1. If I were looking to hire someone and read this, I would immediately be turned off. Why? Because part of being an engineer (or any employee really) is doing a bunch of stuff people don't enjoy doing. This includes:
- Writing documentation
- Writing tests
- Fixing bugs
- Talking to partners about a change/launch
- Talking to lawyers
- etc
So I would be wondering: if you're signaling you don't want to do those things, that means someone else will need to do all that for your code, which is not great for them and tends to be much worse.
Like you're basically saying you want to cherrypick the parts you enjoy and not give a damn about anything else. You might say you're only costing $1/hour but the risk of a bad engineer can mean you're still expensive or a loss.
2. You don't factor in the time cost of me or my team in onboarding you, dealing with you, dealing with your code and so on. That's a big part of the filtering in hiring. People are deciding if they can justify that time investment and the opportunity cost involved.
I recently user-tested a job posting for a high-meaning job. [1] Some people were very excited by the meaning, and were strongly motivated to apply. Others cared very little or not at all about the purpose; they worked because they wanted money for other things. Both are perfectly valid ways to approach work, I think, but I would handle each kind of employee differently.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yNITCTtVh5qHPof12cSf5PWh...
If your concerns are onboarding process and talking to lawyers, you would be absolutely out of your mind to hire someone who says "I'll work on stuff that pleases me when I feel like it for little money. And no tech screens, please!".
A better match is an owner-run tiny software company. "We have an open source Python client library. It needs type hints. Sound interesting? Here's a link to the repo and some docs. I'll give you $5/hr in ETH up to $100 for whatever you do by the end of Friday." Then on Friday afternoon you maybe have some type hints and pay out up to $100.
I'm picking on your comment in particular, but it's crazy to me how much criticism this guy is getting. He wants to try something new, and so many people are telling him what he should be doing, or why being on the other side of this trade is so terrible. Let's just let them make up their own minds. Let's stop trying to cram each other into little boxes.
Also imagine the impact on morale of the other teammates when some primadonna gets the cherry picked work and everyone else gets the drudgery. Pay or not.
Run.
I enjoy writing documentation and writing tests. To me, writing documentation is like teaching others about the awesome product / features we have built, and also the different technical tradeoff decisions we had to make.
I can't grasp the mindset where an engineer builds something really cool that they are proud of, but don't enjoy talking about it / teaching people how to use it.
I agree the author hasn't emphasised those things. If I was in need of those things, I might not automatically engage with the author.
But, you've given a list of what you don't like doing - that isn't a universal list.
Given that the author asks to be deeply involved in a human-centred project, it is not obvious to me that they don't like or are not prepared to do these things.
Putting this call-for-employers out there signals (at least to me) that he can be a a really good deal if the employer takes it to task to find his complement, instead of creating a scenario where the employer gets to delegate it all wholesale to one person, regardless of their goals for growth and enjoyment. It's upstreaming the concern, and just getting to work on the things he loves at a pay cut for the inconvenience of matchmaking
As is, the signal is too weak to know if the person just wants a toy to play with (I doubt) or if they are ready for the full package because they understand it's how it should be done. Definitively a point to check thoroughly before hiring – but it would be the same for other candidates, right ?
In fact, can't we go further? Is there anything interesting about it if you can just crank it out?
The interesting work in my recent memory has been about reading, learning, thinking; not cranking.
[...list of things that, as an engineer, I enjoy all of, as long as I’m engaged with the project, and none of which conflict necessarily with OPs requirements...]
Sounds like you just read your own stereotype of engineers ans what they like into that.
> You don't factor in the time cost of me or my team in onboarding you, dealing with you, dealing with your code and so on.
Well, no, nor does he factor in the potential value of his work on the other side, either. He offers to do an interview and let you, as the hiring party, factor those things in by setting a pay scale, for which the only up-front limits he proposes is that the hourly rate must be positive. Typically, that’s how factoring in value and overhead works in hiring, the hiring party, not the hired party figures them in and decides if and at what rate to make an offer.
If, however, you're like 99.99% of people and are good at what you do then you'll have to find what is interesting about the job. I've worked at a company that replaced clipboards with iPads in a factory. If all it was to me was a form-builder application and the technology under it I would have been turned off ages ago. But I was incredibly curious as to why the product as successful and growing, what our customers liked about it, and I pushed for developers to visit the factories and see how people used the app. The results were quite surprising and it fed out team with dozens of ideas.
Technology for technology's sake is fun for a while but will eventually bore you. It helps to have a reason to work on what you do. Which I think is part of what OP is saying but I think you can find the reason in a "boring" job as well. You just have to be curious and look for it.
Although avoiding working at feature factories where the developers are just cogs in a Kafka-esque Agile Machine is a whole other can of worms. The OP's strategy seems like an interesting way to avoid it. Best of luck!
I am not sure I agree with premise that most of us have put up with the dullest job to keep up with cost of living. There are plenty of tech jobs out there beyond the valley, in other parts of the world which are definitely interesting and pay reasonably above cost of living requirements.
It is not so clear cut to me that mpst don't have some freedom in choosing what kind of work to do without going to the highest paying boring one, tech is not minimum wage sector where we have little to no choice and limited in mobility. The cost of living is not that high that we have zero choice, other sectors don't pay as much in the same areas and they are able to manage after all.
This reminds me of the advice that one needs to cultivate their passion rather than expect to stumble upon it.
(As an aside, it's kind of a pity that there isn't a standard drop-proof tablet out there that can be deployed without thought in these kinds of situations.)
“I’ll work for free or nothing if you let me do what I love under the umbrella of your organization because I love it so much.”
I did one or two agreements like this and then stopped altogether. The individual would start their work, others would start to depend on its existence and the individual would leave in a matter or weeks or months because something else better came along for them. There was no incentive to keep the relationship going over a longer term. My organization just wasn’t setup to see any upside to short lived but high quality team members.
Is there anyone out there who does work agreements like this currently and benefits from them? Would love to hear more details. Perhaps that feedback could help Franceso with his pitch.
Franceso please come back in a week and let us know what kinds of offers you received. Will be very interested to see where this goes.
People like variety - the initial love doesn't last long. After a few weeks/months it gets boring and repetitive. Learning the shiny new tech is only fun until you you've figured out how it works, but the project doesn't end there and you have to deliver a product in the end. But for most people who exclusively want the "position where they can learn new things" fixing the bugs and doing the finishing touches is no longer fun once they've figured out how the underlying tech works - they leave for the next position where they can learn another shiny new tech and you're left with a half-finished project (usually with subpar code quality because this was the first project they did using the new tech).
Here's a couple of techniques for anyone looking to do the same:
1. Look at the 'supply chain' of inputs and outputs from your problem area. Are there new inefficiencies somewhere in the stack that you can dig into and solve, and leverage your new knowledge. This could mean a whole new area of things to learn in order to investigate or solve those problems.
2. Never accept the status quo. Every time you're asked to do something else, treat that as an opportunity to find one thing that you can improve in the related systems. Here you'll learn the new system, but you'll also learn how to pick worthwhile areas for improvement.
3. Be reflective and review what you found interesting and what you didn't and dig into the ones you didn't find interesting. Ask yourself why you didn't like things; was it cause it was too difficult to pick up? was it cause you don't like people problems? was it just too big a problem to tackle? Dig in more and ask why again (like the Toyota 5 Whys). Eventually you should be able to find a problem area that you can clearly define and potentially work on to improve.
I realize these 3 techniques won't necessarily lead to 'cool tech problems', but that's kinda the point! If you can get yourself interested in solving related problem areas, you'll find you pick up a lot of useful knowledge and value that you can apply in many other areas you wouldn't have first thought of, all while always jumping between things and not getting bored!
(edit: formatting)
To me it seems that time is much better spent on a fun personal (side) project. And who knows ... maybe the side project will earn some income in time.
When you're highly paid you will get more interesting work, because the company will see you as a valuable asset that should be working on "hard" things. When you're being paid a penny, the company will think you're worth a penny and will assign you menial tasks.
BTW I didn't really live up to my own advice, either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've worked with people in the past who felt like they weren't getting any of the interesting jobs. Their solution was to go to their manager and complain that they were being passed over. But if you're not proven at a task, then you're a risky bet, and you'll only be picked if there's no other option.
My advice to those people (and this won't necessarily work in all industries) is to make yourself less risky. Share a weekend project with the team where you worked on the sort of problem you find interesting, and make sure it's good enough that it gets people's attention. If you can make some important people say "wow, I didn't know you could do that sort of thing!" you'll probably notice you start getting more interesting jobs after that.
When you have a growing business, money is probably not not the primary concern, but the last thing you can afford is someone on the team being picky about which tasks are beneath them.
No judgment here, I understand OP's sentiment, but I cannot remember any situation in my career where 'hire me, I only work on what I find interesting but it'll cost you comparatively little' would have been an exciting proposition (on the hiring side).
I'm currently about to abandon a 12 month contract about 3 months in because it's become apparent that the company didn't actually want a "DevOps" position, and I was hired as part of some incredible misconceptions about the regulatory environment they operate in by the managers who created the position.
The problem isn't "being bored" for me, it's feeling like time is passing slowly. I don't really care what if at the end of the day it's a surprise that it's all of a sudden 5pm.
- https://github-help-wanted.com/
- https://opencollective.com/discover
I'm sure there are organisations that would love to have some technical volunteers. Maybe try and find NGOs you believe in and send them a private or public message?
Or, if you want to get politically involved in your country, you could try and find yourself a political party you believe in, ask them if they have any technical tasks, and see from there.
>> no daily stand-ups
>> Meaningful work means work that I care about
>> This whole thing is not about money, so what the work is about comes first
There is a profound mismatch between what this person is offerring and what anyone would want from a developer, or even the core requirements for effective software development. I'll pass.
This all really reads in an uncomfortable way and I would never risk investing into somebody by guessing if whatever I need done, as a business, will be interesting enough for this person to put genuine effort into.
I feel like OP needs hobbies to get the fun/interesting itch scratched and then go back to being a "code monkey" like the rest of us, doing "boring" stuff to pay the bills.
I've been there myself before and the most valuable lesson I've learned is that motivation != discipline. Motivation comes and goes and if you base your productivity solely on that you will burn out. Being disciplined though allows to get the "boring" out of the way first, leaving lots of time to explore other interests.
It's not similar to a contractor relationship, since there there's at least contracts and deliverables that give some clarity to planning.
You completely misunderstand what "professional" means and what the "professional pride" is about.
You might also consider working on side projects with an emphasis on them making money, but then I think you'll quickly find that you'll be required to do work that you don't consider fun and interesting, so you'd probably have to give up before it got far enough to become an actual money-making venture. So again, closer to $0/hour.
Or maybe you'd like to do contract work, but again, to fully complete a project for a client is most certainly going to require that you do some work that you don't like, so I don't think anyone is going to pay you for delivering something that's only partially complete, so again, $0/hour.
The CV shows experience as a freelance engineer at Apple for a bit, then an engineer for Samsung which they were made redundant from. Their GitHub is 3 projects, a python script, a breakout board and then a beta libary. They argue that's fine though because they'd work for £1/hr, but the real cost of an upfront hire is my time, not money.
The author seems to not understand how key money is for the relationship between manager and employee. I have plenty of employee's who'll work on interesting stuff in their own hours, but I pay them so they stay around and do the boring bits like docs, DR, testing, support, bus-factoring.
I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might be happy doing that kind of work part-time and remotely (almost nobody offers part time work) or I might want to do that later in life.
I read a post about Gumroad here on HN, and that's how I want to work. The way Gitlab does it is also very interesting.
There must be other people who feel and think the same, and the post is just a way to try to reach them.
But overall, I somewhat agree with Francesco. I used to work at a large corporation where majority of the work was minor config changes and rolling out deployments for handsome pay (somewhat KTLO work). I left because I wasn't growing my career. As companies get bigger the money gets bigger as well but the interesting work gets much smaller. At the end of the day, once you have a solid product in place you need a lot more people to just keep it running vs. work on some very interesting technical work. I think applied research is the best way to go for very interesting technical work but I think the bar is pretty high for that.
Well if it's freelance work there are situations where the upfront time cost is not massive, especially if it's a task with a limited scope. I know this because I hire freelancers.
But yea, I don't have a bag of small-scope, interesting and meaningful tasks lying around...
If your job is to keep the gold mine running all your underlings are working on the mine. If they go do something else its a waste of your time and resources.
If your job is to explore the jungle for new mines, then the story is very different. Its more about finding as many curious cheap chimps as you can and sending them out in every direction. In such cases imaginative managers use all the chimps they can find.
The most arduous hiring processes are often little more than an illusion of selection, yielding a process that is more the rolling of dice. Most hiring processes hire based upon interview skills that have extraordinarily little correlation with job performance.
Google has such a famous interview process that everyone tries to clone it. For that they get employees with an average tenure of 3.2 years, made worse that internal project-to-project migration is endemic. They have a tiny core of institutional knowledge, and then a passing army of travelers.
This industry would be far more robust if it hired quickly and fired fast, because the only way you know how someone will do in the role/team/org is by actually having them in the role/team/org. Everything else is just loose proxies that do little. Iterate through people and just punt out the ones that don't work. That shouldn't be a big deal.
:)
My own anecdote: when I graduated from college I had zero experience aside from one internship at a small noname company. No one would hire me. I started reaching out to local companies big and small saying I would work for free if they'd use me. Not just programming jobs, but also general IT or even helpdesk jobs - anything remotely computer related. None took me up on my offer. I suppose they saw me as more of a liability than an asset, or that onboarding costs still wouldn't be worth having free labor. It was an interesting eyeopener.
But since you're experienced, your story is different from mine.
Sort of a "hmm.. why is this person unhireable elsewhere.. what do those companies know that I don't?" combined with a concern of "this guy's gonna clean out the office when we go home"
Both times it worked, although I had to cast a wide net and wait a little bit. Both were very, very small underfunded companies. I didn't say I'd work for free, but said I was working for the experience and job recommendation more than the money.
Honestly for the second one it was more about the recommendation, of having something to put on my resume other than my own S-corp and what have you. I could get most of the small scale experience myself (although they pushed me into NoSQL, GCP/EC2 and other things I wouldn't have ventured into - and turning mockups into code too). I was very up front with them too - I promised them I would do cheap work for them for a month and would then be open to offers, and if someone wanted to hire me for six figures I would probably take it. Oddly enough at both companies (1996 and the more recent one) I spent about 18 months working for the company before being hired by a company actually willing to pay.
In the recent situation, I also was fixated on a niche which made things a little more difficult for me initially, although now I am better off it took a little longer to get going in terms of getting paid. Small tech companies are generally looking for people who known HTML, CSS, Javascript and web frameworks like React. If you look like, without needing that much help, you can do tickets/stories to implement features on a web site that uses React, and can pass the standard interview gauntlet for that type of job, I think you will find a job fairly quickly.
the lesson should be to value your labor correctly, as large deviations in perceptions of value mean that transactions won’t happen. a more astute approach would be to communicate your (accurate) understanding of your own value and your willingness to negotiate alternate dimensions of value in exchange, like getting experience faster or doing more interesting work in exchange for less money.
tl;dr: establish a common understanding of value, then negotiate.
One thing that I have been doing, my entire adult life, is shipping product. A lot of "ship" is not fun. There's all kinds of boring stuff, like good design (as opposed to "just enough design to get started"), good coding (as in "code I'll understand when I come back to refactor in three months"), good quality (as opposed to "Who cares? I'll be out of here, before they run out of integer space"), good testing (as opposed to "I'll write a few unit tests that show it handles low-hanging-fruit problems"), accessibility, localization, aesthetic design, supporting documentation for users, administrators and developers, etc. You get the drift. Lots of "not-fun" stuff, there.
For me, I've always enjoyed "finishing" projects, and that means shipping them, so users get their grubby little paws on my work, and start abusing it (and, sometimes, me).
I'm taking on a CTO role (I've actually been doing it for months, but we're formalizing it). I was asked to write my own job description. I used words like "Accountable" and "Responsible" a lot. I got used to that, working for a Japanese corporation for 27 years.
Not fun. But I get to run the whole show, and ship. That's my idea of fun.
Oh, and I totally relate to the thing about LeetCode interviews and whatnot. I have tens of thousands of lines of code, ship-ready projects that people can clone, build, and run, dozens of articles, etc. It has been my experience that these are totally ignored; which I consider...not sane.
I have found the greatest pleasure in writing software that helps people help people. These organizations don't usually get "top-shelf" talent, so they tend to have a great need.
Again, good luck.
Positions are usually low paid for one of two reasons: either there isn't a budget for it, or there is but they're being cheap and cutting corners. If there isn't a budget, that's a sign of a failing organization or a bad startup idea, so probably not a job you should take. If they're being cheap, that's a sign that they don't respect or value the people doing the work, which is a huge red flag.
I've taken jobs that were essentially volunteer work because I got to work on projects that were interesting to me. I've also taken jobs that weren't that interesting to me which paid generously. In the end, much of my volunteer work wasn't valued, and seen as disposable. The more highly paid work never got interesting, but having a decent amount of money took off a lot of the financial stress and ultimately made me happier and enabled me to spend more of my free time on things that interested me.
At this point, no matter how interesting, there are only two people I would do underpaid work for: myself, and my grandmother.
These are general-purpose programming languages. Due to their design, some patterns/paradigms might seem more natural to implement, but you can build anything you want with them.
For an experienced programmer eschewing conventions with this "resume", I am surprised by this comment.
They only have about a year of full-time engineering experience, so they might not recognize this yet. (Not trying to talk him down; plenty of people without much experience still do valuable work, but it's only natural to have blind spots.)
I think they would have better success by actively seeking what they want, though, rather than expecting it to turn up at their doorstep.
if you do it right they’ll be overjoyed to have technical staff who aren’t degree candidates and you’ll get something tasty to intellectually munch on.
1) It took my boss significant effort keeping her busy with things to do: explaining the problems we needed solved, etc. is non-trivial
2) Since she was working for so little, she could basically dictate what she was or wasn't doing. The very fact that she wasn't on a real salary meant it was actually harder to work with her in some sense.
1) You needn't necessarily restrict this to tenured professors. Indeed, plenty of new tenure-track professors have both the need and startup resources to potentially hire you if you're likely to boost their group's productivity.
2) It's hard to fund people with grant money who weren't written into the grant in the first place. So while grants might be interesting as an indicator of interest, they don't necessarily ensure you'll be hirable. Which means either patience, or hoping they have a small slush fund somewhere - which is more likely for a tenured professor, but not exclusively so.
Have you ever worked on something interesting or meaningful at a job? You list a bunch of random topics, none of which are inherently interesting or meaningful. I've worked on flashy projects - most recently self driving at one of the bigger companies doing it. Guess what? In an eng org of hundreds, at least half the people were still doing shit work that had nothing to do with self driving.
Beyond that, if I want to hire you for interesting work, it falls into two buckets: mission critical, or irrelevant. I can't hire you for mission critical work because I have no confidence you can do the job, so I can only hire you for irrelevant work. If I hire you for irrelevant work, it makes me no money, so I pay you no money. Why even have this arrangement? Just go start your own side project - at least then you own it.
Consider this: join a company doing something you don't like (making an absurd amount of money because of the industry), demonstrate/develop your expertise, identify the parts of the company that are interesting to you, then go work on those. People doing interesting satisfying work didn't just get there accidentally.
Can give some practical advice or pointers about how to become interested in something? What do you practically mean by "engage"?
Second point: even though something is "only" in your head, it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to change.
The question then becomes not whether it's possible to become interested in something, but whether it's worthwhile to put your time and energy into doing so as opposed to doing something you find interesting from the start.
One of my past manager told me that the trick of making a boring job interesting is to introduce a layer of abstraction to the task.
For example, if you have to right a lot of boiler plate code then write a code generator.
I'm far from perfect with it, but it has changed the way I perceive work forever.
What you’re proposing here feels like such a deviation from the typical hiring process that I just can’t imagine many companies going to the effort of making you a personalized proposal just for you to turn it down as not interesting.
Being unable to find anything that interests you also comes across as a bit of a motivational problem that could scare companies off from investing in you (if not with money than with time).
Just my two cents. I don’t consider myself an expert on interviewing or hiring, so I could be wrong!
> Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the intersection of "interesting" work and "valuable" work is pretty small.
Your comment was flagged/dead, but I absolutely think you are right.
Look at most of the jobs today. Laborer, factory worker, package sorter, delivery driver, fast food worker, government process worker, ... These aren't particularly interesting or fulfilling.
Apply that lens to our industry, and what do you see? Plumbing grunt work, glue code maintainer, migration work, form collection CRUD. There are so many jobs that don't do anything particularly novel or exciting. You might even be building something you hate, like ad tech.
I don't think the comment is too off base. Maybe the scale and tone is wrong, but there's certainly plenty of boring work.
You're looking at it wrong. The idea is to find interesting problems that have unknown amounts of ROI but should still be tackled by someone. Give him some cash and something interesting to chew and see what he comes up with. It's kind of like tending to a houesplant.
If he produces nothing of value, then fine you know the idea was probably a dud anyway, but you didn't have to spend any time on it. And if he does spawn something of value, you can take the work and have more qualified engineers work on it full time.
Personally, I find the best use case for people like this is to throw ethically questionable tasks at them. Stuff you shouldn't really have a full time employee doing, but would be perfectly fine outsourcing to a contractor who works off the books.
My work is not always very exciting, and that's okay. I work normal hours and have purchased my own beautiful home at 24. After work I have freedom to do whatever, and enough money to pursue pretty much any hobby that I want. My employer sponsors books, courses, and conferences, and provides great healthcare.
I would rather have a stable, but boring, job over being broke and working on something interesting.
As a manager I would be responsible for providing you with a steady stream of interesting or meaningful work. I would have to structure the work to fit around your flexible schedule, shield you from doing the parts you don't like, and change it up if you start getting bored. But I would not be able to rely on your output for anything mission critical.
How much would you pay me to provide this service to you?
(Please take this as tongue-in-cheek not as a snarky comment, it genuinely is an interesting thought experiment despite the obvious issues it raises).
However, what I was trying to do here is to reach organizations or people that already work the way I'd like, so that work is already organized in a flexible/async fashion and the arrangement can be a net positive for them.
And I think you should apply the same reasoning to the definition of "interesting work" or "meaningful work". Try to see the big picture, from a bird's eye view: a piece of work can be interesting or meaningful even if it has boring parts. Almost anything has and we probably wouldn't be here as human beings if we couldn't handle that. Carrying sick people up and down the stairs is strenuous (and repetitive?) but can still be a net positive because you feel so good for helping them. Same goes for writing software or any other kind of work.
I think that, as a manager, you should not shield me from the boring parts of any work but you should make sure that my overall "working experience" is a net positive for "interesting" and/or "meaningful".
Thank you!
While I think he is a missed opportunity for consensus-workplace-realty in which we live, anyone that sets their own rules and principles and firmly acts from there is worth my esteem, especially if those principles don’t hurt any other being and on the contrary represent an element of novelty in the too constrained way we look at the world of work. Clearly he has to define better what he can offer vs what not, for in every contract or exchange of whatever good the rules have to be well defined on both ends.
What employers often don’t take into account is how costly lack of motivation is. I’d rather find 2 Francescos than hiring 20 standard employees that work just for money and are guaranteed to either stop producing quality work or leaving the company after a few months, years at the best, bringing back the cost of hiring someone new over and over again, or even the cost of keeping a bad hire (especially with the EU regulations)
There’s no price for talent mixed with a clear statement of interest in doing only something exciting, especially when you make the price… you’d have to be a fool not to try out someone so sincere and willing to put on the table their intentions, and then take it from there.
I might be wrong of course, I work for the biggest corporation out there and don’t hire directly, but seems a good deal to me!!
1. interesting work, checked. 2. part time, remote and probably asynchronous, checked. 3. no interviews, just build the web app or iOS app, checked. 4. probably minimum wage, checked.
How people value you – and treat you – is directly reflected in how they pay you. Working free or cheap actually encourages employers to micromanage and committee review things because inexpensive things/people are seen as less reliable or professional.
If you want interesting work, my advice is to make it yourself. Find a problem you're passionate about and make something beautiful of it.
You'll improve your own skills, have more fun, and eventually employers will be coming to you.
No interviews? No fixed hours? Maximum 10 hours per week? He'll refuse to do anything he doesn't think is interesting?
Who would even want to hire someone like this.
What you propose sounds great but I think your article works better to find like minded people who share your thoughts (definitely count me in on that) than to find some work offers.
Maybe with HN's reach you would find something, but I think a normal contractor's pitch + vetting for interesting jobs would work best.
I would also recommend looking into building your own project
My way of dealing with this problem has been: - Do contract work and vet the work; worst case scenario, you can drop off with some notice and not much will change. I did some employee time but that was mainly to get benefits (eg. paternity leave) and some fixed money for a period of my life I knew I wouldn't be very productive in - Raise the price of my services; this tends to filter out the worst jobs, albeit VC funded startup and rich tech companies have plenty of money to waste on chair warmers. Established mid companies without funding doing something you care about and with a remote first culture (pre-COVID and post-COVID) work best. - Build your own project, add almost-passive revenue streams; outsource the boring bits you don't want to do - Save money and try to reduce your expenses so that your passive revenue streams need to cover less money (making it easier to survive on passive revenue)
Not a recipe for optimising for wealth, but for freedom.
Well it quickly became apparent that that really wasn’t an option for some dumb kid. I had tried freelancing for a few years but got sick of the overwhelming amount of people who just wanted me to update their WP site. After humming around for a year or so I gave up trying for anything greater and just accepted a string of low paying, “boring” development jobs.
> I genuinely believe that for those of us who feel this way, there is nothing else to do but pursue it.
Yeah I’m starting to feel this way again, so fuck it, might as well. I haven’t been nearly as productive as I should have been the past years though. I have a better idea of what I want and there’s really only two choices. One of continuing stagnation or one of putting in the work and attempting to pursue something better. We’ll see though, I’m not betting on anything working out.
However, the answer to this is not to just cut out the "pays well" part of the equation and assume that the rest will follow as a result. As others in the comments here have pointed out, interesting work is hard to find, full stop.
I would actually think that the non-conventional nature of the author's offer would actually decrease the quality of the work. In my experience, work can be enjoyable based on two dimensions: the technical aspect of the work (am I learning? is this engaging?) and the "organizational" nature of the work (is the company well organized and run? are there clear expectations? or is there just chaos everywhere?). Even if work you can find from this kind of offer is better on the first dimension, I imagine it'll be far worse on the second dimension.
That being said, I hope the author proves me wrong and finds a work situation which makes them happy. Good luck!
I imagine they are not supporting a family or a mortgage, or if they are they must have a significant alternate source of financial or housing security, and that's not a bad thing.
I wish more people had the ability to put out such terms for their employment without worrying about keeping the roof over their head.
They would likely have to drop some of their more naive requirements though (i.e. no Java or PHP, only "interesting" work). The road to interesting work is paved with the mundane, no matter how cool the job or technology is.
I can understand not wanting do maintenance, but I also wonder: How much is there to be made from dealing with all that legacy stuff from the last 20 years? I suspect it’s a lot.
Some of the work is exciting, some of it is boring, but I like it on average. Though it's much different when there's a goal in mind (to finish your own project). It's still good in a way, because I think, ok, I will work 2 weeks on that boring stuff and can't wait until it gets more interesting, then it gets interesting and I have my reward, back to the boring stuff. I find that this chase of seeing completion creates the passion even for the boring stuff.
Of course I don't want to keep it up endlessly. I will either try to turn this project into a product and see how it goes, or I will open source it and get a full time job (freelancing is a bad strategy for building a business by the way. If I could go back in time I would never start freelancing, but get a full time job and make savings if I wanted to start my own business).
I will second what others have said, start something yourself in your free time. Get a boring job that doesn't require much time if you don't care about the pay. I think there was a popular thread about that recently.
Or maybe change your industry, i.e. game dev. From what I have heard, the pay is low, precisely because there are a lot of people who want to do it just because they are passionate.
Francesco's experiment seems to rely on an assumption that he can bow out of things that teams typically need their members to do (such as daily standups) if he accepts less pay, as if the team-level work could somehow be parceled out and evaluated in a piecemeal basis in terms of budget. The issue with that is that there is a level of engagement that is non-negotiable in a team. If I thought Francesco would act as a force function for the team and help them be more cohesive, faster-moving, and results-driven, then I would bring him on-board and pay him comparably to what I paid the other members of the team who were producing equivalent results. If Francesco decided that he didn't want to do the sorts of things that the team required of him to be an active and productive participant in the team effort, then to me Fencesco's value could very well be negative.
Don't strive to do what you love, do what you take pride in. When you are working towards a goal which resonates with you personally, all the tedious, unpleasant, painful moments and all the other obstacles in your way just make your eventual triumph sweeter.
Odd choice of location given that hailing from Poland and having lived in Italy I had an opportunity to compare costs of employment and generally they're not that different.
Perhaps Milan is exceptional - can anyone from that location tell me whether €60k annual costs of employment are considered a lot for a senior developer?
Not sure how reliable is this info, but Glassdoor suggests that salary in Milan could be slightly lower than what I would expect from average software engineer in Poland.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/milan-software-engineer-s...
You are brave, tough. And I mean if the most positive way.
Hell, I wouldn't even let them wander around my jobsite for free.
The entitlement in this profession is sometimes truly astounding.
If you want some pay, start your own business. Yes some parts are sucky, but you can freely choose between doing them or letting your business fail.
If you're working for someone else, why would they hire you to do just the interesting work? If it was all interesting they would just get free labour.
Best of luck with your goals by the way. Avoiding the full time grind in favor of lower time commitments with interesting projects is a great objective.
So my advice to the OP is to focus on opportunities and positions that do not require going through engineering gatekeeping. Other disciplines tend to have more optimistic viewpoints and tend to be more willing to accept risk when they feel there is potential for high returns. I would recommend finding small startups that are looking for part-time engineering folks.
My thought was that many responses are of the form "well good craftsmanship is boring and not 'interesting' - that's why we charge money for it" and I'm glad to have found lots of people that I DO NOT want to work with.
Good craftmanship - writing tests, documentation, making sure something works and actually ships and gets out the door - now that's interesting and rewarding. OP is trying to avoid those organizations that get caught in the trap of "we don't know exactly what we're building, so we're going to write some tests" or "well we could ship now, but we should probably add some more features just to be on the safe side." Places like that would be really boring.
Fortunately, engineers don't dispense budget.
I spent 20 years in the Marine Corps because they continued to challenge me and test my abilities. Some days the work wasn't interesting other days it was really interesting. But it was always challenging.
They always told me what I was going to get paid, but I think they owe a few hours for some overtime I did back in 2005.
I think it's great that we have a balance between work and play or maybe even have a life of just play and work on whatever fun stuff you want. You don't need an employer for that. Just know the difference. If you're going to have fun programming and entertain yourself, just do it on your own.
Employers need people to do boring work: maintaining existing legacy systems, fixing bugs, doing the last 20% (which takes 80% of the effort), to get things working perfectly for as many customers as possible.
> Work takes up such a big part of your life that what you do is terribly important. I’ve been contacted by many companies and recruiters during this time, but the idea of going back to full-time work doing something I don’t care about or is not technically interesting just scares me.
Yeah, scares is a good word here - I feel the same. I get contacted by recruiters and they describe the job and I get that dread in the pit of my stomach. I've been in tech for 30+ years, I've seen all kinds of companies, situations, bosses, coworkers. It's all a roll of the dice and from my experience the odds aren't on your side.
> 1. You will give me interesting or meaningful work
I tend to think that there's just not a lot of funding out there for the most interesting and meaningful. I had a job doing software development for an alternative energy company. They never got to stable funding and folded. That was interesting, meaningful work, but they couldn't get money to keep it going.
> 3. No technical interviews or coding challenges
I have reached this point as well. I'm tired of the interview game. Just done. Can't do it anymore. The thought of interviewing makes me physically ill. I like to say that I'm retired form interviewing not software development.
> 4. You pay what you want, per hour
I'd work for $50K/year if the work was interesting and the people were nice. Heck, maybe even less than that in the right situation.
In the meantime I'll be over here working on stuff that I find interesting in languages that I like (and aren't necessarily in demand). And gardening. And baking bread.
Just a technicality, but if he sets the number of hours a week, then he is still somewhat in control of his own paycheck. If I were the employer, I'd want to set the hourly rate as well as a fixed number of hours per week, or at least a max.
Problem: OP does not have the freedom to pursue what he finds interesting.
Tactic: Given existing work arrangements, attempt to negotiate a setup where he can just work on what he wants. If the employer changes its mind, OP gets to restart the cycle.
Strategy: Avoid having this problem in the first place.
Pursuing the strategy means taking a high-paying job, saving a large fraction (https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...) and having the financial freedom to never worry about this problem again.
Anecdata:
A friend of mine worked in banking where the pay was amazing, but the tech used mostly outdated(think Java 6 in 2018). At some point he got fed up with all that and tried to switch roles, but to no avail, because no one would hire him.
He's still there but should a recession come he'll be in a very tough situation.
I'm curious if the lessons learned from OSS projects would apply to work output from this person.
I'd prefer a guy who has fun solving hard problems, like say, "how do I convince people more senior than me to follow my advice", rather than someone saying "find me a cheap job where I don't have to deal with snobbish seniors".
Find a way to build an inner child, something that makes you happy to learn in any condition even conflict. I can be insulted by a colleague and still find the experience an interesting challenge: how to make this moron either like me or do what I need him to do. I wouldn't quit, I wouldn't ask the company to fire him.
Sounds to me like you just want flexibility and the opportunity to work on things you find engaging. Don't expect 100% of that all the time but I do think if you look hard enough, you'll find what you seek.
Eventually you can share some the unfun crap to other team members.
Instead, what you may want to do is get into consulting.
If the motivation is there, and you're cause is meaningful, then all of the problems will become interesting.
You should go into academia. I think that model is more what you are looking for.
I want to be able to have more autonomy on how to do my work. Take a piece of code (large or small) and relentlessness make it better. I don't want to have to explain my self for every little change. I want to be able to deploy my changes every day. I have a grand vision on my head and I want to make it happen. Second guessing my self of what others think, drains my energy.
For one, whats the big deal? I can put in the difficult hours and continue. Secondly, often, what is considered inefficient and stupid is not, or just cant be done better because organizations are not perfect.
Having said that, OP, I have lots of respect for your strength to go for what you want.
Sooner or later, everyone does maintenance work or fixes bugs. It comes with the job.
If a member of a team says that what they do is boring that's often a sign of poor leadership.
As for the job itself, let me concern myself with the how and let me have enough leeway to do some wool-gathering.
I predict you’ll get some decent offers, so cheers mate and have fun!
thats why I think a lot of people become founders.
so if you work for a startup you will literally get paid whatecer and work on cool stuff, haha
Who are you and why should we care?
the author did not make that decision, the author had no choice
But what's not landing with me: when the author had the choice, because let's face it, nobody cuffed the author to the desk, nobody forced anybody to do the boring tedious work - the author did not make the decision but rather was prolonging in that, what is portrayed, uncomfortable situation.
The rest of the post paints a portrait of a person who doesn't know what they want. No commitments, no responsibilities, one side wants without being explicit what they can give back.
I think that the key to this post is the paragraph starting with "Accepting a job offer is a bit like getting engaged or married:". But it should be rewritten like this:
> I know (I) will have to make compromises to make it work, but I should not go for it unless I am 100% sure and obviously I should not marry someone I don’t know. If I do, chances are I will end up being unhappy for a long time or staying with them for longer than I want, because I will get used to the day-to-day and the “rewards” while still getting to know them. When I begin to have an understanding of who this person really is, I will already be invested and leaving will be hard. Many never leave(, I never left and I was hurt because I was laid off while unprepared). For a company however, it is much easier to stay with someone who is unhappy in their relationship [with the company itself], because it’s a one-to-many relationship. They have many other employees they can rely on, and an underperforming or unhappy employee can be easily shadowed by better or happier ones without the company suffering. Is it starting to feel dysfunctional?
In that context, the last question could be the writing on the wall. I'm sorry if I come across as condescending, this is my interpretation: this portrays a person who openly admits is not able to make a commitment and is uncertain of their qualities.
The rest of the post suggests the person is looking for a quick fix instead of long term solution. Today they may like this, tomorrow that, today they do something for someone who pays $1/h, tomorrow maybe something better comes through so screw that $1/h. "Didn't like it anyway and you knew the rules so it's your fault".
I like author's rules. Assuming they stick to them. It might work for some companies so good luck.
As a side note: I was hoping to find the info if the person can raise invoices. Obviously, paying invoices in cryptocurrency might not land well with local tax authorities.
Golden handcuffs: a phrase first recorded in 1976, refers to financial allurements and benefits that have the objective to encourage highly compensated employees to remain within a company or organization instead of moving from company to company (or organization to organization) (opposite of a golden parachute).
Surely you can relate to someone taking a job they might not love because it pays more right? I think the main point he's trying to make is think twice before doing a job you hate, just because it pays more. Life is short, your job takes up a lot of your time, so consider doing something you enjoy...even if it pays less. That part at least is good advice I think.
Why should we make any compromises on the activity that we'll spend the majority of our lives doing?
