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Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
2022 points by lmueongoqx on April 7, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 1091 comments
Hey HN,

I'll probably get a lot of flak for this. Sorry.

I'm an average developer looking for ways to work as little as humanely possible.

The pandemic made me realize that I do not care about working anymore. The software I build is useless. Time flies real fast and I have to focus on my passions (which are not monetizable).

Unfortunately, I require shelter, calories and hobby materials. Thus the need for some kind of job.

Which leads me to ask my fellow tech workers, what kind of job (if any) do you think would fit the following requirements :

- No / very little involvement in the product itself (I do not care.)

- Fully remote (You can't do much when stuck in the office. Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect.)

- Low expectactions / vague job description.

- Salary can be on the lower side.

- No career advancement possibilities required. Only tech, I do not want to manage people.

- Can be about helping other developers, setting up infrastructure/deploy or pure data management since this is fun.

I think the only possible jobs would be some kind of backend-only dev or devops/sysadmin work. But I'm not sure these exist anymore, it seems like you always end up having to think about the product itself. Web dev jobs always required some involvement in the frontend.

Thanks for any advice (or hate, which I can't really blame you for).




This is an awesome question. I hope someone has good strategies for you. Life should be spent doing the things you find worthwhile, and the fact is, not all of those things are monetizable.

Given how esteem- and success driven HN as a platform is... you might not get too many ideas since I suppose people want to maintain their "hireable" status.

Success and "loving your job" are more or less empty phrases unless you are actually a professional moving your field forward or learning a highly complex subject matter - or you own a stake in a company.

Beyond that you are toiling, and if you like your job, it's glorious toiling like gardening (pleasing, but not important, but you love it, so it's great) or terrible toiling for living that eats your soul.

I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work since the tech stack is complex and fugly. I probably _appear_ motivated but I'm just a neurotic who hates failing. If I didn't need to feed and house my family I would have moved to a lower paying position long ago that is intrinsically more motivating.

Success and "loving your job" have nothing in common in my experience.


> I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work

There's a class of "crystallized intelligence" jobs which are about what happened before rather than what you do today. There's an intersection between that sort of knowledge and a certain fluid intelligence to slot it in where things fit.

I'm in one of those jobs right now, where the last six years of what I've read/absorbed is more valuable (as a sort of fast cross-reference in my brain) than what I actually do right now. I'm the guy with the picture that's on puzzle box, rather than having to place each puzzle piece.

I've tried really hard to make myself obsolete and do something else, but it has backfired spectacularly.

I've written down all of this in documents, trained other people to do the same thing over the years, even built tools to replace the easy parts (right now there's an intern doing the next pass of that automation) the effect of which has been to lighten my workload even more & I'm not missed if need to take a couple of weeks on a roadtrip or something.

To do this, I've had to do something which is not volume driven (i.e my output is not a factor of time), so moved away from building web applications to profiling/optimizing all kinds of networked applications, where the ability to cut through the stack is useful, but for any given layer there's someone who does it "professionally".

This is of course not a long-term parking spot for me, but I'm useful and in essence acting as "an elder" store of information about the past & a slightly clearer view of the future.


This reminds me of advice I got from the VP of Eng at my first real full time tech job. This was back around late 1999 / early 2000. Peak of the dot com era.

He told me what most people think of as job security is totally wrong. If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. But if you're constantly teaching and sharing that knowledge you become incredibly valuable to the organization. That's when you have job security.

Since internalizing that advice, I always try to work myself out of job by ensuring I share anything I know. And I always pass this advice along to others. As you get more seniority in the organization, the way to have more impact and scale is to work through others by sharing your knowledge and helping them get better.


At one of my old gigs, I asked my then-colleague a bunch of questions about the codebase for a task I was assigned. He was always like "you are a senior resource, you should not ask such questions; if you want to find answers, look into the code itself." This is how he keeps his status and job at that company, and he is still there now. When I enquired around about how he got that tribal knowledge of that codebase, I got a fascinating answer: he asked his ex-colleagues at the same company, the same kind of questions I asked.

Unless one joins as an intern at some company, there are gatekeepers in most of the companies, who don't want to train you at all. Instead, they criticize any attempt to find answers as "hand-holding, fake, inexperienced, etc."


>you are a senior resource, you should not ask such questions; if you want to find answers, look into the code itself.

You should never tell anyone they 'should not ask such questions', but I will absolutely tell you 'hey, go read this code / documentation and it will help you understand'. Mainly, I just want you to show me that you've at least attempted to solve or research the problem yourself. If you've done that I'm happy to help. Unfortunately a lot of Jrs straight out of school seem to expect to be spoon fed answers, and it makes me wonder if college has changed since I graduated.


Most work knowledge now is google deep, but even back to the 80’s I encountered a lot of college grads who did not want to read the code.

A lot of it is intimidation, they’d never seen a printout stack of 50 or 100K eslocs. Kids today never start with monolithics like that but they do get swamped by the fifty layers/packages that change every year.


> it makes me wonder if college has changed since I graduated.

Or how you have grown since you graduated.


Learning “on the job” is an anachronism from the days when companies invested in their employees and employees stayed in the same organization for their entire career. We’re moving towards the gig model, even calling programmers “rock stars” to sell it.


This is profoundly true. It's also one of the reasons I want to get out of IT after 20 years. I'm past the point where I'm tired of the meetings, false niceties, and desire from management to submit to the hive mind. Nothing worse than stand-ups, Teams or Google Meet meetings. No one wants to be in them. It takes time away from my job where I could actually be productive. This is why I really like the videos from Patrick Shyu on YouTube (Tech Lead). He gives the skinny on working for companies like FAANG and in general. I don't always agree with everything he says, but I've seen much of what he says.


Honestly, I feel like much of what you don’t like applies to other industries as well and is not tech specific... human nature..


It’s not human nature it’s management consultancy culture. Fuck agile


Surprisingly a lot of folks on my past and current teams haven't figured this out yet. They still think the manager who promises them a promotion next year is going to be around by then.


> there are gatekeepers in most of the companies, who don't want to train you at all.

This is fear mongering for the juniors. Most people don't help because they don't get asked. Juniors, reach out and I will help. I'm the kind of person that is sociable and helpful anyway though.


There are plenty of people who have "closed the drawbridge behind them once inside." They don't want to help, or think that you should figure it out yourself or should already know the answer etc.... They forget that they were newbs once too.


It goes both ways,I suppose. I'm more than willing to teach anyone who is willing to listed what I know, but some mutual respect is needed. I remember a meeting, where I got asked to get someone up to speed with some core concepts. I thought,OK, that's fantastic.I prepped the plan, go to him and tell it'd take him about 20h of his own time to go through the stuff.. 'Oh no, I thought we'd be done in 2 hours'.. Sure, I can teach you in 2 hours what took me 5 years to learn..


It varies widely by company and by person. The unhelpful senior trope is not a myth.


It depends. Sometimes the answer is obscure because of our setup - like you'd need to know to look in the other repo. I'll always tell you that, and point you to the doc and the problem-list to update in case the doc is wrong.

But, if you ask me a question where the answer is in the code, the proper answer you seek, in the detail you need, then I'm going to ask you to read the code first and only ask me what's left.

Perhaps the story is true as retold, or maybe the original guy asked about the right things and read the code for the rest, but people watching from the outside couldn't tell and conflated it all, turning it into a story of ladder-pulling bitterness.

That doesn't really ring true for me because I want coworkers taking responsibility for these odd systems (that they have to find me to ask about). But I don't want to be stuck in the role of their System-X guy who they get to do their changes. This guy's incentive would be to walk the line, educate and hand-off.


>He told me what most people think of as job security is totally wrong. If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. But if you're constantly teaching and sharing that knowledge you become incredibly valuable to the organization. That's when you have job security.

Sounds like the VP of engineering was doing his job quite well. Set up new hires to share everything so when their salary becomes a burden you can "sadly let them go" when "necessary downsizing" occurs because they've given away the farm.

Don't get me wrong, I spend a ton of time mentoring those around me, but there's no planet on which I would give a document dump of my personal notes, ever.


Aviation engineers guard their shit and embed themselves like ticks. Access databases, spreadsheets, Fortran (like old ass fortran spaghetti code), servers under the desk. All this was common at GE.

They know what happens when you don't hold the company hostage. Nearly all of them retire and then "consult."


That's not necessarily the case.

Any personal notes are, by their very nature, shorn of the full context you have. They are always data, sometimes information, but never knowledge.

I once left a job where I had taken pains to document everything, to regularly teach what I'd worked on, and to help everyone, even beyond strict software functions, familiarize themselves with the systems in play as needed.

Were they glad I was relieving them of the cost of my salary? No, they were mournful. I would not be there to continue to draw connections between disparate items and serve as a voice of organizational experience. No amount of notes would replace my ability to, mid-meeting, say "That won't work" and explain why. Someone who had invested real time in internalizing those notes might -- might -- get there, but it would be difficult.


> If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability.

Sorry, this is just wrong. You are a liability if someone thinks about you that way. Fortunately, not that many people are like that. In Contrary, if you are the only one to know something then you are regarded very highly and almost untouchable.


If you know something no one else does... sometimes the management is kinda aware that it's a problem, but they are too busy doing something else, so you can keep your job for decades with minimum work.

And sometimes you know something no one else does, and you want to share the knowledge, but management says no, because having you talk to someone else feels like a loss of time when both of you could be developing a new functionality instead... and then one day you leave, no one reads the documentation you wrote, and your successor ends up reimplementing from scratch everything you already did.

Sometimes it seems to me that the perception of your importance is proportional to the number of bugs in your code. If things keep breaking and you keep fixing them, you are a hero, and the company wants to keep you. If things work flawlessly, company assumes that it is easy and that you could be replaced at any moment by a random person who walks in.


> Sometimes it seems to me that the perception of your importance is proportional to the number of bugs in your code.

That's incredible, isn't it? it's one of the many possible manifestations of "worse is better", I fear.


It depends quite a bit on what it is you know, and what it pertains to, and how problematic it is.

If you guard the knowledge to the core application for how the company makes it's money, you're not going anywhere.

If you guard the knowledge to a component used in that core application, which while it's problematic to replace could be swapped out with a lot of effort, you are going to be walking a tightrope. As soon as it becomes more beneficial to replace that component than keep dealing with the problem of it being hard to deal with (because if it wasn't your knowledge would have little value), you're faced with the fact that a large chunk of your value to the company has just been obsoleted with it.

So when taking the hoarding info approach, just how irreplaceable is the thing you're guarding knowledge of? Often it's far more replaceable than people think, and often becomes more so as people hoard knowledge of how to deal with it. Unless you're that guy that's on call 24/7 to immediately deal with a problem, the fact that it all relies on you which is unsustainable will eventually come to light.


If you're the only person who knows something it can also mean you end up in a rut. You can't tackle interesting new stuff because you're stuck looking after the old stuff that no-one else understands.


When I assumed my current position,the first thing I told the owners of the business is that the biggest risk in the business is me and that the company should work towards getting someone in, who could partially cover some aspects of my job. They understood it well,but probably not too well, however some attempts were made to address the issue.


Can I ask why did you do that? Was it so you could divide & delegate your work to underlings? Or was it so you could be totally free from the position one day?


The position I assumed is pretty senior- I report directly to the CEO. As part of the change,I still retained some of my previous responsibilities+ gained a whole lot more. I did it for two reasons:

1) it was the right thing to do,considering the situation. My approach is always to be open about issues within the business, even if it's my own department. This isn't university liked by my colleagues but appreciated by the CEO, as he knows I'll tell the real situation rather than that with a pink filter.

2) I will move on, sooner or later, and I'd rather have someone in place before that happens. I want the company to be successful in the same way as they've given me tons of opportunities that I successfully used.

3) There's a considerable backlog of things I need to do at any given time,so having more resources would free up my day+ speedup certain developments in the business.


Exactly, that's the reality at majority of companies.


I'm in this boat right now-ish. I don't want to be the person who only knows somemthing. I'd rather delegate it and then if I get sick I know someone else can cover the work needed to get the job done.

I just recently had my first junior developer assigned to me. Learning how to mentor, teach, as opposed to just getting a task done is harder than I imagined


> Learning how to mentor, teach, as opposed to just getting a task done is harder than I imagined

I've had the good fortune to inhabit a mentoring position twice in my professional career. Both have afforded me opportunities to teach new people as each business expands.

I find mentoring incredibly rewarding. But I also naturally enjoy spreading knowledge (I considered a career change to teach history at the university level, but didn't want to pursue the academic credentials). It's not just teaching the tech that's rewarding. I also enjoy sharing time management techniques, tips for writing solid documentation, and pointing out how to avoid gotchas that I've run into in my personal experience.

What I absolutely don't want is to join the ranks of management. A buddy recently moved up and he now spends almost all of his time in meetings. When he isn't in meetings, he's responding to the many people who need his attention for one thing or another. I wouldn't find that the least bit fulfilling.

This is what strikes me as tone-deaf about the grandparent comment with regard to "loving your job." I love my job because it pays well enough, I like the people I work with, and it doesn't intrude into my "real life." I hated my former employment, where ambition was a thing, because it dominated my life. It paid far better, but I was unhappy overall. What I have strikes the right balance, and that's rare enough that I treasure it.


Yeah, and it's particularly hard when you're still ultimately responsible for the result, but others are doing the work. That certainly brings some amount of stress. But also the money gets bigger and bigger.


"If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability."

So I had that philosophy when I was in the Marine Corps, well because I wanted my Marines and myself to survive and carry out the mission.

Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job.


> Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job.

If you're working at a functional organization that rewards growth, never sharing knowledge will ensure you put quite a low ceiling on your advancement.

I've written countless promotion justifications. Been on countless promotion review boards at several very successful tech companies. Being the best programmer, or what ever, is only going to get you so far. Advancement comes from teaching and leading others. You do that by sharing knowledge.


Ohh! Promotion hacking.

There was a broad HN discussion about this here on HN late last year [1].

And the top comment [2] is worth repeating here

  Here's some of my learnings about getting promoted for those that really want to play that game:

  - Only the perception of your work matters
  - Attend the social events and get in good with the bosses
  - The countability of your major achievements is important. Make the list long, too long to hold in the mind
  - At the same time the gravitas of your best achievement is also important since that will be the soundbite that is shared about you behind your back
  - Get allies who can proselytize about you behind your back
  - Be the best. The difference between one and two is bigger than that between two and three, as far as promotions go
  - Take credit for your work (use pronouns I and Me when talking about your work, not We) and do not allow others to take credit for your work
  - If it's a teamwork situation with other people on your level, don't do most of the work, because the credit will end up being split 50/50 in the eyes of the bosses even if you did most of it
  - Make a very good first impression
  - Shape the narrative around the role you played in the success of the mission/team/company
  - Get the bosses to make a soft public commitment regarding your competence
  - Even if you have a really good boss, all of the above is still important, because they are fallible humans and aren't omniscient
  - Actually do good work, it'll make the above easier
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24618707

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24622111


I can attest to that 100%. I work at a medium-sized startup, but we've got leadership from Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, and MSFT so I think it's pretty universal.

You can progress to a pretty decent level and pay as "the best programmer" up until a high senior role, which most talented folks hit after about 8 yrs of experience. After that, promotions start to depend on the extent to which you influence the direction of your group or even company, which is all about teaching and leading others.

I think of it as three stages:

* Learning: you may be good at completing well-defined work, but you generally need a mentor to guide and help you. in other words, the company at this point is investing in your growth.

* Building: you are now self-directed and able to work independently, capable of being assigned a possibly ambiguous product requirement and being able to solve it yourself.

* Leading: you are now at the point where you can be given a large, complex project with possibly ambiguous requirements and trusted to deliver. you can work with management to form a team, and can design the technical / architectural approach and break it down into smaller pieces which you can delegate to the rest of the team.

And once you hit "leading", it will grow in scope.


> If you're working at a functional organization that rewards growth

So that excludes about 95% of them.


This. So many people on here keep making that mistake over and over.


True, but on the other hand these 5% pay more than almost everyone else in that 95% so...


"Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job."

I think that depends on the role and the organization.

Generally organizations do not like to loose valued individual contributors unless the organization is somehow pathological (I know those exists).

A programmer that delivers value is always worth more than his or her paycheck. If you can dump his load to a more junior dev then that's great, there are other, more important things always that need doing. That is, if the business is growing.


I agreed with some of what your saying.

The delta comes from my incredible work experiences / organization management in the Marines and then working for selfish and incompetent bosses in the civilian side. (I have had bad luck on the civilian side in the past.)


I agree if an employee needs to fight for leverage over their manager then hiding your notes is as good way to do that as any. But if you need to use this tactic it's a clear sign the workplace is not healthy.

So, instead of as general advice "never show your notes" - I would rise to a level above - first in good faith, but in a defensive posture observe if your employer rewards co-operation or selfishness - and then choose your tactic accordingly.

Falling under incompetent management is a double injury - the incompetence is both professionally reprehensive and being managed incompetently just hurts.


I'm sorry you've had this experience on the corporate side.

I see in one of your other comments that you work for yourself now, so this unsolicited advice probably doesn't apply to you. But I'll leave it here anyway.

I've had plenty of candidates ask me how I or the company help employees grow, and what it takes to advance.

I typically see this as a good sign and I explain the career ladder, explain how promotions work. Explain how I would help in their growth.

If they don't have good answers for this, it's quite a red flag.

You can also ask about collaboration and what kind of work is rewarded.


Think of it this way, if your employers fire you for doing the right thing, then you will spend less time at companies like that.


Chad_strategic, I'll have a much easier time promoting you if we are replacing you from within


LOL.

I have been a Sergeant, I have been an officer. I have worked for Colonels and served in combat. Real leaders are hard to find.

I can happily say, you can take your unsolicited offer and well you know what...

I'm lucky now, I work for myself. The whims of the market are my only customer and what cruel customer it is...


If you're a leader at an organization, it's important to make people feel like it's a positive thing to make the company need you less for a particular task.

At our company, we've had situations where employees automated themselves away or found somebody else to replace themselves. In response, gave them raises and helped fill their extra time with more interesting higher impact work.


I've encountered a totally different school of thought on job security in the early 2000s after the fall of the dot com era. Many jobs were cut. "Outsourcing" became a dirty word.

My good friend got a year-long internship in banking industry in early 2000s. When I asked him how the real world worked, he was taught to hoard as much knowledge as he possibly could and not share it. Sharing knowledge means someone could do his exact job. He had no desire to learn new skills. He worked with folks who had been with the organization for 20+ years and that's how the workplace worked. He and his colleagues were so afraid that their job would be outsourced.

We are not friends anymore. I bet he still works for the same organization. He may not be wrong about hoarding the knowledge and working in a slower pace industry: Doing so could be an easy ticket to gain job security for life.


Agree! Bringing up those around you is the real way to be seen as a 10Xer. The alternative story of one hacker solving all of the business's problems on their own is a fairy tale.


The very words "job security" are a lie and have been for decades. Unless you have a contract that grantees you pay for a number of years. Which 99.99999999999999% of W-2 do not have.


> I'm the guy with the picture that's on puzzle box, rather than having to place each puzzle piece.

This is such a great phrase! It so succinctly captures a situation I think we've all observed many times, but I've always struggled to encode it in words.

> I've tried really hard to make myself obsolete and do something else, but it has backfired spectacularly.

How has this backfired, I'm curious?

I'm imagining that the future-you's fail to seamlessly slot-in, and management types don't have an appetite for broken eggs on the way to an omelette, when they already have an omelette in you?

> I'm useful and in essence acting as "an elder" store of information about the past & a slightly clearer view of the future.

I wonder, do you feel any anxiety about this?

As in, you're valuable at $COMPANY_X, but you're not challenged to better yourself beyond what you already are. Much of your value to $COMPANY_X derives from skills and knowledge that are specific to $COMPANY_X / $INDUSTRY.

For me, the anxiety would come from the question "sure, I have this here and now, but would I be able to reproduce this elsewhere, or what this a fluke?", and it would increase with tenure. :)

Curious to hear your thoughts on this, too.


> How has this backfired, I'm curious? .. > I'm imagining that the future-you's fail to seamlessly slot-in, and management types don't have an appetite for broken eggs on the way to an omelette, when they already have an omelette in you?

No, not that way - I took about 9 months off in the last 4 years, which has forced a replacement of my past self.

But there are still problems which are "new".

So in a manner of speaking, but more along the lines of filtering out all the easy problems with automation, documentation, others with similar skills - by the time the buck stops at my desk, I have nowhere to move it to.

Instead of being obsolete, I'm a SPOF higher up the problem complexity.

The more guesswork I do, the better I am at guessing what's wrong and every time I pull off a further "last minute miracle", the more entrenched I become, rather than obsolete.

> For me, the anxiety would come from the question "sure, I have this here and now, but would I be able to reproduce this elsewhere, or what this a fluke?"

The success part of it was a total fluke - lots of bets on me by others which came through.


> Instead of being obsolete, I'm a SPOF higher up the problem complexity.

This seems somewhat inevitable for "high performers". The only way round it I'm aware of is to hitch your wagon to an SPOF further up the chain.


Before I was a manager I used to always try and automate my job away. I was of course never able to completely do this and the result was never actually less work. Once you were able to automate away one task a new one would magically appear.

Of course to my surprise me trying to automate away my tasks only increased my value to the companies I worked for and now I, as a manager, try to encourage my reports to do the same thing so that they can focus on more important projects and personal growth.


I feel like I'm in a similar position on the automation side.

I've automated so much of what I'm responsible for that it mostly runs itself without issue. There are certainly stretches of time where I work my ass off, but mostly it's days of a couple of hours of light work and then being available to help people via Slack the rest of the day.


After 20 years of working and a sense of genuine burnout, I landed a "Dream Job" a few months ago where I'm doing tech leadership at a mid-size non-profit. We have a small familial team, a set of worthwhile and genuinely beloved public services and mission of doing good. There's still politics and revenue issues and all the sorts of stuff that a go along with any company, but it's a lot less aggressive. Work-life balance and diversity are genuinely respected. I'm busy, but it's not crazy. In my past I worked on so many gigs for companies I didn't care about or downright disliked. Building tools to grab eyes or sell crap no one needed. Working somewhere with a positive mission is so much more valuable to me than working on a cool tech stack (our stack isn't too bad, but we're not cutting edge either). I feel better about work than I have in a long, long time.

And before anyone asks, no we're not hiring. One tradeoff is that it's a very slow growth environment. We don't have VC funds to burn and our business model is very mature.


Man I'm so cynical. As soon as I see "I landed a great job a few months ago," my thought is just wait a few more months. I hope the job stays great for you.


I think I've already seen the ugly side and decided it's not ugly enough to discourage me.


Yeah that's cynical ;). I for example am with my current startup for 5 years now and can hardly find anything to complain about. Previous job was 4 years and was also ok although there it was a bit too much management for me me ;). Before that I've been freelancing for 10 years where most of the time was also with the same company and also fine (there it was more that I got bored of software dev itself and did my PhD afterwards to get to more special topics than the generic embedded/network development I did back then)


Congratulations -- I left VC-funded tech for a nonprofit a few years back and it's the best thing that's ever happened to me (or I guess, that I did). It's certainly not perfect but working in an environment with people who believe in what they're doing and genuinely want to support each other has made a massive difference for my attitude as regards work in a general sense.


My first job in tech was at the American Red Cross. Easily one of the best cultures I have ever seen. Better than a dysfunctional family.


Congratulations, sounds indeed like a good working environment.


Nice one! Very close to my own experience and I feel much the same way.


As someone who sympathizes with your comment ("tech stack complex and fugly") and has made moves both ways in terms of salary (high to low for QoL -25%, then low to high again +50%), start with your requirements.

OP did a great job of saying "Here's what I need." Until that's staked out, you don't know what's too little, enough, and too much.

But generally, minimizing and controlling costs (critically, through city choice) affords you flexibility. High costs = must work high paying job. Low costs = choice between working less, taking a job you enjoy more that pays less, or working more & saving.

I'll probably switch back to a lower paying job in the next 6 months or year, because I'd rather work on something I love, and because I'll have the financial flexibility to do so.


Partner choice and choice whether to have children are other critical considerations in cost control.


This can be the biggest factor. It can't be understated.

For example, my wife won't let me consider relocating and spends basically all her money on hobbies. This limits my job options to locally available ones (not a great area) and that I can't get a less stressful job because it pays less and I need my current salary to pay all the bills.


For many years my partner and I operated in the same way. I paid our rent, utilities and food while she spent on her hobbies and saved. I was not unhappy during this time because I didn't want much. A few years ago though, I became a bit more financially aware after having my first soul crushing job and realizing I couldn't rely on work to produce income in the same "easy" way I had when I was younger. The emotional cost had become too high. Managing this part of our relationship continues to be a multi-year process requiring ongoing discussions of what we have, what we want and what we'd be willing to do to get it. It feels like a muscle that atrophies, but I have made my peace with that because it works for us. I remind her what she wants and how she can get it by helping me now or spending less now. I even ask her to provide the same feedback for me. Her perspective on my spending is as important as my perspective of hers. I imagine we will regress in the future. Those moments will probably suck and cause a lot of stress. For now my only advice is to make a habit of these discussions in your relationship and protect the habit as long as you can.


"...having my first soul crushing job and realizing I couldn't rely on work to produce income in the same "easy" way I had when I was younger. The emotional cost had become too high."

I feel exactly like this.

My wife has basically changed what she wants (or stopped hiding it) now that we are married. She wants a big fancy house and she wants to live in an suburbanized and expensive area. She originally told me she wants to live in the country and own land. This area isn't the country and we can't afford land around here.

She doesn't care about her spending. She has never been required to support herself or even live alone. She would rather spend a lot on a her expensive horse hobby than contribute to our kid's college or our shared bills. By expensive I mean she spends as much or more each month than I do on the mortgage. One month of her hobby expenses equals what I spend in an entire year on hobbies, and many of my hobbies have a return on investment (like foraging/cultivating mushrooms, growing a garden, etc).

I've come to accept that I will be stuck here and miserable. I don't see myself living past 50 in this condition, so I just have to endure this until then. I don't really see much reason to try extending that either.


If your relationship has you counting the days until you die, you need to hit the eject button for your own safety.

This entire post, if it's anywhere close to objective truth, is wildly alarming!


How? With a divorce, GP commenter will be required to continue supporting his* ex-wife's hobbies financially, now without any option to balance then with his own earning. He will not be permitted to earn less and reduce the spending proportionally.

On top of that if there are any kids he will be required to take up a portion of her only responsibility.

* Statistics-based assumption


He can move to any country that doesn't have debt collection agreement with US (assuming he's from US). Like Philippines or New Zealand. Or just make himself judgement-proof. Convert his savings to Bitcoin, quit his job and work cash jobs. Court cannot force him to earn less.


Then they'll issue an arrest warrant.


No they won't. Debt is a civil matter, not criminal.


Unpaid child support will result in an arrest warrant in many states. The debt itself may be civil, but it's a crime to avoid the court mandated payments.

My father in law was in a coma for a while and the child support payments stopped and he went broke from the lack of job and medical bills. They arrested him multiple times after that because he wasn't paying. Of course that gave him a criminal record and made it much harder to get a job.


Until convicted.


What do you mean by "not permitted to earn less?"


If you're under some sort of child support and/or alimony, courts will often interpret losing a job as an attempt to dodge payment, and will not reduce payment to match the new circumstances.


Are you a divorce lawyer? Please substantiate your claims with credentials.


http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ is a great resource on this subject


Are you a credentials expert? Please substantiate your loaded questions with credentials.


(throwaway because I don't like to mix discussions of my relationships with professional discussions)

I was in a situation freakishly similar to yours for over 10 years. In late 2019 I left her, and while it was one of the hardest decisions of my life, definitely the hardest day of my life, and the road to a mentally healthy(er) position has been ongoing, it has proved to be a wise decision. I spend far less of my day feeling resentful, unvalued, and unvalidated, both individually and in my new relationship. In my own time and in counseling with a professional, I have learned many lessons about myself, what I want out of life and in a partner, and how to be my own advocate.

I deeply empathize with your position and you deserve to be happier. I hope this experience of mine might give you some vicarious experience to draw from, and I encourage you to consider making a change.


You're getting a lot of unsolicited advice here, from folks who mean well but all of us here can't know the particulars of your situation.

That you're posting this on HN suggests that you would really like to have someone to talk to about this, at the very least to feel heard about it.

From personal experience, consider a therapist for a while - starting just on your own. There's nothing wrong with you, but you're in a sticky situation and are unhappy, and you're worried about the implications for your daughter and your own longevity. It can be really nice to have someone to talk through this stuff with, especially when it might be tough to talk with your wife about it, at least at this point, if she's causing the problem. I don't know about you, but it helps me mentally figure out what to do when I can talk about it, and (good) therapists are good at pulling our thoughts out and letting us think about all the angles.

It's pretty low stakes, and while they do cost some money, it's not a ton (compared to the horses!). And it can really help you think through the particulars of your situation over time, which it's tough for any of us here on HN to do, and when it's time to do the tough stuff - like broaching the subject with your wife - you have got someone in the therapist who knows the background and can help you deal with any fallout.

Good luck. You deserve a happy life. Your daughter deserves a good future. We only get one shot at this.


Yes, agreed. I want to add, "You can’t pour from an empty glass of water.” Fill your cup first, take care of yourself, then your daughter, otherwise you might harm both.


I agree with the other comments that you need to do something, but I'm going to disagree with that you should jump to divorce as the first step. You haven't said what you have already tried, so I suggest:

1) telling her how you feel, in the form of "I feel X when you do Y". For example, "I feel unvalued when you spend more on your horse than we do on the mortgage. I feel scared for our kid's future when you prioritize your expensive horse over saving for his/her education. I feel trapped when you spend the money I make without deciding together how to spend it." It can be hard to know exactly how these actions make you feel unless you've practiced thinking about it, so you might want to write it down and revise it over a week or two. Also, depending on how your wife takes feedback, you might want to have discussions of just one at a time.

2) marriage counseling.

3) setting boundaries: "my standard of being treated is <...>" and take steps to "enforce" them. The easier levels are along the lines of "I want to be talked to respectfully, so I will leave the room when you do not, but when you are ready to talk respectfully, come and get me." I'm not sure how you communicate "I think our budget should look 25% house, 20% food/clothes, 10% retirement, 10% kids education, etc, which leaves $X for optional things like horse; if you need more than that you'll need to get a job" without being unilateral, though. But you have some financial values/boundaries that are being crossed and you need to communicate / enforce those.

4) It would be a bad sign if your wife didn't respond positively to any of the above. However, even in that case you could get counseling for yourself on how to respond healthily, and you are also likely to get insight into why your wife is behaving this way (the counselor might notice consistent signs of co-dependency, for instance).

5) Read pre-modern stories about how spouses handled toxic behavior. (The quasi-mythic ones that start off "There was once a woman in ... whose husband ...") I've read a few Japanese stories about wives that change the incentives for their husbands and they stop being drunkards and start being productive. (There's fewer stories the other way, but those exist, too.) Some of these stories are quite creative solutions; maybe something like that would work with your wife.

Don't just stay stuck and miserable, though. There are many ways to defeat the giants.


As a married woman, I’d say leave ASAP. Your mental health is most important to a fulfilling life. People marry the wrong person every day. Divorce is the way out of this situation. Judges are more realistic today about women and their plots. Write down and document everything. Find a couples therapist so you have on record you are trying to make the marriage work for everyone. The therapy will either make your wife “grow up” and perhaps better your relationship or it will show her inability to deal with reality of marriage as a working relationship. Don’t be the guy that hates his life. There is the right person for you out there. Take that first step for your own sanity. Her parents can help her out financially. She knows this too!


You need to change something. Other people have better advice, or at least specifics due to personal experience. But I can see that you are living in resentment and hell. There is no way your relationship with your wife is healthy. You've got a kid right? That child is watching you two and learning what it means to be in a relationship. They pick up on stuff left unsaid, you aren't hiding anything successfully (if you are indeed trying to hide these feelings).

Would you want your child to grow up to feel the way you do now? You're giving them the lesson plan right now.


Get a divorce attorney now, because you'll need one later.

For now, just because you're married doesn't mean you have to have complete sharing of finances. Get your finances completely separate. Create your own bank account; have your salary go there. Cancel any shared credit cards. Lock your credit report so new accounts cannot be made using your social security.

Then, offer to pay 1/2 the mortgage each month; or, better yet, let her pay the full amount from her own wages.


I am also an avid equestrian but support myself and my hobby on my own (which also costs more than my share of the rent). And I have to admit, I feel a bit envious of those who managed to make a fool work and sustain them without caring the smallest amount. But I hope it will bite her back the day you will leave her because you sound too miserable to stay in this relationship.


To what end? There is no award for Longest Suffering Person, just a life of wasted opportunities. The repercussions and coping mechanisms are likely to only get more destructive the longer you put off dealing with misery. May you find your bliss, internet stranger.


> There is no award for Longest Suffering Person, just a life of wasted opportunities.

Welp, I know what I'm going to be lying here thinking about for the next several hours.


You seriously need to consider pulling the rip cord. Life is not worth being a miserable wallet.


You sound pretty miserable, with unempathetic partner you obviously resent, why are you with her?


Feel this comment in my bones bro. Right there with you.


You're in big trouble there, friend. This website may help save your ass http://www.realworlddivorce.com/


Either dump her ass or go 100% OfficeSpace on her and stop caring about being responsible and focus on enjoying life.


How did this happen to you?


Everyone is blind to that which they do not do.

I've seen couples drift apart pretty quickly once their daily experiences diverge.

If she spends all day working at an office, and he spends all day homemaking and with the kids, then each forgets what the other really does.

"The office" becomes an abstract place that someone just goes and isn't stressful at all. "The home" and "the kids" just magically take care of themselves and don't require much work.

Dual income has its own problems, but it seems a healthier default in terms of reminding people that work is... work.


Quarantine and work-from-home has also had an enlightening impact in this regard.


he got married


Watch American beauty. Do that.


You should consider a divorce.


Start converting everything to Monero coin.


I can relate to this but my wife is attractive, smart, honest and loyal so it seems like a fair trade. I earn all the income, do most of the house chores, spend almost nothing on myself, buy her almost everything she wants, move to whatever country she wants to go, I let her win all arguments (including arguments about who does the most chores). Thankfully when she sees me getting overly stressed, she gives me some slack. She even stayed with me after we ran out of money (I say we because we share all bank accounts) - Running out of money is the best test for a relationship.


Jesus, so jealous of you all's wives. I've always worked full time, even made more than my ex and put all my earnings to common family bank account.


My wife is almost 100% consumer and I'm almost 100% producer. She latched on to me the second we met. She initiated. I was a poor and shy college student at the time so it was quite a shock for me to suddenly receive so much attention. It's like she knew something about me that nobody else knew, not even myself. It's like she could see through everything and see the pure productive potential.


If you don't mind me asking, what does your wife spend her time on?


She spends a lot of time at home reading books (mostly non-fiction) and browsing the net (she reads a lot of online articles about a wide range of topics) and chatting with her friends on social media (most of her friends live in different countries because we traveled a lot). We do a lot of outdoor activities together but aside from that she doesn't like to do much. We both spend most of our time at home because I work remotely. She hates working or doing anything productive. She even tried painting once and is good at it but she could never be an artist as she is allergic to the idea of earning money.


That is funny shit! Looks like a spin-off scenario of The Stepford Wives!


From reading your other replies, if you're staying in it for the kids; don't. If my parents were deeply unhappy with each other I'd much prefer they went their separate ways than to suffer through the marriage just for me.


Agreed. Also, you're actually hiding the kid from the support they need by staying married. They're not considered a child of divorced parents, yet they might live the worst lives of all. People who live together but don't like each other aren't exactly good parental role models, and they also hog the opportunity for others (go dating!). Staying together means children don't get the support, and parents don't get the support/ suffocate. If this is happening, do you really think your child is currently getting a fair childhood?


Aren't you and your wife sharing responsibility equally or proportionally at least? It is unfair for one partner to bear the brunt of stress and the other to thrive. Sounds like some compromises need to be made here.


Relationships aren’t 50/50. A common misconception that came along with other great ideas of the 70s like pet rocks.


I can safely say that I feel we're at 50% with bonus of feeling that it's more like 100%/100% :-)


Ironic, coming from someone with such nickname. :)

Relationships aren't 50/50 in each area, but the effort across everything should be similar on both sides. Otherwise someone is taking advantage of their partner, imho.


She feels she is.


Do you let her know that you don't feel the same way?


Yep. She doesn't really care. She says nonsense stuff. Like I should get a different job. But we can't move, so my options are limited. I pay all the bills and would need to take a pay cut if I switched jobs, so we would have to at least sell the current house and move to an much smaller one.

Another good example is that she said I should keep my nice car and keep doing track days when she found out I was going to sell it. Well, were getting married and having a kid. With what money am I expected to do all this? It had to be sold for the budget to work.


You don't have to be a victim. If you earn x, and she earns y, it's perfectly OK in a relationship to get a job that pays only y. I think your wife doesn't want you to be a victim either, maybe she is just not good with finance. You can be happy in a smaller house as well.


"You can be happy in a smaller house as well."

I can be. She complains about our current 1800sf house being too small.


Then she can sell her horse.

Good relationships require clear communication and some semblance of equality.

If you're serious about staying with her, then you need to balance your needs against hers. It's a perfectly valid thing to say "I hate my job. I'm looking for one I enjoy more that pays less. If that happens, I won't be able to pay for your horse. If you want to keep your horse, we need to find a way to balance the budget."

Either she cares about you and has never developed financial muscles, in which case you two can get through with some hard decisions and be happier.

Or she doesn't care about you, and you should split.

(Said as a child of divorce)


You should stop being a victim. You should simply get a lower paying job at a cheap location and remove her from your credit card.


Stand up for yourself!


Too late for that. I'm stuck with this.


It's never too late. Overturning old trends is uncomfortable for sure, but definitely not impossible.


If you control all of the coffers, you should get to choose where you live. Sounds like your relationship is dreadfully unbalanced at the moment.


If I choose where to live, then I will be divorced and have no money and still be stuck in the same area if I want to see my kid at all.


While my wife and I are mostly eye-to-eye on bills, etc., we are in a disagreement on where to live. We live in Texas, a state I loathe. I'm not from here. I grew up in Europe. My wife is from this area. She makes twice what I make. Both of us love the scenery and overall PNW vibe. I have been trying for years to get my wife to move. She finds every excuse in the book. Meanwhile, neither of us are getting younger. Our daughter is graduating HS soon. This leaves a kid in the house for several more years. Once my daughter is off on her own, I suggested being able to downsize (no real opposition there), maybe buy a nice double-wide trailer on our own land (no real opposition), and save money on taxes, etc., in the PNW close to a fairly large conurbation where we could work.

It's tough trying to get someone to see your PoV. Maybe do a spreadsheet with numbers to show her how you could get ahead elsewhere, keeping in mind her hobby. Big houses suck. Literally. Ours is ~2500sf and the upkeep is ridiculous. Maybe sell it as, "we could both do more with our respective hobbies if we had a cheaper outlay every month. We can only be in one room at a time, so having a lavish house is more to impress others than for our own benefit. I encourage you to pursue your hobby (within reason/set a budget maybe). Set a budget for you both outside of essential spending (housing/utilities/medical) and stick to it. I now no longer buy computers. I buy RPis and do things with them. They have a command line. I'm happy. My wife gets her happiness from attending sports games of our children. Her other hobby is gaming. Sell the idea of moving to a cheaper state with less taxes/cheaper property taxes and downsizing but keeping her hobby. It's all about compromise (but not your dignity). Remember, love is not a sentiment or emotion, it's an act of the will. Love wills the good of the other for the other. Find a way to make you both "happy" while giving you both what you want. I'm sure a nice, expensive house with high taxes and ugly upkeep costs would take a back seat to your wife's hobby (at least I would hope it would). Chart it out with numbers and present them. You owe it to yourself to stand up and set the tone, but do so with respect and tangible ideas that you can execute on. Everyone has great ideas, but almost no one can execute on them well.


As someone from the Gulf South who lived in the PNW for most of a decade:

There is a not insignificant chance your Southern wife will be incredibly miserable in the PNW. It is gorgeous and green but it is also grey, and if your wife has not lived in similar conditions before, it is very possible that the lack of Actual Sun will start giving her heavy seasonal depression.

A huge sun lamp will help. So will regular megadoses of vitamin D. But she may be like me and find that even with that, the urge to kill herself gets louder and louder every winter.

I moved back to my very culturally weird Southern birthplace a couple of years ago and that urge completely vanished.


Thank you for the information. Fortunately, we are both overcast lovers, so the SAD angle would likely not play a huge role. Growing up in Europe myself, I prefer 9 months of overcast and rain. I'm at a high risk for skin cancer, so this features into my desire to move as well. For my wife, the primary reason is that her parents are here. She doesn't want to leave them, which I can understand, but at the same time, they are loaded and want for nothing. My parents are long gone, so I have zero attachment to the area other than my wife.


Ah good, I wanted to make sure that angle had been considered. I was super surprised at how insidious it was for me!

Good luck finding a way to make both of you happy with where you live. :)


You might have a reasonable case for custody. Talk to a lawyer.


She's as stuck with you as you are with her. You are allowed to stand up for yourself.


Eh, the courts seem to be notoriously biased, so I doubt she's equally stuck.


No matter how rigged the courts are, it can't be worse than spending 100% of your money taking care of the two of you. You'll still need to stay in the same city for custody, but at least you can switch to a less stressful job.

Also, you should keep your eyes peeled for remote jobs.


"...but at least you can switch to a less stressful job."

Nope, the courts will force child support and probably alimony based on the current job rather than some lower paying job one might get during/after any divorce.


How much lower paying are we talking about here?

Alimony probably isn't going to be a big deal, since I'm assuming by the age of your child you haven't been married for too long.


This is not good advice but as you stuck. Learn to lie and be manipulative.


Bs. You choose to be stuck. Resist.


Not looking to divorce since we have a kid.


At this point you're participating in your own abuse. Your relationship is unbalanced and objectively broken. If you're unwilling to entertain any realistic solutions then you're wasting everyone's time complaining about it.

You should seek out real help, either a therapist or marriage counselor. There's no actual reason for you to stay in your current broken state. Your made up reasons are equal parts bullshit and naivety.


This comment right here %100


I wasn't going to jump into this thread and I don't want to turn this into "Relationship News" but, I feel like I need to let you know.

I grew up with divorced parents who were together longer than they should've been and let me tell you, kids know. They absolutely know when their parents are together but can't stand each other and what's worse, they may assume it's their fault.


And to support you but from the other side:

I grew up with parents who divorced when I was 18 months old when it became clear they did not love each other anymore. But they both wanted the best for me, and didn't do the petty shit I've heard about other couples where they shit-talked each other to the kid or something. They split time with me evenly.

They both eventually got re-married and are very happy and I have no regrets about how my childhood went in that regard.


Seconding. Furthermore, please don't feel like you gotta stay together "for the kid". At least ask the kid whether they care. My parents asked me. I told them I didn't care.


The kid is 2, so they don't really know.


Looks like you are less than 10 years into the marriage. Get out ASAP. You are stuck with alimony for basically half the length of your marriage. Unless it exceeds 10 years. Then you are stuck for life.


I think that varies by state.


Wow, those are some crazy laws. Child support is mandatory around here, and follows well defined rules, but spousal support ("alimony") is much less well defined and (in my limited understanding) less common and shorter lived.

Edit: "around here" being Australia and New Zealand


Know, soon.


Hopefully for them you've sorted this one way or another in the next year or so.

Kids are more perceptive than anyone gives them credit for.


Look get a lower paying job in a cheaper location and move. This will lower your monthly alimony payments.

You are choosing to be a victim here.


"Family as the main instrument of cost control" - now that is bleak :D


You know what, if you don't want to have kids because they're too expensive - do not have kids!

Too many parents don't want to be in the position they're in for whatever reason and didn't take the time to figure out whether they really want to have kids.


Yeah, if one thinks that kids are expensive they're probably making the right decision of not having any. It is true having that children require changes in the parents lives, which are not only financial, a lot of time gets sunk into family and children. One must enjoy it. I personally do though I can't say I would've said the same thing before having my family, I did not know what it would be like. There is a great positive side and that is the great reward this brings. My life took a different turn for sure and it is for the better.


There's a term for this (anyone know?) - when someone says life has improved and attributes it to specific events when really it would have improved on any number of other paths they could've taken too. The underlying factor is that "time passed and things happened".

You imagine the alternative as staying in the spot you were in, but of course that's impossible. There are all kinds of random encounters and unknown unknowns that would have happened.


I was on a stagnant personal development trajectory for a while and having a family unleashed stored potential. It is impossible to know exactly how things would have turned out in an alternate reality but if I feel that things took a better turn and that is enough for me to feel satisfied.


That's a good way to put it, and I don't doubt you. It's just that the childless are frequently spoken to as if getting a family is the only way to unleash this potential, and I want to provide a counter-view.


Oh, I was responding from my personal experience. Some people have other priorities and are currently doing well the way they are and that is perfectly fine by me.


Being aware that they're expensive (although my child is much less expensive than my spouse) doesn't necessarily mean not having them, it just means having them with your eyes open.


I find that the highest expense, at least in the early years, is time.


I think it's only genuinely bleak if your starting position is that family is assumed, rightful, and ineluctable - and electing to not head down that path is purely a fiscal decision.


Agreed, and I didn't meant to suggest that it's purely a fiscal decision, just that there _are_ fiscal elements that one should be aware of.


Kids are not that expensive. You do not have to send them to college, you just have to love them, teach them, care for them. Sure you will have to buy more food, and you might need a bigger house/apartment.


My opinion only- For the middle class going to college is not seen as optional. Doing the same expensive activities as the other middle class kids is not seen as optional. There are millions of working class people in the US with good lives, but most middle class people would never seriously consider not following middle class norms.

So raising a kid who's middle or upper class is actually quite expensive, and that's part of why low income and high income families have more kids than middle income families. https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-u...


Not paying for your kid's college doesn't mean they don't go to college. I went to a very respectable state university with loans that I paid off within 3 years after graduating. I've worked at some of the top companies in the world. It's very attainable and not unreasonable.


Totally agree. You can graduate from your state school with <$100k in debt easily. You can get much lower debt levels if you don't stay in the expensive dorms (with expensive meal plans) after your freshman year, if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).

As an engineering student, you can also get paid internships each summer (can often pay >$10k) or can be a paid research assistant for a professor during the year for ~10 hours week (pays for groceries each week).


Or you can go in the Air Force, be a "civilian in uniform" (Air Force is really easy), and have Uncle Sam pay for your degree at night while you get free room and board, free meals, free medical and dental. It's an option for those people not opposed to military service. The AF really is an easy row to hoe. Personal experience. Show up with a clean uniform, good attitude, and everything is easy peasy lemon squeezy. My military service paid for my own degree. Nothing says crappy life like emerging from university behind the power curve because you're in massive debt, paying back student loans while struggling to pay rent, medical costs, transportation costs, ad astra... Start your working career not in debt. Just my 0.02.

Editing to say that if you make the military a career, you can literally save almost your entire salary if your personal peccadilloes are minimal. I knew guys that decided 4 years was enough and emerged after 4 years with over 50k in savings while paying nothing and they also got the BA/BSc degree on Uncle Sam's dime. They emerged debt free, degreed, and ready to start the next stage of their lives. Doing 8 years gets you a masters all the while doing nothing but work a job with everything paid for. At that rate, you might as well do 20, marry another member and have a steady retirement at 39 or 40 with money enabling you to pursue a job you really love because you can afford to live where you want. Bonus: Tri-Care military medical costs $500 year on retirement. Cannot touch that out here.


You can get much lower debt levels if you don't stay in the expensive dorms (with expensive meal plans) after your freshman year,

As someone who lived off-campus the entire time and regretted it, I do think that spending at least freshman year in dorms is a really good idea to make friends and get to know the school's culture and environment.

if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).

My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.


> My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.

This is counter to my experience. I was able to work part-time jobs just fine, and having that experience made me a much more competitive candidate upon graduation.


Depends on a lot of factors -- morning vs. night chronotype, how close work is to school, how close school and work are to housing, how many hours work demands, whether your landlord is insane and kicks you all out with 3 days notice right before the semester to rent to a family, etc.

I would still have worked most if not all of my summers, but never more than 5 hours a week during the semesters. My job, which I actually really liked, demanded 20, which also required another 6-10 hours commuting on top of 5-8 hours of commuting to school.

I had also worked in tech for a year before starting school, so I was a bit less worried about having experience to list. And in the end it didn't matter because I started a company and ran that for 5 years instead.


At least for me, the key was to keep it capped at 10 hours a week. With more hours than that I would have struggled to balance coursework, social life, work, and sleep.

You definitely can't pay for everything on 10 hours a week, but it at least pays the bar tab...


This is pretty much my own history, too. (I think I took three years to pay them off, too!) And yet, many--I'd say most--people out there don't want to be computer programmers or work in other technical fields. They still need degrees to be employable at all in most fields, and with the state of student debt, it's pretty reckless to just roll out claims like the ones you've made.


Reckless how? The point was to go to an affordable state school, not to just indiscriminately get loans to fund a $300k degree from the Art Institute.


"Affordable" is doing a lot of work there, particularly when before you didn't say "affordable" and did say "very respectable".

I went to a "very respectable" public land-grant university in my home state and today that school costs $15K a year outside of room and board ($35K/year for out-of-state), and students should live on-campus at minimum the first year--so let's say, best case, you're looking at $70K for in-state. Plus living expenses, and despite your claims elsewhere in-thread I can personally attest that part-time jobs even ten years ago took a bite out of but did not solve the problem of food, board, etc.--so we're probably talking closer to $100K when all is said and done.

Even if you assume some defraying of costs, a student loan bill of $50K (which was about what I left school with) is staggering for many non-technical folks, coming out of college looking at salaries closer to $40K than $100K when they can find a job at all. Further, the knock-on effects are financially hazardous. If you end up on income-based repayment because, y'know, jobs are hard to find unless you're a computer toucher and even then there probably aren't enough for everybody, you will be paying less-than-interest, and the principal only grows.

Put frankly, I would advise the cultivation of more empathy for those not as economically advantaged as you or me. This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.


I think affordable was implied by "state".

> This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.

Society has always worked this way. Those who have rare skills get paid the most. Supply and demand and what not. Universities are gateways to advanced skills, especially in traditional occupations where equipment is often expensive (medical, chemical, mechanical, etc). The reason you go to a university is so that you can get advanced skills in order to make an advanced salary. It makes no sense to go to a university by default and come out with a degree that doesn't teach you advanced skills that get you a high wage. If the jobs that your degree are going to get you aren't going to pay for what that degree cost you then you made a poor decision by taking on that debt.

This sort of thing is why I believe basic economics should be a hard requirement in high school. You shouldn't be able to get a high school diploma without understanding the mechanisms of debt/leverage. So many people have screwed themselves over because they don't understand that the only reason to ever take on debt is to use it as leverage so that you can earn even more than the debt you took on. Any other reason is foolish.

It's really sad when you think about it, so many people would be way better off if they knew the definition of leverage. Such a simple concept, yet so powerful (it's funny how knowing about leverage gives one so much leverage in life).


> The reason you go to a university is so that you can get advanced skills in order to make an advanced salary.

Most of your post is pretty good, but I laughed aloud at this, tbh. The reason you go to a university is because your resume gets thrown out for almost any desk job--hell, for Starbucks--if you don't have a bachelor's.

It is functionally necessary. These aren't "rare skills". These are employer-mandated minimums, and it leaves people with that inflated student debt, encouraged and pushed upon them by their parents and by the expectations of society, to subsidize those employers' demands.


Man, that's weird. US really is different to our North-European way of life.

We are middle class and have two kids but our kids have close to no hobby expenses. Our son is vehemently anti-hobby and daughters dance and piano lessons are not really that expensive. On the other hand we have no-one close for whom we should "keep up appearances".

Government will pay for the kids degrees. Ditto for healthcare and the dentists for kids are excellent.

I know some kids play hockey or whatever and that can be a bit steep but never have I felt such would be a mandatory hobby. Neither of my kids really showed interest for any team sports and we gladly obliged not to force introduce them.

Sure you need to buy food for 4 persons and wash a bit more laundry, but that's about it when I think of the "overhead" caused by kids. The necessity for an apartment with a few more rooms is probably the biggest financial burden but loans are cheap.

The fact only one of us is capable of working due to health reasons is a much bigger issue financially than having kids.


It’s not the US, it’s a certain income bands in the US. This forum is probably full of many people who earn at least $100k per year, if not much more, and are likely to be partnered up with someone earning the same. Naturally, if you’re hanging out with people that have a lot of disposable income, they’re going to use that to give their kids as much of a leg up as they can to maximize their kids’ chances of moving up to the next step on the ladder.


They're also tend to blow money on things that have no real use whatsoever yet they fervently believe they are absolutely necessary to live a normal life even though 95+% of the planet lives without them.


Some things, but I think it's evident that the neighborhood/friends/schools/network you make are a big factor in one's upward mobility, so parents are willing to part with a lot of money to increase those odds.


Eh. It's pretty clear that people blow huge money on all sorts of shit that they think makes a different but doesn't in reality.


But it is optional. There's social pressure for all kinds of things, including getting married and having children.

You have to figure out how to get food & shelter and follow local laws. Everything else is unequivocally optional. I would argue that "not seen as optional" is just a way of saying "I don't own up to my choices."


Agreed with not sending them to college. My wife and I are not paying for college. I have a daughter who is getting close to graduating HS. She has two choices: get a local job and attend the local university or go in the military and have Uncle Sam pay for it. I did the latter many moons ago and I'm glad I did. These days, if you are disciplined, you can go in the Air Force, for example, and get your degree in less than 4 years almost free. If you hate it after four years, you leave debt free, have veteran status and hiring preferences, and you paid nothing for your medical/dental/lodging/food. If you like it, go back in as an officer and still not pay for anything other than a tiny officer housing sum for single officers. If you marry an officer and do 20 years, you can salt away some serious cash and still be young enough at retirememt (39-40 yo) to get a second gig. If the government doesn't ruin Social Security, you'll get that, too. All the while not paying for medical or dental, two things which out in the civilian world are costly. Just my 0.02.

Editing to say that kids are not too expensive if they're healthy. If you have children who have medical conditions, then all bets are off. What really pisses me off is the local school district always begging for money. I pay those thieves almost over $5000 year in property tax, since we live in an area with ridiculous property taxes. Whenever I've visited the school and my children have also seen this, they beg for school supplies, but the closets in all of my kid's classrooms are brimming with supplies. They spend more on sports than they do on education, which really irks me. Sports may be important, but nowhere near as education. 1% of 1% go on to play pro sports, but here they act as if sports are more important. Classes are let out early to watch games, yet the school district where we live is a poor performer academically. My own children are fine, but that's because we watch and are involved.


Kids are not that expensive

Colleague I knew in London literally spent more on daycare for his two kids than he did on his mortgage.

The other option is that one parent quits their job and stays home, but that is also a massive (opportunity) cost if you're both educated and have a decent career.


Strictly speaking the problem isn't that the kid is expensive, it is that, per your two options, 1) childcare is expensive, and 2) London / their spending habits are too expensive to support a stay-at-home parent. There are lots of other choices that one can make, although they are problem not the common choices. They might actually be happier with some of the other choices, from stories I hear of people that sat down and thought about other options.


It really has nothing to do with being able to support a stay-at-home parent or not. If you're bringing home 100k a year and quit your job to raise kids then the opportunity cost of having kids is 100k a year. The fact that you can afford to 'lose' that money doesn't change that.

Now you may think it's worth 'paying' 100k a year to gain all the non-monetary benefits of staying at home and raising kids, but that is a separate discussion.


My experience- I had my first kid when I was totally broke. Working multiple minimum wage jobs. Everything was thrift store, hand-me-down, government assistance. Instead of child care, I worked every day and night so our kids could be with their mother.

As I built my career, my lifestyle inflated, and so did the kid’s expenses. We make in 3 days what used to take us a month.

The kids get to share our lifestyle with us. It’s probably different for us because we’ve never been well off + not have kids.


More food+bigger house probably adds $400-$1000/month to your budget.

Also, kids need doctors, interests (books or toys), durable goods (clothes and furniture) and more to thrive.


Funny you mention this. I live near Houston, Texas, soon to be, if not already, the 3rd largest city in America. What I'm seeing around me in north Houston burbs is somewhat disturbing, namely two things: 1. An outbreak of RV parks (6 near me in less than two years) 2. An outbreak of tiny home parks (Several in my area). What pains me is driving by the RV parks, where entire families are living in an RV not much larger than my kitchen and I see kids boarding the school bus. Some of you may disagree, but that is no way for a child to grow up. While I don't have anything against this per se, the stigma of that lifestyle can damage children. The rotten-ass kids at school make terrible fun of children who live in trailer parks, RV parks, tiny homes. Of course this is no fault of the children in those conditions, as they have no say in how they live, only in how they perform at school. This area lives and dies by oil and gas jobs. It's likely no accident that in the last couple of years, those jobs have bottomed out and many people have lost their jobs. I don't know if there is a correlation between the job losses (tens of thousands) and the number of cheaper housing accommodations springing up, but it's real and it's somewhat disturbing to see so many people in a down-and-out state.

Editing to say that these are not the $500,000 RVs that retired people holiday in. They are kitchen-sized campers (for lack of a better term) that may be the size of 6-8 cubicles. They need outside water connections which many don't have, and they almost always need propane attachments. Many have composting toilets which the owner needs to clean out, as they cannot connect to the sewer lines.


Consider introducing yourself to those people and asking them about their experiences.


An acceptable daycare for the "professional, white collar" class is minimum $1,500 per child per month and doctor visits are at least $200 or $250 out of pocket each time for regular viral/bacterial infections.

Kids aren't cheap if you want to keep up with your socioeconomic class. And by far the biggest cost is the extra you pay for a house to be located near other high earners so that the schools your kids go to is filled with kids of other high earners.


That's only true in the US of course...

I make less money than someone in the US, but daycare for me is 250 euro (it was 500 until 3 years old) and public daycare would be cheaper still. Visiting the doctor for a random virus brought back from school costs exactly 0 (a private visit would be around 100 euros). An orthodontist, if needed, would be the only major expense for a child apart from clothing and food.

University will be about 4000 euros a year at most (and would be cheaper if I earned less).


I start to think that I’m really lucky in central Europe. All those things (daycare, doctor, dentist) are free here. Even university is free.


What doctors are you going to!? Do you not have medical insurance?


Gold level HSA qualifying high deductible BCBS health plan with $7,500 out of pocket maximum and $3k deductible.

I’ve never known a doctor to charge less than $200 per visit with or without insurance.


Kindergartens are quite pricey all over the world, so that's 3-4 years of approximately double rent / mortgage


Our kindergartens (Finland) practically cost nothing (expect a small fee mostly as a formality).


A large emotional/spiritual investment... And financially as well, especially considering the cost of child care nowadays. Tax breaks help (in US), but not that much.


Sure, you don't have to send them to college, but if you don't help them pay for some sort of education or training after high school, you're doing them a massive disservice if you can afford it at all.

You may say, oh well they can just get loans, true, but you can only get so much in federal loans before you have to get private, non dischargeable loans for ~ 7% interest.

Alternatively, you might say oh, they can just join the military. Only problem is the Air Force and Navy don't want little Johnny and now he's getting blown up doing patrols with the 3rd ID in Iraq (I lost my childhood best friend this way).

TLDR: If you don't want to help your kid pay for college or trade school, just don't have them. No one should have to go deeply in debt or put their lives at risk to earn a decent living.


Partner especially, you can always raise children on a budget.


Yeah but chances are once you try, you realize it's no fun for either of you and your incentives change towards more lucrative jobs.


My partner is also a limiting factor on the budget on which our child can be raised :-/


Generally true. It gets more complicated if they have medical issues or a disability.


In that case, in the US you need to live in a state with a good medicaid program and infrastructure.


> good medicaid program

Except, the minute you make any money, you lose this.


Many people would qualify for CHIP. But of course that only applies while they are children. If they are disabled, then they would likely qualify for social security and medicaid as adults depending on the severity type. The real issue is that they may need help with the administration of the benefits or with things not covered after the parents pass away.


Social security disability is incredibly difficult to live on. Depending on the individual's work history it can pay as little as $700/month. The average beenfit is $1263 but it's only that high because most people claiming it became disabled but had (or their spouse had) a productive work History before that. People with lifelong disabilities will be well below that.

You can supplement with part-time work but that only gets you so far. As soon as you start making money on disability, you lose 1 dollar for every two. And the most you can make is $1260/month. At that point you lose Medicaid and any progress you've made is lost because insurance is way more than you are making.

You effectively top out at $1263 + $1260/2 = $1893/month. Rent is going to claim 1/3 to 1/2 that.


Yes, US disability and far too many government benefits are setup in a way that can actively discourage people from self improvement or trying harder.

Where are the fade outs, and the incentives that will reward you for getting off the system, rather then punish you? It's a subject for a different thread at a different time.


Depends on the state and the issue. (Emphasis on GOOD medicaid program.)

For example in Pennsylvania:

https://healthbridges.info/hearing-aid-insurance-coverage-fo....

You can't get non-state insurance for hearing aids for kids, and they aren't cheap.


Yep. Hearing aids are excluded on almost all health plans, it's ridiculous. Hearing tests too.


…in the US.


isn't that why the US salaries are higher? move to US get paid fat stacks, then when health suffers you have some more $$$ to stay alive with


Most serious medical costs will far outstrip the increased salary. Usually you use that increased salary to pay some crazy insurance premiums/deductibles.


Nonono spend your fat stacks so you can qualify for Medicare and financial aid faster when the wolves come for everything


In theory. In practice, some health issues costs hundreds of thousands or even millions (cancer, heart bypass...)


The highs are higher and the lows are lower than in other developed countries


Yes and no. Acute health care may be free in Canada, but even here, money has a particularly substantial effect on your quality of life if you're disabled.


Sure, most important thing is to know yourself and your preferences.

In complex technical niche fields jumping from gig to gig is not that easy, though.

I was perhaps overtly bleak in the above for the benefit of clarity (it's ok not to love your job, but it's also ok to concentrate on things you love and the thing does not need to be your job).


I'm surprised once again by the nice and helpful community on HN. I anticipated most comments would be people telling me to get my head out of my ass and get to work.

I hope you find a way to chill through life.


I think you question is very sincere and VERY UNIQUE for this community because every other question is asking for the exact opposite. That's why there are a lot of interesting replies as well as a lot of interest in the question itself.

Is your hobby/"passions (which are not monetizable)" expensive? And are you 100% certain they are not monetizable?

In today's world, I have yet to see something which is not monetizable. Unless you are referring to something which is too competitive - even that can be monetized....though monetization itself might require too much work which goes against your requirement so I understand.


> And are you 100% certain they are not monetizable?

I learned that once I try to monetize my hobbies, there’s a very real risk that they become stressful and no longer fun and invigorating. Sometimes it’s best to keep hobbies as just hobbies.

Or, at least, make sure you have some hobbies that will only ever stay hobbies. Nothing wrong with trying to do monetize something you love, just don’t let it be the only thing you love to do, so you still have something when you have a stressful day doing the first thing.


This is one of the most important lessons driven people have to learn!


Yeah. I have since went out of my way to develop some new hobbies that have nothing to do with my work. I used to program a lot because it was fun (and I still do for fun every so often) but after doing it for work for many years, I often feel like its sucked much of the fun out. I can usually still enjoy working on stuff that's very different from the day to day (eg tinkering with 3D graphics), but I don't have quite the same level of drive and enthusiasm I once had.

So I picked up sleight of hand card tricks a few years ago as something to do that had nothing to do with computers and last year I started to learn to play the guitar. I have no intention of ever trying to monetize either of these hobbies. They're purely for fun, to relax.

I have other hobbies too, but too many revolve around computers or tech and after a long day in front of the screen, its good to get away and do something completely different.


there are also a lot of endeavors that at core are not compatible with profit/capitalism. meaning that as soon as you start monetizing them, that inevitably perverts the core incentive of said project on the long run and restrain the possible trajectories of evolution.


YMMV, but I've also found that treating all side projects as potential businesses sort of...takes the intangible quality of magic / fun / joy out of those side projects for me.

For OP: it's OK to not want to monetize everything you do, even if those things might potentially be monetizable (which most things are, as the parent comment mentioned) - past some point, the incremental value of really, truly enjoying more of your time can have way more value than even fairly large amounts of additional money.

Where that point lies exactly is a matter of debate, and probably depends greatly on how you place value on intangible experiences vs. tangible things. From experience, many people in the tech industry are well past this point but don't realize it, largely because we have a cognitive bias towards comparison with those around us. (Also, the above framing suggests strongly that we can learn to change where that point is for ourselves.)


> In today's world, I have yet to see something which is not monetizable.

Plenty of artists out there who love making art, and yet their art is simply not sellable. For many people this would be a source of disappointment, but for a lucky few they may realize they just enjoy creating art for its own sake, and not to sell it.


> In today's world, I have yet to see something which is not monetizable.

This is the attitude that causes people like the author of The Great Suspender to sell out and betray the trust of everyone.

https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1...

I believe that uBlock Origin fundamentally cannot be monetized without violating the spirit of the extension itself. It's meant to fight back against predatory monetization practices. We can only hope that gorhill will never believe the mantra that anything can provide a source of revenue if you just put your mind to it.


e.g. you like to play a lot of chess. So you COULD theoretically monetize it by making content about chess (youtube, ebooks etc.), maybe even do some events but still.. that's not the same as playing chess which is what is your hobby is about. Thus, making money with your hobby would then indeed not relate (much) to the actually fun part about the hobby. (although you can argue that working as a writer on your hobby is better than being a writer about something you're not that interested about. However, it might sour your hobby.)


Making a positive income on youtube is incredibly difficult. The competition is very high, the pay is pretty subpar, and the hours are long. You also need to take a few (yes, a few, not a couple) years off of your day job to work entirely on content and marketing to get your channel off the ground.

A topic like chess might take 60 hours a week of video editing over the course of years just to get to 4k/month in income IF you beat the nearest 10,000 competitors who are trying to make similar channels.

Really not a realistic option for most people.


> In today's world, I have yet to see something which is not monetizable.

What about working on free software without compromises like ads or dual licensing (which does not usually help anyway)?


My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons.

Colleagues have spent days in jungles building bridges to drive cars over them, have got to know people living in random villages from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and share in their culture, have met and quizzed world leaders, have been to Antarctic bases, and have exposed and brought down criminal networks making lives miserable for thousands of people.

I guess you'd define that as "glorious toiling", but I could have 10m in the bank and never have to work again, but get to do very little of that.


> My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons.

I had a similar job once, where I worked in TV coverage of final table of WSOP (World Series of Poker). I was around the poker celebs at the time, preparing talking points for my boss who interacted with them, even have somewhere a photo of me sitting at the final table. My ultimate conclusion is... so what? Beyond a cool story to share with people interested in poker, there's little value in that for me, and I was a poker nerd then.


I'm unsure how this is a relevant reply. I guess if you interpret GP's comment as saying "I had a job that I could tell a lot of cool stories about," then you're right, that's not worth so much if all you get out of it is a "cool story bro."

But if you actually enjoyed living in those stories, then how can the ultimate conclusion be "so what?" Having an interesting and rich life that you enjoy is clearly a goal for many.


It seems like this person deeply values what they had the opportunity to do, while you don't care about poker.


in the end, everyones going to just figure out they should be doing yoga


I've done some travel for work in my life. I did an extended stay in the UK (I'm American) when I was young and it was pretty amazing. Many years later I had a gig that needed me to spend time in spots around the US and also some stays in East Asia. All business class and expense accounts in first-rate cities and I hated it. I'm older now and I have kids at home that I didn't get to see. Taking a business trip to Tokyo always seemed like the ultimate Business Guy thing to do but I spent 80% of my waking hours in conference rooms with salary men.

You value different things at different times in your life, but looking back I'm glad I got to experience those things because most people don't get the chance.


On a related note, I think what you might call "low income" service jobs are often more likely to put you in contact with those sorts of people than some middle class job. Sort of like being a maid. Maids work for the rich and the rich are more likely to be those sorts of people. So a maid is more likely to know one of those people than a middle class person and in a way that is quite personal (you're in their house, possible living under their roof). I know of cases like that involving well known people. Naturally, the perspective is more quotidian and more accurate than the kind of comical celebrity fantasies middle class people often believe.


My choice of expression was a bit clumsy.

By "toil" I did not mean a thing without a worth - a thing you find worthwhile is intrinsically valuable. I don't believe you can compute economic value to life experiences.

I would call toil anything that does not enable you to rise to the stage of self-actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

But like I said my intent was not to present such a non-self actualizing job as bad, quite contrary.


If you have 10m in the bank and want to be involved in events at that level, you can be: we would just instead call you an executive producer.


> My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons.

Cool.... so what do you do?


Mostly broadcast contribution and networking. Take the London Marathon in October, nice simple job given it's covid with 6 outgoing video circuits to national and international - some via satellite, some via dual-fibre - 4 incoming circuits, about 16 bidirectional audio channels, wifi across the compound.

Most of it is sitting at home making sure everything runs fine -- today I was looking into a supposedly resilient SRT connection that's dropping every few days - incoming packets from two different suppliers stop at the same millisecond, but the far end (not mine) insist they are coming from two different devices (which I can't believe)


Sounds like some sort of audio tech?


What's your job?


Works at the BBC if I had to guess...


A lot of OBs are outsourced


What are ‘the proms’? And why would anyone want to sit through royal weddings


Major cultural event

And as for weddings about a million people lined the streets of London when Kate + William got married. Might not be your cup of tea, but horses for courses.


Ok. Major British cultural event. It would have been helpful to include that since (I assume) most HN readers are American. And I guess Royal weddings are more popular than I thought, at least in the UK.


https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/news/tv-ratings-royal-...

> TV Ratings: 22.4 Million U.S. Viewers RSVP to Royal Wedding


Most HN readers should have been able to work out it was a non-American comment, based on the "royal wedding" event option even if unfamiliar with Glastonbury and the proms.


He is probably referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Proms#Last_Night_of_the_Pr...


I think it says a lot about our society, that this comment is the most highly upvoted in a forum such as this.

It's clear that if we decided to let everyone's basic needs of food, shelter, healthcare, and transport be met unconditionally, the world would look very different. It would not cost us much, maybe even less than we pay in taxes now, but I feel certain it would make everyone's lives significantly better. The lack of unnecessary stress and "soul-destroying toil" that anyone would be forced to endure is surely worth it.

The only downside I see is that no one could get as extraordinarily rich as a very few people can today. I don't see how most of us can't be fine with that.


This situation seems ideal, but how would you get people to do the grunt work? This is one thing the current system takes care of with threats, for lack of better words.


What if it was rotated among "everyone"? I think people would be happy to do grunt work for a week (probably even a month or two) if it meant that they get all the rest of their time back to do what they want.


"I probably _appear_ motivated but I'm just a neurotic who hates failing." I feel seen.


> I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work since the tech stack is complex and fugly. I probably _appear_ motivated but I'm just a neurotic who hates failing. If I didn't need to feed and house my family I would have moved to a lower paying position long ago that is intrinsically more motivating.

I too hate failing. And many times end up working extra to get things done properly. This keeps me in very different position where my manager, team relies on me, praises me but end of day it takes toil on other parts of life. I have seen many people in my career, who just don't work, don't bother about product at all, do things at last moments, have literally zero affection for the craft and still survives in industry. I really envy them.

I am grateful to have good paying job in pandemic while many people laid off. But these days what I really need is to close my laptop at 5 pm WITHOUT ANY WORRY.


> I'm basically in a job that is quite important for my org, I get compliments for good job, but I hate most aspects of my daily work since the tech stack is complex and fugly

I think a lot of people can actually relate to this. IMHO, a good way to think about it is to consider that there's more granularity to work than a black-or-white "I like my job" / "I hate my job". Maybe you dislike meetings, but enjoy the feeling of triumph after fixing bugs, or maybe it's vice-versa. Maybe you enjoy helping coworkers get unstuck with your expertise despite working on a crappy stack. Maybe you take satisfaction in seeing the burndown chart go down each week, or maybe thinking about how to be a better tech interviewer is something that interests you. There's usually _something_ - even if it's a small trivial thing - that is nice about your day to day.

I often think of it in terms of parallels to meditation: honing self-awareness skills lets you realize small things that you might not have been aware of before. Walking to the supermarket might be a tiring chore, but hey look I never noticed that tree blooms beautifully in march, or hey I started to notice a small difference in my stamina, etc. You are in charge of your (limited) attention span, and you can choose to focus on the positive things - no matter how small - and let the rest naturally fall by the sidelines.


> Success and "loving your job" have nothing in common in my experience.

This was something I have been "feeling" to be true recently, but really needed some independent validation.


"Beyond that you are toiling, and if you like your job, it's glorious toiling like gardening (pleasing, but not important, but you love it, so it's great) or terrible toiling for living that eats your soul."

How beautifully put.


If you want my advice, it is simply this: look for dysfunctional companies. They're easy to recognize, because they look like pretty much the opposite of those companies everybody really want to work at.

Take everything you see from a website like Elastic[1] for example and invert it:

- It should NOT be clear what the value proposition is.

- The website should NOT adhere to modern design standards, or at least do so very poorly.

- Bonus points for lots of unnecessary, buzz-heavy text that does not give any further indication of what the product/service offers.

Just look for any remote developer job via linkedin or any other place recruiters frequent and just invert what seems to be a "good" job and look for that instead. Approach it with your current attitude (maybe not in the actual interview) and assume that you probably won't even want to add it to your resume.

I think you won't have any problem finding a role where you can get away with this: how it will affect your mental health is another question, but that's for you to find out. If you ever want to bail out, you can just drop it and fill this gap period with something else in your resume, like whatever hobbies you were busy with.

For the record, I think the incredulity in some of these responses is pretty hilarious. 99,9 % of companies do not care about your well being as a person, by choosing this attitude you're really just treating them the way they are already treating you: a disposable business partner that will be removed from the equation as soon as they are no longer beneficial for you.

[1]: https://www.elastic.co/


> look for dysfunctional companies

This theme is common in the thread and is wildly wrong.

First I recommend reading Bullshit Jobs to get some perspective on how others have fulfilled your goals.

Big, rich, process-driven companies and institutions are the easiest to do the least work in for the longest time.

Process is the toxin low-effort thrives on.

An admin role at Google pays more and works much less than an engineering role at a dysfunctional company.

If you look at (rich) university departments the admins are impossible to fire and work very little despite being paid only about 30-40% less than a professor with multiple postdocs working five to ten times as hard.

Anything in government: remember, process is where you thrive, and big rich city and state governments have incredible amounts of process.


I think this is the better advice here, and fits with some comments I left elsewhere in this thread about people I know working at MSFT and putting in only a handful of hours a week and still getting raises and promotions.

It's easy to do little when everyone expects everything to take forever because of how heavy the processes are in the organization.


It's not necessarily just processes.

There are also more experienced people who are just very good at certain types of tasks with the result that they can bang something out in a half day and everyone else assumes they must have spent a week on it. They're still generally available the rest of the time but they can produce what's considered high quality work in very little time. Of course, one needs to have that skillset and it helps to be mostly autonomous.


Working in govt is the way to achieve what OP wants. Especially in positions that are unionized. We call these people "lifers" or "gamers". They know how to game the union seniority system. Most of these people know how to phone in their work just enough to not get noticed and hop from one seniority-based position to the next before anyone catches on. By the time they've put in their 25 years, you've got a guy who majored in chemistry getting ready to retire from a senior software dev position. You can't fire them because they're union and it would take 6 months to a year to get all the documentation in order. And by that time, they've transferred to a different position.


Is THIS why Satya Nadella is so keen on getting everyone back in their cubicles. It makes everyone look like they're banging on their keyboards, nevermind that they're sending pictures on .... Teams? Can you do that on Teams? We use Slack. I was curious why he thought, "So much work gets done around the watercooler." I just thought he was a holdover from an earlier time. He's a smart dude, I'm not denying that. And I'm not young, but I'm not really working, usually, when I'm chatting in the snack room.

Maybe I'm too low level, though. That's a real possibility. I 100% admit that.


I think what he meant was that by being together and discussing problems we solve them a lot faster. This is absolutely true in my job. If I didn't know my team loved being remote so much, we would have been back in the office as soon as was safe.


Yes, we do solve problems faster if we're around the watercooler, but we're also miserable, and wondering how to escape. Be careful what you wish for.


pretty sure it's not safe yet. unless you're in israel/new zealand.


> Process is the toxin low-effort thrives on.

I'd argue it's even more sinister than that; too much process can very quickly cause engineers to burn out, and since they aren't reprimanded in any serious way for not doing much work, they can sit and feel depressed without anyone even addressing it.


You've just described my reality


I think it's a reality of most of the giant, brand-name companies. Near the end of my time at Apple, I was certainly underachieving (hence why I quit), largely because I became incredibly burnt out from the process.


> Big, rich, process-driven companies and institutions are the easiest to do the least work in for the longest time.

You kinda need to weasel in there first. When I worked at Intel (& to a lesser extent, Microsoft and IBM) there were literally hundreds of little 5-10 person b.s. boondoggles that did nothing of value but had management that could spin like Rumpelstiltskin, just took the company for a ride. Get several levels of that management going and no one has to really produce anything, they just need a manager to create paper-thin goals and hit those. Why? Because managers want to retire on the job and with enough nepotism it is entirely possible to scratch each other's backs. Problem is, they are very defensive about bringing in anyone that could upset the applecart. If you find one and burrow in, enjoy it!


Yes to university or government jobs as being good places to "disappear" and still earn a decent salary (with generally very good benefits). It's also very unlikely you will get fired once you've been around for a little while.


> An admin role at Google pays more and works much less than an engineering role at a dysfunctional company.

There's two issues here:

1) The op asked for a technical role, so comparing an admin role to a technical one isn't helpful.

2) You're presuming Google is not a dysfunctional company.

I think point (2) is actually the more important one; reading through your comment, the type of "big, rich, process-driven" company is you describe is exactly what I thought of when the gp said "dysfunctional".

The only extra qualifier I would add to the gp is to "look for uncool dysfunctional companies". There are companies (like Google) that have what I would describe as a "cult factor", where they're able to create enough mythos around the brand that "good", hard-working, attentive & talented people want to work there purely based on the "culture" associated with the brand (and also having that brand listed on one's resume). This creates a competitive environment where the scale & bureaucracy might not be sufficient to save you from scrutiny.

The ideal place is somewhere exactly as dysfunctional as Google, but without the same reputation attached to the brand.


At least as far as Google is concerned, this hasn't been my experience. I spent ~6.5 years there working an hour a day at the most (cue Office Space, meeting with the Bobs) and AFAIK didn't raise any alarms. In fact, when I left, my colleagues complimented me on my "work ethic".

It wasn't just me doing that either. Most ppl are too busy focusing on whatever life goals and illusions they've crafted for themselves to really scrutinize what others are doing and even if they realize what's happening, why would they care?


Good to know. I haven't worked in Google myself so I can't comment from first-hand experience, but I've heard from other Googlers I know that this is very much not the case for them. Could be office location/team dependent I'm sure.

I guess in any large enough org you're likely to be able to find this in some areas.


You're not wrong, but I also firmly believe that most if not all dysfunctional companies are extremely process heavy.


I think more dysfunctional companies are constantly working hard and sprinting... in circles.

They are making no real progress, but on the inside they’re all working hard at accomplishing nothing.


There's definitely lots of overlap in the venn diagram of "process heavy" and "dysfunctional", but there are plenty of each category that is not the other. Lots of industries require process, and lots of startup type places are dysfunctional without being process heavy.


Yes, they are either over-heavy on process or over-heavy on micromanagement

Each creates different kinds of misery, and could be exploitable by OP for his goals.

The over-process version is likely more durable (both the org not imploding soon, and the position lasting) and potentially less interpersonal misery.


Specifically, stay away from the tech industry.

1. Look for a smaller antiquated company or department that doesn't understand IT, and has few if any in-house IT professionals. Make sure the role doesn't include user support. Look for "Operations" jobs.

2. Look for positions that have a TON of manual work. Search for "prepare daily/weekly/etc... reports." and similar job functions.

3. Automate as much of it as possible.

4. DO NOT TELL ANYONE that you have automated those functions.

(optional - ethical constraints)

5. Insist on working from home so you can work for multiple companies simultaneously.


Early in my career (23 years old) I made the mistake of automating (rule 4) and bragging about it. I wrote some scripts that automated AutoCAD drawing calculations and spit out some spreadsheets. It would save a draftsman or engineer the entire morning of work every business day.

Naive and hungry for recognition, I even did a couple presentations about the process and was very proud of myself.

Later, I was reprimanded by an 'old school' director for taking shortcuts and changing processes that were well-established. There was no process change, my script performed the same calculations that a draftsman/engineer would click and commit to paper every morning.... zero room for error.

My boss was also reprimanded for letting the 'new kids they hired' run amok and do things however they liked.

They still used my script though and began giving our group new responsibilities to manage with the time I had freed up.


I was in a role that hit 1 & 2 for my first 'job' out of college in 2008. They told me that I couldn't go on vacation if I didn't finish my entire 2 weeks worth of work once... so, I automated all of it. A couple button clicks right before I left town and boom, all of my work was done.

Eventually the marketing department caught on that I had a really fast way to build reports and marketing targets that didn't require using a cumbersome db marketing tool and manually generating reports. I shared what I had built, and it royally pissed off everyone else in my role because they thought they were going to lose their cushy do basically nothing jobs. It actually turned into the team building out more tooling + automation, and most people learned valuable skills. The company even sent people to training and paid for tech books etc.

I left shortly after for greener pastures, but overall I think it was a net win.


Items three and four I did at my first job (non-technical).

I had been screwing around with software through my teenage years building AOL chat tools and little mods for games - I never considered it for a career.

I was hired as a data entry clerk when I was 18 at a large hospital. The billing department would work in excel and print hundreds of pages a day for data entry clerks to enter into our insurance billing system.

It took me about two weeks before I realized that if I could get them to bring me the spreadsheets on diskettes I could write a program to input the data into the system for me.

It took me a few days to figure it out and then I completely automated my job for about six weeks.

I was busted reading the Dungeon Masters guide in the middle of the day by my boss.

She asked what I was doing and I explained “I am reading the dungeon Masters guide.”

I explained that I had written a tool to automate my job.

I had not signed a PIIA form and I wrote the software at home on my own computer. I guess the company had no legal right to take it, so she offered me $2000 and a promotion to the IT department to give the company the rights to my software.

I was making $7 an hour, so I was very excited at the 2k.

I took it and they fired 15 clerks :(


Excellent points except (5) Usually immoral and often illegal


Why is it immoral? As long as the asked work gets done there's nothing wrong with splitting your time. How it any different from spending that time slacking off and working on hobbies, which could be monetized (ie art)


It's immoral because to be hired for a 40/hr full time job by 2 companies at the same time, you'll need to lie to both companies, representing to both that you're working full time, while in fact you aren't.

And presumably the lies aren't limited to the interview process. You'll probably have to lie on a daily/weekly basis to keep up the ruse (for example, what will you say when both companies want you in a meeting at the same time?)


A different take: in this line of work especially the “40 hour” requirement is an unethical backdoor way to impose a non-compete condition. It’s not entirely an arbitrary number since the 40-hour week has been customary for decades. But in practice there’s no good reason to demand that allocation of time for an exempt, salaried employee.


If you are paid by the hour it's immoral (and fradulent) to submit a time sheet for more hours than you actually work. However if you are paid a salary, you are being paid to do a job without regard to how much time it takes. If you can get the work done in 10 hours, and your supervisors are happy, then that's all you're obligated to do.


I often see this, but it doesn't match my experience of being salaried (outside the US). There's never a concept of "work done", there's just an endless list of things to do that I tackle one at a time, for 42h/week. If I go faster, then it just means I do more things in that same time.

Are there really salaried software jobs where every day someone tells you "your task for today is X", and you're finished for the day once you have done it?


We have expected productivity requirements on a bi-weekly basis. The expectation is that if you finish 2 weeks worth of work early, then the next iteration you will get slightly more work. Of course this isn't 100%, (obviously someone could just take longer on purpose), but as a manager its pretty easy to tell when your direct reports are slacking off.

Personally I don't think having 2 salaried jobs is immoral. If you're not caught, I feel like it is indicative more of bad leadership than your skill. A good manager should know what someone of X skill level should be accomplishing. If you're only doing half of that, (assuming the other half was spent on another job), it should be fairly easy to notice.


Thanks for the explanation. In practice, it seems pretty similar, the manager has to estimate what is a reasonable amount of work an employee should be able to do. It's just that in my case it's over 42h/w and in your case it's more nebulous.

2 salaried jobs here would clearly be illegal though, even if in practice you could manage manage it by only working half the time per job. There are laws around how many hours you can do in a week, and two 100% jobs would blow over the limit.


It’s immoral to not live life to its fullest or do anything that is not your passions. It’s immoral because you are betraying yourself, when literally you owe no one but yourself anything.


A very Epicurean philosophy. There are other philosophical schools of that come to mind, Kant and Epictetus are diametrically opposed for instance.

Noting that if everyone thinks this way, then civilization falls apart rather quickly.


I don't think it's immoral if you get to accomplish all of your tasks in both companies. For what I understand, companies want you to do the work they hired you for; they make money out of you, otherwise they wouldn't need you.

Maybe a better way to be at 2 companies at the same time is by being completely transparent about working on both places with one of the companies. You automate all your full-time boring work in the first one, and in the second maybe you do part-time, or some kind of work that can align with your own interests.

maybe an etrepeneurial partnership or a flexible deal to get a new product that really interests you without having to commit all of your life.


I've never signed an agreement that says I work 40 hours a week. It has never even come up.


Meh, if they're happy with your work, it's no big deal. It would be immoral if they saw you were automating the same work and decided to fire you or demand you do more.

Salary workers aren't paid for their time. Their paid for their productivity


Bill by the hour, and suddenly they call you a consultant, and it's neither immoral nor illegal. smh


That's called double billing and is considered unethical [0]:

> In law, double billing refers to charging an hourly rate to two clients for the same time spent working. The American Bar Association prohibits double billing. It is tantamount to overcharging, since the amount of time actually spent working on any one client's work is less than the amount billed to that client.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_billing


For lawyers, by the Bar Association... What does that have to do with tech?


If you can charge the amount lawyers charge per hour then it's definitely unethical.


Double the rates, work half the time for each client :)


I never understand this point personally. If you're delivering value to the multiple companies you work for such that they like you, or at least don't fire you, then I don't see anything immoral in that. It's merely corporations who insist on people working for one and only one company at a time when in reality it shouldn't matter.


Completely agree. Do we insist that corporations only sell to a single customer? No that would be absurd. But insisting a person can only sell their labor to a single customer is seen as perfectly normal.


there is a chance you are going to have access to valuable information of competing companies, that would put you in position of power over them, and is a clear conflict of interests.

So it's like a lawyer serving opposing parties in court, nobody's asking why it's impossible


That's only true in that particular hypothetical. There are a lot of possible circumstances without such a clear conflict of interest.

Also, in the lawyer example, someone's freedom or livelihood is on the line. In the company example, it's a company's profits, which has a much less clear relationship to either of those two things, especially in today's world of 250:1 salary ratios.


> and often illegal

Source? As long as it's not explicitly stated, and in my experience, it never is, then there should be no issue with this.


Interestingly, for my current role at Salesforce as part of the employment contract it explicitly states I’m not allowed to work on anything else on the side unless I get explicit permission from their legal department. Including nonprofits, hobby projects, consulting, etc. I don’t know to the extent that anyone abides by that, but they drill at home pretty strongly when you start. The language is far above and beyond what most companies insist about not working on anything with a conflict of interest, and I’ve never seen it before at any company, large or small.

Then again, there’s a difference between something being illegal and it being against your employment contract. You’re not going to go to jail for having a secret second job, but you might get fired. But at least you’d have that second job…


I've only worked at tech companies, and mostly the kind that you want to work at. But basically every company I've worked at has some clause in the employment contract about outside activities. And typically having another full time job would violate the spirit, if not the letter of the employment contract.

That said, some contracting on the side is probably fine, as long as it's not at a competitor.


Correct. Most companies have "Moonlighting" clauses.

It's a clause that originally meant that you couldn't have a 2nd night job, because you would be exhausted in your primary job, but it also includes having a 2nd job in the same hours.


It's very common for employment contracts to explicitly forbid you from working on things during your employment that is not directly related to your employment. An expectation of "loyalty" is also often even included in labor law, even in very left leaning countries in Europe.


yes, which is bullshit because this said loyalty is not reciprocated in any meaningful way, I still fail to see how such conditions came to be.


As I said in a sibling comment, bill by the hour, and they start calling you a consultant, and suddenly this isn't an issue anymore :)


Maybe in the US it is not explicitly stated. My previous contract stated explicitly that I had to work from 9:00 to 18:48 five days a week, and do 1:00 of lunch between 11:00 and 15:00. Anything deviating from that would be accounted in the Bank of Hours and be subject to additional laws regard pay.


That's fascinating. I just checked my contract and it doesn't mention working hours at all.

However, I'm not in tech, and prior to COVID, it physically wouldn't be possible to work multiple jobs remotely. So perhaps this is an artifact of that time.

Some of the other comments suggested there may be actual laws against it, I'll have to look into that.

Off-topic, but I discovered that recent legislation made my wage confidentiality clause illegal.


It depends on the country.

In France for instance, it is legal to have two (or more) jobs but they cannot be with competitors, you have a limit of hours you can work (which means that if your contract states 40 hours work then you cannot have another one), and you cannot have a clause in your contract which you usually do have (in the companies I know at least - tech oriented).


Simply insist on being paid by 1099 and don't live in California.


> often illegal

I think a citation is needed here. It _may_ be a contract violation, but I struggle to think of many jurisdictions where this would be illegal.

Could you share some examples of when this would violate a law?


I thought the whole point of being paid a salary was to not have to worry about keeping track of hours


Except if you are hired as a contractor


5. is like this tweet that suggests there was an engineer that worked at both Google and Facebook simultaneously.

https://twitter.com/arrington/status/1311520168200163328?s=2...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24650817

The issue is that this thread is suspicious, says 'a friend of a friend' so there's literally no way to verify this as being real. It got 20k likes on twitter so it might have just been a made-up tweet to garner a day of fame.


For what it's worth (sample size of 1 - me) - if you are at all competent and bad at setting boundaries, the dysfunction will absolutely frustrate the heck out of you.

Seeing what is broken, knowing that it can be fixed, and having even the slightest bit of motivation or knowledge of how to do so, and how it goes on forever and ever and doesn't get fixed becomes incredibly tiring.

I suppose, if you go into a dysfunctional company hoping to "coast", just be aware, if you are not good at managing boundaries and passing off the "frustration", it might be a lot worse than you realize.

Just imagine.. if you are spending 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, watching a slow motion wreck.. and powerless to do anything about it... sure, you get paid, but is it worth spending the time?


If I were being paid like $250k/yr+, think I could tolerate it for enough years to retire and go do my own things.


lol, well the slow motion trainwrecks are, in my experience, about a quarter of that. But it's still enough for a comfortable life, especially if you have a side hustle or you're self-teaching stuff that will help your resume.


I know some Google teams that might qualify.


Dysfunctional companies in my experience have been horrible places to work where they work the devs to death and make them do all kinds of unrelated tasks.


This or, these are companies where managers need people to "look busy", which in a "remote allowed" environment will not be possible or will mean surveillance software.


If you're a dev working from home, surveillance software might be easy to get around ;)

Automate some real-looking work processes and just use your personal computer for everything else.


I can vouch for this. Dysfunctional companies have no conception of humanity and you will suffer as you try to squeeze through the cracks, which is much harder than it looks.


Dysfunctional companies consume effort, but they waste it. People work themselves to the point of burnout with little to show for it.

What the original poster needs is a company that is already functioning without them, and does not require any of their effort to keep going.


This is great advice but if I could just add one thing, from experience, and that is, do treat the interview with dispassion. I have consistently found employers (esp in a dysfunctional organisation) often read dispassion as confidence and that is always a plus point.


+1 for this advice. In my experience skepticism and hesitation (within reason) are often highly regarded in these environments, and enthusiastic upstart types are seen as inexperienced / naive, even when that's not the case.


The backhaul VOIP telco space has TONS of companies that meet these criteria.


I'm curious, could you be more specific?


Well I'm not going to name specific companies, but you know those international calling cards that are sold basically everywhere in areas with a large migrant work force? Those cards tend to use these discount VOIP networks.


I assumed WhatsApp audio and FaceTime audio killed that market years ago.


You might also assume Vonage was killed off, as I did until recently discovering they have a multi-billion market cap.


Vonage is supported by people like my parents, who for years have used the landline via Vonage for at most 2 phone calls per month that could have been done via a multitude of apps, yet refuse to heed my advice to cancel it.


Try setting up E911 service for a GVoice voip phone in your house sometime -- you'll run across a lot of web UIs that look >10 years old.


The funny thing about this is that all the people I know who work or worked at Elastic say it's one of the most dysfunctional and toxic environments.


I wasn't in any way trying to say Elastic must be a great place to work, only that the type of places I'm talking about normally have web sites that look like the opposite of theirs.


Slick websites often cover a multitude of sins - in a dysfunctional company "update the website" is something they can subcontract out and point at.

Look for multiple changes to the website with no consistent plan over years.


This is how your life becomes endless putting out fires


You just described my job to a T. I'm a systems analyst at a university.

This was a big, demanding job when I first started. But after being here for 2 years, I've automated a lot of the complicated stuff. So now most routine tasks that took the other guy a week takes me about 15 minutes. To be fair though, the other guy was *really bad*. Like, couldn't even open IIS manager and restart a single website, bad.

The pay is not fantastic / FAANG, but it does offer a decent salary in a mid/low cost of living area. Combined with my wife's salary we make more than enough.

Also I get a free master's degree out of it. So that's awesome.


I think the take-away here, which I've also experienced, is to get an IT job in an industry that does not appreciate IT - find a position that seems to involve a TON of manual work - automate all of it - and DO NOT TELL anyone that you have automated those activities.

If you are working from home, you could conceivably do this for multiple jobs (in theory, ethical considerations aside).


> find a position that seems to involve a TON of manual work - automate all of it - and DO NOT TELL anyone

This reminds me the article "Now That's What I Call a Hacker" [1], where a guy left behind his automation scripts when switched companies, which revealed some extreme scripts, like:

> hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.

I'm putting this article and what you just said together. Now I think it's reasonable to believe there are a lot of IT professionals doing this, they are just hidden, because there is no reason to share this kind of works experience, as it makes sense in the competitive side of the industry.

[1] https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/249-now-thats-what-i-call-a-...


> hangover.sh

I almost created this myself some time ago, although not specifically for hangovers. I was envisioning a sort of dead man's switch, where if I didn't check in before a certain time it would send an SMS to my manager calling in sick.

The main reason I didn't, was that I figured I was more likely to forget to check in (and be forced to use a sick day when I didn't "need" one) than be incapable of waking up, making the call on if I was in a workable state, and sending the SMS by myself.


You could just make it message you first saying "Respond within 30 minutes to stop sick message from being sent"


I know a UX/UI guy that worked for two big canadian banks at the same time. He was moving to Bank B, and did it for three months, just enough to lock in his annual bonus on Bank A. Oh, and he was praised in Bank A for his work in this period.


Stories like this is what will get to management and have them force everyone back in to the office.


I don't get this reaction by management- if the work is getting done, who cares?!


They are going to force everyone back into the office anyhow... upper management tends to place high on the narcissism spectrum... they need to see, feel, and experience their kingdom in person for maximum narcissistic supply.


^ and this is one of the major downsides of working for a pathological company.


Because $/resources are fungible, and your task isn't the only thing in the organization that needs resources.

Assuming you are on salary, if you can legitimately do something in half the time, great, you should then move on to doing something else that contributes to the company.

If you are on salary you are paid for your time and talent, not by the task.

The right thing for management to do would be to reward you for being efficient (doesn't just have to be simple monetary, people are motivated by all kinds of things), and then reallocate those resources that we saved to some other need.

This of course changes if you are on some kind of contract work.


Well... yes. But if the company suddenly becomes wildly more profitable because of work you’ve done will your salary grow in proportion? Of course not. I admire your work ethic, but you might want to consider just how asymmetric the employer/employee relationship is.


If you miss a deadline or delay the launch of a product does the company dock your base pay?

Look, I'm not saying you shouldn't optimize for your own goals. You do you, no judgement.

What I am saying is that running a successful company means optimizing for the company, not the individual. And the best run companies make sure that the incentives of their staff are closely aligned with the company.

If staff are functionally lying to their company about their output, something has gone wrong.


> If staff are functionally lying to their company about their output, something has gone wrong.

Problem is that productivity gains are extreme across most industries over the past fifty years, and except at the FAANG end of the income spectrum where people are making $300k+/year, those gains have been 100% absorbed by employers and not passed on to workers.

As such, employers are the ones to have broken the social contract. Yes, they're pushed to do this because they can, and there are no penalties to dissuade them from this behavior (specifically because employee organizations/unions have fallen out of favor, though that may seem to be reversing recently).

So it feels justified to provide a service to an employer for a fixed fee (a salary or weekly contract wage) in exchange for satisfactory work output, and to not work the hours the employer may assume you're working. It's a profoundly asymmetric relationship, and letting an employer believe you're working more hours for that work output--as long as they're happy with your work output!--is balanced by the fact that they're not paying you what you're worth to them.

The latter is clearly true if they're continuing to be happy with your work output and you're working half as many hours as they may believe you to be working. And yet they absolutely wouldn't double your salary if you doubled your work output.


Even at the FAANG end the gains are tiny compared to the ownership class.


> If you miss a deadline or delay the launch of a product does the company dock your base pay?

Inasmuch as it impacts the performance review, yes. Employees are held accountable to a much more extreme degree than gains are shared.


To provide a counterpoint, we are humans, not machines for capital.

If I automate my job and halve my workload, I am going to be working easier and chilling more.

I will still spend some time on company growth activities, but I refuse to see myself as a monetary number on a spreadsheet. I have a life, and you only have one life.


It's not a counterpoint, both statements are true. Also, the post was in response to why do managers feel this way, not how do I feel personally.

The company pays you $$$ in exchange for your time and talent. That's the deal.

You don't have to take it. Seriously, in many cases you shouldn't take it. Life is short, optimize for being happy. I am the strongest supporter of that philosophy you will find.

But, if you can do your job in half the time and you are getting paid on the basis of time...you and the people who are paying you should reconsider the basis of that deal.

Hey, maybe you can get paid more and work less hours. Maybe you get a promotion to do something you find more interesting, or extra training opportunity, or a bonus, or even time off. But again, that should be negotiated within the confines of that original agreement between you and the company.

Once again, it's in both you and the companies best interest. Company shouldn't pay me to waste my time at the office, and I don't want to pretend to work. I'd rather spend that time outside, or with my family, or on a hobby, then try and hustle out some extra chill time.

The issue I have is when it's one sided. If the company knows that you are finishing your work in 2 hours, but they are paying you for 8, and they are ok with it, then again, it's part of the agreement and it's fine. There are lots of reasons that a company would be okay with this. Basically they have made the choice to pay you a much higher rate.

It's the hiding it part that I think is a grey area.


> The company pays you $$$ in exchange for your time and talent. That's the deal.

I'd disagree. They pay me for a specific amount and type of output, the same way they would for a new piece of machinery. It's not indentured servitude; they don't own me. If they just owned me, I wouldn't charge different rates for different things. A salary doesn't change that - a salary is just your assurance of my availability.


Not for salaried jobs they don't (which is going to be almost all HN readers jobs) - piece work like Amazon delivery drivers is different.


Generally when you are on salary, you get paid a set amount of money for some number of hours worked annually.

You don't get paid different rates for different work.

While it is possible to have a salary position with expected outputs (teach x classes a semester, launch 1 product per quarter, etc.) the better position descriptions will talk about responsibilities not metrics.


The point of being paid a salary vs per hour is that your entire time worked is abstract & non specific. It's also why salaried workers are usually exempt from overtime laws.

Our pay is also based on demand for our skills, based on the value it delivers, balanced with it's supply, which is why a software engineer is paid more than a McDonalds worker. If I could hypothetically produce the output of 100 google software engineers and I charged the price of 90 of them, any company would take me up for my offer and would be out competed by companies who didn't.

The fact that companies try to get the most for their money is just human nature and opportunistic. We don't need to actually go along with it, and nobody should feel guilty about doing the same with their employer too. If your a sales guy, you're considered a bad sales guy if you don't aggressively negotiate the best offer possible, engineers should not feel shy about doing the same too.


When you are on salary, you don't get paid to write code during all the time you are working. I can think about a problem for 6 hours and work 2 hours and fully deliver what the company expects from me.


If you're lucky you might get a few attaboys and a small bonus. Maybe a small promotion if really lucky.

The reality is career progression inside companies is unpredictable and underwhelming which is why people switch jobs so often.

Being an overachiever is great, but doing it for a thankless company is a waste of energy and resources.

So treat them the same way they treat you. Business only, no hard feelings, watch out for me and mine first. Act like they're disposable if they don't live up to your expectations - because that's how they will treat you.


I think the answer is because it's called "business" - if you're not busy it's "bad for the economy"


"Business" is anxiety.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/business


Going back to the office might in fact make that situation worse. Now the person with time on their hands and low ambition isn't gonna suddenly get ambitious, but is gonna distract other people as well.


And to be clear, "management" pulls these stunts all the time, so they might even be impressed.


Management doesn't even need forum posts to force everyone, they will do it just for their own job security.


Yeah, this is definitely happening. They need to dominate your life to pretend their job has purpose.


I have a very good friend, who was also a fairly accomplished engineer at Google for a time...

He, in the past, had like five jobs - he outsourced all his work to devs in Croatia, and he would take on jobs and present the work on a regular basis - but he was doing none of it.


Winning at life.


Ya know I've been considering taking on more jobs, but the biggest challenge is still being available for weekly meetings. Still need to appear in zoom calls on video for a status report.


I did 3 software jobs at the same time for a period of a month. But I was actually working full/part/part so it was kinda back breaking - but I was being paid as a consultant so I was actively working hard..


I managed four concurrent "half-time" gigs once.

Probably my most lucrative month ever.


Find jobs that don't require that nonsense. They do exist. I don't have weekly meetings, and haven't seen my co-workers either physically or on a screen in over a year.


What role exactly is that?


Senior developer on a smaller team.


Gumroad offers that


> is to get an IT job in an industry that does not appreciate IT

Yeah that's basically the gist. Needs enough IT for someone to steer it, doesn't need enough such that a complex env that requires an MSP to run things in that direction.


The robots are coming for you and all of your slovenly kin.


It's a Walter White moment - "I am the one who automates!"


Ill echo this, (am also a SA at a mid-size US university) I am completely content with how slow my job moves. We have real, actual deadlines a few times a year. The bare minimum earns you praise, I think Ive done a month's worth of work since last march which has been wonderful for my physical health. Nearly every 4-year offers unconditional tuition remission. You will be underpaid. Id stay in this position forever if I didnt happen to dislike the location as much as I do.


Geez this sounds exactly like my job.

Senior SE at a large southern university. Nice and slow, but underpaid.


I ran a small infosec shop for ~15 years and worked in many industries along the way. An IT job at a university was the first thing that came to mind. Not necessarily because the job is easy, because that's not always the case, but because the environments that I've been involved with at least are really chill and you stay in touch with young folks.


Some University positions can be notoriously cushy. I know a few networking folks who have been in their position at the University for a solid 25 years. Kind of unheard of in the enterprise-sector for the same position.


Government positions are even cushier. Things move slowly, they value consistency, and the hiring process is such a pain that you won't be fired for anything short of malicious or criminal behavior.

And if you automate a government task, there's a good chance you won't need to update it for at least a decade.


The pay is usually very noncompetitive. But the OP is okay with that.

The local universities around me have some dev/it positions posted on various job sites, and they are all offering bottom 30% or so in pay, like $45-60k/yr


>The pay is usually very noncompetitive.

But the benefits are usually top notch (e.g. healthcare). If the position comes with a generous defined-benefits government pension, it can actually end up being more lucrative than working in the private sector.


> generous defined-benefits government pension

You have to make sure that this pension actually pans out. I've worked at a semi-government job for 10 years. However only 1 of the ten years, they indexed their current payouts with inflation.

I'm a freelancer now, and I've been counting on that pension. But if this continues, that government pension will be worth a whole lot less. I'll probably have to work longer.


It's interesting to look at this in the context of ballooning tuition costs. Could it be that part of the problem is that university staff positions attract a high proportion of unmotivated time-servers? How is this possible at the same time that instructional staff are being squeezed so hard?


How is this possible at the same time that instructional staff are being squeezed so hard?

If I had to guess, supply and demand. There is a massive surplus of PhD’s looking for any job whatsoever in academia. Meanwhile, the demand for university IT jobs is probably low given that many other jobs in tech will pay more.


The problem is the exact opposite. The unmotivated time servers fill unnecessary positions created by the ambitious climbers. Doing a better job would likely make the problem worse as the bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.


Some tuition reimbursement is often baked into the salary.


Yep, we recently had to give several IT staff very "motivated" retirement packages because they've been on payroll for 30 + years. One guy was here for 42 years. Literally his entire career.


My buddy worked IT infrastructure at a major public university and would work 3 days a week but spread out his deployments for the write-ups that were used to evaluate his performance. The pay wasn't great so he left, but it was a great gig for a while.


Next step is to get some undergrads to do the work for you... [0]

[0] https://cat.pdx.edu/


How can I find a similar job?


I love this question for its honesty. Frankly if I had a job I just needed technical competence on without much thought, I'd probably hire you. Our 1-on-1's would be brief and probably just be you demoing whatever hobby it is you alluded to. As long as you can crank out some decent code, I don't see a reason why a person who needs some quality work done shouldn't at least give your desired arrangement a chance.

Unfortunately right now I do need product focused engineers, but in this case you wouldn't want to work for me anyways :-)

This is also a great thought exercise, what jobs would be good for you? Thinking on it a bit, I think the following could work:

1. Scrum team member at an all remote company on one of their lesser products. If you work fast then you can probably do it in a few hours each day.

2. Maybe a small consultancy where you work on a contractual basis just completing tickets?

3. Government. A small city council style place where you specify you need remote work and then probably the workload is minimal? I don't like the idea of being a burden on a government when there are perfectly dysfunctional companies you can find this with, it feels somewhat undemocratic, but in a pinch this might do?

4. A niche field? Maybe take up COBOL? Then you can specify the hours you work and if the patches are minimal you can fly through them?

Ultimately the thing that might get you to this arrangement fastest is being really good at your job, so you can fly though the work. So perhaps doubling down on one field and becoming a domain expert is the path to this arrangement?

These are all speculations, and hopefully they help you on your path to your desired role. Good luck!


I came here to respond to your #1 and tell you I worked in that position, and you are 100% spot-on. I chose to do more and grow/learn, and obviously there were times when you had full weeks and overtime, but by and large, I’d say 50% of people on my team were phoning it in and only putting in 2-3 hours per day. The rest was team meetings, corporate meetings, lunch hour, miscellaneous slack chatter, etc


It sounds like OP doesn’t want their day wasted with the extra 5 hours of non-coding work though (what you call “the rest”, they want to be free from, at least as I read the original).


yes, finding a job where not much real work is done is easy. find one where there's also not much busy work too is much much harder.


Thanks for the ideas ! 4. is probably what I'll end up doing, the niche field being some sort of devops / sysadmin job.

While reading the impressive amount of responses this thread got I realized I do enjoy helping other developers and generally keeping stuff working. I still end up spending nights tinkering with my .vimrc, it's not like I can't watch a computer anymore without puking.

Good luck to you too !


5. Take your job. Essentially you’re not doing any work are you? You’re looking for competent people to do work for you.

Would going into management be what this guy is looking for? I’m looking for honesty as candid as the op.


I may be naive but why would you hire someone who repeatedly says "I don't care". I have no problem hiring someone who just wants to get their shit done and get the f out and if that means, they only work 2 hours, so be it as long as expectations are clear BUT they still have to care when they are working those 2 hours. May be I am too simplistic but when someone tells me "I don't care", I generally won't hire them regardless of whether they are product focussed or not.


There's different things to "not care" about. It sounds like you're thinking "I don't care" means they don't care about the quality of their work output, which I agree is not good.

But the original question I think is saying "I don't care about the big picture, the product's 'strategic goals'". Which in my opinion is totally reasonable. If you hire a stonemason to build a wall in your garden, you don't expect (or even want) them to give a toss about your designs for the herb beds.

Of course there's a difference between full time employment and a one-off craft job. But why does a programmer need to care about the product as a whole? The product people certainly don't care about the quality of the source code itself (just the results it gives).


Because if the company sucks, which most companies do, then probably almost no-one there actually cares except people who have a larger-than-salary financial investment in the company, people who have been there long enough that the company is part of their identity and social group, and people who drank the kool-aid of company propaganda. People who do not fall into a group such as one of the above but who nonetheless tell you that they care are quite likely just lying to you. The person who says that he doesn't care is at least being honest.


Watch Office Space. It's funny, but it's really based on a lot of truth.


If they do good work why do they need to give a shit about your product?


Yes, exactly this. Plus at least they're being up front an honest about where they place value in their life.

At the end of the day a lot of us are working as "brains for hire" I don't know why I'm supposed to invent some lie about how i'm so passionate for the product in order to have gainful employment.


Can you share product you're referring?


A start would be to ignore a lot of things said about tech on HN. It is a solid source of pain, suffering and time wasting (I like it, but that's another story).

Forget about all this modern tech stuff no-one is asking for. You can work for companies / clients who need stuff automated; they don't care about k8s, jamstack, react, docker, service mesh, etc etc. You can hack shit together with php + mysql, put in on a vps and you'll be treated like a sorcerer.

Find small companies (I know a bunch in the EU, which is a good region anyway as you have a safety net if you lose your job and many places have 36 hour or less weeks) that are not IT companies but factories or something non-software with a small team that are working on internal software for the last 10 years. You will get tasks to fix/add on stuff, no-one will be in a hurry (factory runs fine without it, it just makes things better or gears up for a tax rule change or whatever).

I would be careful to not get depressed by this kind of work (I nearly did), but it's not hard to find (not here anyway) if you are at least a bit social and can write code so you can get through the interview. These companies don't give you whiteboard interviews or actually any more than just a friendly chat.


Medium sized law firms (25+ attorneys) are a good place to look. They have a lot of internal business processes that can be wrangled with some fairly simple apps. Not a single person in the whole firm knows anything about computers. Profit margins are fat. If you automate a couple things the managing partner thinks are a PITA, you'll be treated like a god. Also law firms seems especially fearful of tech talent leaving, so I don't even really think you have to worry about a paycut.


This is great advice. I have several friends who are lawyers, and they are just utter and completely non-technical. If you can find a place like this that allows you to work from home, it would be a great job for someone like OP's profile.


More generally still, look at established, unsexy industries flush with (old) money, such as finance, law, oil&gas, government services, infrastructure, real estate...

If you can find a space in there where you can accelerate things just by 5% mostly on your own, you'll find yourself in a highly paid, irreplaceable position soon enough.


Worst thing is: Nobody likes doing these manual tasks. They get the junior/paralegals/interns to do them but they all could be doing more valuable stuff.


Which processes? Could you give some examples?


>You can hack shit together with php + mysql, put in on a vps and you'll be treated like a sorcerer.

This times 1,000,000


Yes this is one of the most true things I have ever read based on my own experience..

In 2009 I was hired to do mostly helpdesk / IT support for a printer/copier sales company, making $36k

By 2012 I was making over $80k, being taken on the annual company trips with the high sales earners (cabo, hawaii), etc..

All basically because I set up a web based dashboard that aggregated numbers that their Sales CRM stored in a SQL database, which saved the Sales Managers tons of time every week..

I continued building this out / milking it for a few years, adding new reports and features.

It was the worst spaghetti code you have ever seen, SQL statements placed inside of HTML tables, wow it makes me kind of sick thinking about it now, I did not know what I was doing.

None of that mattered though.


> None of that mattered though.

After doing this professionally for 20 years I've found that clients don't care what language, framework, hosting provider, etc you use to solve their problems. They don't care about your code quality, they don't care about your CI pipeline or any of that shit. They care if you have solved their problem for them, and that's it.


They also don't care about security, until one day it bites them in the ass.


I continue to be surprised by how little impact gigantic hacks seem to have on large companies. Countless media reports of deep intrusions, stock market valuations not dented in the long term.


Until giant hacks result in actual pain being experienced by the leaders of these companies in the form of jail time and/or fines that aren't rounding errors on the balance sheet, no one will care.


>SQL statements placed inside of HTML tables

You're good. The principle of proximity applies, or was it locality of behavior?


There was nothing good about my code organization


Just make sure it is only internal software you'll be working on. Otherwise those small companies will have you doing customer support on the phone too.


That might not be a big deal if the goal is low effort work.


I personally found it very stressful but maybe not everyone would. Customers can be a PITA. There's always the guy who wants to question you on the finer details of the technology being used because he knows he could do better, and he's a passive aggressive asshole.


Nice to know this stuff is out there. I really do wonder how long I'll be able to handle the exhausting pace of US tech before I want to settle down and have kids in a society with a better social safety net and maybe a more sustainable approach to living.


I think it's probably fairly random. I.e. you're just as likely to have a "do nothing" job in a FAANG as in some other random corps. But I don't think you can start doing nothing right after being hired - usually people are hired because there's more work in a team that the existing headcount can handle. So, you have to work for some time and then count on "falling into the cracks" - landing in a place where there's less work than people capable of doing it.

BTW I recommend against startups (pre big funding). In startups, the owners watch costs like hawks and there's zero chance of slacking off.

BTW2: if you're good with people, I recommend a Scrum master role. From my observations over the years, these folks have almost zero workload and absolutely zero responsibility for anything. It's slacker's paradise - you just have to be comfortable with babbling on meetings/calls for the majority of the day.


Anything *agile related bullshit job will do, really.

Scrum master, agile coach, what have you. SM certs are easy to get with minimal investment. A meeting here, some buzzwords there and compile the results regularly in lengthy confluence pages nobody will ever read. Automate much of it and maybe generate a graph or two to present during reviews.

OP will have to organise retros, groomings, etc. Invent ever changing formats. Remind everybody to stick to the rulez, but don't do much else. Keeps people on their toes. At minimal effort.

Have regular catch-ups with various people. They're essentially coffee breaks, but you pretend to be productive and maybe generate a protocol. Plus you get to suck up to all the important people.

Bonus points for regularly posting obnoxious agile methodology articles on your companies intranet or Linkedin.


> Bonus points for regularly posting obnoxious agile methodology articles on your companies intranet or Linkedin.

To truely leave a legacy, it would be great, if you could also miss what the original intentions and benefits of agile are and go on to raise a few teamleads and middle managers to use your buzzwords in the wrong context.

A true master craftsman in this area makes the right people feel more, but the whole organization be less agile. Your work is not completed, until developers visit threads like this to step into your footsteps.


Definitely - in a last job, I wast told to not make waves (about how we could cooperate in a better way) and follow the agile process.

I resisted sending that scrum master a first sentence of agile manifesto and left promptly.


I am twitching reading this. This is cartoon punching fight cloud meets head-inside-church-bell.

This is like the social equivalent of How To Write Unmaintainable Programs ._.


Truly this fulfills the destiny of a Thought Leader.


> A meeting here, some buzzwords there and compile the results regularly in lengthy confluence pages nobody will ever read.

Uhm, no. I've been a scrum master. Your calendar looks like a lost game of Tetris, everybody above you is wondering why everything is late, everyone below you is wondering why they don't get more time. It's the anti-thesis of a cushy job.


This is pretty spot-on. I didn't get a lot of face time with stakeholders as an individual on a scrum team until our project manager was fired, and I said "f** it, I'll be the product owner AND scrum master".

I basically dumped our Atlassian suite, set up our Azure DevOps, including our project's processes, boards, and rules. I automated most of our meetings to run asynchronously because we're a remote team.

Takeaways: - The team loves me more than anyone on the team because I don't force arbitrary bullshit on them like holding them to extremely rigid scrum standards meant to create and highlight artificial scarcities of work. - Stakeholders (the ones that will recommend me for promotions) know my name and I get to shoot the shit with them in our weekly touchpoints while I show them the metrics that only matter for my team.

The easiest jobs are typically the mid-tier levels inside a company undergoing a "digital transformation" (unless your new boss would be from Amazon). These companies are rife with dysfunction and boomers that barely understand how to effectively leverage the Microsoft 365 platform. Cue automating everything, blowing the pants off of older folks like your mom when you fixed her iPad, and basically skating by while making good money (not FAANG great) money.


+1 for scrum master. Their mere existence is a strong signal that you are in an environment with a high tolerance for bureaucracy and low expectations for delivery.


Your cynicism is speaking directly to my soul.


This is the best description I've read!


I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week. We have a lot of contracts where we have Scrum Masters just because we do Agile, usually the non-technical types do it.

The irony is that Scrum Masters are supposed to not make the team reliant on them but by having a dedicated role for it of course the dev team will make the Scrum Master do menial tasks, if you don't might dealing with the Agile bullshit full time it's a doss.


> I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week.

Same here! Scrum masters are secretaries on managers' salaries. They're the true winners of the corporate game.


I think they get a bad rap. Good scrum masters are worth their weight in gold at scale. The solve all inter-team comms, the bat away distractions, and they generally find the answers, or the people with the answers and get them solved and batted out.

Bad scrum masters take up space with reporting meetings that aren't reporting - but who are we kidding. I've been privileged to work with both.


For 19 years of career I've never met this unicorn scrum master you are describing.

Not a counter-argument, just sharing an anecdote.


Anecdote -- in the last 15 years I've had exactly one unicorn. They do exist, but they are very rare. And worth their weight in gold, I was really sad to lose ours in a layoff. Scrum masters, project managers, and marketing folks all seemed to be first out the door when money got tight


I thought the same of Project Managers, until I had the pleasure with work with the MissionCloud people in a project that included a Project Manager (in their side). I was amazed at her project management skills, and I really wished I could have her in my team.


That's the problem with anecdotes. Over my (longer, not that it matters) career I've had both. I've only had 2 of the unicorns however.


If the scrum master has enough rank or credibility + technical experience, they can get tickets routed and convince team leads that "yes this ticket is your problem until you prove otherwise".

This probably falls under your "solves all inter-team communication problems" catch-all.


They are project managers then, really.


Another vote for Scrum Master here. It's only in the past 5 years or so that I've personally seen it as a job in itself - previously, I'd seen Scrum Master as part of the role of one of the developers or similar.

But now in large corps, Scrum Master exists as a distinct job, which appears to require doing very, very little - chairing most of the regular scrum-related meetings (daily standup, planning, demo, and the much loathed retrospective), sending out meeting invites, occasionally futiley butting heads with the Project Manager, and... actually, I think that's it?!

I've worked with some good people in the Scrum Master role, but beyond being good people to work with, they are glorified secretaries, and really don't have anything to do all day.


Why on earth would you have a Scrum Master AND a Project Manager? Makes sense to have a dedicated less-technical person to manage schedules, coordinate with clients and keep people honest on commitments... but dear god why would you ever start splitting that role up into multiple people


Because sometimes projects are complicated and require lots of business knowledge, and the project manager may be managing multiple projects.

The idea of a "secretary" is not a bad one for high performing teams.


I've been tech lead on projects with as many as 30 team members, and still the full-time Scrum Master had very little to do.


Scrum Masters are basically secretaries with more steps


100% Scrum Masters!

If you are actually a good developer and you get a pure Scrum Master role then it's almost impossible to not get endlessly promoted and praised and possibly paid better than a developer role itself whilst actually still doing fuck all work. Imagine, you do a standup, ask in the end if anyone has any blockers, some developer or QA will say something stupid about the CI/CD pipeline or merging a PR and you'll schedule a meeting with the people who need to follow this up and you could actually throw in some suggestions which only a great developer would normally do and the team will look at you as if you're some bloody hero for DeNiro and praise you as "the best Scrum Master they ever had who actually helps the team and lives up to their role". LOL. Then you know you can go to sleep for the rest of the day and nobody will even notice.

The only other thing I can come up with which could be easier than Scrum Master is to apply for a manual QA role. I don't think I have to say more, but essentially, you will look like you've worked around the clock when really you just click a button at the beginning of the day and then go to sleep again.


> The only other thing I can come up with which could be easier than Scrum Master is to apply for a manual QA role. I don't think I have to say more, but essentially, you will look like you've worked around the clock when really you just click a button at the beginning of the day and then go to sleep again.

Laughed out loud at this hahaha. There is one dedicated manual QA guy in my team that perfectly fits this description. And he probably earns more than I do.


OP does state "I do not want to manage people" which might go against the "you just have to be comfortable with babbling on meetings/calls for the majority of the day".

And being in meetings/calls can be a very taxing job. Talking is exhausting from my experience at a call centre.


Listening to other people talk is even more exhausting.


Random may not be the right word for it, but I think you're right. Do nothing jobs tend to be snowflake jobs, each one different.

A lot also depends of what you consider "work" or "slack." Is low attention meetings work?

One good strategy might be the 1/10X programmer. Find a team that sucks, be 10X better than average. Work 1/10 as hard. Spend 2 days on 2 hr tasks, etc.


As many of the stories here show, it’s usually easier to grow into a do nothing job. Build rapport for a few years and take on responsibilities that can be automated but don’t tell you automated them. And slip into the legacy projects no one knows or cares about to look at but that need a little maintenance here and there. They tend to build up where you can easily own multiple products that still have to run but don't really need more than a few hours of work per month at most. Just don't document anything about them or refactor them to be easier to look at lol

Agreed on scrum masters. I’d rather go hungry than be on calls all day though


I don't know about putting in the least amount of effort for 5 days a week. But what I do know is that in my country, the Netherlands, part-time work is more and more becoming the standard. Already, 75% of women and 30% of men work 32 hours a week or less. In many sectors the fulltime standard has been lowered to 36 hours, which means every other Friday off.

I myself started on 40 and will move to 32 hours somewhere next year. It's your right by law to reduce your hours for the same pay/hour.

So my advice would be to look for remote only dev jobs in the Netherlands, and just ask to work 24h or 32h a week. It's very common here and won't be a roadblock.

Although this is going to entirely depend on how much money you actually need to get by.


I'm extremely curious about this from a practical perspective. (Disclaimer: American, so probably not the best work-life perspective)

As far as company / coworker expectations, how does this work? Are responsibilities / work adjusted to fit the hours provided? What about being on-call?

It seems like something a lot of companies should be taking advantage of, but the desire to own souls fights against it.


Majority of my team works 4 days/week, but do so by working 4x9 hours (36 total) instead of 5x8 hours (40 total). We don't really do less work (or take longer for projects).

Some observations:

* The folks working 4 days are a bit less likely to pick-up 'side activities' (e.g. help organise an external event, lead some of the recruiting efforts, etc.), because a day away takes out 25% of active time in one go.

* Ratio overhead vs work is probably better for the part of the team working 4x9 vs 5x8. It turns out they can miss many of these meetings and still be fine without additional catch-ups. (unfortunately not in my power to just remove it completely)

* I believe in people having broad responsibilities ("deliver this project in the best way you see fit") rather than "work X hours". We don't downscope projects because someone works 4 vs 5 days, but no one has ever remarked on it either. This type of responsibility sometimes means people wrap-up early, sometimes they feel responsible enough to pick something really important up in the evening/weekend and take a few hours off on another day.

* I think the ~10% difference wouldn't be measurable for software (or AI in our case) development anyway, we're not a call center where you can measure 'minutes called'.

Final notes:

* This is my European/Dutch perspective. I understand this trend is stronger in the nordics/Germany/Netherlands than in the southern countries. Having managed a team in the US in the past, I find it hard to imagine how this would work in the US culture I experienced.

* I have no desire to own souls ;)


Nice to see a reply from a managers perspective. That being said, 4x9 is not considered part-time in NL.


That’s fair, 4x9 is indeed more the standard these days.

On real part-time: I think once it moves below 3 days a week it works better for transactional roles. E.g. I know dentists that work for a few days per week in a practice, people with 8-16h per week in chat-support, 3-day/wk secretaries, etc. Most of these roles measure their work in calls/appointments/hours rather than longer running projects though.

But with the right culture it can be done in IT as well, I think Gumroad is a good example.


I work in the UK as a remote architect for a megacorp, working a 4-day week, 7.5h per day Mon-Thu. I work on projects all across Europe and Scandinavian. I moved to a 4-day week a long time back - something like 7 years, I guess.

Honestly, I get as much done in 4 days as I did in 5 - I really think it's a sweet spot, where you are forced to focus more for a shorter time.

Anyways, in terms of team working, obviously some meetings need to be either held without me, or not held on Fridays. Otherwise, it's simply never been an issue.

I've worked before with developers who work similar hours, and again it's never been a problem - we just adjust our sprint capacity/staffing accordingly.


Do you have open positions? Sounds like something I'd do too.


If you're in the UK or Europe (AFAIK, this applies to Europe too), by law, any company has to seriously consider requests for flexible working (e.g. part-time hours). I simply asked, and they said "yeah, OK". Obviously working 20% less hours means 20% less pay and holidays.

I work for an out-sourcing and consulting mega-corp - I get to work on interesting projects, but and honestly, it's a horrible company to work for in terms of culture, power struggles, biases, bureaucracy and lay-offs. I plan on getting out soon, going full-time on my side business. As such, I'd never recommend them to anyone.


Fair enough.


Yes, responsibilities will be adjusted accordingly. On-Call depends a bit on your sector and what the unions agreed. Most of the time one hour on call will count for 0.25 hour worked I think, at least that's how it was for someone I knew.

And most people simply put their days / hours in their e-mail signature so other colleagues know when to expect a reaction. From personal experience this works fine. Half my team is off every Friday and some also on Wednesdays.

Companies can and do require 36 or 40 hours though, but most of the time vacancies will list something like "24-36" to signal the possibilities.

---

edit: for your curiosity: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/dashboard-arbeidsmark...

It's in Dutch, but as long as you know that 'uur' = 'hour' you can read the charts.

As of 2020, 72% of men worked 35 hours or more (full-time) compared to 26% of women.


I've been working 4d/week for 4 years for a small Belgian company. I'm a software engineer.

I've never got any complain from my manager, employer or colleagues about it.

I'm usually taking my day off on Friday. All my colleagues know it, so we will try to schedule meetings for which I'm required on other days. If that's not possible (it only happens a few times per year), I'm flexible enough to take my time off some other day.

I might be 90% as productive compared to when I was when working full-time. This difference is probably too low to be noticeable by anybody else in the team.

My gross got reduced by 20%. But considering the way taxation works in Belgium, I'm only getting about 10% less on my bank account. I also got promoted to a senior role since then, which entirely offset the difference anyway.

While it has been working extremely well for me (I spent the additional free time doing physical activities and launching my personal project [1]), it might be harder/impossible to get into higher positions (team leader, project manager...) while working part-time.

--

[1] https://noisycamp.com


NL is a strange place to work in IT, I worked there for a little while doing consulting work.

Projects were not meeting deadlines yet everybody dropped the pen at 5pm sharp, I was baffled and amazed at the same time.


I like this. Deadlines are set by humans and inherently flawed. It isn't right to go into crunch mode when a deadline isn't met - instead how the deadline was set and how it can be improved should be revisited.


It all depends on context. Most project deadlines are artificial bullshit anyway.

And the reasons why a project is not on schedule may not be due to the behavior of people dropping their work at 5pm.

Even so, tough luck: in NL most work to live, we don’t live to work like in some other countries.

I really resonated with the original question of ASK HN.


I think that's the right approach. The alternative is crunch, but you can't have a workplace non-workaholics want to work at that does crunch.


I created a part-time jobs board: https://parttime.careers/

I hope it will be useful for people in this thread.


I was going to reply to the parent, but yeah, perhaps going part-time might be the simplest and quickest solution?


> It's your right by law to reduce your hours for the same pay/hour.

Is this actually a thing? There are laws regarding this? How do these laws work if there's a job requirement itself which needs certain number of hours?


https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM...:

“Part-time workers cannot be treated less favourably than comparable full-time workers solely because they work part-time, unless it can be objectively justified.”

So, employers can deny requests for shorter working hours, but only if that can be objectively justified.

In general, that’s fairly hard to do, given the amount of part-time workers and the diversity of their jobs already in the market.


Have you heard of Texas? Almost the worst state in the union for workers. This is a right-to-work or at-will employment state. This means employers can, and often do, treat workers like slaves with little oversight. Texas law says an employer can fire a worker without "cause or condition". They could fire anyone for almost anything and they do. This state is absolutely hostile to unions, worker rights, and higher pay. The only reason I can avoid much of this is because I work for a not-for-profit and we treat each other with respect. I'm blessed in this regard. I'm negotiating with my wife to move to the PNW at some point. I hate the politics, weather, and redneck outlook here with a raging passion.


At lot of states are at-will, including Washington and Oregon. So if you think at-will employment produces slavery like working conditions (which seems rather overstated), moving the the Pacific Northwest isn't going to help much.

Also, when I was considering moving to the Seattle area, I got the feeling that non-compete clauses were fairly standard, although, that is entirely subjective and might be incorrect.


Thank you for the info. The chances are high that if/when we move, I will be leaving IT after 20 years, so the non-compete angle will not apply. I may still do some consulting on SaaS/PaaS and small automation tasks to help if I can, but I've long desired to get out of IT. The grind is starting to take its toll on me and I want to take on new adventures in things I like to do on the side like crafts and similar. With my daughter off doing her thing, I'll have spare money to set up shop and do other things. My wife wants to work until she cannot stand up, which is just like her dad.


I worked in Texas for a stint, and completely understand what you describe here. However, don't look to the PNW as a place it's any better.

Both Oregon and Washington are at-will states, and have the same laws with the same kind of work cultures -- you're a cog in a system, and if you start grinding or upsetting the status quo in some way, the candidate pool in this region is strong enough, they'll replace you. However, the expectation still remains that when you choose to exercise your same rights under at-will that you give two weeks notice. Can't say any employer is going to give an employee that same courtesy when letting them go. Not to mention if you're salaried, you might as well accept that your role is nothing more than indentured servitude branded as capitalism (to clarify, this may not be at all companies, but definitely is a strong cultural trait I've seen at the ones I've worked at).

All that being said, the PNW is much prettier than many areas of Texas, and while natives are hostile towards transplants, the quality of life is leaps and bounds better than that horrendous mass of land called the Lone Star State.


Thank you for the information. I am looking at smaller cities rather than Seattle or Portland. I don't care for major conurbations. My wife can work anywhere with her job and I'm starting to edge out of IT myself after 20 years for something a little less stressful like woodworking or arts/crafts. I'm handy with these things and I need to pursue this angle while I'm young enough to do so and still make money.


And that if the person still gets full benefits, then the hourly rate can be objectively reduced to offset the difference in total compensation rate.


Yes.

This is a page from the government describing your rights: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/arbeidsovereenkomst... (you can translate it)

I understand that it is fairly strictly enforced, so an employer saying "no sorry, that would be annoying" won't fly - they would need a concrete justification.


> It's very common here and won't be a roadblock.

Some companies won't let you do 24hr/week though. They'll require at least 32hrs :P


Fine if you're single with low rent. If you have a family and a mortgage I can't see how this is an option.


People in this kind of career easily make twice the country's average. If most people can live on that average, then you can bear a 20% salary reduction.


My wife's parents raised 3 kids and paid a mortgage on two part-time salaries. Europe: it's where it's at for work-life balance.


Then I guess the UK never belonged in Europe after all.


France be like what the hell are you talking about.


Try being a product manager of a web service at a big corporation. I stopped and went back to programming because of how little there was to do. You said you don't want to manage people, but in my experience all I had to do was:

- E-mail calendar invites for a meeting

- Show up to said meeting

- State the topic, point to an engineer at random and say, "What do you think?"

- Zone out for the rest of the meeting, zoning back in only if it sounds like the conversation is starting to get off track

- 5 minutes before time is up, say, "OK, it sounds like we're agreed that we're going to do X?"

- Go back to coding side-projects

It's a funny job, because even though it's very easy to coast, it's also fairly high-visibility and in my opinion very necessary. Without a dedicated person to spend 30 minutes a day watching over meetings, things seem to very quickly go off the rails.


This can be automated. My new startup will provide "self-driving management", or MaaS, and will be called pointy.com.


This is the premise of Manna by Marshall Brain. The results in the story were mixed.


Put OP out of a job, why don't you!


he didn't event take it yet !


Thanks for sharing this. I had a good laugh. I both agree your role is necessary but also makes it feel like it’s a bit dysfunctional, that people can’t have effective meetings on their own.


Eh, it's just people being people. It's similar to how when you're learning first aid, they always tell you to not say "Someone call 911!" but rather point at one specific person and say, "You, [distinguishing characteristic of said person], call 911!"


That's a very good analogy. Much of role is just coordinating; expecting your team to self-coordinate is expecting your team to do your job for you, and leaving things up to chance.


This is amazingly relatable. I do appreciate the work, coordination and decision making that PMs drive, but in practice it does not require much work.

In truth though it does require a lot of meetings. Not great for a 2-hr work day.


I'm still not sure if you were joking or not.


Not, honestly. I'm sure it depends on the company.


If only I had read advice like this earlier, life would have been so much easier.


Honestly, I think this is somewhat of a crapshoot/hard to tell from the job description and the reason I say this is the job I'm currently in functions exactly how you describe but the job description/everything else from the outside gave me no clue before I actually started the job.

"Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect" -- in fact, for me, often it's 2 hours on a Monday morning the first day of the sprint, then just being present on Slack for the rest of the two week sprint. I wait and submit PRs etc at the end of the sprint.

My previous jobs in tech absolutely did not function like this, so I was somewhat surprised when I fell into my current position/groove. My coworkers/managers seem to think the amount of work I get done every sprint is actually above average, even though it rarely takes me more time than six hours max every two weeks. I mostly work on backend stuff (85%/15%) and am in a senior position at a relatively large (non Silicon-Valley though still very tech savvy) company with tens of thousands of employees and billions in revenue, though based on the East Coast. My salary isn't bonkers but I'm comfortably in the 150-200k range before bonus.

There was no way for me to know, going into the job, based on the job description, interviews with team members, etc, that the expectations of my managers and co-workers would be so low. And honestly, I'm still confused. I'm not a genius software engineer, I'm maybe above average but still not anything special. My coworkers aren't lazy or bad either - they're all sharp, proactive people. All of this is to say, what you're looking for does exist, it's my job, but I haven't the slightest idea how I would've been able to tell this is that type of job before actually doing it, so alas I can't help you very much, though I am willing to answer questions if you may have any.


> My salary isn't bonkers

> For me, often it's 2 hours on a Monday morning the first day of the sprint, then just being present on Slack for the rest of the two week sprint

You may not think so, but... Your salary is bonkers.


"based on the East Coast. My salary isn't bonkers but I'm comfortably in the 150-200k range before bonus."

Hope you are not trolling. 150-200K is not only comfortable but one of the top salaries even in East Coast area.


No crap, that's significantly more than I'm making and I work 50 hours most week plus have a requirement to maintain certifications and write cookbooks and/or blog posts after hours. It's a bonkers salary if one actually works.

I wonder if the OP's company needs any data engineers.


For NYC at least, that's fairly normal for software engineers at tech companies. https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/New-York-C...


NYC is a step-function of higher COL than just about anywhere else on the East Coast. Even compared Boston or DC. Taxes alone are high, around 6% total for New York State. Want to live in New York City? Great, that's an additional 3%. OK, so you don't want to live in New York City to avoid that 3%? Now you're looking at $600/month for your commute costs to spend 3 hours a day commuting.


Yes I have seen same productivity patterns. In one company I applied, the most senior developer's average skills were less than my junior skills. I can say I have junior skills but better productivity. Most of the times I had under-performed to save my ass from undeserving workload.


>Most of the times I had under-performed to save my ass from undeserving workload.

Sounds like you're on their trajectory already


Nope my behaviour was specifically related to office politics, I left the job. I never liked to fake it.

currently I am openly searching for some good remote part-time job so I can work with full productivity without office politics.


This sounds like a job a friend has in city government (in the midwest US). They have to look busy but in the end it sounds like they really don’t do a whole lot (he’s the manager and knows they don’t have much to do but has to maintain head count).


This was my experience with government work and is why I'm now an advocate for small government.


"Small government" and a small government are not the same thing


The hilarity is when you realize that with all this inefficiency government still often does a better job that smaller government or private enterprise.


The same thing happens at private enterprise because free market incentives don't apply internally; i.e. if I double my productivity it won't actually affect my income at all.


2 weeks' work in 2 hours seems borderline unbelievable. Do you just radically overestimate the amount of effort every ticket will take? How do your coworkers/manager not push back?

I can see accomplishing that much work in 1/2 the time, or maybe even less, but you're talking about spending 1/40 the amount of time as estimated.

Many people here debate the existence of the 10x developer, and you're claiming to be a 40x developer.


To be clear: I'm definitely not claiming to be a 10x, 40x or 100x developer. I'm not claiming I could do the same amount of work as you or anyone else any faster than you or anyone else could.

It's more like my managers and product management radically overestimate the amount of time things take. Those are the people choosing how much work they think I should be able to accomplish each sprint and I don't do anything to dissuade them from the idea that that seems about right to me as well. I'm frequently praised by my manager and kidded by my colleagues about how "fast" I've managed to knock out my stories even when only working a few hours the first day of the sprint and submitting my PRs the day before or of the sprint ending. Those same managers/product managers work with many other engineers at my company so I don't know if everyone at my company is underachieving stealthily or what. As I said in my original post, I'm honestly as really, really confused as anyone else about what's going on, but since I'm praised in performance reviews, given a decent bonus, been 2x chosen for quarterly awards and promoted internally, etc, I mean, what should I do ? Demand more work ? Yeah, no thanks.


Fair enough. I guess in your place I would just be very interested in knowing how I performed compared to other people working in the field, but I can't blame you for not wanting to mess with a good thing either.


curious, do you find leetcode easy/mediums atleast somewhat challenging? or is the stuff you are doing like... connecting plumbing / CRUD stuff together in CLOUD


I haven't done leetcode type exercises in years but even then I never found them too difficult, so hard to use that as a gauge, but yeah, most of my work is implementing new products and features via somewhat fairly standard CRUD-y microservices in the cloud.


amazing, thank you


Almost nobody uses leetcode algorithms for real work. Most of work is usually boring CRUD API piping.


What do your work tasks consist of? It might seem simple to you, but maybe you have unrealized talent.


Consider: you may become depressed, unfulfilled, and unhappy in this life. I had a position that was around halfway to what you want, government database coding, and I was miserable. I think becoming fully "chilled out" is ideal, because being "half chilled" and half "in-the-hotseat" gave me whiplash a few times. I developed lazy habits over time, my work output suffered, and all that free-time on my hobby wasn't as great as I envisioned.

You know the story, it's Christmas, you're the only one in the office this week because you're new and your PTO is garbage, you're young and have no family to go back to anyway. You stroll in an hour late through the side door, check emails briefly, okay no one is here, then you fire up the YT clips or the novel reading or whatever it is. By 3pm, after 5 hours of pure faffing around, you surely deserve the christmas cookies left in the break room. By 315, you're pooped, time to head home, sneak back through the side door, and you're off to use the screen at the apartment.

Is there some nagging feeling in your stomach? That you could've explored the database, you could've dived into that long-term project you've thought of. You could've been writing up a research proposal, searching for new grants, or helping someone at a volunteer organization. Instead, you're "half on" so you're half-assing your life, not fully relaxing, not working at all.

Honestly, it wasn't for me. I want to feel fully into what I'm doing, and having to half-ass my way through a boring job was causing serious depression. I'd only recommend this if you can use less of your ass, preferably remotely, and if you're sure you won't have a crisis of meaning in life.


Can attest to this experience as well.

When I was in high visibility roles in start-ups, I dreamt of a place where I could fall through the cracks and kind of breathe -- or at least what I thought would be breathing. I found that spot, and after a couple years feel like taking the offer was a monumental mistake in my career. Nothing is a challenge, my output is minimal yet when I actually do produce something, I get massive praise, and yearn for somewhere that I can throw myself into interesting work.

I think that next phase is coming, but I've definitely stagnated a bit and wish I'd spent more time using the required seat time (have to be visibly online 9+ hours a day) doing something fruitful instead of wasting time on HN and occasionally toying with various project ideas.

The soul crush is real in this kind of position, and as OP said, always being "half on" emphasizes the mental toll that all of my output has suffered both personally and professionally. Or I might just be burnt out.


I think this soul crush only occurs if you take the stance that it's an issue. I.e., if you suddenly want to find fulfillment and meaning in work, sure, you'll feed bad.

I submit that you can counter this by using that free time to do things that interest yourself and help you progress in the areas you want to grow in.

I have a lot of free time as a designer maintaining an enterprise product, so I flex my downtime into acting as my team's de facto product manager. When I step back from this interest of mine, I can otherwise use the time to teach myself VR (not related at all to my company).

My biggest piece of advice to people is to not look for fulfillment in work, but rather to find fulfillment in your interests. The burnout happens when your interests don't align with a highly demanding job. The soul crush happens when you suddenly try to tie all of your interests back to your job. That'll never be feasible 99.99% of the time. There's a reason why "a job is just a job" is an adage.

If you're fortunate and your job doesn't demand a lot, don't look to it to fill the void of free time if it's not interesting. Use that time for yourself to the extent that your company will allow/overlook it (I suspect this is why so many FAANGs are anti-remote work).

As most people can agree, no one will ever be lying on their deathbed thinking "damn, I wish I'd clocked more time filing those TPS reports".


I have this issue too with the couple do-nothing jobs I've had. It causes me anxiety. It's uncomfortable. I'm waiting for the day that someone reviews my timesheets and says "this looks like bullshit" because I'll have no real defense. I'll have to say something to the effect of "I have a lot of downtime. I get all my work done and my projects are successful. But I agree I get this work done in only a few hours a week".

However, this anxiety is far, far less than the anxiety caused by doing a job I absolutely hate and required 30+ hours a week of decent effort.


There's a big difference between having nothing to do and not having to do anything. If you have nothing to do but need to keep up appearances, being in the office/online, etc. you're just wasting your life. But if you don't have to do anything and can disconnect and go on with your life it's much better.


This varies widely by person. Some people - whether they want to or not - define themselves by their work. Other people's priorities lie elsewhere. It sounds like the OP is of the latter type, though it's hard to know for sure until you try it.


If you have a good pre-existing network of contacts (or have a modicum of networking skills/are willing to do a bit of legwork) I’ve found there’s a constant demand for “low-end” sysadmin/devops work for small businesses - usually they just need someone to be on call in case their AWS/virtual hosting/or Shopify what have you go down. You could probably gather about a half dozen or so of those contracts, set up some alerts, and spend no more than a few hours a week on average of work and pull in enough to cover all your bills.

Like others, I’d recommend looking into FIRE principles at least, particularly the idea of Safe Withdrawal Rate - basically every $25-30 you have invested = $1/yr you can spend for the rest of your life.


If they're all hosted on aws you'll have a bad day if it ever goes down.


Well, if you battle-test the "what happens if unexpected reboot [edit: or network loss, or API failure]" side of things for EC2, and validate simulated resource failure for the other bits... wouldn't it basically amount to figuring out where AWS's *real* status dashboard is this month (eg, specific Twitter or HN thread) and mass-mailing realtime "there, there"s until everything mostly comes back up by itself?


Yes, in this position you'd best find a way to diversify some of them or move them to, say, a Proxmox instance.


I had a data science position with a large non-tech company. It did B2B sales, and had a giant office for us, done up in brushed nickel and Edison light bulbs. The rest of the company was designed in standard cheap-cubicle format, but they took visitors (i.e. sales targets) through to see the data science team, so we got the fancy layout. After working there a few months, I realized that I was also there as part of the decoration. My work didn't matter (it took them 4 months to stand up a server for a project I was working on) and my boss didn't understand what I did. Very cush. Could have gotten away with a few hours a week of real work, though I still had to physically be there most of the time. I left for more money, plus ultimately having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining.


> My work didn't matter (it took them 4 months to stand up a server for a project I was working on) and my boss didn't understand what I did. Very cush. Could have gotten away with a few hours a week of real work, though I still had to physically be there most of the time. I left for more money, plus ultimately having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining.

Yup. I've occasionally landed on projects like this and had the same reaction. Sure, you can coast for NOW... but it always makes me feel like I'm rusting, and that the slow pace is undermining my competitiveness for the next position.

My view is that job security is your ability to get your next position. Any given job can blow up on you for reasons beyond your control. You have to continuously push yourself so you can easily pick up the pieces if/when that happens.

But 2008-11 was a formative experience for me, so maybe I'm just bitter.


My view is that job security is your ability to get your next position. Any given job can blow up on you for reasons beyond your control. You have to continuously push yourself so you can easily pick up the pieces if/when that happens. But 2008-11 was a formative experience for me, so maybe I'm just bitter.

Same with the dotcom crash. Those with sharp technical skills soon found work with old-skool companies when the dotcoms evaporated. The others struggled for a long time after.


Pretending to work at an office for 7-8h is soul killing. If it was remote then it might be a different story as you could just work on something else.


> But 2008-11 was a formative experience for me, so maybe I'm just bitter.

Sounds like an interesting and potentially insightful story...


Perhaps. My email is in my profile - reach out if you want to chat.


> having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining.

This is the real nightmare for me. If I go in and code for 7 or 8 hours a day, time flies and my mind is active and focused. Really doesn't matter what it is, just needs to be clear and well defined.


> just needs to be clear and well defined

Jeez I wish I had work like that. Maybe 1 in 10 tickets is clear and well defined where I work.


At the my current job, I don't even have tickets just slack messages consisting of hey can you do this inset vague thing, and after asking for multiple clarifications to narrow the possible interpretation I start working on it.

Guess what ? The last Big task/Project I had to do morphed into another one each time I reported that I was done for 11 times in a row, midway I just gave up mentally.

And it all started with "hey can you do a small script to download some CSVs from this server"


sucks. I feel your pain...hope u find a better gig.


> having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining.

I 100% agree with this. I'd much rather have actual work to do. My workaround has been to find 35 hours a week on something meaningful to me that won't upset the company if they find me doing it. So when I need to kill some hours looking productive, I find a way to use that time on a side project or hobby work.


During down time, work on outside projects. Nobody knows which project you're working on. It's just a editor with code :-)


Good idea, but for data-security reasons, they disabled all the USB drives. It would have been quite a challenge to get the code out without a trace. Probably no one would have cared if I emailed it to myself, but it would have been a very bad look.


I'm a musician and developer/architecture consultant. My goal since day one of tech work 15 years ago was "fund music life better", so I hear what you are saying. I currently average half-time and make a comfortable middle class salary.

The big thing to realize is that there is a huge difference between "I want a job where I can do minimal work and mostly do my own thing while still getting paid" and "I want a job where I can earn my living in 2-3 hours a day". I have done both, the first when young in non-tech fields, the second for the last 15 years in tech. I work very hard on those 3 hours a day, in a role where deadlines can never be missed and we are part of $100M+ transactions. I take that work very, very seriously. But I get paid enough to do my 18-20h a week and spend the rest of my time pursuing the arts, with no pressure to have to figure out how to monetize my music (a very nice thing).

If you're after the second, (hard, short work, for high money), you want to find specialized expert work where you are (as you astutely pointed out) out of the production loop. Consulting is the best thing I've found. When I'm on a gig with a client, they get me 100%, totally focused. When I'm off the gig, no one expects me to get back to them sooner than a day, allowing me to do grad school in music. The key to finding this work is to become an expert in some subfield of tech, and get really good at the human side. Writing, pubic speaking, negotiation, client relationship management, project and timeline management, etc. Not many techies want to get really good at those "soft skills", but if you do, and you are an expert in something, consulting firms will value you highly.

Another good option is contract tools development or freelance contracting for folks who need code only occasionally. Lots of companies will hire part time contractors to improve internal systems, and you're still out of the product deadline loop. I've done that too and still do it sometimes for scientists. Python and SQL are good for that area.

HTH


You got my curious, which subfield are you in or which subfields you’d recommend for someone to specialize in like you’ve said?


I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I've actually tried to hire dispassionate people before.

One was an assembly line style UI job with no future - the API was solid, the UI was designed by someone else. It just needed someone who could glue the parts, and repeat the same job forever, with minor API updates every now and then.

Another was a teaching job. Beginner HTML/CSS/Node.js. Come in 35 hours a week, actual necessary work is 12 hours/week. It's probably a dead end job, but it's a cash cow. Some graduates managed to go from becoming Uber drivers to junior developers who made the same salary with little manual labor, so the job brought benefit to society.

There's too many passionate people in the industry who just won't take these kinds of jobs.


The positive side of dispassionate people is that they won't write a new framework just to solve some tiny little task.


I was never the type of person to try to write a framework to solve a tiny little task, but I am probably 50% more effective with my time since I stopped caring about my job. I am not stressed out at all and that makes a massive difference.

That being said I probably work about 75% less (~10 - 15 hours a week if I'm being honest) so the joke is still on my employer.


I would be too afraid that such cash cow dies at the time I still need it and I won't have skills to find something quickly again.


Nice. I'll look for one of those. I'd be perfectly content having some designs/specs handed out and implementing them.


First was with a Huawei partner. They do certifications for this, full training, gave a checklist of what to do, and how to handle every error code. It pays bloody well for blue collar work. The work was done remotely at the time.

You could probably find similar work with some other tech giant that outsources routine work to agencies.

Second was with a major coding bootcamp that had a partnership with an educational institution. The person who created the syllabus went on to do his own course. They tried to hire me, literally saying that I could play games all day, freelance, come in late. The downside is tech moves, so you still have to keep up, even if it's beginner level.


I'll look into those. Thanks.


This is the best Ask HN I've seen in a while. Fantastic.

As for OP, I recommend you consider data analytics. That may seem counterintuitive, but the analytical work is a great place to escape into, mentally. I really, REALLY enjoy it, and I can generally use whatever tools I want for the hard stuff, and then just spew out some Python/R for a notebook deliverable, or whatever format they want. It's really liberating to have so much control over the workflow, it's entirely unlike any other tech work I've performed.

Downside, there is a little "work" involved, but I think that you might not actually mind it. It seems you are frustrated with some part of your industry.

We can talk further if you'd like, I'd love to hear more about your story, however much of that you'd be willing/comfortable to share.


This is a double edged sword:

1. Expectations are vague in analytics work so most people can't tell if you're doing well or not. 2. Expectations are vague in analytics so if you're not delivering magic people will think you're lazy.


I create a lot of reports and dashboards.

Sometimes I make magic, but magic can be difficult to explain/understand, so mostly it's reports and dashboards.


I honestly thought about this question but thought I would get laughed out of the room for asking. Good on OP for having the guts haha. There were several posts in the past of people complaining about "vest and rest" and I kept thinking, man... that sounds pretty sweet


If it's report generation, I 100% agree. ...and you can maybe have more than one of these jobs if they are fully remote.


I can think of two possible routes that would fulfil this criteria in different ways.

The first is to get an IT job at a government organisation that isn't heavily IT focussed, but needs someone on staff "just in case". I once interviewed for a job at a National Library for a 35,000 GBP/year role (with 20% pension). They had a system where someone could book a room to read old manuscripts, and there was a C# program that let people swipe in and out with a smart card. For some reason they needed a dev on staff full time just in case anything went wrong. That was the whole scope of the job. Apparently most of the IT people there had other personal gigs they worked on most of the day, and it was super flexible. I didn't take it because I wanted a job that would push me and force me to learn things, but I reckon there would be a few jobs like that in government that would give you what you want.

The other way isn't exactly what you asked for, but might appeal to you anyway. Recently I've been working as a software contractor, mostly doing 3-to-6 month contracts, mostly for companies that need extra resource to hit some looming deadline. It's intensive work for the duration of the contract, but the money is a lot better than being a permanent employee, and I've been finding that over the course of each contract you can save up so much money that you could happily take a few months off in-between roles if you wanted to do what you like. I'm using the time off (just starting what I envisage to be a 4 month break minimum) to try to build side projects, but you could spend 4-5 months playing sport or whatever just as easily. You might even find the contract route gives you the time to do your hobbies, and professional fulfilment too, because each is timeboxed into several month long stints. Personally I love it.


Can I ask how do you find those kind of contracts?


I feel like I wouldn't be able to find good contracts but it might be imposter syndrome?

MSFT employee, most of what I need saved up but could use a bit more. I'd love to quit and just do some seasonal work but I imagine competition for the contracts you're talking about is pretty stiff and I don't have a huge professional network


You're in a fantastic company for networking, and Microsoft is a great partner for many small dev shops. Being a more niche Microsoft partner might be a good differentiator based on the Microsoft name on your resume.


The second route sounds like something that would be perfect for me. I assume you are in the UK, how does IR35 affect that nowadays?


Would also like to know!


There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to focus on hobbies/life and not caring much about working time job - I would guess most people fall on this side, actually (and they don't even have too much of hobbies either). However, the way you wrote this post, it strucks me that maybe you have burnout, or you're depressed - as if you reach out to your passions not mainly because you like them, but because those never failed you, and you want to get away from everything else, in which you were disappointed.

If this is not the case, just ignore this, but please think about it first. The world can be a great place with the right view, and there is a lot that can bring you back on track - including an inspiring daytime job.


Thanks for the kind words, I'm absolutely not depressed ! I'm very happy with my life outside of work. Some days I even feel euphoric being lucky as I am, being able to play my favorite sport and having a loving family.

I'm only trying to optimize by reducing the time spent working and thinking about work, which I never see bringing me anything else than money.


It's funny to see the guy thinking you were depressed. You seem actually very excited to myself, not just excited about some boring coding job like most of the people in HN are.

Wish you success in that endeavour!


What would you recommend?

I identified myself way too much in OP's post. I'm in my mid-20s, have a job as a consultant DevOps engineer in a boring fintech company, in a project that I think will fail. I'm full-remote atm, and I'm already doing the least amount of work that I can do without it being noticed.

I'm really good at programming (based on feedback of my co-workers), and I like doing side-projects (usually video-game related). I can't stop thinking everyday that I'm wasting my skills on, as OP stated, useless software. I'm not sure that I'm not being a diva, though.

I'm currently taking the steps to go to a 4/5th schedule, but I'm not sure it will make it any better. I'll have more time to do what my want (side-projects + hobbies), but I'm not sure it will solve what I feel deep down.


In my experience shifting to a 4/5 schedule won't cure your burn-out. You need to take a vacation, 1-2 week vacation, to really get rid of that burn-out feeling and "recharge" yourself. And if you come back and within a week or 2 feel that dread feeling again, then it's time to move on and find something else. As everyone else has said, being unhappy ever day is no way to live life.


There's a truckload of options, really. Get more into side projects while ignoring/minimizing job tasks, like OP. Try to find jobs that relate closer to what you like (that's the great thing in being a dev, you can switch jobs or roles rather effortlessy, if you have CV that proves you are generally experienced). Find more interesting things within your field, or even current role. Simply switch to a nicer company. Get into charity work. Monetize a hobby, start a venture - even besides an existing job. And so on.

One thing is important, is that you HAVE to deal with this problem, however convenient it seems to just let things as they are, and "not think about it". OP was really great at recognizing that there is a specific issue to be solved here.


I think you're feeling some depression/ennui because you don't care for this particular job. I had similar issues years ago which went away almost immediately after switching jobs. I'd suggest just trying to find a devops job elsewhere at a company you think isn't making something totally pointless.


Start a software startup in your free time? Pick a passion and run with it, maybe even try to make a business (or non-profit out of it)?


Thanks for writting this. This is how I feel for two years and having a random stranger on Internet being able to describe it and says `The world can be a great place with the right view` is reconforting.


> but please think about it first

This is not an adequate advice for somebody who has a family to support.

I'd argue that for the most of us, once we go beyond 18-19 years old we can no longer afford to "think about it first" all the way to retirement age.

So I am really not sure what actionable point you're making here. "Find a better job", maybe? Yeah, a lot of us are trying that. I guess it's filter bubbles thing because I keep being contacted by HR agencies and companies that I want nothing to do with.


I think the poster you’re responding to is just asking the person to check in with themselves about where they’re at mentally. The original post sounds a lot like myself when I was burnt out and depressed. Sometimes when you’re in that state, you’re looking for a bandaid rather than a fix for the things you’re feeling. I thought it was valid advice, even though it sounds like the original poster is very happy outside their job.

Sounds like you might be burnt out yourself looking for a different job? It’s tough to know you’re a good worker, but feel like companies are passing you up. I’m sorry if you’re going through that. Hang in there. It can take a while, but it gets better eventually!


Sure, I am mostly saying that depending on their situation they might not be able to afford to make the right call that will serve their mental health. I feel the crowd in HN is very privileged and regularly are lacking this perspective so I feel the need to point it out.

Thank you for the kind words. I am severely burned out indeed and always fatigued but at least I went to the doctors and have a few examinations due. It's a start.


As someone that spent years working 2 - 8 hours a week on their real job while getting top performance reviews, here's my slightly unethical tips.

- Choose a megacorp where you're far away from the value being created. Analytics at a e-commerce site? No. IT at an oil giant? Yes.

- Cherry pick what you work on, image is everything. Focus only on project that make you look good and (ideally) others don't understand. Work on them a couple hours a week and make it seem like you spent all week on them.

- When interviewing make sure your manager doesn't have a technical background in what you're going to be doing.

- Build relationships. This one is critical. Just genuinely try to be helpful when others are in a rut. Get to know your boss on a personal level.

You'd be shocked how achievable this is at a megacorp. Personally I used the time to launch a variety of businesses, but be warned choosing this path can be a double edged sword. Sometime's it's the amazing but other times you can slide into a funk when you feel like your life isn't going anywhere.


It's so interesting reading these replies because I identified a lot of different sings that I thought would be good, but then reading yours, I see that every single one is in play for my dud job. I do think having a non technical boss is important though, so you can hand wave that you are doing some tech wizardry while really doing nothing


The US Federal Government is where you want to be, if goofing off all day is your goal. I know, I worked there. I supervised a guy who explicitly refused to do his job. He said so in emails that he sent to me. I, and my supervisors, started giving him bad annual reviews. He sued, claiming racial discrimination. From that point on, every time he refused to do his job and we tried to pressure him into doing it, he amended his EEO lawsuit to claim that we were retaliating. My supervisor said to me "This guy can spend 100% of his time trying not to get fired. You can spend maybe 2% of your time trying to get rid of him. Who's gonna win?". I was told by our HR department that we could get rid of him, or at least demote him, if he failed two annual reviews in a row. Eventually he did, but we were then told by HR that he had to fail two annual reviews in a row in the same way; if he failed twice, but differently in the second year, that didn't count. At that point I stopped trying to get rid of him, and he's still sitting in his office pulling down 6 figures. Everyone is in a protected class. If you're not a racial minority or a woman, or in a minority religion or older than 50, claim you're depressed - bingo EEO protection!


I was going to ask, "wow, how does he live with himself?"

But I suppose he's quite happy.


What was his job out of curiosity? haha


Sounds pretty unethical.


I suggest being the one-man IT department in a non-IT org. E.g. a university department, a smaller school, a small-time manufacturer or retailer, etc. Automating your job on one hand and managing expectations on the other should set you up for a while.

Your tech skills will degrade if you tend to them, but accumulating good will and maintaining occasional contact with people should ensure they help find you new jobs as they move about.


> one-man IT department

This means you will be on call 24/7/365 though.


Not necessarily. Not everyone are willing to pay for on-call.


You would be payed a salary but still be expected to be on call at all times. As a one person IT department, you are now the go-to to fix any and everything.


Depends upon what kind of contract you sign. But sure, any place small enough to only want one person is unlikely to be reasonable about it.


Don’t take that job, take another job. There are enough schools and manufacturers to go around.


How do you take a few weeks off from that job?


I'd say that this is a good direction. Even better would be to take a job that isn't exactly an IT role at an org that doesn't really have an internal IT department, but does its data processing by sharing Excel files.

Then, automate your work away but don't tell anyone.


Working for a big company maintaining a legacy system can be like this.

You can get by outputting 3 lines of code per week between meetings, filling in tickets, clearing disk space occasionally when the monitoring alerts and doing mandatory upgrades.

Nobody really cares as you are a cost centre but they need to keep people around for support.

There are a lot of people in banks still making reasonable money doing this type of work.


Find a medium-sized company with a local monopoly.

- They are not competing in their market / has had dominance for more than a decade. - Their business model does not depend on innovation or moving fast. - The ambitious people are all located in sales/marketing. - The development dept. is known for saying "good things take time" because they can afford to. - Career advancement typically isn't possible unless a tech lead quits, but they're cushy.

You can't trade low effort for low wage. You have to qualify skill-wise and drop the effort over time. You may be able to find something on the low end for your skill level, but an employer will think it's average. Picking something you think is below your skill level might boost your psychology, and you might be able to pull 2-3x.

As for picking tasks where you can minimize effort:

- Pick a role where spending time on other people's task is justified. During stand-ups when you have to explain what you did, you can say that you worked on your own thing, and that you helped the other person. This is not just a way to cheat: I care more about what I do, if I'm helping someone who cares more. I invented this coping strategy at points where I didn't care at all myself. - Pick more researchy tasks: People don't know exactly what to expect, the work isn't as easily quantified. So when you spend longer or don't have as much to show for it, that may make sense. - Become highly available on emergency / show high effort once in a while: This counts against not making an effort, but people will remember you for fixing things when it matters, and they tolerate you working at your own pace most of the time. - Select somewhere with a new CTO / tech lead: They're super busy learning how to juggle management and mentoring, so if you're stuck onboarding for more time than normal, they won't blame you. This may sound leechy, but just make sure you provide some kind of value to everyone else other than your full attention.

Also, this was my best-paying job for 3 years focusing on family and mental health outside of work.


> During stand-ups when you have to explain what you did, you can say that you worked on your own thing, and that you helped the other person.

Also, pick a role where you're constantly blocked by other people. So, working in a big company, where every function (renting a VM, setting up a DB schema, adding an AD group etc.) is centralized in one team, possibly overloaded and not too competent, possibly outsourced for cheap to India. These folks can take months to complete simple tasks and you can always say you can't move forward until they deliver.

Also, working in integration-heavy project. If your codebase calls 8 different systems in your company, they will all fail, have incomplete documentation, unresponsive teams etc. and will result in a lot of waiting and lost time on your end (which is what you're after).


>pick a role where you're constantly blocked by other people

Excellent advice.

I love how HN still ends up thriving for perfection. If I compile all the comments in this thread I'll have the best optimized way to become the ultimate do-nothing slacker piece of crap.


> the ultimate do-nothing slacker piece of crap

Just call yourself a company and then you'll be called "an efficient business". ;)


This possibly the best comment I've ever read on Hacker News - it so succinctly points out what is wrong with the modern world.


Always strive to be the best at what you do.


The reward for hard work is more hard work. ~Tom Sachs.


At least in my experience, people who get away with a small amount of work are almost always senior people who are highly regarded by the higher-ups. It's difficult to get away with doing very little work as a junior person in any org because 1) you don't have the autonomy to choose the work, 2) you're considered fungible, so you're given relatively fungible work, which is easy to size and compare against others, and 3) you're not trusted, so managers scrutinize your work more. The caveat is that it's hard to overcome these issues without having worked hard at some point - the key is having some level of expertise within the company along with the trust of the higher-ups who would rather focus their energy on ensuring that less trustworthy people don't mess up.


Work where your perceived value is disconnected from actual real work, where you can hide your actual productivity or where the company has set so low bar that you will be shining example even when actually working 1h a day.

- Providing advice, if you already have experience. Ideally general advice that would not require you to spend a lot of time investigating client-specific situation or do it relatively quickly.

- If you run circles around other developers and want to earn well, DO NOT get paid for time. Your time is much more valuable than other developers but you are most likely going to be paid roughly the same (within a small factor).

- Fixed price rather that time and materials, provided you can choose your own technology and you are good at it (see above). Make sure you are well insulated from any impediments from the company that contracts you. Make sure contract is very, very well specified.

- If you are good developer, get hired well below your ability. Get hired at a shitty company where average productivity is very low. You will be running circles around other developers working 1h a day.

- Spend significant part of your time (say over half of it) learning stuff. Over time you are going to become much better than other developers and be able to do things in fraction of the time. Even if the project doesn't work you are still taking the knowledge with you.

- Contracting. Contracts will make it difficult for you to get promoted but you don't care. You just want to get decent money for little work. In general, you earn more on contract than full time employee, but you can hack the system and earn as much as a regular employee for less work.


Totally reasonable thing to want IMO.

Try searching for stuff to do with managing ETL/integrations. Some of these jobs will require loads of product involvement, others will be some not terribly interesting data munging. At your target salary level which you mentioned elsewhere (30k EUR), there should be plenty of positions where you'll exceed expectations with 2 hours of focused, intelligent work per day. Not sure how many will be remote though, sorry!


Didn't think about ETL jobs. Thanks !


You can do all of this and earn a high salary if you become an...

...agile coach

Read a few books, recycle stuff you find online, do a presentation on neurodiversity. It really is money for old rope. I knew of one who worked in a UK gov department who got £1250 a day, charged for 5 days, and only turned up for 4.5. Did it for years.


Agile coaching is it.

It's literally money for nothing.

I'm not an Agile coach, but have seen enough to know that it really is nonsense snake oil that large organisations will pay incredible sums of money for.

I sort of wonder if the negative real value of the Agile industry means the price is effectively limitless, given that the whole thing is a Fugazi so the bill is whatever the buyer is foolish enough to pay.


Well, it's a transformative process that not many orgs can implement.. that's basically it.

Another is a JIRA consultant. You basically setup JIRA and teach an org how to use it.


> Another is a JIRA consultant. You basically setup JIRA and teach an org how to use it.

What about the alcoholism to cope with what you've wrought on the poor souls?


But that's all synchronous work - running courses, giving presentations, coaching people.

If their objective is to only work 2 hours a day, the last thing they want is hours of meetings every day where your absence will be immediately noticed.


If the organisation is big enough and dysfunctional enough, your absence will not be noticed for long periods of time. Just make sure whenever you are seen you have the appearance of being in a huge rush.


>your absence will not be noticed for long periods of time

Be still my heart


There was a well-written story about someone in a large company who was by some coincidence suddenly left without duties and went on for years doing exactly that. But I no longer remember the source or whether it was a fictional story.


Could it be the [Forgotten Employee: The American Dream](https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/)?

> After 30 days, I became convinced that I was a forgotten, non digestible entity in the corporate stomach. No man ever comes over to ask me for anything - although I am but a Manager, and Directors roam the hallways like rabid hyenas, I am much too senior to all of them for them to attempt an attack. Every once in a while, the phone will ring, and an old acquantance will ask for help solving a problem - I gladly comply. Sometimes, I let the phone ring... but the voicemail light never comes on. They move on to the next target, under the false assumption that I am much too busy to be bothered.


I cant believe this hasnt been said yet:

Every job can be converted into this esp in any sort of managerial role, the strategy to do this has only 3 basic steps:

# 1 - Hire a great team under you.

If you have one person, two person, or more working under you, make sure they know what to do and make sure they understand your expectations.

# 2 - Delegate your work.

Try to get rid of as much work as possible. There will be surprisingly little you have to do personally if you have done step 1 right. People who work under you wont even mind delegation+trust if you dont get in their way and micromanage. Just give them work and forget about it.

# 3 - Relax

Now you can chill while other people do your work for you. Keep tuning this system until you have created a well oiled machine under you that runs with minimal manual supervision. You now have time to focus on more important things.


"Hire a great team" .."Delegate your work"..These are the opposite of easy stuff which OP wants to do. Team building