you're not even hiring someone) be a bad match. That's it. Doesn't mean you're bad, doesn't mean he's bad, doesn't mean his post needs changing, doesn't mean your company needs changing. None of that. He advertised himself honestly and it's clear it would be a bad fit.
Totally. If I retired early I'd still want to work on something. I was thinking the other day what I'd like my next job to be and it involves taking a pay cut, working on something meaningful where I can explore new things, work at my own pace (not exactly a lesser workload but when I want to), and having nothing to do with nonsense corporate structure and culture. Yes, startups are dogmatic in their own ways and would avoid those. Why am I still taking jobs like this from time to time? Because I didn't get there, I can't afford the pay cut yet. Wish me luck.
I suspect dealing with this type of person would become a huge issue. This work request hints at overblown entitlement. I've seen these types in action, the relationship between this worker and the manager/other teammates can turn abusive.
Also imagine the impact on morale of the other teammates when some primadonna gets the cherry picked work and everyone else gets the drudgery. Pay or not.
As opposed to the overblown entitlement seen from managers and leadership?
Typically this kind of setup works best when working independently. However in my experience doing similar setup in tech and other industries, many team mates have been grateful to work and learn from someone who otherwise would not work in their org or team.
It works other way around too, I would happily work in a team for much less pay if I can work with people I can learn from even if they do all the cool stuff.
Also I think he meant what kind of project he will work in not what all he will do in that project. Even if he did mean it that way, it is no different than in many regular roles where Senior ICs anyway pick and choose work they wan and junior members get the grunt work .
I enjoy writing documentation and writing tests. To me, writing documentation is like teaching others about the awesome product / features we have built, and also the different technical tradeoff decisions we had to make.
I can't grasp the mindset where an engineer builds something really cool that they are proud of, but don't enjoy talking about it / teaching people how to use it.
Explaining how you did the thing that you already did cuts into the time for building the next thing. The difficulty that people wrestle with isn't whether or not documenting something is valuable, but rather whether documenting that thing should cut into their sleep, recreational activity, or The Next Thing.
Personally, I'd rather not immediately jump into building the next thing. After having worked on any significant project, I find writing documentation helpful on a selfish level: I use it to wind down and let my brain idle for a while. I don't think it's a good thing to go full tilt from building one thing to the next. It's good to pause in between, appreciate what's been accomplished, reflect on lessons learned, and take a well deserved break. I find writing documentation an excellent vehicle for that.
I look at it like this: explaining how you did the thing is part of doing the thing, so it's not complete until it's explained well enough for whoever your audience is. Not writing documentation cuts into time for doing the thing, i.e. cutting corners.
I don't really enjoy writing tests at the best of times, for example, because I've never had the enjoyment of inheriting a readable test suite. Most of the time you're looking at coverage hacks that test the runtime and, hopefully, cover some behaviour, and you're lucky if they can give you confidence through a refactoring. Mocks and stubs and spies are helpful tools but I've lost count of the amount of times that the actual purpose of the test is faked without anybody realising it.
But now, this time, there is a purpose and also organisational remit to change this situation and I'm going all in on rebuilding test architecture and writing examples of what we want to see. I'm actually enjoying something I never really enjoyed.
So it is with documentation, or dealing with bugs, or tech debt, or anything like that. It's not really about want or don't want, but why... and if you're on board with the why then it's gonna be better for you than if you're not.
That, of course, depends on solid leadership. So ultimately you're looking at how tight your org ship is.
The problem is documentation is a different skillset to coding. Spend enough time doing only documentation and suddenly you're no longer a programmer, you're a documentation writer.
I actually like writing tests and documentation however i end up hating doing it for many reasons
- If I am able to focus on code, documentation or tests, I like doing it. Writing tests is sometimes lot more challenging than writing the code it tests. However context switching to difficult. I hate having to switch between the three
- The pressures of delivery makes it quite difficult to allocate meaningful time for either without cutting into scope.
- If your team does not value both to either read docs or maintain tests it become frustrating to be the only person doing it. If no one values it it can be demotivating.
- I have also seen teams either just focus on arbitary metrics like code coverage but not quality of tests or look at metrics like comment coverage/ number of lines of documentation, not whether docs are useful, how quickly someone is picking up by reading the spec, does it reduce bugs etc, quality and simplicity of language etc.
- It is a constant battle to keep both in up sync since i find it difficult to write code, tests and spec together. Once or twice a month I spend few days in trying to update both, which annoys me as they are out of date and I can only spend so much time on them.
it's almost like a form of solipsistic narcissism (the way The Last Psychiatrist describes it). Nobody else exists except as a supporting role. Why should they have to explain their genius work to anyone...
Or they are stimulated by new ideas and and general patterns? To those kinds of people writing how something that already exists works is supremely boring. It doesn't require narcissism
The difference is in whether you are willing to do the part that is not the most simulating but useful or whether you expect others to put up and do it instead of you.
And generally z others are as bored by that work as you, as simulated by new thing. Pretty often, the difference is not in how much you like boring parts, but in whether you are willing to do it anyway.
I agree the author hasn't emphasised those things. If I was in need of those things, I might not automatically engage with the author.
But, you've given a list of what you don't like doing - that isn't a universal list.
Given that the author asks to be deeply involved in a human-centred project, it is not obvious to me that they don't like or are not prepared to do these things.
The specific list of things doesn't matter. It'll vary from person to person and project to project. The point is, there'll always be something.
My point is that if you're signaling from the outset that you want to cherrypick those things then I, as your employer, don't actually know what you will or won't do. I don't know if you'll follow up on tricky-to-reproduce bugs (as an example) because that's "boring".
That's just creating work and uncertainty in dealing with those issues.
I genuinely think that you are missing the author's point, and thus precisely not the target of this article.
In my reading of the article, I did not get the impression that the author is opposed to the specific, discrete components of the job that he found "lame".
If the demands of the article are truly impossible (socially and/or economically), then I believe that is the *point*, not a criticism of this post.
If you as an employer are not able to deal with the fact that different people have different preferences, you either are running a very small shop (2-4 people) which just makes that impossible, or you're probably not an employer that will attract people who aren't deliberately choosing a "cog in the machine" path.
I want to be very clear: There's nothing wrong with that path. There's nothing wrong with wanting to employ people who follow that path. But making it clear from the outset that he's not going to be a match for you specifically is likely a feature, not a bug.
I didn’t downvote but what I suspect the OP is saying is “I want to hire someone who will get done what needs to get done whenever it needs to be done, not just when it aligns with what they want to do.”
Having just re-read Daniel Goleman’s book on emotional intelligence recently, one important aspect to high EQ individuals is having the ability to motivate themselves to do work that may be necessary, but not necessarily glamorous or fun.
This only makes sense if in aggregate preferences are proportional the amount of work in each area, which is not the case (documentation is the obvious counterexample)
I think you're taking a very black and white view of this.
For example, ANY shop, of ANY size, is going to have issues with tricky-but-hard-to-reproduce bugs. The parent comment is highlighting the fact that they can't be sure if this sort of prima donna is going to be willing to run that issue to ground, or if they'll put up a stink about it being "boring".
Additionally, even if this person were working for free, there's a definite cost to foisting difficult bugs on your teammates.
Do you honestly believe only "cogs in a machine" should be / would be interested in fixing that sort of issue?
Exactly. I hire you (and pay you) to do what I need to be done, not what you want to do. Of course we both look for a situation where there is a lot of overlap in these things, because that means you are a good match for the job I am offering. But it will never be 100%.
I feel you've misunderstood his point. The stuff you (or anyone) perhaps doesn't like is stuff that someone else LOVES. I absolutely love writing docs and tests and fixing bugs, and would be willing to get paid less to work on public code that allowed me to spend what I consider the right amount of time tending to those things :)
Putting this call-for-employers out there signals (at least to me) that he can be a a really good deal if the employer takes it to task to find his complement, instead of creating a scenario where the employer gets to delegate it all wholesale to one person, regardless of their goals for growth and enjoyment. It's upstreaming the concern, and just getting to work on the things he loves at a pay cut for the inconvenience of matchmaking
I don't disagree with your first point but I think much depends on a person work ethic and what it means to them to do a good job. An engineer worth their salt would understand that success is not only writing the fun bits but also: the tests to make sure everything works as intended, documentation for their failing memory and having other contribute, bug fixes because we can't have those laying around, ...
As is, the signal is too weak to know if the person just wants a toy to play with (I doubt) or if they are ready for the full package because they understand it's how it should be done. Definitively a point to check thoroughly before hiring – but it would be the same for other candidates, right ?
This is such a bad faith argument that’s putting words in the author’s mouth. We all just want to be motivated to come to work everyday and be working on a product that we find interesting. I hope everyone understands everything can’t be a toy project (I think people do understand this) and even if something is interesting or meaningful it will still involve some level of “bullshit work” - the stuff you’ve listed. Every job has a bullshit to fun ratio and I think the author wants a fun part that he’s interested in and a ratio that’s acceptable. Nobody expects that ratio to be zero.
Short version, the rest of the team had to pick up all of the things that he wasn’t willing to do. It shifted more burden to everyone else for his benefit and created a terrible team environment.
Are you saying ftruzzi is like a person on your team in your last company and should be avoided? I don't see why you think he'd be "like that", what that'd mean, or really what value your comment is providing. I personally would love to work with ftruzzi!
I was commenting on this part of the post I was replying to. I had a person that fit this profile.
> So I would be wondering: if you're signaling you don't want to do those things, that means someone else will need to do all that for your code, which is not great for them and tends to be much worse.
Like you're basically saying you want to cherrypick the parts you enjoy and not give a damn about anything else. You might say you're only costing $1/hour but the risk of a bad engineer can mean you're still expensive or a loss.
I'm reading your comment before TFA, but in doing so my reaction is Uh what? Interesting can include docs, tests, bugs, partners, lawyers - it's whatever the topic is that all that is the work around. Again, I haven't yet read TFA but I don't tend to think that people seeking 'interesting work' are looking (and I don't personally want) to just crank out code.
In fact, can't we go further? Is there anything interesting about it if you can just crank it out?
The interesting work in my recent memory has been about reading, learning, thinking; not cranking.
> If I were looking to hire someone and read this, I would immediately be turned off. Why? Because part of being an engineer (or any employee really) is doing a bunch of stuff people don't enjoy doing. This includes:
[...list of things that, as an engineer, I enjoy all of, as long as I’m engaged with the project, and none of which conflict necessarily with OPs requirements...]
Sounds like you just read your own stereotype of engineers ans what they like into that.
> You don't factor in the time cost of me or my team in onboarding you, dealing with you, dealing with your code and so on.
Well, no, nor does he factor in the potential value of his work on the other side, either. He offers to do an interview and let you, as the hiring party, factor those things in by setting a pay scale, for which the only up-front limits he proposes is that the hourly rate must be positive. Typically, that’s how factoring in value and overhead works in hiring, the hiring party, not the hired party figures them in and decides if and at what rate to make an offer.
Yep. I've been in tech for 20+ years, everything from a junior engineer to CTO and founder of a small company. A lot of the work is pure drudgery. I'd say 10% to 15% is "interesting." Usually that doesn't last for long.
The way I would sum this up is that it seems like this person thinks of their code as an asset rather than a liability. I think of code the opposite way around. It's not a perfect analogy, because of course the functionality of the code - along with all the documentation and processes to maintain it - is an asset, but the code itself is not the thing, it's just the thing that gets you to the thing.
Writing just tests is not ideal, but writing tests in general can be very challenging and interesting given that you need to understand what the code under test does and figure out (edge)cases to exercise/break it.
Regarding your first point: I want to do those things if I'm convinced they help the "good work". I might not want to clean the dishes but I'll do it until I can delegate it.
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!
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.
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.
Random idle/curious question: "a factory" doesn't describe the roughness of the working conditions, but assuming a baseline of a mildly industrial context, how did you mitigate the risk of dropped or damaged iPads?
(As an aside, it's kind of a pity that there isn't a standard drop-proof tablet out there that can be deployed without thought in these kinds of situations.)
I’ve been on the receiving end of similar requests before.
“I’ll work for free or nothing if you let me do what I love under the umbrella of your organization because I love it so much.”
I did one or two agreements like this and then stopped altogether. The individual would start their work, others would start to depend on its existence and the individual would leave in a matter or weeks or months because something else better came along for them. There was no incentive to keep the relationship going over a longer term. My organization just wasn’t setup to see any upside to short lived but high quality team members.
Is there anyone out there who does work agreements like this currently and benefits from them? Would love to hear more details. Perhaps that feedback could help Franceso with his pitch.
Franceso please come back in a week and let us know what kinds of offers you received. Will be very interested to see where this goes.
I have some similar experiences. Especially with people saying "let me do what I love" or "give me a position where I can learn new things".
People like variety - the initial love doesn't last long. After a few weeks/months it gets boring and repetitive. Learning the shiny new tech is only fun until you you've figured out how it works, but the project doesn't end there and you have to deliver a product in the end. But for most people who exclusively want the "position where they can learn new things" fixing the bugs and doing the finishing touches is no longer fun once they've figured out how the underlying tech works - they leave for the next position where they can learn another shiny new tech and you're left with a half-finished project (usually with subpar code quality because this was the first project they did using the new tech).
But this is my personality. Given repetitive work I become depressed quite quickly. I say this as a 40 yo who understands themselves well. Yes I can struggle through, but this career has brought me to the brink of suicide on two occasions. Working to the grind of an agile development cycle is poison to me, it drains all color from the world. I'd rather break my bones. Where is the space for people of my color? Who dry up and die if asked to write boiler plate crud code and unit tests for fizz buzz UI elements.
Unless I'm solving a problem that's genuinely intellectualy stimulating then I have 0 interest in coding.
Most of us hide the misery because we know that the only outcome of airing it is dismissal either in the short or the long term.
There is no role for us in this career but having sunk so much time into it we have no other option but to keep on going.
You have to do your own thing ... usually that's bad advice but for people with the temperament you describe I think it's reasonable.
Also a lot depends on expectations and finding good partners. In a previous job I worked with another guy as a team. I would start projects and get an MVP out and delivering value - then move on to the next thing. He would go through and essentially rewrite them to be high quality, solidly engineered products, well integrated with the rest of the stack.
We both got to do what we enjoyed and were good at: I am very fast at breaking new ground and delivering new value, and find engineering a bit boring. He was very good at improving existing systems, but too slow and plodding to try out new ideas effectively.
i have the unmet rambling dreams of the first person, and the anxiety-driven perfectionism and revulsion to poorly written code of the second person... so i'm unhappy thinking about unfulfilled ideas, unhappy writing new programs, and unhappy fixing old programs.
"i can only do so much and of course it's never enough"
i want the perfect programming language, the perfect gui library api and theme, the perfect program, the perfect ide... and i can't accomplish a single one
and of course C++ is an all-devouring Cthulhic monster that does everything but poorly, Rust has immature gui libraries and doesn't fully align with my values and desired features (I want linear typing, strong typedefs/subclasses of integer types, polymorphic variants/anonymous unions, prioritizing iterator generators over async), qt is basically legacy code and Qt Widgets is mostly unmaintained but difficult to fork (to build, create Windows installers, and convince Linux distributions to accept behavior-changing bug fixes), and my personal dream project (https://gitlab.com/exotracker/exotracker-cpp) is vaporware no matter how much i burn myself out making it (trying to both explore new ideas, and engineer them well, at the same time).
I don't think so, most teams never do the last 10% on any project ever. They pick the low hanging fruit with the first 80% and if they are thorough they might bring it up to 90%, but 100%? I've never seen such a software project.
> Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.141592653; it was last updated in 2021.
Personally I love doing the finishing touches but I'm usually not allowed to because the feature or product is considered good enough. It's hard to find a job where everyone really care about quality.
For side projects, I think there is some value in not being concerned about finishing them. If you're doing them for enjoyment then they shouldn't feel like a job.
But I find defining exactly what done will be on a personal project helps a lot to get completed. I define features are the minimum necessary and once I reach those features I immediately switch to trying to release it. Releasing is always a lot of work so it's easy to put it off forever while constantly iterating on a product. But actually releasing gives a good feeling of accomplishment.
Here's a couple of thoughts. Sometimes not following through might not be about feelings or at least not directly. If you do a project to learn some new tech then the project is not about what it does but about how to do it. So make sure you pick side projects that you think need doing. Find a partner or a group to do the project with or create some way that you make yourself accountable for it's completion. Who are your projects for? If it's for yourself, then is it something you really want or maybe just an idea? If it's for somebody else or some group then create a connection to that group or some people so that you know who you're making it for and include them in the project. That way you have someone to deliver it to and to continue to support. Lastly, maybe it's a decision issue. Maybe you just never really completely decided to do it. How do you know when you've decided to do something?
When I get stuck on projects that are very meaningful to me, I chip away at the pieces I don't want to do and allow myself to take as long as I need to complete them.
When I get stuck on projects that are not so meaningful to me, I reduce scope.
The obvious elephant in the room is how can someone afford food and rent while working on $1 or whatever. If I was a hiring manager I would assume one of 3 things: 1) He is independently wealthy, 2) He lives in a van, or 3) he really expects $50/hour and this is some sort of bait-and-switch strategy.
I'd also suggest people making these requests to try and expand their interests to make themselves more rounded and valuable. For example I'm totally the kind of person that likes to jump from one thing to another cause I like the challenge and I get bored quick otherwise. But instead of jumping ship cause the challenge is gone I try to find a different closely related challenge.
Here's a couple of techniques for anyone looking to do the same:
1. Look at the 'supply chain' of inputs and outputs from your problem area. Are there new inefficiencies somewhere in the stack that you can dig into and solve, and leverage your new knowledge. This could mean a whole new area of things to learn in order to investigate or solve those problems.
2. Never accept the status quo. Every time you're asked to do something else, treat that as an opportunity to find one thing that you can improve in the related systems. Here you'll learn the new system, but you'll also learn how to pick worthwhile areas for improvement.
3. Be reflective and review what you found interesting and what you didn't and dig into the ones you didn't find interesting. Ask yourself why you didn't like things; was it cause it was too difficult to pick up? was it cause you don't like people problems? was it just too big a problem to tackle? Dig in more and ask why again (like the Toyota 5 Whys). Eventually you should be able to find a problem area that you can clearly define and potentially work on to improve.
I realize these 3 techniques won't necessarily lead to 'cool tech problems', but that's kinda the point! If you can get yourself interested in solving related problem areas, you'll find you pick up a lot of useful knowledge and value that you can apply in many other areas you wouldn't have first thought of, all while always jumping between things and not getting bored!
Seems like a weird idea to me anyways, to offer to work for very little money or even nothing, as long as the work is interesting.
To me it seems that time is much better spent on a fun personal (side) project. And who knows ... maybe the side project will earn some income in time.
I did something sort of similar. There are limits to what you can do with a side project, and joining a company gets you access to other people with different skill sets from yours.
In my particular case after finding a good fit with a small startup I told the CEO to just pay me as little as he could reasonably justify and make up the rest in equity (which I was fully aware would likely be worthless). In a different framing, I was "spending" my missing salary by "hiring" some people to do the work I wouldn't want to do - pitching deals, forming business relationships, and negotiating contracts to get me the data that I actually wanted to work on.
But that's not the idea is it? The idea is to define the terms, and see what the bids are. Perhaps, if the bids are too low, the decision would be to 'pay oneself' (spend from savings) while working on said side project. But the point is simple - an attempt to find a union of two interests at a price that makes sense.
Same, sometimes people volunteer to help me code https://coursemaker.org for free because they like the idea. In one case this has worked out well. But in a couple of others the engineers have vanished quite fast. Sometimes I wonder if I made a much more serious effort to onboard/document/give ownership then would they stick with it. What do you reckon - how was the onboarding in your case?
A generic advice: 15 years ago I might have felt similarly, but now I think it's the other way. If you want interesting work, demand higher pays and try to get into such positions.
When you're highly paid you will get more interesting work, because the company will see you as a valuable asset that should be working on "hard" things. When you're being paid a penny, the company will think you're worth a penny and will assign you menial tasks.
BTW I didn't really live up to my own advice, either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's not just about pay it's also about earning respect (by delivering good and making valuable contributions to the team) and your relationship with your manager. My manager literally asks me, "What do you want to work on?"
In my experience it's more to do with whether you've proven you can do a particular type of task, and do it well. Project managers will then give you that type of work because you're a safe bet.
I've worked with people in the past who felt like they weren't getting any of the interesting jobs. Their solution was to go to their manager and complain that they were being passed over. But if you're not proven at a task, then you're a risky bet, and you'll only be picked if there's no other option.
My advice to those people (and this won't necessarily work in all industries) is to make yourself less risky. Share a weekend project with the team where you worked on the sort of problem you find interesting, and make sure it's good enough that it gets people's attention. If you can make some important people say "wow, I didn't know you could do that sort of thing!" you'll probably notice you start getting more interesting jobs after that.
This is what I found as well. At high pay, you may be getting into building MVPs and prototypes - these don't require "boring" things like extensive testing or documentation.
The board will see that their idea works and then only "boring" part is hand over to dev teams to "productionise" it.
It's almost funny how this is the polar opposite of what you often want when hiring. You're hiring to add manpower to tackle the kind of unexciting tasks that you don't naturally find people drawn towards from your existing team (and then, people's responsibilities expand, or they turn 'boring' work into interesting work by redefining the problem or attacking it on a deeper level).
When you have a growing business, money is probably not not the primary concern, but the last thing you can afford is someone on the team being picky about which tasks are beneath them.
No judgment here, I understand OP's sentiment, but I cannot remember any situation in my career where 'hire me, I only work on what I find interesting but it'll cost you comparatively little' would have been an exciting proposition (on the hiring side).
I'd put it a bit differently than the OP - for me interesting and meaningful work means that it's actually benefiting society in some way. That would mean that even the 'boring' aspects would have some kind of meaning ("we're trying to cure X" or "We're working to help solve global warming"). Too much work now is just trying to sell stuff to other people, get people to click links, get people riled up so that they're engaged with some social media platform - it's not helping us as a species.
Hire me and provide a steady stream of well-defined work is what I'd settle for.
I'm currently about to abandon a 12 month contract about 3 months in because it's become apparent that the company didn't actually want a "DevOps" position, and I was hired as part of some incredible misconceptions about the regulatory environment they operate in by the managers who created the position.
The problem isn't "being bored" for me, it's feeling like time is passing slowly. I don't really care what if at the end of the day it's a surprise that it's all of a sudden 5pm.
If a company is trying to hire people to do the work that current employees don't want to do then it sounds like they have already hired the wrong people.
As a company grows, all sorts of new problems open up that your current employees might not be a great fit for. For example, you might not need a DBA when just starting out, but when your database reaches a certain size it might make sense to hire one. Or you might need to hire a middle manager once you reach a certain size - but all of your initial hires prefer individual contributor roles. Or maybe you need someone with a strong background in security to be able to pass an audit.
It doesn't mean that you hired the wrong people. Just that your needs are changing.
I'm sure there are organisations that would love to have some technical volunteers. Maybe try and find NGOs you believe in and send them a private or public message?
Or, if you want to get politically involved in your country, you could try and find yourself a political party you believe in, ask them if they have any technical tasks, and see from there.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> This whole thing is not about money, so what the work is about comes first
There is a profound mismatch between what this person is offerring and what anyone would want from a developer, or even the core requirements for effective software development. I'll pass.
I am most curious about the "no technical interview" part and "my work speaks for my skills" while OP's GitHub is just forks.
This all really reads in an uncomfortable way and I would never risk investing into somebody by guessing if whatever I need done, as a business, will be interesting enough for this person to put genuine effort into.
I feel like OP needs hobbies to get the fun/interesting itch scratched and then go back to being a "code monkey" like the rest of us, doing "boring" stuff to pay the bills.
I've been there myself before and the most valuable lesson I've learned is that motivation != discipline. Motivation comes and goes and if you base your productivity solely on that you will burn out. Being disciplined though allows to get the "boring" out of the way first, leaving lots of time to explore other interests.
> I am most curious about the "no technical interview" part and "my work speaks for my skills" while OP's GitHub is just forks.
On Github you have to fork a project first if you want to create a pull request. I randomly opened three of the forks and saw that he'd made pull requests for two of them.
I fully understand the way forks work - what I found troubling is that for somebody who is dying to do something interesting, for close to no pay, there seems to be little indication of them doing things out of pure passion/interest as is. For somebody expecting me to hand pick things that are super fun to work on there is not enough incentive/conviction for me to trust this person and/or invest any time into onboarding/managing them. That's literally why you get paid "the big bucks" - the employer can demand specific things without having to depend on your mood and attitude towards task A.
The only thing I can suggest to the author is what others have already said - go in to academia/research and volunteer your time to selected interests.
One scenario in which the author's attitude and desires could work is if he starts his own business and focuses on the fun things while paying others to do the boring stuff. But then again - building a successful business to achieve the luxury of total choice takes a lot of "boring" work beforehand.
I confess that I have trouble seeing the logic in wanting to work for someone for free. Maybe as a short-term learning thing if a temporary position can be structured that way legally.
But, by and large, if you don't care about being paid, why not just work on your own project. Because there's pretty much no such thing as a 100% no-BS position anywhere.
There is a UI problem on GH with forks. (From my limited experience) most profiles that are full of forks the person just uses forks like they would stars. No branches or PRs made. I'd guess, cynically, this is to fill out their profile.
On the other hand a profile of meaningful contributions looks the same on the surface.
I've made a habit of deleting my forks after the PR has been merged upstream to the main repo.
So I'm actually in the position where I do have meaningful contributions to open source projects, but my Github profile doesn't show it (unless you look at my contribution activity).
Without a need for money, I need to rely on this person's ability to be a professional out of the goodness of their heart. Nothing in that post or their previous work says I can rely on that. Frankly nothing in the post or their history shows they have the ability to deliver value that outweights the headache of planning, managing, and integrating them into an existing team knowing how fickle the relationship can be.
It's not similar to a contractor relationship, since there there's at least contracts and deliverables that give some clarity to planning.
There is an interesting question about whether they will contribute valuable work, knowing that they probably won't be that professional as you say. When I don't care about quality I can often produce really good results early but that might not be conventional or that maintainable. Maybe it's healthy diversity in approach for a company, better at writing interesting prototypes than a final product?
It seems that if you want to be supremely picky about what you do, and don't care what you get paid, then the obvious answer is to just do your own side-projects, open source them, and have a paypal tip jar where people can send you some money. This pays closer to the $0/hour side than the $100/hour side.
You might also consider working on side projects with an emphasis on them making money, but then I think you'll quickly find that you'll be required to do work that you don't consider fun and interesting, so you'd probably have to give up before it got far enough to become an actual money-making venture. So again, closer to $0/hour.
Or maybe you'd like to do contract work, but again, to fully complete a project for a client is most certainly going to require that you do some work that you don't like, so I don't think anyone is going to pay you for delivering something that's only partially complete, so again, $0/hour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
> 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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 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.
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"
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I wish you the best of luck. I can relate to where you're at.
One thing that I have been doing, my entire adult life, is shipping product. A lot of "ship" is not fun. There's all kinds of boring stuff, like good design (as opposed to "just enough design to get started"), good coding (as in "code I'll understand when I come back to refactor in three months"), good quality (as opposed to "Who cares? I'll be out of here, before they run out of integer space"), good testing (as opposed to "I'll write a few unit tests that show it handles low-hanging-fruit problems"), accessibility, localization, aesthetic design, supporting documentation for users, administrators and developers, etc. You get the drift. Lots of "not-fun" stuff, there.
For me, I've always enjoyed "finishing" projects, and that means shipping them, so users get their grubby little paws on my work, and start abusing it (and, sometimes, me).
I'm taking on a CTO role (I've actually been doing it for months, but we're formalizing it). I was asked to write my own job description. I used words like "Accountable" and "Responsible" a lot. I got used to that, working for a Japanese corporation for 27 years.
Not fun. But I get to run the whole show, and ship. That's my idea of fun.
Oh, and I totally relate to the thing about LeetCode interviews and whatnot. I have tens of thousands of lines of code, ship-ready projects that people can clone, build, and run, dozens of articles, etc. It has been my experience that these are totally ignored; which I consider...not sane.
I have found the greatest pleasure in writing software that helps people help people. These organizations don't usually get "top-shelf" talent, so they tend to have a great need.
I'm not primarily a financially motivated person. And I would prefer to spend my time doing something interesting. But in my experience, taking on some one else's projects that are interesting but not well paid has always gone badly.
Positions are usually low paid for one of two reasons: either there isn't a budget for it, or there is but they're being cheap and cutting corners. If there isn't a budget, that's a sign of a failing organization or a bad startup idea, so probably not a job you should take. If they're being cheap, that's a sign that they don't respect or value the people doing the work, which is a huge red flag.
I've taken jobs that were essentially volunteer work because I got to work on projects that were interesting to me. I've also taken jobs that weren't that interesting to me which paid generously. In the end, much of my volunteer work wasn't valued, and seen as disposable. The more highly paid work never got interesting, but having a decent amount of money took off a lot of the financial stress and ultimately made me happier and enabled me to spend more of my free time on things that interested me.
At this point, no matter how interesting, there are only two people I would do underpaid work for: myself, and my grandmother.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Have you ever worked on something interesting or meaningful at a job? You list a bunch of random topics, none of which are inherently interesting or meaningful. I've worked on flashy projects - most recently self driving at one of the bigger companies doing it. Guess what? In an eng org of hundreds, at least half the people were still doing shit work that had nothing to do with self driving.
Beyond that, if I want to hire you for interesting work, it falls into two buckets: mission critical, or irrelevant. I can't hire you for mission critical work because I have no confidence you can do the job, so I can only hire you for irrelevant work. If I hire you for irrelevant work, it makes me no money, so I pay you no money. Why even have this arrangement? Just go start your own side project - at least then you own it.
Consider this: join a company doing something you don't like (making an absurd amount of money because of the industry), demonstrate/develop your expertise, identify the parts of the company that are interesting to you, then go work on those. People doing interesting satisfying work didn't just get there accidentally.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like you would be better off finding companies that interest you, and inquiring if they would be willing to hire you as a part time contractor.
What you’re proposing here feels like such a deviation from the typical hiring process that I just can’t imagine many companies going to the effort of making you a personalized proposal just for you to turn it down as not interesting.
Being unable to find anything that interests you also comes across as a bit of a motivational problem that could scare companies off from investing in you (if not with money than with time).
Just my two cents. I don’t consider myself an expert on interviewing or hiring, so I could be wrong!
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.
Question for the author: would you really work for $1/hr? Why? That’s essentially zero, and for zero you could work on whatever you like all day. Is it being part of a team? Being able to say you have a job (and put in on your resume)? Is it that you don’t have your own ideas of what to work on?
A lot of people are saying "I would never hire this man".
You're looking at it wrong. The idea is to find interesting problems that have unknown amounts of ROI but should still be tackled by someone. Give him some cash and something interesting to chew and see what he comes up with. It's kind of like tending to a houesplant.
If he produces nothing of value, then fine you know the idea was probably a dud anyway, but you didn't have to spend any time on it. And if he does spawn something of value, you can take the work and have more qualified engineers work on it full time.
Personally, I find the best use case for people like this is to throw ethically questionable tasks at them. Stuff you shouldn't really have a full time employee doing, but would be perfectly fine outsourcing to a contractor who works off the books.
Getting paid appropriately to do work that you genuinely enjoy is a privilege. It certainly is nice if it works out that way, but most of the time it does not. A lot of the work that needs to be done in the software world (that pays well) is just not terribly interesting.
My work is not always very exciting, and that's okay. I work normal hours and have purchased my own beautiful home at 24. After work I have freedom to do whatever, and enough money to pursue pretty much any hobby that I want. My employer sponsors books, courses, and conferences, and provides great healthcare.
I would rather have a stable, but boring, job over being broke and working on something interesting.
Interesting thought experiment! Let's take it one step further. Can the "pay what you want" value be negative?
As a manager I would be responsible for providing you with a steady stream of interesting or meaningful work. I would have to structure the work to fit around your flexible schedule, shield you from doing the parts you don't like, and change it up if you start getting bored. But I would not be able to rely on your output for anything mission critical.
How much would you pay me to provide this service to you?
(Please take this as tongue-in-cheek not as a snarky comment, it genuinely is an interesting thought experiment despite the obvious issues it raises).
You raise a very valid point and yes, it could be a net negative.
However, what I was trying to do here is to reach organizations or people that already work the way I'd like, so that work is already organized in a flexible/async fashion and the arrangement can be a net positive for them.
And I think you should apply the same reasoning to the definition of "interesting work" or "meaningful work". Try to see the big picture, from a bird's eye view: a piece of work can be interesting or meaningful even if it has boring parts. Almost anything has and we probably wouldn't be here as human beings if we couldn't handle that. Carrying sick people up and down the stairs is strenuous (and repetitive?) but can still be a net positive because you feel so good for helping them. Same goes for writing software or any other kind of work.
I think that, as a manager, you should not shield me from the boring parts of any work but you should make sure that my overall "working experience" is a net positive for "interesting" and/or "meaningful".
Given he seems to have a pretty low tolerance for boredom, I'd expect any potential employer to worry about this: What if he starts working for me, and a few months later (after having started some big refactor job for example) he decides it's no longer interesting, and leaves for someone else paying 1$ an hour
Consider academia. I have a very similar opinion to you about interesting work (less so about meaningful). I was working at Google doing web development even though I have a security specialty, everyday was like pulling teeth. It is just not worth it and I'm not sure it is sustainable for me. Academia has always been appealing because you dictate research direction. I ended up going from part time, to 80% time, to full time over a year and a half for a small company. My work here is mostly interesting and I'm happier than I've been anywhere else.
This guy worked in my team for a long time, and by writing this post he gained back my respect.
While I think he is a missed opportunity for consensus-workplace-realty in which we live, anyone that sets their own rules and principles and firmly acts from there is worth my esteem, especially if those principles don’t hurt any other being and on the contrary represent an element of novelty in the too constrained way we look at the world of work.
Clearly he has to define better what he can offer vs what not, for in every contract or exchange of whatever good the rules have to be well defined on both ends.
What employers often don’t take into account is how costly lack of motivation is.
I’d rather find 2 Francescos than hiring 20 standard employees that work just for money and are guaranteed to either stop producing quality work or leaving the company after a few months, years at the best, bringing back the cost of hiring someone new over and over again, or even the cost of keeping a bad hire (especially with the EU regulations)
There’s no price for talent mixed with a clear statement of interest in doing only something exciting, especially when you make the price… you’d have to be a fool not to try out someone so sincere and willing to put on the table their intentions, and then take it from there.
I might be wrong of course, I work for the biggest corporation out there and don’t hire directly, but seems a good deal to me!!
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.
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.
What you propose sounds great but I think your article works better to find like minded people who share your thoughts (definitely count me in on that) than to find some work offers.
Maybe with HN's reach you would find something, but I think a normal contractor's pitch + vetting for interesting jobs would work best.
I would also recommend looking into building your own project
My way of dealing with this problem has been:
- Do contract work and vet the work; worst case scenario, you can drop off with some notice and not much will change. I did some employee time but that was mainly to get benefits (eg. paternity leave) and some fixed money for a period of my life I knew I wouldn't be very productive in
- Raise the price of my services; this tends to filter out the worst jobs, albeit VC funded startup and rich tech companies have plenty of money to waste on chair warmers. Established mid companies without funding doing something you care about and with a remote first culture (pre-COVID and post-COVID) work best.
- Build your own project, add almost-passive revenue streams; outsource the boring bits you don't want to do
- Save money and try to reduce your expenses so that your passive revenue streams need to cover less money (making it easier to survive on passive revenue)
Not a recipe for optimising for wealth, but for freedom.
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.
I definitely sympathize with the author's dissatisfactions. It's difficult to find meaningful, interesting work that pays well, and when you find yourself sacrificing one part of that equation, it can be very disheartening.
However, the answer to this is not to just cut out the "pays well" part of the equation and assume that the rest will follow as a result. As others in the comments here have pointed out, interesting work is hard to find, full stop.
I would actually think that the non-conventional nature of the author's offer would actually decrease the quality of the work. In my experience, work can be enjoyable based on two dimensions: the technical aspect of the work (am I learning? is this engaging?) and the "organizational" nature of the work (is the company well organized and run? are there clear expectations? or is there just chaos everywhere?). Even if work you can find from this kind of offer is better on the first dimension, I imagine it'll be far worse on the second dimension.
That being said, I hope the author proves me wrong and finds a work situation which makes them happy. Good luck!
It's baffling to me why so many in this thread are so cynical, when burnout and bullshit like being a "passionate" engineer are so hyped. Of course you need to do some things you might hate doing in any given job. But, software engineering is a stressful and often times unforgiving drudgery. The vast majority of startups and companies serve the most vapid or ethically questionable markets, or are totally opaque in terms of where your value goes. Every startup ever asks you to "believe in it's mission" and that's typically to acquired (but ostensibly to change the world, through handcrafted advertising). If you do participate in the drudgery of programming for one of these hapless corporate entities or pointless startups too long, especially with no other personal reward than money, the thought to end your life or switch careers might cross your mind frequently. Good job OP, I like the idea.
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.
I think there's no really "boring" developer jobs. There are strict jobs (where you have very little freedom), and they can be more boring, but if you get more freedom, even a repetitive job can become interesting, by finding and making the right tools to automate more, etc..
The most interesting thing about this is that the writer is in a position to be able to work part-time for only 10 to 20 hours a week at a very low rate.
I imagine they are not supporting a family or a mortgage, or if they are they must have a significant alternate source of financial or housing security, and that's not a bad thing.
I wish more people had the ability to put out such terms for their employment without worrying about keeping the roof over their head.
They would likely have to drop some of their more naive requirements though (i.e. no Java or PHP, only "interesting" work). The road to interesting work is paved with the mundane, no matter how cool the job or technology is.
I can understand not wanting do maintenance, but I also wonder: How much is there to be made from dealing with all that legacy stuff from the last 20 years? I suspect it’s a lot.
Ignoring the money for a second, I think for some people (author clearly aside), maintenance work can be the interesting work. As long as there's buy-in from the business side of the house – they understand the goal in its full extent is to reduce technical debt and increase future development agility, and that there will be no visible changes to end users – it can be very rewarding to refactor old code.
Yes! Maintenance and refactoring is a huge creative opportunity, if management isn't thwarting you. Dismissing languages and maintenance outright makes think the author is just difficult to work with. Even in modern places, maintenance and refactoring simply need to be done every so often. That's part of the job, we can't only work on things that we want on someone else's dime.
Looks like you're a decent enough coder, you're still young, and you want something interesting to do. Why not start one of the many startups that people here on this site tend to start?
I work on my own project mostly, at the expense of not earning almost anything. (I freelance to earn money and spend minimum time, to have most time for the project).
Some of the work is exciting, some of it is boring, but I like it on average. Though it's much different when there's a goal in mind (to finish your own project). It's still good in a way, because I think, ok, I will work 2 weeks on that boring stuff and can't wait until it gets more interesting, then it gets interesting and I have my reward, back to the boring stuff. I find that this chase of seeing completion creates the passion even for the boring stuff.
Of course I don't want to keep it up endlessly. I will either try to turn this project into a product and see how it goes, or I will open source it and get a full time job (freelancing is a bad strategy for building a business by the way. If I could go back in time I would never start freelancing, but get a full time job and make savings if I wanted to start my own business).
I will second what others have said, start something yourself in your free time. Get a boring job that doesn't require much time if you don't care about the pay. I think there was a popular thread about that recently.
Or maybe change your industry, i.e. game dev. From what I have heard, the pay is low, precisely because there are a lot of people who want to do it just because they are passionate.
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.
When I found myself with a mandate and a budget in a previous company, I set out to hire a team. The health, happiness, and productivity of the team overall was my top priority. In terms of budget I didn't think in terms of what I got from any one individual contributor vs. what I paid. Rather, I assessed the cost of the total team vs. what the business was getting from that team.
Francesco's experiment seems to rely on an assumption that he can bow out of things that teams typically need their members to do (such as daily standups) if he accepts less pay, as if the team-level work could somehow be parceled out and evaluated in a piecemeal basis in terms of budget. The issue with that is that there is a level of engagement that is non-negotiable in a team. If I thought Francesco would act as a force function for the team and help them be more cohesive, faster-moving, and results-driven, then I would bring him on-board and pay him comparably to what I paid the other members of the team who were producing equivalent results. If Francesco decided that he didn't want to do the sorts of things that the team required of him to be an active and productive participant in the team effort, then to me Fencesco's value could very well be negative.
You're never going to find a job that's constantly interesting and fun. Even if you love doing something normally, there will be days when you have to do it, and that will eventually become unpleasant.
Don't strive to do what you love, do what you take pride in. When you are working towards a goal which resonates with you personally, all the tedious, unpleasant, painful moments and all the other obstacles in your way just make your eventual triumph sweeter.
The project I was working on was moved from Milan to Poland in what was most likely an effort to downsize the project and cut costs.
Odd choice of location given that hailing from Poland and having lived in Italy I had an opportunity to compare costs of employment and generally they're not that different.
Perhaps Milan is exceptional - can anyone from that location tell me whether €60k annual costs of employment are considered a lot for a senior developer?
Not sure how reliable is this info, but Glassdoor suggests that salary in Milan could be slightly lower than what I would expect from average software engineer in Poland.
I'd imagine that what you get for $25k/yr in Poland is way better than the ROI on $30k/yr in Italy. Depends on the stack though. Most corporate Java people earn peanuts here.
It's also likely that they replaced a well compensated engineering firm responsible for setting up the project with a cheap team handling maintenance.
$25k/yr is a junior level pay in Poland (at least in larger cities). You can double that with a few years of experience, and you'll likely top off at triple that unless you work remotely for a US company. Most of the local work is the typical satellite office stuff though.
That being said it quickly puts you in a very comfy financial situation, with very little risk and standard working hours.
Could you imagine a hiring a general contractor for your home renovation business with this sort of attitude? This person would be an instant liability. I can't imagine any instance where I would want them doing free work for me, bouncing from one half finished task to the next when it became boring for them.
Hell, I wouldn't even let them wander around my jobsite for free.
The entitlement in this profession is sometimes truly astounding.
If you want to do only what you find interesting with no pay, make an open source project.
If you want some pay, start your own business. Yes some parts are sucky, but you can freely choose between doing them or letting your business fail.
If you're working for someone else, why would they hire you to do just the interesting work? If it was all interesting they would just get free labour.
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.
So many responses here are of the type: "My org couldn't hire someone like that for legitimate reasons". They then list a series of fears they might have with such an employee. This is typical engineering thought, a pessimism firmly rooted in avoidance of problems. Engineers tend to focus on what can go wrong so that they can avoid negative outcomes. One myopia of our discipline is we don't often consider "what would the world look like if this went better than expected?"
So my advice to the OP is to focus on opportunities and positions that do not require going through engineering gatekeeping. Other disciplines tend to have more optimistic viewpoints and tend to be more willing to accept risk when they feel there is potential for high returns. I would recommend finding small startups that are looking for part-time engineering folks.
My thought was that many responses are of the form "well good craftsmanship is boring and not 'interesting' - that's why we charge money for it" and I'm glad to have found lots of people that I DO NOT want to work with.
Good craftmanship - writing tests, documentation, making sure something works and actually ships and gets out the door - now that's interesting and rewarding. OP is trying to avoid those organizations that get caught in the trap of "we don't know exactly what we're building, so we're going to write some tests" or "well we could ship now, but we should probably add some more features just to be on the safe side." Places like that would be really boring.
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.
I completely understand wanting a gig like this if you are a dev. But it seems to be missing a key truth of hiring - I already know a dozen brilliant engineers who would jump at such a gig. If my company supported setting this up, I would go with someone I already know and love, not risk it with a stranger.
the point of work is to provide value to someone, in exchange they give you cash. That someone, can be anyone in the world or any people except for one person, and that's you (the worker). the point of work is providing value to someone else, not entertainment to yourself: that's called play.
I think it's great that we have a balance between work and play or maybe even have a life of just play and work on whatever fun stuff you want. You don't need an employer for that. Just know the difference. If you're going to have fun programming and entertain yourself, just do it on your own.
Employers need people to do boring work: maintaining existing legacy systems, fixing bugs, doing the last 20% (which takes 80% of the effort), to get things working perfectly for as many customers as possible.
I'm in the same situation Francesco is in. Other than a short gig in the Fall (for some people who knew my capabilities, hence no interview required) I haven't worked for pay in over a year. Fortunately I'm in a position to be able to not work as my spouse has a job with health insurance and we've got a decent amount of retirement savings.
> Work takes up such a big part of your life that what you do is terribly important. I’ve been contacted by many companies and recruiters during this time, but the idea of going back to full-time work doing something I don’t care about or is not technically interesting just scares me.
Yeah, scares is a good word here - I feel the same. I get contacted by recruiters and they describe the job and I get that dread in the pit of my stomach. I've been in tech for 30+ years, I've seen all kinds of companies, situations, bosses, coworkers. It's all a roll of the dice and from my experience the odds aren't on your side.
> 1. You will give me interesting or meaningful work
I tend to think that there's just not a lot of funding out there for the most interesting and meaningful. I had a job doing software development for an alternative energy company. They never got to stable funding and folded. That was interesting, meaningful work, but they couldn't get money to keep it going.
> 3. No technical interviews or coding challenges
I have reached this point as well. I'm tired of the interview game. Just done. Can't do it anymore. The thought of interviewing makes me physically ill. I like to say that I'm retired form interviewing not software development.
> 4. You pay what you want, per hour
I'd work for $50K/year if the work was interesting and the people were nice. Heck, maybe even less than that in the right situation.
In the meantime I'll be over here working on stuff that I find interesting in languages that I like (and aren't necessarily in demand). And gardening. And baking bread.
Just a technicality, but if he sets the number of hours a week, then he is still somewhat in control of his own paycheck. If I were the employer, I'd want to set the hourly rate as well as a fixed number of hours per week, or at least a max.
I think the author is getting stuck in tactics, not strategy.
Problem: OP does not have the freedom to pursue what he finds interesting.
Tactic: Given existing work arrangements, attempt to negotiate a setup where he can just work on what he wants. If the employer changes its mind, OP gets to restart the cycle.
Strategy: Avoid having this problem in the first place.
A sound tactic but there's one issue: high-paying jobs, in time, often turn into a sort of "golden cage", which makes you unemployable and vulnerable to lay-offs.
Anecdata:
A friend of mine worked in banking where the pay was amazing, but the tech used mostly outdated(think Java 6 in 2018). At some point he got fed up with all that and tried to switch roles, but to no avail, because no one would hire him.
He's still there but should a recession come he'll be in a very tough situation.
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.
The CV is fine (I wouldn't put DuoLinguo as a proof of English fluency however, this is borderline) but the attitude is difficult.
I'd prefer a guy who has fun solving hard problems, like say, "how do I convince people more senior than me to follow my advice", rather than someone saying "find me a cheap job where I don't have to deal with snobbish seniors".
Find a way to build an inner child, something that makes you happy to learn in any condition even conflict. I can be insulted by a colleague and still find the experience an interesting challenge: how to make this moron either like me or do what I need him to do. I wouldn't quit, I wouldn't ask the company to fire him.
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
You'll never find a job that meets these requirements, but you may find a job with good co-workers, a boss who is decent and a healthy work environment. To me, that is nirvana. Just like in a marriage, there's going to be good and bad times. It's the people that make those rough patches bearable.
Sounds to me like you just want flexibility and the opportunity to work on things you find engaging. Don't expect 100% of that all the time but I do think if you look hard enough, you'll find what you seek.
part of my company's long term onboarding of this prospective employee will include an intensive course in Buddhism, with the purpose of slowly teaching him to find something interesting in everything he works on. I believe that within 6 months to a year we can have the perfect highly competent employee, willing to work for very little and doing whatever asked of them because every task, no matter how mundane, is filled with interest.
If you learn how to find what's interesting about the dullest of topics or tasks, you will never be bored a day in your life. I enjoy taking on tedious tasks that few people want sometimes. Being able to do something and do it well despite my brain yelling at me that it doesn't like it brings me satisfaction. Also, after a while my brain quiets down and starts enjoying itself. Perhaps the author should try this more often.
I've asked dev shops to feed me work with no standup or meetings, just send the spec and answer my questions. Nobody will take the offer, even if I am willing to do 2 guys work for half a guy's pay. I have no way to explain this, but it seems like standup meetings are more important than anything to most employers. Best of luck, please post your results if you actually get work that wants output and not hangout time.
Hiring is a lot of the times more about finding someone that'll fit in your current team than about an individual with a lot of skill/enthusiasm. You don't sound very reliable and that would be my main concern. Even if you were working for nothing, it would still be a waste of the time invested if you are just going to leave in a month or two.
You should go into academia. I think that model is more what you are looking for.
I'm an academic, and I do not think it's what he's looking for. Most Ph.D. and postdoc-level research involves much less flexibility and much more tedium than it sounds like he's looking for. The overall project should be very interesting, yes, but the day-to-day work usually still requires plenty of boring bits. And while I'm sure there are some labs that would allow remote work on a flexible schedule, it's not the general culture in the places I have experience. CS might be different--it's not my field. But I'm skeptical.
I have a phd and have postdoc'ed at a couple of places also. I am now in industry.
Sure, there are boring bits. But I think what he is more looking for is being able to explore the space and more open-endedness to projects, which I do think academia affords. It might also mean he'll never really produce anything and keep going down rabbit-holes. But that can be enjoyable.
Pie in the sky. Any realistic employer reading this plea should be turned off fairly quickly. Typically, it's a red flag when an employee gives an employer ultimatums while already in their employ (e.g., give me a raise of x amount or I will quit). This post is an example of a potential employee giving ultimatums to a future employer before they have even been given a job.
Thats a strange way of thinking about things. Why shouldn't the employee have power in the relationship. Employers are always giving ultimatums, no-remote, remote-only, 40 hours a week, $X/hr. But the employee/employer relationship is really only an agreement to do X much work for Y money. Everything else is secondary. Why shouldn't an employee's secondary concerns be just as important as the employer's secondary concerns ?
I want to be able to have more autonomy on how to do my work. Take a piece of code (large or small) and relentlessness make it better. I don't want to have to explain my self for every little change. I want to be able to deploy my changes every day. I have a grand vision on my head and I want to make it happen. Second guessing my self of what others think, drains my energy.
I dont understand the OP and others who feel it is soul crushing to do stupid tasks.
For one, whats the big deal? I can put in the difficult hours and continue. Secondly, often, what is considered inefficient and stupid is not, or just cant be done better because organizations are not perfect.
Having said that, OP, I have lots of respect for your strength to go for what you want.
now here we go, I had this exact same feeling after doing a contract job recently. I'm going to place this url (https://truzzi.me/hire-me-pay-what-you-want-interesting-work...) into a db and start a site and also add my own profile and... wait, how will this different from linkedin? its like at some point, I need a MOTIVATED programmer that will give me that 24/7 move mountains full effort. Like there is famous James Cameron quote while he was filming 1997 Titanic movie, something about his top professionals needed to play like it was the superbowl. So like how does a company hire that vs. its all on them to make US interested in the project? I'm just playing devils advocate. I think there is a happy medium somewhere.
If I could make this work for myself, I would. But "interesting work" often arises out of interactions with others and it's not like there's always a pile of interesting work just waiting for someone who wants it. I'm afraid that it's just not this simple most of the time.
Wanting to do interesting work and not caring about money is the perfect environment to start your own project/service/company. If you want to work for others (especially on a contract basis), don't expect groundbreaking work to fall in your lap.
If such a well-qualified person wants to work for any wage, it will distort the market in the first place (i.e. clients will be even less willing to pay decent rates if people with his qualifications work for any amount). Why doesn't he work for open source projects on his own initiative and at his own discretion and try to finance himself via Patreon or similar? Or he could solve interesting problems for companies at his own risk, let the company check the suitability of the solution (initially as closed source), and then sell it for a fixed price "as is" (including source code). This way the company can save the specification effort, is more willing to outsource the project and the consultant can demonstrate its qualification directly with the solution and the speed with which it develops it. This has worked for me for many years, and I don't have to convince my customers with cheap rates.
I very much appreciate the poster being upfront and taking his shot. From the point of view of a hiring manager though, why would he not think that the second OP stops finding the work interesting that he will just ghost?
It is interesting how many of the responses to this here say some version of "our industry is mostly boring". That has been my experience of the industry as well, unfortunately.
In a similar venue, I'd really like to get some 4-6h work done per week as freelance projects, but it is very hard to find the kind of work that fit short, weekly hours like this
The author of the blog graduated high school in 2014. I would really like to see his blog again in a few years to see if he still feels the same way about work. :)
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.
There is something in the second paragraph that made me read it four times, I think, until I was able to read the rest of the post. The author somehow manages to turn around the fact of being laid off into freeing themselves from the "golden handcuffs finally". No matter how I read that paragraph, I can't help the feeling that the author misses the point:
the author did not make that decision, the author had no choice
But what's not landing with me: when the author had the choice, because let's face it, nobody cuffed the author to the desk, nobody forced anybody to do the boring tedious work - the author did not make the decision but rather was prolonging in that, what is portrayed, uncomfortable situation.
The rest of the post paints a portrait of a person who doesn't know what they want. No commitments, no responsibilities, one side wants without being explicit what they can give back.
I think that the key to this post is the paragraph starting with "Accepting a job offer is a bit like getting engaged or married:". But it should be rewritten like this:
> I know (I) will have to make compromises to make it work, but I should not go for it unless I am 100% sure and obviously I should not marry someone I don’t know. If I do, chances are I will end up being unhappy for a long time or staying with them for longer than I want, because I will get used to the day-to-day and the “rewards” while still getting to know them. When I begin to have an understanding of who this person really is, I will already be invested and leaving will be hard. Many never leave(, I never left and I was hurt because I was laid off while unprepared). For a company however, it is much easier to stay with someone who is unhappy in their relationship [with the company itself], because it’s a one-to-many relationship. They have many other employees they can rely on, and an underperforming or unhappy employee can be easily shadowed by better or happier ones without the company suffering. Is it starting to feel dysfunctional?
In that context, the last question could be the writing on the wall. I'm sorry if I come across as condescending, this is my interpretation: this portrays a person who openly admits is not able to make a commitment and is uncertain of their qualities.
The rest of the post suggests the person is looking for a quick fix instead of long term solution. Today they may like this, tomorrow that, today they do something for someone who pays $1/h, tomorrow maybe something better comes through so screw that $1/h. "Didn't like it anyway and you knew the rules so it's your fault".
I like author's rules. Assuming they stick to them. It might work for some companies so good luck.
As a side note: I was hoping to find the info if the person can raise invoices. Obviously, paying invoices in cryptocurrency might not land well with local tax authorities.
"But what's not landing with me: when the author had the choice....nobody cuffed the author to the desk".
Golden handcuffs: a phrase first recorded in 1976, refers to financial allurements and benefits that have the objective to encourage highly compensated employees to remain within a company or organization instead of moving from company to company (or organization to organization) (opposite of a golden parachute).
Surely you can relate to someone taking a job they might not love because it pays more right? I think the main point he's trying to make is think twice before doing a job you hate, just because it pays more. Life is short, your job takes up a lot of your time, so consider doing something you enjoy...even if it pays less. That part at least is good advice I think.
> Surely you can relate to someone taking a job they might not love because it pays more right? I think the main point he's trying to make is think twice before doing a job you hate, just because it pays more. Life is short, your job takes up a lot of your time, so consider doing something you enjoy...even if it pays less. That part at least is good advice I think.
That's correct. I can relate to someone. I repeat from the sibling comment: Maybe the post leaves too much in the unclear. It's not obvious if this is the author reflecting on the past and making up with their inner self or if it is simply taking out on the world. The post doesn't answer any of that.
Because of that, it's not possible to make a judgement why the author did not consider their own advice while at that previous job. If life's too short, why sticking up for until being laid off?
Golden handcuffs means to leave would mean giving up too much money. I think it’s understandable behaviour. It would be financially irresponsible to quit a job that pays very well, especially if you’re not sure of landing another one. Being laid off, however, takes you out of the dilemma, so feels like a relief.
That's right. Thank you, I know what the phrase means. Don't get attached to me simply using their words to make my point.
The point is: instead of making a change, they waited until laid off. So in the end, it's somebody else's fault, like this: "I don’t want to talk too much about it, but let’s say my boss didn’t care about doing good work and didn’t know what good work looked like."
Maybe the post leaves too much in the unclear. It's not obvious if this is the author reflecting on the past and making up with their inner self or if it is simply taking out on the world. The post doesn't answer any of that.
Rarely met a postdoc doing interesting work; it's more about "earning your way" (i.e. to be abused for all kinds of tasks) with various professors in hopes of having your own academic career.
Edit: we've had to warn you about this multiple times in the past. Fortunately it looks like you've mostly fixed this. If you'd please stay on the desired side of the line, we'd be grateful.
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).
1. If I were looking to hire someone and read this, I would immediately be turned off. Why? Because part of being an engineer (or any employee really) is doing a bunch of stuff people don't enjoy doing. This includes:
- Writing documentation
- Writing tests
- Fixing bugs
- Talking to partners about a change/launch
- Talking to lawyers
- etc
So I would be wondering: if you're signaling you don't want to do those things, that means someone else will need to do all that for your code, which is not great for them and tends to be much worse.
Like you're basically saying you want to cherrypick the parts you enjoy and not give a damn about anything else. You might say you're only costing $1/hour but the risk of a bad engineer can mean you're still expensive or a loss.
2. You don't factor in the time cost of me or my team in onboarding you, dealing with you, dealing with your code and so on. That's a big part of the filtering in hiring. People are deciding if they can justify that time investment and the opportunity cost involved.