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I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one

I completely understand your point of view and I would think the same if I were you, but that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might be happy doing that kind of work part-time and remotely (almost nobody offers part time work) or I might want to do that later in life. I read a post about Gumroad here on HN, and that's how I want to work. The way Gitlab does it is also very interesting. There must be other people who feel and think the same, and the post is just a way to try to reach them.

the_only_law 5y ago
I have no problem whatsoever with staying around and doing the boring bits. But if those are exclusively the job, that’s when I take issue.
arcturus17 5y ago
> 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. But surely they do a lot of boring work at those companies too, as in all tech companies?
- ftruzzi 5y ago
  Of course, but if it's part-time and full remote then it doesn't take away most of your day/life and I would have no problem with that. I also do translation work which can be tedious at times but I really enjoy it because I can do it from anywhere and just a few hours per week. The "needs to be interesting" part is more tied to the "pay what you want" thing.
munk-a 5y ago
> Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. The only times this ever happened to me was while I worked in the gaming industry and I absolutely still had work available - but we had some pretty rough overtime expectations that lead to constant overtime even if a different department was behind. On principle I would just sit there and relax as best as I could in the office if my team wasn't behind. But, keep in mind, that this was also all unpaid overtime at the employee's expense because thank you EA lobbying and a terrible industry. I occasionally lost money on these evenings since transit would shut down and I'd need to cab home. Now that I've left the gaming industry I doubt I'll ever be in that position again and I continue to have oodles of work in front of me, though, due to ADD and such - I often have trouble with motivating myself to do the boring bits they are part of the job and go with the good.
folkrav 5y ago
> that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. The boring bits _are_ part of the job. > I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. The part about "in an office" is a fair goal, but if you want to avoid docs/tests/support/refactoring work, don't do this job. Writing code is just one part of it, any way you take it, and avoiding the rest is cutting corners. Even our consultants have to write tests and update docs.
pmarreck 5y ago
> and I just don’t want to be paid to “stay around and do the boring bits” I’m a little ADD, so my most hated work is paperwork and administrivia. Nevertheless, I recognize that it is sometimes necessary (documentation, performance evals, collecting metrics, etc.) and I just get my favorite coffee and suck it up (the work, but also the coffee). Programmers have arguably the least boring jobs in the world (we can literally automate all the most boring bits except for certain types of paperwork/administrivia) so to hear a developer complain about doing a little bit of boring work smacks of a special brand of entitlement to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. This only happens at terrible, un-enlightened companies who are more willing to waste both of your time and pay you a little less than they are to either give you meaningful work or let you go to the beach but stay on-call. Bosses should not be babysitters.
harikb 5y ago
You may want to rephrase your proposal a bit. Include the part that you are willing to do the boring parts of an otherwise interesting project. The way it is worded, it would sound to me, as a hiring manager, that you might not finish the work. Because we all know the prototyping / experimentation part of a project is the most challenging and rewarding. Taking it live will involve dealing with the boring parts. I am not claiming you _are_ such a person, but you might want to make it clear.
- ggggtez 5y ago
  > The way it is worded, it would sound to me, as a hiring manager, that you might not finish the work You read that correctly. The OP said clearly he has no intention to do documentation or testing, meetings, or much of anything other than just write code for about 40 hours and then quit.
humbleMouse 5y ago
You’ll keep doing the “interesting work” until it all turns into “Boring work”, just a matter of time
eloff 5y ago
Just look for part time positions. You can also try to make your own by applying for full time jobs and then springing the part time thing on them at the salary negotiation phase. Yeah, some will balk, but make a cogent argument about how working less hours means your performance per hour should be higher. Which is easily supported by current research. Provide citations if you want. It's sufficiently hard to find good developers, that if you're good enough you can get jobs like this. I've been working part time, fully remote last year and it was wonderful. I don't think I'd go back to full time work. After achieving enough trust with the company, I negotiated working alternating weeks. Having a 9 day weekend every 5 work days is incredible. Yeah, I didn't make much money, but I spend that time on my startup, so maybe it will pay off one day. Either way it is a lot more fun!
beaconstudios 5y ago
if you don't care about pay and you want to work on interesting projects, why not start your own? people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun. If you are in a position where you don't need to pay the bills with work, then you're in a great position and can have fun all day long - so why not just do that? If you work on something that also turns out to be marketable then you might even end up with a viable business that you love working on.
- CaptArmchair 5y ago
  > people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun. If a position across the street becomes available which allows you to pursue a personal goal you aspire and afford your current lifestyle, would you remain at your current "non-fun" job or give it a shot and apply? Many people don't just get job because they have bills to pay, they get jobs that they don't like because there is no alternative available to them which meshes with their lives. To an extent, you could argue "that's personal responsibility, everyone makes tough choices". Then again, the author tacitly references to the fact they were still obligated to physically attend an office space, even though they could their work remotely. Now expand that to the millions of workers who are forced to make long commutes.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    obviously there's such a thing as better or worse jobs, but OP suggested that they were willing to work on whatever, as long as it's fun, for any arbitrary amount of pay. So OP is in a position where money is not important to them. So why have a job at all? Have a fun or meaningful hobby instead, or start a personal project.
    - CaptArmchair 5y ago
      > So why have a job at all? The author doesn't ask so much for a job, as reflects about something more profound: meaningful, purposeful relationships with others which enables them to manifest their morals, values, identity,... Interesting work isn't interesting for the sake of spending 8+ hours a day "doing" something. It only becomes interesting when it has an impact on the world which one feels is meaningful. For sure, a novelist could write books for no other reason then deriving enjoyment of the sheer act of committing words to paper or a screen. But the vast majority of people feel that the things they do in life truly become meaningful when they are seen, used, enjoyed,... by others. One could argue that one could do so by volunteering, taking initiative, or starting one's own business. However, the vast majorities of opportunities to enter meaningful professional relationships still involve signing a dotted line and a salary.
onion2k 5y ago
Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. That should literally never be the case for a developer though. You can always be improving the documentation, increasing the test coverage, optimizing for speed/bandwidth/complexity/some other metric you've measured, working out how to measure something, learning new tools or tech that could be applied to a project, working on a spike for some future feature that needs upfront research. If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer. You're a hacker. You want to hack what you see as the fun stuff rather than developing complete, robust applications that can ship. That's fine, and loads of fun, but no one will pay you to that. You don't get a role like that unless you're some sort of programming savant on a par with the likes of John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard - someone has proven they can invent amazing things by being left to their own devices. Unfortunately, you really need to prove yourself first before you can land a gig like that. If it was easy we'd all have done it.
- ruraljuror 5y ago
  > If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer. You're a hacker. This point parallels the distinction made in the Software Engineering at Google flamingo book between programming and engineering. Engineering comprises the tools and processes to maintain software over time (this is a rough paraphrase), of which docs, for example, is essential. So to use their language with your point: this sounds purely like programming and perhaps not engineering.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. > That should literally never be the case for a developer though. After 20+ years I've both been in such a position FULL TIME, as have others (eg: Many devs at ServiceNow) - hired on to work on cool things at an old small company and then literally sat around every day with no tasks and no responsibilities while everyone around me either didn't show up or watched TV on their monitors (open-plan btw). I've seen big company devs do the same, making up busy-work tasks and literally not committing any code for months at a time playing the priority-game of "wait until something more important comes up, someone else will make a workaround" which was surprisingly effective. The reality that a developer shows up and have nothing to do happens OFTEN in all sorts of organizations - eg last day of sprint, how many times have you pulled in a new multi-day ticket? Developer accountability is at an all-time low when software developers (across many sub-disciplines) can't make accurate estimates, can't meet anyone's estimates anyway, and are at an all-time-high demand. Managers are in a different boat, but same result. Perverse incentives and lack of a consensus (or willpower) on what constitutes value makes for do-nothing-and-get-paid while someone else does the work.
flatline 5y ago
Don't want to stay around to do the boring bits required to make a working product that serves a real world use case? Go into academia! Not making a generalization about academics, it's just that academia is one of the few places you can carve out a place to just work on interesting things and get paid for it.
mcshicks 5y ago
I retired close to 7 years ago, and I have a similar set of guidelines for doing part time work. However I have another stipulation which is that if I don't personally know you, I'm not interested, at least for paid work. I've done some volunteer work where I've had introductions from someone I know and that's worked great. And for any given paid job the max I will work is 20 hours/month. That is I might work more than that, but I will only bill that. That allows me the flexibility to put the effort in I think is needed to do what I think is acceptable quality, without imposing my standards on someone who just wants something that will solve a problem immediately in front of them. Good luck!
langitbiru 5y ago
I created a part-time jobs board, ParttimeCareers (https://parttime.careers https://parttime.careers). I collect remote and part-time jobs (mostly engineering jobs, but sometimes marketing jobs). Yeah, I can see where you are coming from. Some people want to look for part-time jobs because they want to spend more time with their passions, kids, parents, or friends.
FalconSensei 5y ago
> having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me Maybe nothing you want to do, but I doubt there was nothing to do. Improving docs, tests, small refactoring to old code to make it more readable are a few examples.
brundolf 5y ago
Have you considered just coming up with your own projects? Set some arbitrary, useless goal that will be an interesting engineering challenge, and have at it. Nobody will force you to write docs or do any other "boring bits". It's a great outlet in my experience.
agumonkey 5y ago
I think the solution needs to live on both fronts. IMO the boring bits are boring because there's no time spent to make them not boring. On all layers of society there are tasks that are under-tooled and under-organized and if you make them worth doing, people will enjoy doing them 24/7.
PH01 5y ago
There are plenty of people who feel and think the same. Many people find it very difficult to understand that money is not always a motivator. This is a particularly difficult concept for managers to deal with. If an employee is not motivated by additional remuneration, or in the case where they do not require an income, the relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally different.
PascLeRasc 5y ago
I think you'd really like Jason Fried's writing. You can find some short posts [here](https://m.signalvnoise.com/author/jason-fried/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/author/jason-fried/), but his book It doesn't have to be crazy at work is really great too.
quentin_dck 5y ago
The way you talk about the work culture you want to avoid makes me think you might be interested in "opale" companies and the way they operate. Check "Reinventing Organisations" by Frederic Laloux, there are a couple of software and none software company examples which might be of interest to you.
itronitron 5y ago
A lot of people on this thread seem to think that boring work provides job security. Based on your experience it sounds like you have reached a different conclusion. I believe you have the right intuition, that you find valuable work interesting.

the_only_law 5y ago

I have no problem whatsoever with staying around and doing the boring bits. But if those are exclusively the job, that’s when I take issue.

arcturus17 5y ago

> 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. But surely they do a lot of boring work at those companies too, as in all tech companies?

ftruzzi 5y ago
Of course, but if it's part-time and full remote then it doesn't take away most of your day/life and I would have no problem with that. I also do translation work which can be tedious at times but I really enjoy it because I can do it from anywhere and just a few hours per week. The "needs to be interesting" part is more tied to the "pay what you want" thing.

munk-a 5y ago

> Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. The only times this ever happened to me was while I worked in the gaming industry and I absolutely still had work available - but we had some pretty rough overtime expectations that lead to constant overtime even if a different department was behind. On principle I would just sit there and relax as best as I could in the office if my team wasn't behind. But, keep in mind, that this was also all unpaid overtime at the employee's expense because thank you EA lobbying and a terrible industry. I occasionally lost money on these evenings since transit would shut down and I'd need to cab home. Now that I've left the gaming industry I doubt I'll ever be in that position again and I continue to have oodles of work in front of me, though, due to ADD and such - I often have trouble with motivating myself to do the boring bits they are part of the job and go with the good.

folkrav 5y ago

> that's probably the kind of work I'm trying to avoid. The boring bits _are_ part of the job. > I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. The part about "in an office" is a fair goal, but if you want to avoid docs/tests/support/refactoring work, don't do this job. Writing code is just one part of it, any way you take it, and avoiding the rest is cutting corners. Even our consultants have to write tests and update docs.

pmarreck 5y ago

> and I just don’t want to be paid to “stay around and do the boring bits” I’m a little ADD, so my most hated work is paperwork and administrivia. Nevertheless, I recognize that it is sometimes necessary (documentation, performance evals, collecting metrics, etc.) and I just get my favorite coffee and suck it up (the work, but also the coffee). Programmers have arguably the least boring jobs in the world (we can literally automate all the most boring bits except for certain types of paperwork/administrivia) so to hear a developer complain about doing a little bit of boring work smacks of a special brand of entitlement to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ > Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. This only happens at terrible, un-enlightened companies who are more willing to waste both of your time and pay you a little less than they are to either give you meaningful work or let you go to the beach but stay on-call. Bosses should not be babysitters.

harikb 5y ago

You may want to rephrase your proposal a bit. Include the part that you are willing to do the boring parts of an otherwise interesting project. The way it is worded, it would sound to me, as a hiring manager, that you might not finish the work. Because we all know the prototyping / experimentation part of a project is the most challenging and rewarding. Taking it live will involve dealing with the boring parts. I am not claiming you _are_ such a person, but you might want to make it clear.

ggggtez 5y ago
> The way it is worded, it would sound to me, as a hiring manager, that you might not finish the work You read that correctly. The OP said clearly he has no intention to do documentation or testing, meetings, or much of anything other than just write code for about 40 hours and then quit.

humbleMouse 5y ago

You’ll keep doing the “interesting work” until it all turns into “Boring work”, just a matter of time

eloff 5y ago

Just look for part time positions. You can also try to make your own by applying for full time jobs and then springing the part time thing on them at the salary negotiation phase. Yeah, some will balk, but make a cogent argument about how working less hours means your performance per hour should be higher. Which is easily supported by current research. Provide citations if you want. It's sufficiently hard to find good developers, that if you're good enough you can get jobs like this. I've been working part time, fully remote last year and it was wonderful. I don't think I'd go back to full time work. After achieving enough trust with the company, I negotiated working alternating weeks. Having a 9 day weekend every 5 work days is incredible. Yeah, I didn't make much money, but I spend that time on my startup, so maybe it will pay off one day. Either way it is a lot more fun!

beaconstudios 5y ago

if you don't care about pay and you want to work on interesting projects, why not start your own? people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun. If you are in a position where you don't need to pay the bills with work, then you're in a great position and can have fun all day long - so why not just do that? If you work on something that also turns out to be marketable then you might even end up with a viable business that you love working on.

CaptArmchair 5y ago
> people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun. If a position across the street becomes available which allows you to pursue a personal goal you aspire and afford your current lifestyle, would you remain at your current "non-fun" job or give it a shot and apply? Many people don't just get job because they have bills to pay, they get jobs that they don't like because there is no alternative available to them which meshes with their lives. To an extent, you could argue "that's personal responsibility, everyone makes tough choices". Then again, the author tacitly references to the fact they were still obligated to physically attend an office space, even though they could their work remotely. Now expand that to the millions of workers who are forced to make long commutes.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  obviously there's such a thing as better or worse jobs, but OP suggested that they were willing to work on whatever, as long as it's fun, for any arbitrary amount of pay. So OP is in a position where money is not important to them. So why have a job at all? Have a fun or meaningful hobby instead, or start a personal project.
  - CaptArmchair 5y ago
    > So why have a job at all? The author doesn't ask so much for a job, as reflects about something more profound: meaningful, purposeful relationships with others which enables them to manifest their morals, values, identity,... Interesting work isn't interesting for the sake of spending 8+ hours a day "doing" something. It only becomes interesting when it has an impact on the world which one feels is meaningful. For sure, a novelist could write books for no other reason then deriving enjoyment of the sheer act of committing words to paper or a screen. But the vast majority of people feel that the things they do in life truly become meaningful when they are seen, used, enjoyed,... by others. One could argue that one could do so by volunteering, taking initiative, or starting one's own business. However, the vast majorities of opportunities to enter meaningful professional relationships still involve signing a dotted line and a salary.

onion2k 5y ago

Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. That should literally never be the case for a developer though. You can always be improving the documentation, increasing the test coverage, optimizing for speed/bandwidth/complexity/some other metric you've measured, working out how to measure something, learning new tools or tech that could be applied to a project, working on a spike for some future feature that needs upfront research. If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer. You're a hacker. You want to hack what you see as the fun stuff rather than developing complete, robust applications that can ship. That's fine, and loads of fun, but no one will pay you to that. You don't get a role like that unless you're some sort of programming savant on a par with the likes of John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard - someone has proven they can invent amazing things by being left to their own devices. Unfortunately, you really need to prove yourself first before you can land a gig like that. If it was easy we'd all have done it.

ruraljuror 5y ago
> If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer. You're a hacker. This point parallels the distinction made in the Software Engineering at Google flamingo book between programming and engineering. Engineering comprises the tools and processes to maintain software over time (this is a rough paraphrase), of which docs, for example, is essential. So to use their language with your point: this sounds purely like programming and perhaps not engineering.
Supermancho 5y ago
> Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. > That should literally never be the case for a developer though. After 20+ years I've both been in such a position FULL TIME, as have others (eg: Many devs at ServiceNow) - hired on to work on cool things at an old small company and then literally sat around every day with no tasks and no responsibilities while everyone around me either didn't show up or watched TV on their monitors (open-plan btw). I've seen big company devs do the same, making up busy-work tasks and literally not committing any code for months at a time playing the priority-game of "wait until something more important comes up, someone else will make a workaround" which was surprisingly effective. The reality that a developer shows up and have nothing to do happens OFTEN in all sorts of organizations - eg last day of sprint, how many times have you pulled in a new multi-day ticket? Developer accountability is at an all-time low when software developers (across many sub-disciplines) can't make accurate estimates, can't meet anyone's estimates anyway, and are at an all-time-high demand. Managers are in a different boat, but same result. Perverse incentives and lack of a consensus (or willpower) on what constitutes value makes for do-nothing-and-get-paid while someone else does the work.

flatline 5y ago

Don't want to stay around to do the boring bits required to make a working product that serves a real world use case? Go into academia! Not making a generalization about academics, it's just that academia is one of the few places you can carve out a place to just work on interesting things and get paid for it.

mcshicks 5y ago

I retired close to 7 years ago, and I have a similar set of guidelines for doing part time work. However I have another stipulation which is that if I don't personally know you, I'm not interested, at least for paid work. I've done some volunteer work where I've had introductions from someone I know and that's worked great. And for any given paid job the max I will work is 20 hours/month. That is I might work more than that, but I will only bill that. That allows me the flexibility to put the effort in I think is needed to do what I think is acceptable quality, without imposing my standards on someone who just wants something that will solve a problem immediately in front of them. Good luck!

langitbiru 5y ago

I created a part-time jobs board, ParttimeCareers (https://parttime.careers https://parttime.careers). I collect remote and part-time jobs (mostly engineering jobs, but sometimes marketing jobs). Yeah, I can see where you are coming from. Some people want to look for part-time jobs because they want to spend more time with their passions, kids, parents, or friends.

FalconSensei 5y ago

> having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me Maybe nothing you want to do, but I doubt there was nothing to do. Improving docs, tests, small refactoring to old code to make it more readable are a few examples.

brundolf 5y ago

Have you considered just coming up with your own projects? Set some arbitrary, useless goal that will be an interesting engineering challenge, and have at it. Nobody will force you to write docs or do any other "boring bits". It's a great outlet in my experience.

agumonkey 5y ago

I think the solution needs to live on both fronts. IMO the boring bits are boring because there's no time spent to make them not boring. On all layers of society there are tasks that are under-tooled and under-organized and if you make them worth doing, people will enjoy doing them 24/7.

PH01 5y ago

There are plenty of people who feel and think the same. Many people find it very difficult to understand that money is not always a motivator. This is a particularly difficult concept for managers to deal with. If an employee is not motivated by additional remuneration, or in the case where they do not require an income, the relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally different.

PascLeRasc 5y ago

I think you'd really like Jason Fried's writing. You can find some short posts [here](https://m.signalvnoise.com/author/jason-fried/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/author/jason-fried/), but his book It doesn't have to be crazy at work is really great too.

quentin_dck 5y ago

The way you talk about the work culture you want to avoid makes me think you might be interested in "opale" companies and the way they operate. Check "Reinventing Organisations" by Frederic Laloux, there are a couple of software and none software company examples which might be of interest to you.

itronitron 5y ago

A lot of people on this thread seem to think that boring work provides job security. Based on your experience it sounds like you have reached a different conclusion. I believe you have the right intuition, that you find valuable work interesting.