

Ask HN: a bad ass jobs market? - Tichy

I just started reading "Bounce", which seems to be a variant of the "Outliers/10000h to become great" theme. One thing I saw while flipping through the pages: the "winners" don't only put in more hours, they also try harder challenges.<p>Which reminded me that yes, my day job is probably rotting my brain :-(<p>In fact, a lack of challenges has been a problem with all of my jobs so far. So I had this thought: would it be possible to create a job market exclusively for challenging jobs?<p>Thoughts, ideas? In itself, job markets don't seem to exciting to me, on the other hand, the allocation of resources is perhaps the most important economical problem...
======
mgkimsal
You'd need someone to decide what's "bad ass" to include. Voting/filtering
might come in to play, but it's hard to tell, and you usually only have the
company's explanation of a job to go on (and those usually aren't accurate).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At minimum you will have the experience.

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

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

