37 ms·

Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?

• dave84 4y ago
  Local companies, usually not technology companies.
• userremoteplace 4y ago
  anyone looking to enter the environmental lab/chemistry space can look at pace labs.com and https://www.pacelabs.com/company/about/careers/ https://www.pacelabs.com/company/about/careers/ Still using traditional client server apps with sql databases with some win/linux services on backend.
• goodpoint 4y ago
  • fxtentacle 4y ago
    I didn't downvote you, but I did consider it because your answer doesn't add anything to the discussion.
  • jgrahamc 4y ago
    I downvoted you because what you said was simply wrong.
• softwaredoug 4y ago
  > Everything is double-digit YOY growth with impending exit I'm going to say, on a random job board, this is actually the vast minority of jobs. Most, even at FAANG, have lots of unsexy maintenance that just needs to get done. Even in fancy machine learning land (where I work) 99% of the work is fairly 'boring' in the traditional sense. Also, there is a strong bias to talk about 'sexy' work outside the company. For a variety of dev marketing reasons. Nobody does a conference talk about the uninteresting boring work that gets done.
  • cupofpython 4y ago
    > Nobody does a conference talk about the uninteresting boring work that gets done. Id go to that
    • StellarTabi 4y ago
      sounds like some kind of crypto-free utopia
      • jthrowsitaway 4y ago
        Not sure what EARN IT has to do with this.
  • rufius 4y ago
    I had a job with a lot of ML and Data Science a few years back. I learned that the job really should’ve been called “Data Janitor”. 90-95% if the work was cleaning data sets and making sure that last update in some ML library we used didn’t mess up something.
• reportgunner 4y ago
  Try working with an independent recruiter.
• davidn20 4y ago
  Look for small companies you never heard of, in places you've never been.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  My impression is that there's a lot of Kubernetes jobs because all those unnecessary scaling tools come with additional maintenance work. So if you use new & messy technology, you just need more people. My boring deployments (Nginx+Ruby+PostgreSQL on Debian) can be maintained for multiple projects by just one employee, because there isn't that much to do apart from updating Ansible scripts and running them. But on the Ruby side, stuff gets deprecated/broken all the time, so we need much more manpower to maintain it. And Docker/Kubernetes (where everything depends on access to random GitHub URLs) is even a lot more fragile than that. EDIT: I was considering doing this myself recently, so maybe you'll like the idea, too: Just walk physically to all the mom&dad shops in your area and ask them if they want a free website, if they allow you to put Google text ads on the side. If you have time, you can build those websites and super cheaply host them themselves, and it'll certainly help those shops get their feet wet in the digital age. Plus you build up some ad/link inventory which you can monetize later. The reason why I considered doing it is because I'm 100% sure that people will tell you a lot of technical stuff that they need solved, if you're there and willing to listen. And those small shops are going to need small cloud-free solutions.
  • jthrowsitaway 4y ago
    > And Docker/Kubernetes (where everything depends on access to random GitHub URLs) Where is this true? I'd say this ecosystem is more dependent upon Docker Hub et al.
    • rmoriz 4y ago
      OP probably referring to all the YAML files that deploy services. Many projects share something like "just kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/...".
    • k8sToGo 4y ago
      It isn't. There is helm charts and such that can be hosted on GitHub.
  • umvi 4y ago
    Don't confuse Docker with K8s. Docker is more for solving dependency management problems than scaling and redundancy which are the problems k8s solves. I highly recommend some sort dependency management solution like Docker or Nix - it makes changing hardware or OSes down the road much easier.
• hobs 4y ago
  The middle ground between the places trying to be mini-googles and places running their own server under a desk has been squeezed pretty hard by SaaS/PaaS stuff - you either run your small business entirely on other people's services and sweat OR you have a big enough budget to have the faux-SRE experience. In my experience only owners who had enough momentum from previous businesses with that setup or who just maintained a fairly small pool of revenue (and so didn't change.) Also the economy went through a lot of M&A because its hard in the middle, failures are catastrophic, and paying some guy who will probably take you to beer lunches to host your stuff makes you look smart to all the other up and coming CEOs.
• alkonaut 4y ago
  If a company has 9 racks with their legacy products and 1 product sounding like the ones you describe, then the job ad will mention the kubernetes all the things product/job, but if you apply you'll be maintaining 10 products where 9 aren't very sexy at all. So unless the company is extremely young (say younger than 10 years) then there will be tech of all ages and all levels of sexy.
• giaour 4y ago
  I think many places with a setup like you describe don't have in-house staff to manage their tech. I briefly worked for an agency early in my career where most of the clients had WordPress or Magento sites with low to moderate traffic. They would usually only need a few hours a month each, so it wouldn't have made sense for them to hire full time programmers or sysadmins.
• manuelmoreale 4y ago
  Small design studios. They still exist and they often need developers to develop “regular” websites using very down to earth stacks. There’s a ton of business that simply need basic websites and those still need to be developed by someone.
  • spcebar 4y ago
    This is a great answer. At a small studio you'll absolutely see some LAMP servers being run in a corner of the office and some deploy pipelines that boil down to "FTP into the server and then copy and paste the files into the www directory."
    • manuelmoreale 4y ago
      That is much more common that people probably realize. I worked with maybe 60 or 70 different clients over my years freelancing and not one of them was using anything more complex than a basic shared hosting to host their sites. That’s just the reality for the vast majority of businesses. Most businesses don’t need anything complex. It’s just basic sites and emails.
  • smm11 4y ago
    There's a ton of businesses with mail servers, ERP systems, workstations, industrial equipment, web sites, and hardware to support salespersons, events, and visitors. Keeps me busy, and automating as much as I can, before I ride off into the sunset. Sometimes the shiny ring isn't what you need to chase.
• ajoseps 4y ago
  Hedgefunds/podshops might fit what you're looking for. Depending on the size of the place, it might be a fairly lean set up (colo,minimal cloud). Usually they don't need to scale to "web-scale"
• dsr_ 4y ago
  Smartleaf runs out of high-quality third-party datacenters on hardware we buy, install and maintain ourselves, running Ruby on Rails and C++ and Oracle/Postgresql on Debian with borg backups. Is that close enough? We also deploy with Chef and an in-house application deployment system written in Perl, do monitoring with mon, and understand that a sysadmin is a subject matter expert. Hiring, too.
• eatonphil 4y ago
  Local/regional companies outside of tier 1 cities. Before the pandemic they only hired locally and their salaries were good for the US but 1/3 to 1/2 of salaries in NYC and SF. Companies that were bootstrapped within an hour or two of Philly, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville, Sacramento, you get the picture.
  • ramesh31 4y ago
    >Local/regional companies outside of tier 1 cities. Before the pandemic they only hired locally and their salaries were good for the US but 1/3 to 1/2 of salaries in NYC and SF. Companies that were bootstrapped within an hour or two of Philly, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville, Sacramento, you get the picture. This. There are thousands of great "Tier 3" (not FAANG, not Fortune 500, but still large) companies out there in the US that will pay $100k-$200k with great benefits, 9-5 culture, and good job security. The SV startup world is pretty irrelevant at this point with the shift to remote IMO.
    • Melatonic 4y ago
      Plenty of places like that even in Tier 1 cities!
• k8sToGo 4y ago
  Probably government related stuff.
• jupp0r 4y ago
  You’d be surprised how much business is still running on paper …
• esel2k 4y ago
  Look at industries that typically have a very low level of digitalization. I think I read once the lowest ones are: Oil and Gas, Agriculture. And then you pick local smaller companies and then you have you what you look for.
• skrebbel 4y ago
  I know a social media analytics SaaS company, they're pretty successful at ~200 employees and 100% bootstrapped. All their servers are in the basement of the main office building.
• yalogin 4y ago
  The problem is you will also want job security. The answer is to look in a company that is not tech. Lots of companies that have tech in the background, where it’s needed but not driving revenue. However even in that scenario there is a risk that the job could be cut because software wants to eat everything, move everything to a service oriented architecture or automate, or do the same thing using new buzzwords. So you need to look at a lot of parameters score you jump in.
  • eatonphil 4y ago
    I disagree that coolness of tech has any relation at all to job security. You're implying pure tech companies will always use cool tech. But there are plenty of pure tech companies outside of major cities that primarily use PHP and Rails and Django and ASP.NET and Perl and JQuery and maybe colo servers and haven't seriously changed their stack in 5-10 years if not longer.
    • yalogin 4y ago
      I was not suggesting that at all. Cool new tech has more churn actually. I was simply saying, if someone wants unsexy that would also imply they want job security.
• mattlondon 4y ago
  A lot of the companies that do/did this potentially no-longer do it themselves. E.g. years ago a company might have run their own LAMP stack to host a website or a small online store or whatever. But in this age of SaaS it is easier for these smaller shops to just use something like Wix or Shopify to handle it for them, complete with fancy wysiwyg editors etc. I used to get requests to "add payments" or something to websites I used to help out with so that they could basically do an online shop. At the time I actively rejected those requests as there were huge headaches around things like PCI compliance and the like. Fast forward a decade or more and with GDPR and Cookie laws etc it is a total non-brainer to use a hosted service where they handle all of this, rather than spin up your own ecommerce solution. It does not make sense to roll your own unless you have a large engineering team, at which point you move beyond some random thing running in some random data center somewhere. Of course not everything online is ecommerce or CMS-oriented - there will be niche and custom stuff that is not handled well by SaaS offerings.
• rg111 4y ago
  > Where On LinkedIn. This is the best answer that you will get.
• mmcdermott 4y ago
  It also depends on how boring you want to get. Any company with a mainframe will have a large amount of 'boring' tech stack, even if it is paired with newer offerings. The core might be RPG or COBOL, but there's usually a layer of newer languages around it that has had time to crystalize. For historical reasons, this is also heavily tied to the adoption of EDI. So I'd start looking for boring tech stacks in areas that have EDI documents associated with them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List
• throwaway787544 4y ago
  I don't want to use K8s. But I also don't want to use a manually setup rack in a random DC. Back in the day when we had to hire a guy to go down to the cage every day to repair yet another faulty machine, we would have given our left arm for the ability to magically spin up a new VM of any size with a baked image by just running an API call. It's freakin' magic. I also love, love, love plain Fargate. Not as stupidly complicated as K8s, but I can still run containers without ever thinking about managing hosts. Just keep my containers up to date, push new ones, and trigger a deploy. Never have to "upgrade my cluster to keep from using EOL versions" or "migrate ingress to a new API version" or some other ridiculous thing. It just works, and all I have to think about is my app/container.
  • dcminter 4y ago
    So much this. I have painful memories of talking a not-very-technical "technical support" guy through the use of `lsof` on Linux (they'd never heard of it) to diagnose a deployment issue. Also of multi-day to multi-week waits to get hardware lined up for our projects. I miss it not one jot.
  • dotancohen 4y ago
    Don't confuse faulty hardware with software abstractions of perfect hardware. Those cloud VMs are still running on some hardware somewhere, even it's been abstracted away from your control. And that hardware can and does fail.
    • throwaway787544 4y ago
      But with an autoscaling group a new one magically pops up in the same AZ if an old one dies. You don't get that by rolling your own rack (without having hot spares on hand, in multiple racks or data centers). Not to mention getting a managed SAN basically for free (EBS) and backup/restore, and managed DBs... I'm a pretty good engineer, but I'm not good enough to be an expert at managing racks of hosts, switches, routers, storage, tape robots, databases, etc. And I don't have to be with cloud services. I just press a button and it's all there.
• qwedf 4y ago
  Industries that actually run the world and won't be disrupted by whatever VC-funded "Uber of X" whose business model is ultimately a Ponzi scheme. Think banking, engineering firms like Schneider/ABB, tools that are actually used in hospitals, etc. Look for major industry players that provide the backbone of basic infrastructure that you probably never heard of because they're too busy growing at a clip of 2% per year at $2B profit and don't need to crow. And of course the companies that support them
  • Cerium 4y ago
    Medical hardware is great. Boring time tested technology and good profits.
    • bitwize 4y ago
      All of the non-Web GUI development jobs I see are for either military applications or medical devices. They also pay much lower than even enterprise webshit, despite requiring increasingly more specialized knowledge.
  • rramadass 4y ago
    Well Said! I suspect this where the real "expertise" in Building Software Systems lies. Stable, Steady, Fault-Tolerant, least MTBF etc. characteristics are the name of the Game.
  • sealeck 4y ago
    Not sure that financial services (banks) are less likely to be perpetrating a Ponzi scheme than Uber, etc.
    • qwedf 4y ago
      Can't argue against that. Although to be fair, the MBAification of the leadership class is turning most places into Ponzis or client-hating Monopolies
    • orangepurple 4y ago
• curiousllama 4y ago
  They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech. Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.
  • bmj 4y ago
    Small-scale manufacturing is another good spot. I spent some years doing consulting work with a steel processing company. "Boring" tech, but interesting problems to be solved.
    • seanw444 4y ago
      This is it. Currently at a local manufacturing company, and their in-house software runs mostly open-source stuff. No major proprietary headache to deal with, it's not a tech company so I'm not dealing with the obnoxious meetings and calls; and since the software I maintain is internal, I don't have to deal with angry customers. Coworkers let me know if something needs to be better, and I make it so. Simple. I would recommend anybody this approach.
      • mschuster91 4y ago
        For that you need a small/medium business where the owners realize that IT is fundamental to their business even if it does not appear to be so... and the amount of people open-minded enough to admit that is not exactly large. Rule of thumb for Germans, if they write a fax phone number on the imprint or the website looks 90s style... don't waste your time, skip them.
      • fudged71 4y ago
        You’re also likely solving very tangible point problems. Dreamy
      • RyanGoosling 4y ago
        Thanks for the advice. I had an internship at medium-sized manufacturer in California, above SF a bit. Was really cool to be next to a bunch of CNC machines while writing some code. I think I’ll try to find that vibe again sometime.
• gherkinnn 4y ago
  Non-boring tech within reason is fine with me. What is off putting is all this hyper growth series F funding impending exit nonsense. An independent and profitable company that wants to sray below 50 or so people sounds like a dream to me.
  • eatonphil 4y ago
    That is basically every tech company founded outside the most expensive cities in the US. :) It's just that lots of people like living in/near the most expensive cities in the US so you don't see these companies as much.
• jthrowsitaway 4y ago
  Keep in mind that organizations like you've described may treat IT and other such investments as necessary evils.
• ArtWomb 4y ago
  DC. State & Local Gov't. All undergoing massive transformation. Who wouldn't want to try and solve the puzzle of the IRS's new Tax Cloud? Sometimes the most boring inquiries, yield ripest fruits ;)
• teddyh 4y ago
  Places like that are around, but, crucially, don’t have much turnaround and don’t do much new hiring.
• olau 4y ago
  We do, with a slightly charitable interpretation of LAMP. We did have a brief stint with AWS, but that's thankfully over, partly because their Aurora Postgres-like cloud thing regularly would thrash to death because it doesn't have anywhere to store temporary data so a biggish join means out of memory, partly because the US law that says foreigners have no right to privacy from NSA with judicial review makes it illegal in Europe to use US providers unless data is encrypted client-side (see Schrems II). I wish someone would start a sysadm contractor company offering setting up and maintaining servers at something like Hetzner. Take a service fee for being ready to respond to emergencies, bill for hours spent, and let Hetzner bill the hardware. Setting up a server isn't that bad, you can do that with a script, but ongoing maintenance and having someone always ready to respond to emergencies (that never occur, almost) is something you wouldn't mind having a competent sysadm take care of, as a developer. I think there's a huge market for this in Europe with Schrems II, for those that aren't really deeply dependent on the software stack in cloud services. And you can get some beefy machines at Hetzner for pennies compared to Amazon or Google.
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    A managed dedicated server?
• breadzeppelin__ 4y ago
  academia
• bob1029 4y ago
  Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain. I showed someone the models we use to track a customer implementation and they thought we were insane for even thinking this is a good business to be in. Because the problem domain of banking sucks so much, the tooling is necessarily simple and "unsexy". We like things that fit into a single VM/folder and can be built in 1 click. Anything more complex than this is almost certainly going to fail by default under the combined weight of unnecessary technical complexity and vast (and necessary) business requirements. It took us until the 3rd year of integration with one of our banking customers before someone in IT even gave enough of a shit to naturally ask the question "so what language/framework/technique did you write <product name> in?" Obviously, we are required to disclose this in legal materials prior to implementing our product, but our customer sees "Microsoft" and rubber-stamps it without much drama. No one else gives a shit about the tech after this phase of the project (which lasts approximately 1 phone call).
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    > Banking is pretty desperate for talent The salaries don't suggest that, unless I'm at the wrong locations and/or looking at the wrong banks.
    • bob1029 4y ago
      Allow me to clarify - You typically dont work directly for a bank as a software developer. You typically work for some vendor who sells software to the banks. We have many banks as our customers.
  • eafkuor 4y ago
    > Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain I assume it's mostly because not many decent software developers want to suffer Banking's work environment
    • xtracto 4y ago
      What do you mean? you don't enjoy having to cut all the red tape during a pull request to apease the SOC2, PCI, ISO27001, RGPD, CID360, GDPR powers that be?
• tinco 4y ago
  You've got the wrong impression of what is "boring" tech. A setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter isn't boring, it's frustrating. Saying doing things the old way is boring, is like saying sending your wife out to carry water from the well in a jar on her head is boring. We've got running water now, that has nothing to do with double-digit YOY growth, it has to do with actually reliably and comfortably deploying and maintaining our infrastructure by leveraging modern technologies like Kubernetes. I don't know how old you are, but now that I have running water I think to my old and boring setup I cringe at how much work it was to replace or add to an existing cluster, or to replicate it for testing out new features. How out of date the software was, and how easy it would be for an APT to exploit some known-for-years vulnerability in a transitive software dependency. I wish I could afford an SRE in my current startup, but the fact that we can run a decently reliable setup that's easy to keep up to date, expand and modify is thanks to all of that web scale technology trickling down to us small fish. And why not use borg for backups? We still do run Debian (or Ubuntu, but same diff), if it's good it's good.
  • DrammBA 4y ago
    I don't think he's saying he wants to go back to getting water from the well, instead he's saying he's got running water and he's trying to join company that won't expect him to terraform mars with the running water technology.
    • tinco 4y ago
      Maybe, but then they're confounding goals. My company isn't web scale, but we still kubernetes-all-the-things, we run two Kubernetes clusters, soon three. One on premise in a "rando datacenter" running both boring old processing pipelines and fancy schmancy machine learning pipelines. And a Kubernetes deployment on GKE in the cloud, that runs a boring old Ruby on Rails + Postgres platform with some satellite microservices, some written in Rust. We're in the boring old sector of real estate maintenance and inspection, but we do it by flying fancy schmancy drones around building 3D models using 100MP photo's and LiDAR scans. DevOps, DevSecOps, Kubernetes, SRE's, they're all buzzwords because they're powerful ideas that will enable you to run a modern IT company effectively. Whether that company is web scale 100% YoY growth, or "simple" manufacturing automation. If you're going in comparing it to terraforming mars, then you're not opening your mind to what's possible on earth with a little bit of learning new stuff.
• ravish0007 4y ago
  Hard in the era of resume driven development.
• bluetomcat 4y ago
  Just leave your SF/VC bubble, move to a medium-sized European city and such jobs will be plentiful. Most likely you'll be maintaining internal business applications on uncool and legacy technology stacks. The value of these applications is mostly for the particular business and your experience wouldn't transfer easily to a new job. The upside is that job security is far greater there. Also, you'll have less opportunities to blog about what you are doing, or to write insightful HN comments because most of what you do is totally uninteresting for the world.
  • ParksNet 4y ago
    And between income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, you'll be taking a substantial cut in income - for housing which is more expensive, colder weather, and less sunlight.
    • cplanas 4y ago
      I'm sorry, but exactly which "medium-sized European city" has more expensive housing than SF? I'll be moving back to Europe this year, and I find your comment quite funny, given that I am moving to a city with significantly cheaper housing and better weather than where I live now (NYC).
    • uoaei 4y ago
      I see you have no health issues, no teeth, and no family to speak of, and very much enjoy car-first public infrastructure. You also have no idea that cultures (people, food, entertainment, experiences) in different countries can be different. QoL is not only measured in "dollars of income".
    • Melatonic 4y ago
      Just find medium sized businesses in any major city - many will still be using these stacks. Just avoid the ones that do not invest or see IT as a cost center (there are many of those). Any decently profitable medium sized business that is willing to invest in reliable IT AND knows that they should be involving in IT in many of their normal day to day processes in order to drive further innovation / optimization is probably a decent place to work.
• bombcar 4y ago
  https://careers.walmart.com/technology https://careers.walmart.com/technology perhaps?
  • discordance 4y ago
    Walmart are big Azure users... including Kubernetes, CosmosDB etc. https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/tagged/azure https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/tagged/azure
• joecot 4y ago
  The answer is to talk to recruiters. The job ads that catch your eye are specifically tailored for those results. They're usually posted from flashy startups who are high on their own supply. I had many an interview with those types of places, and nothing you could say would be good enough for them. That's why those job posting are always open. What worked for me was happenstance -- I applied to a job that was posted by a recruiter, and once I was in that recruiting company's ecosystem, they started passing opportunities my way. The opportunities were interesting and had "boring" and relatable tech. If I looked up the job ads for those opportunities, the posting itself sucked and lacked the detail I'd expect. I'd have never applied without a recruiter talking to me about it. There is a massive demand for developers at small and medium sized businesses. Those businesses have no idea how to effectively market their postings, which is why they use recruiters. The startups that know how to effectively market their postings on WeWorkRemotely and such have the applicant pool to be insanely choosy. If you're having trouble landing something, apply to jobs that are close to what you're looking for, but definitely posted by a recruiter. The recruiters will talk to you, and if they like what they hear, the interviews will pour in.
• Ferrari911 4y ago
  Big Law and Big Auditing are seriously a place where to find unsexy jobs
• datalopers 4y ago
  Sorry. We’re not hiring currently because our system is simple and reliable and we enjoy our excess profits.
• lopatin 4y ago
  What if I told you ... that LAMP is sexy?
  • stronglikedan 4y ago
    As sexy as WIPP? I don't think so!
• lifefeed 4y ago
  Most jobs aren't sexy. This website focuses on Silicon Valley darlings and FAANGs and unicorn startups, but that's a minority of the available software jobs. There are a lot of good programming jobs available everywhere from banks to intellectual property protection to Domino's. It can be frustrating working in companies that treat IT as a cost center, but there's still a lot of money to be made there. (And as a bonus, the interviews are ridiculously low-pressure compared to Google.)
• froggertoaster 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I own a boring consultancy. Boring, however, is contextual. We have flex hours. We have unlimited PTO (and frequent reminders to take personal time - I already know the data related to offering unlim PTO and how often people then take PTO, thank you very much). We make over $1 million in revenue a year with 6 people and no plans to have exponential growth, coupled with high margins so that we aren't rugpulled by a rainy day (and to take appropriate profits of course). My employees report high levels of job satisfaction and happiness. Our focus? Maintaining boring legacy software for low-risk clients. We also do some greenfield work, but we like the stability that comes with working on older cash cow software. The jobs are out there. We're just not super flashy about it. EDIT: I appreciate everyone who commented :) if this wasn't a burner I'd totally reach out to some of you!
  • ambicapter 4y ago
    Looking for a remote part-timer? I'm looking to expand my working hours.
  • belmarca 4y ago
    Can you share some more about what you do? Looks interesting! Like sibling comment, I'm also looking for remote part-time work. Such opportunities seem relatively rare.
  • py_or_dy 4y ago
    uh, you got a careers page? :)
  • alongreyber 4y ago
    I would love to hear a bit more about how you built your consultancy firm. I've done some consultancy work for local companies, and I'm looking to focus on similar work (helping local companies with ERP system integrations). If you have some time, I would love to connect and ask you some questions! If you can, please reach out to alon@greyber.org. Thanks!
    • froggertoaster 4y ago
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Don't dismiss this idea too quickly. My son left a floundering startup that was jumping from one trendy tech stack to another. For stuff that wasn't their core IP. And a simple MySQL database would have worked perfectly.
• mbesto 4y ago
  Look up private equity firms who buy software companies and apply there. The number of software companies that are not on a VC track far outweigh the ones who are and they are in desperate need of good tech talent.
• dimitrios1 4y ago
  Work for a heavily regulated private industry: banking, finance, healthcare, energy. I did startups for 10 years prior. Never ending rat races, constant high pressure deadlines, everything is "ASAP", compensation is iffy (your start ups got to make it). In contrast, I work for a bank now. Easiest and most well compensated job I have ever had in my life. So easy that I am pursuing additional degrees (which they pay for), and moonlighting my own product offerings, virtually stress free. They still dabble in some of the tech you mention. But they are much more deliberate about everything. And if they do go with something, it will be around for a long time.
• TrackerFF 4y ago
  Lots of government jobs. But bear in mind, there's a big chance you'll be in a vendor lock-in, with little flexibility to work outside of those tools - at least for the larger organizations.
• bberenberg 4y ago
  I run a high double digit YoY growth company. We use boring tech as much as possible. Sure we lean into some automation, etc, but only when it really makes sense. Your example is probably too much risk for us. We do most of our work as monolithic docker images running in DO App Platform with managed PostgreSQL. Deploys, CI/CD, etc are all in GH Actions. Most code is Typescript to keep it simple and accessible. A lot of the dev work is also tracked in GH Issues. Dev is done Kanban so you finish your work, pull the next item from the list, and keep pushing on. Very few meetings, etc.
• PascLeRasc 4y ago
  Pittsburgh, PA. Every big company here - PNC, UPMC, Highmark, Fedex, Norfolk Southern, Duquesne Light - will pay you $65-70k/year at most. I met an IT director at one of these companies who told me that open source is a communist movement and so he's banned it. The dress code is very relaxed - if you stay late all week you can earn jeans Fridays! At all of these companies you will be forced to use Internet Explorer 11 and you'll program in a remote desktop Notepad.exe on Windows Server 2012. Doing anything else is explicitly banned. The programming language is a proprietary version of Visual Basic with all the functions renamed and changed slightly so the vendor can control access to the $5k/year documentation, which is still horribly written. You will sign an agreement not to ever ask or answer questions about the language on Stack Overflow too. The vendor of these languages doesn't really exist beyond an email address like "sales@enterprisereadypython.com" - they will gaslight you that this is the real Python and python.org is a scam, "if you're not paying you're the product!". None of your coworkers will know what you're talking about when you mention Git or Linux.
  • mstipetic 4y ago
    I’ve always wondered how do they find people to work there, especially young people. Do you know their profile?
    • PascLeRasc 4y ago
      Most of the younger people have degrees in Computer Information Systems
      • mstipetic 4y ago
        My question is why would they work there when there's much more interesting things around? Are they just not aware of other jobs, or they are happy with the stability of these ones?
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Banned open source? As in open source dependencies? Or just releasing anything as open source? Open source is as capitalist as it gets for the most part IMO. Public Github = company flexing or CV. Either way….
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  .. damn. Just read the text. And here, from the title, I was going to advise you to go to Mike Rowe's website, and learn to be a heavy equipment operator, or carpenter, or something.
• exdsq 4y ago
  I'm not old - 28 years old, worked in tech since I left school at 19, and my first job was still wiring routers and building servers (like, physically ordering the parts and building them in a lab). I really miss that sort of tech now I'm a "senior software engineer" and it's all remote, all abstractions, and all in a chair.
• mkl95 4y ago
  Unsexy sounds fun until you have to deal with horrific undocumented XML interfaces and obscure proprietary protocols. Automattic have the kind of "unsexy" stack you are looking for (maybe a bit more complicated, but not much).
• _8j50 4y ago
  Sorry to tell you but a lot of traditional companies, well outside of fortune 500 are using devsecops,sre,k8s and all the other keywords. Their legacy sysadmins are having to adopt. You don't sound too old but maybe stuck on the past a bit? Nothing boring about a LAMPP stack but there are better ways of doing that, the tool for the job and all.
• jakey_bakey 4y ago
  Work as a DB admin in an accounting firm or something, and avoid job boards - just apply online through the company website. You might have an aunt who knows of some job openings in her office.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jf22 4y ago
  Hi, we do fairly unsexy or unzesty work. I love it as I've gotten used to work life balance and predictability.
• 999900000999 4y ago
  You have a right to your opinion, but companies running on AWS tend to be much easier places to work vs companies running on 50 year old mainframes. I've done both, modern companies make it easy to get things done. Legacy companies are frustrating hellholes.
• paxys 4y ago
  Most tech jobs in the country are exactly the kind you describe. Of course if you are expecting a silicon valley salary to go with it then you will be disappointed. Look up any $50-60K IT job in a mid sized city on Indeed.
  • Melatonic 4y ago
    With the IT shortage it has actually shot up quite a bit - when no one will work your 50-60k job because everyone is chomping at the bit the salaries have risen quite a bit. Medium to large city will not be paying top end tech salary of course but you should be able to make between 100-200k depending on experience and the job.
• spaetzleesser 4y ago
  Come to medical devices. If you aren’t directly working on the medical research part everything else is decidedly unsexy by design .
• lolpython 4y ago
  EDA companies, like Cadence and Synopis are consistently unsexy with their tech choices. It's mostly desktop software in C++ or Java.
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Look for companies that got acquired by some big company a 3-5 years ago. I work at Home Chef. We got acquired by Kroger in 2018. It's pretty chill. They don't pay what FANG+ does but its a nice tech stack, lower stress environment, and the workforce is really diverse. The Kroger corporate overlords pretty much leave us alone which is great. Generally mid market companies like this are a little bit more relaxed. Large enough to have some structure and orgs in place while still small enough to do some interesting work without too much bullshit to wade through.
• novocantico 4y ago
  On the (far) outskirts of major tech cities. Like, 50 miles out.
• wnolens 4y ago
  Similar: How to get into cool/cutting edge technical roles without on-call duty? Nothing makes me want to leave this industry more than having to plan evenings and weekends around on-call shifts I didn't volunteer for and get shuffled around less than a month in advance. My expertise is all distributed systems and database engines =\
  • ornornor 4y ago
    On-call requirements is what made me steer clear of SRE or devops/sysadmin roles even though I enjoy it. We have a friend who’s totally nuts. He thinks about work 24.7.365 because he’s always on call. When we go on hikes he has his laptop in his backpack “in case they page me”…
    • wnolens 4y ago
      All my job opportunities include on-call. I'm not an SRE/devops either, just everything is a 24/7 service now =\ And hilariously I enjoy the fire-fighting and deep root-causing under pressure. But 99% of it is waking up in the middle of the night for a faulty alarm.
• skadamat 4y ago
  I recommend reading Shop Class as Soulcraft: - Essay: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-so... - Book if you dig it! https://www.audible.com/pd/Shop-Class-as-Soulcraft-Audiobook/1984843613 https://www.audible.com/pd/Shop-Class-as-Soulcraft-Audiobook...
• runekaagaard 4y ago
  I totally agree, the range in number of servers/services/technologies different companies use to solve similar problems are SO wide. After 12 years of growth we are still happily on: - 1 Ubuntu server - 1 MySQL db - 1 Django framework - Ansible for deployment And thats mostly it. Due to Hetzner missing the 27002 certification we moved from metal to Amazon EC2 instances which was pretty uneventful. We also moved to Aurora and the point-in-time restores actually makes me sleep better at night. Relative to Hetzner it's a lot more expensive. Not at all a problem in the absolute sense. Some years back I had a chance to talk with the CTO of a company very similar to ours, and their landscape was 400+ microservices, 50 servers managed by k8s on Azure Cloud, Service bridges, Workflow engines, 5 different DB engines, etc. It sounded very fascinating, but also quite complicated. Some of my worst decisions over the years has been not having the balls to say no to current best-practices. I've learned the hard way that even though the pressure of using shining-new-thingTM can be immense it's so important to realise that everything always has pros and cons. The most important thing is trying to really understand _my_ specific problem and _then_ using the simplest and most obvious solution that can work. Obligatory "Programmers are also human" link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk
• stronglikedan 4y ago
  I have an unsexy job where I automate JIT manufacturing processes, and I love it, despite the hodge-podge and duct tape. From what I hear, our on-prem setup is quite common in our industry, particularly in smaller family-owned shops.
• throw00019 4y ago
  US-based advice only, but start by getting out of any tier 1/2 city (read: effectively any city with unreasonable cost-of-living). Landing any of these jobs will allow you to easily build your network, which can be 100% of your job referrals thereafter. Some examples: 1. Banking or insurance. Both industries provide high-paying, great-benefits, low-stress jobs (assuming you're OK with bureaucracy or can ignore it) using anything from ancient technology to modern k8s. Here are some anecdotes: a. Friend works at a small regional bank with ~150b in assets. Their job is to maintain (amongst other less important ones) a classic ASP application which generates monthly compliance reports that get submitted to the fed. Critical work but trivially easy (if you know classic ASP!). The software runs on a single potato VM; development is done on a clone potato VM. They don't even use version control for this as it has been pending approval for 3 years... For this, they make $150k + 15% 401k match + unlimited PTO (forced 2 weeks per quarter off). Rent in that area is ~800/mo for a 2bdr. b. College acquaintance does boring ASP.NET WebForms development for a regional insurance carrier. They cover 7 counties out of 30ish in said state. They maintain the member portal for all insured members, which runs in their local datacenter with failover a few states away. Captive audience, known size, no need for fancy scaling or load balancing as they have one active season (open enrollment), easy to prepare for. They plan on migrating from WebForms to .NET Core MVC possibly in the next 5 years. No need to rush, though! Same as above; six figure, good match, lots of PTO, similar rent. c. Insurance for a major carrier, remote. Think Excellus/Aetna/etc. Boring ASP.NET MVC development with jQuery. The engineer has no idea what hardware they run, as despite working on production features, they never deploy any actual code - that happens 15 management levels up the chain. Said engineer has heard that, if they want a test environment, it is requested through IT and provisioned via VMWare, but has no idea if that is what production runs on. Much higher compensation than the previous two. 2. SMB consulting. SMB accounts for what, 95%+ of businesses in the US? Hit up any city anywhere and you will find 50-100 small IT/software consulting companies. There is plenty of the pie to go around if you aren't looking for exit numbers. These companies tackle everything. Custom AS400 solutions? Sure why not. Software written on a version of PHP so low you can count it on your coccyx? Sure, we migrate that. Mission critical software running on Bob's Laptop but Bob retired and nobody has his password and now the entire line is shut down until we can find a fix? Yeah, we can fix that. SMB consulting is really where it's at if you want wonky, boring stuff. 3. Education of the higher (college) variety. I did a stint at my uni for ~5 years and they are the very definition of boring. "Cutting edge" for a uni is paying Oracle a few million bucks for an SIS system that somehow runs slower than their custom built AS400 implementation that Frank from IT wrote himself 25 years ago. If you're somewhere modern, you might have some sort of VM infrastructure somewhere, but you'll be caught up in budgeting for at least a year trying to figure out what code to bill that shit to. In that time you'll find another department tossing out an old Itanium with 16GB of RAM that will absolutely just barely run your critical Spring 1.0 application tossed together by some students who haven't quite got to a web engineering course yet. The biggest way to find these is networking. I have not had a proper interview in 25 years - every single job has been a referral over a coffee or beer that starts with, "So I've got this job, it's a little weird, but hear me out..."
• uticus 4y ago
  I would ask instead is connected to the internet or not. Partly sarcastic rewording: in other words, do you have to track CVEs, updated / broken dependencies, zero-days, encrypt at rest, scale, linguistics, support quick turnaround / Agile, work with people that expect Javascript/Typescript, work with tooling that must run on latest Java or recent C libs, work with managers that think DDD must be followed, etc etc? Sure partly this is just software industry in general, but so many areas of concern balloon when coding for the web.
• thenthenthen 4y ago
  Maybe smaller cultural focussed hosters, like servus (https://core.servus.at/ https://core.servus.at/), or riseup.net
• LarryMade2 4y ago
  Non-Profits, Small to Medium Sized Businesses. Places where being on the leading edge is a bad thing, better to be near the trailing edge where things "just work" for years.
• idorube 4y ago
  There's also too boring. I had a job at a software company that uses Rocket UniVerse (https://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-universe-0/rocket-wintegrate https://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-universe-0/ro...). It upscales a telnet based interface to a windows-like frankenstein that displays on conventional MS Windows pc's. The db is ironically noSQL before they even invented the term. But that interface, that tech...
• AadiBugg 4y ago
  You might find what you want at India's largest stockbroking platform - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sqMIG7wgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sqMIG7wgg
• slap_shot 4y ago
  The government. I worked for the US state department for a couple of years by way of a major consultancy. Not sure you can get any more boring than that. And you'll make a solid six figures doing maybe five hours of work a week!
• aliu22 4y ago
  Look in healthcare IT :)