drKarl · 5 years ago

Well, if you found a job that required a lot of repetitive manual tasks and you could write a little program or script and automate it (and not tell the company that you did so) you would suddenly find yourself with a lot of free time...

muzani · 5 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I've actually tried to hire dispassionate people before.

One was an assembly line style UI job with no future - the API was solid, the UI was designed by someone else. It just needed someone who could glue the parts, and repeat the same job forever, with minor API updates every now and then.

Another was a teaching job. Beginner HTML/CSS/Node.js. Come in 35 hours a week, actual necessary work is 12 hours/week. It's probably a dead end job, but it's a cash cow. Some graduates managed to go from becoming Uber drivers to junior developers who made the same salary with little manual labor, so the job brought benefit to society.

There's too many passionate people in the industry who just won't take these kinds of jobs.

imagine99 · 5 years ago

I do kinda understand where you're coming from but I want to warn you against this approach.

These jobs you mention, they DO exist. But they break people and make them intensely miserable. Look into "boreout" (as opposed to burnout) to learn more about this.

You will be very happy for the first few months, being able to browse HN, news sites and Reddit all day while nobody cares about what you do, nobody wants your input, you've got no responsibilities other than pressing a button, writing a half-page report once a month and saying "yes" on the rare occasion someone asks you something in passing. But it will get old quick.

I've met people who have been in these kinds of jobs for decades and you can see it in their eyes. They are dead inside. I've even heard that in some large companies and cultures with strong workers' rights / labor laws this is actually used as a punishment: We can't fire you, so we'll just put you in a small, shabby, single office on the far end of the campus and give you nothing to do. Nobody will care that you exist and your existence will be pointless.

I do not believe that you can compensate for this 100% with private endeavours and hobbies as long as you still have to show up 8 hours a day (even remotely) and "be bored".

You can try it though, and report back how it went. Why not.

Jobs like this can be found in large, highly bureaucratic but ultimately not very important government organizations/agencies and mid to large enterprises, often in niche markets and the manufacturing sector where things can move pretty slowly.

However, to actually help you, I recommend you try the opposite: Get a high-paying job, slave for two three years, go all-in for 60+ hours a week if you have to. Only do this while you're young, no longer than 3 years. Save (and safely invest) every penny. And if you have enough money, stop immediately or phase it out over 1 year max. If you did it well enough, you'll have also built a network that will enable you to do the odd consulting gig on the side or get a more relaxing steady part-time job.

Alternatively, look into part-time office administration jobs, substitutes for people going on maternity leave etc. If you can use Word, Outlook and express yourself coherently, that will often be enough. Again, beware of the boreout.

Also, I'd really like to know what your passions are because practically all passions and hobbies can be monetized somehow (even a little). If you're into them so much that you want to do nothing else 24 hours a day, then surely you can find a way to monetize them. Even if you're into sleeping all day, there are ways to get paid for that ;-)

HTH

neals · 5 years ago

What salary on the 'lower side' would you deem reasonable?

voisin · 5 years ago

Not directly answering your question, but you might want to look into FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). The subreddits /r/FIRE, /r/leanFIRE, and /r/fatFIRE are full of excellent info and active communities of people who have either achieved or are working to achieve exactly what you are hoping to do.

poisonborz · 5 years ago

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to focus on hobbies/life and not caring much about working time job - I would guess most people fall on this side, actually (and they don't even have too much of hobbies either). However, the way you wrote this post, it strucks me that maybe you have burnout, or you're depressed - as if you reach out to your passions not mainly because you like them, but because those never failed you, and you want to get away from everything else, in which you were disappointed.

If this is not the case, just ignore this, but please think about it first. The world can be a great place with the right view, and there is a lot that can bring you back on track - including an inspiring daytime job.

fsloth · 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

trott · 5 years ago

> The software I build is useless.

Isn't this up to you?

chefkoch · 5 years ago

> devops/sysadmin

While these certainly exist, you would need to know what your doing to not need to do much.

And almost impossible to be remote.

shatnersbassoon · 5 years ago

You can do all of this and earn a high salary if you become an...

...agile coach

Read a few books, recycle stuff you find online, do a presentation on neurodiversity. It really is money for old rope. I knew of one who worked in a UK gov department who got £1250 a day, charged for 5 days, and only turned up for 4.5. Did it for years.

drKarl · 5 years ago

I know right now you want to focus on your hobbies/passion and you don't need much and you don't care about anything else... I don't know what age are you but I would suggest that, while try to enjoy your hobbies/passion as much as you can, think and plan for the future, and what a dire situation you would find yourself if you're in a low paying dead end job for 10 or 20 years... You'd be basically digging a hole for yourself that would be difficult to get out.

marginview · 5 years ago

An inhouse DBA (preferably something like SQL Server as it's quite straightforward). Get it set up/automated (back-ups etc) then the a good indicator that you are doing well is if you've nothing much to do.

ozim · 5 years ago

Well I up voted because I look into FIRE and retire as early as possible.

One way is to get highly paid job as early as possible and invest most of the income.

What OP describes might be different approach, get easy going job and well not really retire but have a lifestyle that would be like a retiree.

Both have their ups and downs. I would rather go with first solution if I were young and have opportunity. Second option is more viable if someone is in his 40ties I believe.

probably_wrong · 5 years ago

The best I can suggest is sysadmin for some boring government agency. It doesn't fit the "fully remote" part, but otherwise you are free to do whatever you want as long as everything is up and running. You also don't need to manage anyone, although you do have to talk to angry users once in a while.

killtimeatwork · 5 years ago

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

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

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

burnoutguru · 5 years ago

Senior DevOps Engineer at a mid-sized, stagnant californian “startup”, roughly $150k salary.

Seriously. My last three jobs were at companies which were 10-15 years old, had burned through $75m-$150m in VC and had flat revenues of $12-$15m for years.

These are my bread and butter. I “work” remotely from utc+2. Theoretically I am working from home, but pre-covid 60% of my time I was “working” from cafes around Europe/the middle-east 1-3 hours per day.

The rest of my time I was being a tourist, getting stoned, having flings or mm-transit to my next destination.

The thing about companies this size is either you have a good sized team managing a medium worklod and very low expectations.

The long timers are milking it to make up for their worthless stock options. The executive positions are revolving doors (all 3 companies saw at least 2 ceo turnovers during my term).

At my last job all real work was done in Belarus and Russia. As the team lead, my entire job was ended up being tidying up / linting / deduplicating our terraform code base while giving the actual engineers encouragement and architectural advice. It even gave me a reason to party in minsk and make more friends.

I get fired every 1.5 - 2 years, but I spend like a poor homeless backpacker and my home base is in the 3rd world, so at age 40 I already have enough saved to retire.

I used to be a hard workimg, diligent, ambitious engineer working startups I believed in, but getting screwed over by 2 consecutive YC startups made me look at employers as nothing more than a short-term atm.

These positions are easy to get if you use the right search criteria, actually know your shit enough to project confidence, and if you’re extroverted enough to have built anreally large network of colleagues who like you.

Look over YC’s list of companies from ‘11-14. Specifically look for the companies which are still around, aren’t unicorns but haven’t failed, and use the tech stack you know best.

Don’t be afraid to shamelessly inflate your resume to do this. Your employers will lie to you, their customers and their investors with a sociopathic calm demeanor. There’s no reason not to do the same.

wubbalub · 5 years ago

Find a medium-sized company with a local monopoly.

- They are not competing in their market / has had dominance for more than a decade. - Their business model does not depend on innovation or moving fast. - The ambitious people are all located in sales/marketing. - The development dept. is known for saying "good things take time" because they can afford to. - Career advancement typically isn't possible unless a tech lead quits, but they're cushy.

You can't trade low effort for low wage. You have to qualify skill-wise and drop the effort over time. You may be able to find something on the low end for your skill level, but an employer will think it's average. Picking something you think is below your skill level might boost your psychology, and you might be able to pull 2-3x.

As for picking tasks where you can minimize effort:

- Pick a role where spending time on other people's task is justified. During stand-ups when you have to explain what you did, you can say that you worked on your own thing, and that you helped the other person. This is not just a way to cheat: I care more about what I do, if I'm helping someone who cares more. I invented this coping strategy at points where I didn't care at all myself. - Pick more researchy tasks: People don't know exactly what to expect, the work isn't as easily quantified. So when you spend longer or don't have as much to show for it, that may make sense. - Become highly available on emergency / show high effort once in a while: This counts against not making an effort, but people will remember you for fixing things when it matters, and they tolerate you working at your own pace most of the time. - Select somewhere with a new CTO / tech lead: They're super busy learning how to juggle management and mentoring, so if you're stuck onboarding for more time than normal, they won't blame you. This may sound leechy, but just make sure you provide some kind of value to everyone else other than your full attention.

Also, this was my best-paying job for 3 years focusing on family and mental health outside of work.

anonymoushn · 5 years ago

My ex-roommate works at Google and this was her approach to work even pre-pandemic.

sparsely · 5 years ago

Totally reasonable thing to want IMO.

Try searching for stuff to do with managing ETL/integrations. Some of these jobs will require loads of product involvement, others will be some not terribly interesting data munging. At your target salary level which you mentioned elsewhere (30k EUR), there should be plenty of positions where you'll exceed expectations with 2 hours of focused, intelligent work per day. Not sure how many will be remote though, sorry!

rwardza · 5 years ago

One of the things that springs to mind is coding emails. Once you have a template that works in 99% of email readers you've done the majority of the work.

The downside is getting clients that need emails coded. This means you need to do some work to connect with people and get the ball rolling.

I used to do this kind of thing many years ago for an advertising agency/publishing house. They had 5 magazine brands they ran and each of them would need a bi-weekly email to be sent to their newsletter subscribers. Their designer would send through a psd, I'd code it up and load it into their mailing list software.

At the same time I was doing wordpress based "catalog" websites for them, also minimal interfacing with the client and the same "psd => html" workflow.

If you can get the energy to talk to an advertising agency or publishing house there may be something minimal that you can do for them.

mysterydip · 5 years ago

Hey, at least you're honest.

Is the problem that your work has no meaning? There are plenty of nonprofits that are slugging away using inefficient processes that could benefit from a developer that makes them custom software. Maybe there's one out there that aligns with your hobbies?

Gatsky · 5 years ago

I would suggest looking for work in hospital IT. The glacial pace of change, entrenched legacy technologies and byzantine bureaucracy should provide the kind of environment you are looking for.

runawaybottle · 5 years ago

Look for teams that have no business being as big as they are. On a over-staffed team, the devs take one piece of work and divide it up (sometimes it’s laughable even to us, but we have to fill up Jira with stories). So long as no one on the team is pretentious, you guys should be able to have very piecemeal amounts of work and a dependable squad to pick up slack as needed.

It sounds like I’m describing a normal company with healthy redundancy, but apparently in tech you can end up on unhealthy lean teams. Your boss also needs to be a long timer who ‘gets’ that all of you divided up the simplest task evenly, and that ‘this is the way’. If he/she scrutinizes it, then it’s no good because the lie must be believed by all (with the underlying acceptance that this is better for everyone versus having heroes and rockstars).

Wait for the pandemic to die down and the froth to return in hiring, where companies will define ‘growth’ by building out more teams. No reason not to stay a developer since you already invested the time to do the work in your sleep.

The hard part is you will have to find a company that is successful enough that they can afford it.

Places like this can actually bring back some sanity if you have a life outside of work. You’ll die if work is your identity though, as others have mentioned (super unfulfilling, no one will be allowed to architect or go nuts, since predictability is paramount).

Last thing I’ll say is, absolutely under no circumstance should you lower your salary expectations. The companies that pay developers lower expect more. They seem to not believe the cost is worth it, and that you are lucky to even be getting as much as you are getting. You’ll be pushed much much harder at those places. The 10k luxury purse only gets taken out on special nights. The $200 one gets taken everywhere.

Become the luxury item and find wealthier buyers.

MartinMcGirk · 5 years ago

I can think of two possible routes that would fulfil this criteria in different ways.

The first is to get an IT job at a government organisation that isn't heavily IT focussed, but needs someone on staff "just in case". I once interviewed for a job at a National Library for a 35,000 GBP/year role (with 20% pension). They had a system where someone could book a room to read old manuscripts, and there was a C# program that let people swipe in and out with a smart card. For some reason they needed a dev on staff full time just in case anything went wrong. That was the whole scope of the job. Apparently most of the IT people there had other personal gigs they worked on most of the day, and it was super flexible. I didn't take it because I wanted a job that would push me and force me to learn things, but I reckon there would be a few jobs like that in government that would give you what you want.

The other way isn't exactly what you asked for, but might appeal to you anyway. Recently I've been working as a software contractor, mostly doing 3-to-6 month contracts, mostly for companies that need extra resource to hit some looming deadline. It's intensive work for the duration of the contract, but the money is a lot better than being a permanent employee, and I've been finding that over the course of each contract you can save up so much money that you could happily take a few months off in-between roles if you wanted to do what you like. I'm using the time off (just starting what I envisage to be a 4 month break minimum) to try to build side projects, but you could spend 4-5 months playing sport or whatever just as easily. You might even find the contract route gives you the time to do your hobbies, and professional fulfilment too, because each is timeboxed into several month long stints. Personally I love it.

ykevinator3 · 5 years ago

State government or a bank although at a bank, while you don't have a lot of work, your monitor is usually public facing.

vishnugupta · 5 years ago

You haven’t stated your nationality (or country of residence) so this advice may or may not work out for you.

Lot of European software companies fall in this category. Not necessarily low expectations but you are expected to work only during business hours and the work is typical CRUD app development/maintenance. The projects are managed well so no crazy fire fighting to meet super tight deadlines. On top of that if you can get into shops that work on governmental IT/automation work then nothing like it. Very decent job security, sane vacation policy are added bonus.

Some of those EU shops may even be willing to take on full remote employees.

Good luck!

jpttsn · 5 years ago

Business are often happy to pay a high effective hourly rate. Consulting is easier than rank and file employment, but you seem to also want job security and predictability.

“Get away with” however indicates you want a “do nothing job”:

Option 1: where the manager doesn’t know/care upfront how little you work. That’s a game of exploring information asymmetries. I’d look for inexperienced managers, people hiring for jobs they have little knowledge about. That’s more important than the actual job description. You can prey on business leaders that are in over their head or have too much capital for their own good. But you’d have to beware so the business itself isn’t too risky, lest you spend all your time job hunting.

Option 2: where the manager can’t fire you even if they want to. Where I live some of that comes automatically with seniority. Joining a union can help as well. Or else playing politics: making the right friends and gathering dirt on them. After attaining the position, incompetence is your friend. Make a point of fucking things up (on purpose) until your responsibilities get taken away.

Option 3: I don’t have anything personally against your position. I’d recommend soul searching just how far you want to stretch it: if it’s okay to trick your employer out of a salary, you might take it a notch further and find a well paying career in outright fraud. I bet ethics are a barrier to entry in many gray area careers.

apexalpha · 5 years ago

I don't know about putting in the least amount of effort for 5 days a week. But what I do know is that in my country, the Netherlands, part-time work is more and more becoming the standard. Already, 75% of women and 30% of men work 32 hours a week or less. In many sectors the fulltime standard has been lowered to 36 hours, which means every other Friday off.

I myself started on 40 and will move to 32 hours somewhere next year. It's your right by law to reduce your hours for the same pay/hour.

So my advice would be to look for remote only dev jobs in the Netherlands, and just ask to work 24h or 32h a week. It's very common here and won't be a roadblock.

Although this is going to entirely depend on how much money you actually need to get by.

raspasov · 5 years ago

I am interested in your thought process. What led you to those conclusions?

PS I can dispense a lot of psychological advice and personal experience here but will only do if the OP asks.

nicbou · 5 years ago

I build a website that helps people navigate life in Germany. It requires little work and pays the bills. I still have to work, but if it's sunny outside, I am rarely stuck behind the keyboard.

Unfortunately, I don't think I could easily reproduce. I wouldn't have the energy to do the same in a new location. Even in my little circle, I have many competitors, though they are fortunately not that good. If there was an easy recipe, everyone would do it.

I guess the general idea is to build something that decouples payout from income, and avoid obligations that force you to work on a fixed schedule. It's important to me to be able to let the website run itself for a week or two.

atemerev · 5 years ago

I am a highly paid consultant in cryptocurrency infrastructure systems, and I use my rates (both hourly and flat) to work less, not more. So sometimes I can earn a lot of money for a few hours of work, but it is not boring. It is stimulating and requires a lot of thinking, as I specialize in a particularly rare niche. Though it generates a lot of stress when there are no clients for long periods of time.

For the rest of it, I work in the academia, where the money is nearly nonexistent, but it helps me for my freedom of self-actualization (and since it is computational epidemiology, there is suddenly a lot of real world relevance). Still, event when there are no clients for months, the money from the academia is enough to survive (barely).

throwaway12504 · 5 years ago

Honestly, I think this is somewhat of a crapshoot/hard to tell from the job description and the reason I say this is the job I'm currently in functions exactly how you describe but the job description/everything else from the outside gave me no clue before I actually started the job.

"Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect" -- in fact, for me, often it's 2 hours on a Monday morning the first day of the sprint, then just being present on Slack for the rest of the two week sprint. I wait and submit PRs etc at the end of the sprint.

My previous jobs in tech absolutely did not function like this, so I was somewhat surprised when I fell into my current position/groove. My coworkers/managers seem to think the amount of work I get done every sprint is actually above average, even though it rarely takes me more time than six hours max every two weeks. I mostly work on backend stuff (85%/15%) and am in a senior position at a relatively large (non Silicon-Valley though still very tech savvy) company with tens of thousands of employees and billions in revenue, though based on the East Coast. My salary isn't bonkers but I'm comfortably in the 150-200k range before bonus.

There was no way for me to know, going into the job, based on the job description, interviews with team members, etc, that the expectations of my managers and co-workers would be so low. And honestly, I'm still confused. I'm not a genius software engineer, I'm maybe above average but still not anything special. My coworkers aren't lazy or bad either - they're all sharp, proactive people. All of this is to say, what you're looking for does exist, it's my job, but I haven't the slightest idea how I would've been able to tell this is that type of job before actually doing it, so alas I can't help you very much, though I am willing to answer questions if you may have any.

ceilingcorner · 5 years ago

Wordpress. There are a million companies selling a plugin or theme and they all hire developers. The tech level required is usually pretty low.

mrwnmonm · 5 years ago

NetSuite development.

mfbx9da4 · 5 years ago

Be a QA engineer! Such a waste of time hehe (in my experience)

zikduruqe · 5 years ago

Just think. If your ability to get good quality health insurance/coverage wasn’t directly tied to having to be employed for those benefits, we all could pursue our passions and desires.

ButterWashed · 5 years ago

> I think the only possible jobs would be some kind of backend-only dev or devops/sysadmin work. But I'm not sure these exist anymore

Actually, if you work for a large MSP (ie, IBM, CGI, DXC) then you'll probably be able to find a job that fits all of those requirements. They'll undoubtedly have contracts with orgs that just want to outsource managing their infrastructure and that's a pretty easy gig.

lhl · 5 years ago

If you have a good pre-existing network of contacts (or have a modicum of networking skills/are willing to do a bit of legwork) I’ve found there’s a constant demand for “low-end” sysadmin/devops work for small businesses - usually they just need someone to be on call in case their AWS/virtual hosting/or Shopify what have you go down. You could probably gather about a half dozen or so of those contracts, set up some alerts, and spend no more than a few hours a week on average of work and pull in enough to cover all your bills.

Like others, I’d recommend looking into FIRE principles at least, particularly the idea of Safe Withdrawal Rate - basically every $25-30 you have invested = $1/yr you can spend for the rest of your life.

j10c · 5 years ago

I am also searching for similar one but I specifically mention part-time and remote. I have fairly regular skills and so far no luck. Most of the times I get discriminated response due to my cost of living in India. But i am surely confident about getting the one.

I think devops is great fit for you.

dazsnow · 5 years ago

Congratulations - you're the perfect candidate to work in the IT department of any bank! Attend some meetings, send some emails.... profit!

nickd2001 · 5 years ago

It sounds to me like you're experiencing burnout (possibly lockdown-related) and/or have worked unsatisfying jobs and/or for not-so-great employers. I worry that the strategy you declare you intend to pursue, while pragmatic, won't lead to long-term happiness or fulfilment. We all need to feel useful and have a real mission for at least some of the time. Hopefully you could find something, maybe part-time, at a government agency, non-profit, university or college. The fact you don't care about salary works wonders in your favour. If there's a job out there that's fulfilling and not stressful, but pay is such they struggle to get and retain people, you could be on to a winner there and find your "mojo" again. I think plenty of people on HN have had such motivational ruts in their career and come out the other side. I personally do a 4-day-week mid-level job despite possibly being "capable of more", due to caring responsibilities and desire to pursue other hobbies. Good luck, I think you're brave to ask this question on HN and its a nice alternative discussion to workaholism / protestant work ethic.

throwaway823882 · 5 years ago

First of all, I think it's great that you don't want to find a job that you enjoy. That would be scary and difficult, and who really wants to face their fears, or make a "normal" amount of money, or be a "constructive member of society" ? Sounds annoying. (And with all that meaningful work, there'd be less time to drink mountain dew and live a pretend life in a computer game)

Second, look for jobs where your only task is to shepherd some black box and make an occasional change. DBAs, Systems Administrators, Quality Engineers, Middleware Engineers. Plenty of jobs where your only responsibility is to make sure some random commercial software is just... running. If you do it right, you can be working 2 or 3 of these jobs at once and nobody will notice.

Third, look for contract work. Contractors generally are expected to suck at their jobs, and even if you do a piss-poor job of it, they'll just move you to another contract soon afterward. All you have to do is make the bosses happy and you don't have to be productive at all. (This works better in larger contracting companies)

Fourth, put your resume and e-mail out there in public resume-hunting sites. You will get bombarded by random e-mails from headhunters for jobs you aren't qualified for at all. Apply for those positions. Lots of hiring managers are morons. You're bound to get one, it's a numbers game!

Finally, once you get such a job, make sure to come back to HN and complain about how bad your job is. Nothing's more inspiring than under-achievers lamenting their lot in life.

neopointer · 5 years ago

Agile coach. 100%. It's not about managing people, but neither is it tech related.

gorpomon · 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dustinmoris · 5 years ago

I really feel for your question because I have felt in similar ways recently. The pandemic has made life really dull and my days literally just consist of work, eat and sleep. Everyone on our team feels the same way and even though nobody really is asked to work long or hard everyone still feels on the verge of a burnout and a mental crisis, because we all feel stuck in a surreal world of four walls and isolation.

Anyways, those feelings aside, I can recommend to do some contract work. Contract work allows you to switch work frequently and take some longer breaks in-between whilst charing good rates whilst you work in order to afford the breaks.

Additionally contract work allows you to change up the projects you work more easily. In your case I'd recommend to look for a contract role where you help with the maintenance of some old boring tech project. These projects don't normally attract career hungry over-achievers which means you'll likely end up on a small team (because old boring tech projects don't attract lots of business investment) and a team of fairly mellow and chilled co-workers, more like the 10am-4pm type of guys and girls.

Also as a contractor you can work more flexible. I for instance have reduced my work days to only 4 days a week which has been a really nice change this year.

benjaminwootton · 5 years ago

Working for a big company maintaining a legacy system can be like this.

You can get by outputting 3 lines of code per week between meetings, filling in tickets, clearing disk space occasionally when the monitoring alerts and doing mandatory upgrades.

Nobody really cares as you are a cost centre but they need to keep people around for support.

There are a lot of people in banks still making reasonable money doing this type of work.

KingOfCoders · 5 years ago

A different avenue, but I became a CTO coach because after decades in tech companies I wanted to work a lot less which I now do.

malkosta · 5 years ago

My advice is to work for the brazilian government. If you don't do anything, nobody will ever notice.

JamesAdir · 5 years ago

Remote support team in shifts. It has usually zero responsibility as your shift ends since someone else is on duty, it can have enough compensation if you work for a long time for a US or a EU company. And after a while it's gets very repetitive since you are becoming very proficient in your domain. If you don't have any aspirations of moving up the ladder, it can be also something you can be hired for even in older age.

popotamonga · 5 years ago

Find a slow company. In some places you can get by on 4h/week remote, no one cares, they dont make enough tasks etc, all on a massive salary.

twobitshifter · 5 years ago

If company still wants you to put in the same 40 hours, I’d suggest a 4 days on / 2 off work schedule. You work 9 hours a day 4 days in a row and then take 2 off

Over a leap year, you’ll have 36*61 hours which is 2196 hours, actually more than the 2080 hours most people work. If you work 8.5 hours a day, you’ll come in only 6 hours short of a 40 hours work week.

(I haven’t tried this myself and I didn’t come up with the idea, but it’s always been something that I thought would be cool to do)

osrec · 5 years ago

Become the database/configuration management guy for a simple but established B2B SaaS? In that sector data volume is not usually super high, so you're not managing complex replication or backup strategies.

Once the DB is up and running, you're pretty much just ensuring it doesn't fall over, which can probably be done in under 2hrs a day.

ItsMrMe · 5 years ago

I think you are right for trying to spend more time on your hobbies. However isn't there a way to make a life out of your hobbies? It does not have to make you rich, but every penny you earn out of it, does not have to be earned by work which is mediocre at best.

Good luck on your search!

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf · 5 years ago

I would suggest looking at government or large, stogy companies (e.g. banks, insurance companies, etc). I think the key here is to find a place where everyone works slowly and it is very difficult to fire anyone.

Kneecaps07 · 5 years ago

This is unethical, but outsource yourself. Get contractor jobs and then hire cheap overseas workers to do the work and pocket the difference. If you can get a few of these gigs going and can manage your calendar you can probably cut yourself down to 20 hours a week.

Just be better at hiding it than the guy we hired who got busted doing this literally within the first hour of his first day. Don't let your boss take over your computer while your contractor is controlling your computer via WebEx!

rmac · 5 years ago

get really good at sysops/dev for legacy mainframes: AIX, etc. get an IT job at a hospital or financial institution that has this legacy system. Install a remote access serial device. Write automations that cover most failure cases. profit (time)

SamuelAdams · 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

faoileag · 5 years ago

This is possible, at least from hearsay.

1. A decade or two ago a story made the news that some guy was working from some remote place in Scotland, basically in the middle of nowhere, with just a modem and some novel idea: do freelance research in subscription-only databases. Basically just getting accounts for various costly services, then advertise that for a fee you will do research in these services for people who shun / can't afford the costly access. Unfortunately, I can't find the story any more.

2. Work as a freelancing developer, but don't accept large projects, only small ones where you know you can beat the time estimate in your favour. There are portals for this sort of work.

3. Doesn't need to be software development. You can do this as well writing short pieces about almost anything for the benefits of web seo. Again, there are portals for this kind of work ("gig economy"). Think $20 to $30 per piece.

4. If the gig economy is not for you: every job where a lot of stand-by time is part of the job description. Janitor for a couple of condominiums, maybe. Or you act as stand-by technician for small companies with self-hosted computer hardware (acting when you get paged).

shireboy · 5 years ago

I might suggest a slightly different approach. “Early Retirement Extreme” proposes that if you save 80% of your income in a few broad index funds (search bogglehead), learn to live on the 20%, then you can get to where you are financially independent and retire in 5 years. I can’t say I’m personally there yet, but it sounds like you are more motivated and maybe less obligations. Get cheap ass housing, eat cheap, bike everywhere, and work your ass off for 5 years while saving 80%.

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/

55555 · 5 years ago

Just get some remote/freelance programming work with long-term potential and then hire someone else to do all of it for you and keep the difference.

Make sure to pick a client who is in a very lucrative high-margin industry, so that even once the work dries up they will want to keep you on payroll incase something goes wrong. They might literally pay you a salary to do nothing just for the one day a year things break.

uncletaco · 5 years ago

Work for scientists.

busymom0 · 5 years ago

Are you able to ask your current employer if they can switch you to 3 day weeks? or 4 day weeks?

Also government jobs might be worth it - almost every friend I know who works in government says they are full of slackers. It might get busy during the end of the quarter but other than that, it's quite lazy from what I hear.

flerchin · 5 years ago

"Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." Mark Twain.

It sounds like you want to help other developers and set up CICD pipelines. Sounds like a DevOps type role?

executive · 5 years ago

Developer relations

DenisM · 5 years ago

I suggest being the one-man IT department in a non-IT org. E.g. a university department, a smaller school, a small-time manufacturer or retailer, etc. Automating your job on one hand and managing expectations on the other should set you up for a while.

Your tech skills will degrade if you tend to them, but accumulating good will and maintaining occasional contact with people should ensure they help find you new jobs as they move about.

adenozine · 5 years ago

This is the best Ask HN I've seen in a while. Fantastic.

As for OP, I recommend you consider data analytics. That may seem counterintuitive, but the analytical work is a great place to escape into, mentally. I really, REALLY enjoy it, and I can generally use whatever tools I want for the hard stuff, and then just spew out some Python/R for a notebook deliverable, or whatever format they want. It's really liberating to have so much control over the workflow, it's entirely unlike any other tech work I've performed.

Downside, there is a little "work" involved, but I think that you might not actually mind it. It seems you are frustrated with some part of your industry.

We can talk further if you'd like, I'd love to hear more about your story, however much of that you'd be willing/comfortable to share.

Clewza313 · 5 years ago

A legendary Something Awful story about somebody getting paid for nothing at all: https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/blob/master/Stories/Ameri...

levosmetalo · 5 years ago

Depends on what you consider "real work". I would say 99% of business analysts in any enterprise level company do real work 1% of the time. The rest is filled with bulshitting, talking, harassing others or actively looking through the office windows while waiting for someone to do something.

blodkorv · 5 years ago

System administrator at some big old company. No devops stuff but old school monitoring and caring about some old solaris servers that nobody want to turn off.

psyc · 5 years ago

Based on experience, I say find the least mission critical skunkworks at a BigCo / FAANMG. Something the executives get a five minute report on once a year, and they don’t care. Bonus: get the same Corp-wide performance / compensation structure as people who do work!

lr4444lr · 5 years ago

Government work. Definitely government work. Ideally in some municipal office managing internal applications. Now that said, don't come crying to us if in 10 years when people get downsized that you cannot find a job elsewhere since the industry has moved on when really it's your skills that atrophied.

synthecypher · 5 years ago

Become an IFS consultantant.

MichaelRazum · 5 years ago

I think you might have good chances with big companies with good work and life balance. Maybe banks or insurance companies could be a good match for you. Basically what you are looking for might be: A rather older team. Legacy technology (maybe COBOL ;) ). No new development. Also a "lazy" team is good. Look for teams where most members have families, maybe small kids.

BUT guess the SECRET weapon is Head-MONOPOLY. You need to find something that nobody maintenance and nobody have the knowledge for or don't want to be involved in. In such case everyone is happy if you do your job, doesn't matter how slow or fast.

SamWhited · 5 years ago

I've been thinking about starting a co-op with a few people recently (get a front end person, a backend person, maybe someone who knows CMS's and can do website things, someone who knows marketing, a writer, a designer, and an ops person) and taking on freelance work. We wouldn't all be needed for all projects, we'd all try to bring in leads, and it would generate good part time work for everyone.

On the side if we did this I thought I'd go work at REI or the local climbing gym or something. Just some place that I don't absolutely hate being where I can make a guaranteed 10-20 hours of terrible wages to pad out the dry spells where we don't have freelance work.

I think if this could be properly balanced I could only work the equivalent of a few full time days out of the week, but also I've never done it so maybe it will just be impossible and consume all my time for no pay.

blodkorv · 5 years ago

It guy at a highschool. Only downside is the salary.

franze · 5 years ago

Scrum-Master

abledon · 5 years ago

Government legacy software maintenance.

usually 95% of your cohorts cant get past a leetcode easy. you will be a god among them and can easily get by with 2 hrs work a day

adamhp · 5 years ago

Get a job in government, or government contracting.

jhiggins777 · 5 years ago

What's your hobby?

gnfargbl · 5 years ago

Have you considered looking for data engineering jobs? Many data-focused companies seem to be looking for people to either set up pipelines and then babysit them, or to babysit pipelines designed by another engineer who has since moved on.

If you were willing to put in the time at the start getting things well designed, implemented and instrumented, I would imagine that in some places you could create the two-hours-per-day situation you're looking for, without anyone really feeling too upset about the deal.

knuthsat · 5 years ago

Get a job at a consultant company that hands you out to others as an expert. It will take a while for the big corp that received you to figure out that team members are doing all the work and that you're applying low effort on everything.

If you do not ask for a raise, the consultant company is fine with it and will hand you out to new clients easily.

iandanforth · 5 years ago

Consider also taking a data entry job. These can be automated a huge chunk of the time. Depending on the gig these can feel like free money. Doing a tricky bit of automation can be fun too.

rookderby · 5 years ago

usajobs.gov

Use your experience to negotiate a higher leave rate.

sneak · 5 years ago

One approach is to roll the dice founding a startup, work really hard for 3-10 years, and, if successful, retire.

I get the impression you want the lowest peak of work intensity, but trying to earn all of your life's money fast and up front may be total overall less work (averaged over a lifetime).

This doesn't fit your requirements, I know, but it might be something to think about: enabling laziness by being maximally un-lazy up front.

loloquwowndueo · 5 years ago

Look for something that’s not really development-oriented: something like handling a process or operation that is repetitive and involves computers. Then use your development skills to automate it so you don’t have to do much except press a button or run a program.

I was responsible for a process which involved looking some data up on a specific system, copy-pasting that into a document, and ticking a cell in a spreadsheet as “done”. Used to take about 3 minutes per item - which is not much. I scripted it all using python-mechanize and some APIs in the office suite, and now it takes 20 seconds of computer time per item - but crucially, zero seconds of my time.

Your investment up front is some time learning the manual process and a bit of work to write the automation, then you can coast along happily.

rognjen · 5 years ago

I suspect you might have gotten more specific responses if you put an email in your profile.

lbrindze · 5 years ago

When I first started working on software I was fortunate enough to get exposed to working municipal contracts. One example was building out a payment gateway and website for the LA county coroner and medical examiner. This included making a small e-commerce site for their gift shop (I don’t know why they had a gift shop).

A friends father, who was very involved in local government, told me with regards to government work, “failure is unacceptable but indefinite delay is ideal.”

As long as you are in no immediate hurry to get paid, these sorts of local/state gov projects can be quite lucrative and require very little day to day effort to get them done. The hardest part is learning how to navigate the RFP process but it’s really just about reading the rules and proposals posted. The reason government is often overcharged for mediocre software comes down to this deeply flawed procurement process.

voidfunc · 5 years ago

Easy solution: marry rich and be good to your partner.

mattparcens · 5 years ago

As someone who has had their past > 1/2 decade of work thrown out, (across multiple companies and projects!), due to low cost sensitivity on the company's part, or just poor planning, I at least halfway admire your question, if not totally admire it.

One recommendation, based on an exceedingly small sample size, would be to search for a non-profit with an outdated tech stack. Seek as many indicators as possible to suggest "lack of push."

Also, I noticed while contemplating this response, that indeed.com appeared to auto-complete "laid back" for me as I was typing it. :-)

38932ur98u · 5 years ago

Great post OP, one of the most relatable things I've seen on HN. To piggyback, does anybody here have any experience doing this while living in Europe as an American? Seems like there are generally fewer remote jobs here, especially ones that can be 60-80%.

flurben · 5 years ago

Government developer roles can be sort of like this, it just depends on the details.

The general idea is that you're expected to fulfill a fixed set of responsibilities, which might be challenging for the first year or so. But as time rolls on, a decent employee can usually automate those things.

Typically you're just ignored, no one knows what you do except your boss. If you try to expand outside of the original scope of job duties, you'll be seen as a troublemaker.

And there's rarely any possibility of advancement, since government never promotes developers to the executive level, and advancement within the 'technology group' is usually predicated on your history of procurement, budgeting, and personnel management.

The difficult bit is getting that remote job, but hopefully that's changing due to COVID.

intrasight · 5 years ago

A common path to such a career is to have deep expertise in some esoteric(or deprecated) tech stack. Cobol programmer comes to mind. You may only be asked to help once a month (or even once a year) but when they need you they really need you, and are willing to pay handsomely.

The question brings to mind this story (if anyone has a reference please provide).

A company hires a management consultant to assist with cost cutting. After spending time on-site observing the workflow, he has a meeting with a senior management and gives his recommendations. He mentions a guy who sits in his office seemingly doing nothing, and suggests they let him go. The manager says no, he's a critical member. About once a month we have a really complex problem that requires a creative solution, and he always provides one.

coglionirotti · 5 years ago

Go work as Developer on some consulting company that literally do Body Rental inside banks or insurance companies. IT departments in those fields suck a lot. Often, you have to wait months for new tasks, and the salary is often above 2k € thanks to "reimbursement". Here in Italy I've worked for BancoBPM and Allianz as "Consultant". The effort was 3 months of "work" and years of free time.

chillfox · 5 years ago

Sysadmin, then use your developer skills to automate the hell out of it.

dontreact · 5 years ago

Am I the only one who read this thread and got a little sad? Technology really does have the potential to change the world for the better, and I still believe that. It's just sad to see so many people who just want to use their talents to make money and that's it.

Anyways I can understand why people get to where they are in terms of believing that there is no meaningful work out there in software which also makes enough money to live on. We live in a pretty discouraging world. The marketplace misprices a lot of things and there are many things with high social value which are public goods that can not be sold at a high price (or at all).

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp

There are things that have many negative externalities that can make a profit even though they are just a cost to society overall.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/051515/how-do-exter...

I am hopeful that over time we as a society can identify and correct these imperfections in the market. It will take a long time though.

Just wanted to send this message out there to people who still believe that the future is going to be better than the present and that software will play a role in making that happen.

waqasx · 5 years ago

I cant believe this hasnt been said yet:

Every job can be converted into this esp in any sort of managerial role, the strategy to do this has only 3 basic steps:

# 1 - Hire a great team under you.

If you have one person, two person, or more working under you, make sure they know what to do and make sure they understand your expectations.

# 2 - Delegate your work.

Try to get rid of as much work as possible. There will be surprisingly little you have to do personally if you have done step 1 right. People who work under you wont even mind delegation+trust if you dont get in their way and micromanage. Just give them work and forget about it.

# 3 - Relax

Now you can chill while other people do your work for you. Keep tuning this system until you have created a well oiled machine under you that runs with minimal manual supervision. You now have time to focus on more important things.

dorkwood · 5 years ago

I find myself in the same boat as the OP. I want a job where I spend the least amount of hours per week and earn $30k per year to survive. Right now I earn closer to $150k but I routinely work 60 hours a week, and I don't get to spend any time or energy on my hobbies.

People recommend freelance but I'm honestly not good enough to work solo. People also recommend teaching, but it's the same problem again. It's like I need to spend all the scraps of my spare time learning how to be a solo dev on the side so I can leave and get a much easier job.

ProjectArcturis · 5 years ago

I had a data science position with a large non-tech company. It did B2B sales, and had a giant office for us, done up in brushed nickel and Edison light bulbs. The rest of the company was designed in standard cheap-cubicle format, but they took visitors (i.e. sales targets) through to see the data science team, so we got the fancy layout. After working there a few months, I realized that I was also there as part of the decoration. My work didn't matter (it took them 4 months to stand up a server for a project I was working on) and my boss didn't understand what I did. Very cush. Could have gotten away with a few hours a week of real work, though I still had to physically be there most of the time. I left for more money, plus ultimately having to surreptitiously waste 35 hours a week turns out to be quite draining.

bryanrasmussen · 5 years ago

can you do tech support for users of the product? It can often be helpful if a tech support person also knows a bit about tech so as to be able to turn the customer's vague bug description into something the developers can actually understand.

samzer · 5 years ago

Big company + Obscure stable internal tool + Maintenance of that tool = thumbs up

KerrickStaley · 5 years ago

Another option: work hard now, save up lots of money and invest it in low-cost index funds, then later in life (e.g. when you're 40) you can quit your day job and focus on your passion or simply kick back. This idea is called "FIRE" if you haven't heard of it.

pc86 · 5 years ago

Honestly I don't think you'll get a lot of hate for this. I would never want a job like what you're describing, but people are different and want different things. The thing you're going to have to square is "being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect" with pretty much any full-time employment.

Despite what a lot of people here will say, the vast majority of FT jobs do not pay you to do a set of tasks, and you're done when you're done. You get paid for (most of the time) 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. So if you're looking for a 10-hour-a-week gig, you're either going to have to be a consultant, find a diamond-studded unicorn willing to pay you a salary for 10h/wk, work part-time, or lie.

If you want to be a consultant, 10 hours a week of billed work will take 20+ hours a week to get, especially at the start. But at software dev rates you could still pull in $50-60k if you billed hourly, more if you could bill at the project level. You also typically need to be much more involved in the end-to-end product than you would if you were sticking to back-end FTE stuff.

christiansakai · 5 years ago

University's IT job?

lmilcin · 5 years ago

Work where your perceived value is disconnected from actual real work, where you can hide your actual productivity or where the company has set so low bar that you will be shining example even when actually working 1h a day.

- Providing advice, if you already have experience. Ideally general advice that would not require you to spend a lot of time investigating client-specific situation or do it relatively quickly.

- If you run circles around other developers and want to earn well, DO NOT get paid for time. Your time is much more valuable than other developers but you are most likely going to be paid roughly the same (within a small factor).

- Fixed price rather that time and materials, provided you can choose your own technology and you are good at it (see above). Make sure you are well insulated from any impediments from the company that contracts you. Make sure contract is very, very well specified.

- If you are good developer, get hired well below your ability. Get hired at a shitty company where average productivity is very low. You will be running circles around other developers working 1h a day.

- Spend significant part of your time (say over half of it) learning stuff. Over time you are going to become much better than other developers and be able to do things in fraction of the time. Even if the project doesn't work you are still taking the knowledge with you.

- Contracting. Contracts will make it difficult for you to get promoted but you don't care. You just want to get decent money for little work. In general, you earn more on contract than full time employee, but you can hack the system and earn as much as a regular employee for less work.

habosa · 5 years ago

I work at Google. Most people here do a lot of work. But maybe 5% do next to nothing, or nothing you couldn't do in 2 hours a day. I imagine this is the case at any sufficiently large corporation. So if you can find a remote job at a BigCo, it might be worth a try! Note that you can't do nothing from Day 1, you have to try for maybe a year and then you can do nothing (based on my observations)

thefsb · 5 years ago

Almost any salaried position in a big enterprise involves very little real work. It's mostly email, meetings and power point.

darepublic · 5 years ago

I actually have come to a similar realization. Most of the software we build is pointless-- does not bring value, and is the vanity project of some manager somewhere or just a way to look busy. Also creating something of value for someone is always seems secondary to some other stupid goal that would only exist within the corporate context, i.e. -- using a library when its really not necessary, having a complicated tangled mess of code when some straightforward logic would do.

I don't have an answer for OP's question except that earlier in my career the above really bothered me and I would fight against it; now it doesn't and I basically just try to do what people tell me to with minimum stress, which leaves me more time for my own hobbies.

ultra_nick · 5 years ago

Work at a large hardware company like Dell or HP. I'm bored out of my mind during work.

ultra_nick · 5 years ago

Work for a non software company. I work for a large hardware company and I'm bored out of my mind every day.

mywittyname · 5 years ago

DevOps/IT at a small company can be a good one.

While you will be expected to work off-hours. So much of the job is about keeping things humming along nicely, and when that's happening, nobody has much expectation from you.

You can slowly automate the time-consuming segments of your job. And most of the time, the automation isn't necessarily difficult to do, as most platforms have API endpoints designed for programmatic interaction.

On the developer-side, you could find a job maintaining a product for a smaller company. It will mostly be DevOps work, but with some bug fixes or minor enhancements thrown in. This would be a much more visible job than DevOps. And if you don't really care about the product, it might not be a good fit.

I have a former colleague who has been working devops/web site maintenance for a Sewage Pipe Manufacture* for going on 13 years now. Last I talked to him, he loved it. $80k is plenty to live on, he has no commute and got to watch his kids grow up.

* Not really, but it's an equally obscure, but very specific industry.

SamWhited · 5 years ago

I should also say that I had an acquaintance that did this. He was working for a small local ISP (I think; might have been hosting, the kind of thing where they give you an FTP server and the ability to shoot everyone else on the shared server in the foot with PHP) and he literally turned his entire job into a couple of scripts and a big spreadsheet. He then just ran them a couple of times a week and called it a day. I don't know exactly what all he did, some sort of server management things and providing stats to management, but nobody else knew how to do it so he provided the non-technical management who didn't understand their own small company with value and the only work he had to do was run some scripts. It can be done.

hprotagonist · 5 years ago

If you like very flexible work, low pay, and generally low stress, get yourself wired into the bureaucracy at a big public university.

latexr · 5 years ago

The question reminded me of a workplace.stackexchange question I found years ago: https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-un...

They arrived at your current goal through automation and were wondering if it was ethical to not reveal that to their employers. It also generated discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945

auiya · 5 years ago

Operations Manager

tylerlarson · 5 years ago

I have no interest in telling you what to do as an individual but this thread and all of the people that seem on board with this is what drives me crazy about most of the places I've worked.

I have the hardest time getting anything done because of the sea of people trying to find ways not to do any work. Is this not abuse of privilege? Do you all not hear the stories of people working multiple jobs and still not being able to pay their bills. Is this entitlement?

There are actual problems in the world, sure most of them you are able to effect might be small but what a complete waist of time to be stuck in a job for 8 hours a day and be actively choosing not to contribute solutions to the problems you are faced with. Sure not everything along the way is going to be interesting but if these problems don't excite you there are other jobs that should and if all of that fails go start a company because you are only on this planet for so long and waisting these hours making it look like you are doing work pails in comparison to actually making any impact on the people and things around you. You will be missing out on shared relationships of successes and failures as you resign yourself to this void.

It doesn't feel good to deceive people, it doesn't feel good to take money from people for work you haven't done.

There are people in this world that would literally give anything to have the jobs you have all listed but they can't even apply because they were not born in the right country or their parents didn't have the money to send them to the right school or their accent or skin color made that same interview that you passed impossible to even get.

This whole thread feels so wrong to me and I'm really amazed this community is okay with propagating it. It goes completely against the idea of progress and works against any form of entrepreneurial spirit. Companies fail because of this mentality and world as a whole is worse off because of it. Sure everyone has moments of these feelings but to encourage this as an ok path through of life, I just don't understand.

nickysielicki · 5 years ago

If jobs like this existed, I’d get 4 of them, pray that they never coincide, and live like a king.

candybar · 5 years ago

At least in my experience, people who get away with a small amount of work are almost always senior people who are highly regarded by the higher-ups. It's difficult to get away with doing very little work as a junior person in any org because 1) you don't have the autonomy to choose the work, 2) you're considered fungible, so you're given relatively fungible work, which is easy to size and compare against others, and 3) you're not trusted, so managers scrutinize your work more. The caveat is that it's hard to overcome these issues without having worked hard at some point - the key is having some level of expertise within the company along with the trust of the higher-ups who would rather focus their energy on ensuring that less trustworthy people don't mess up.

picodguyo · 5 years ago

Work in government, education, or non-profit. I've worked in 2 of those and was regularly pressured by management to work less hard lest I make everyone look bad. My first job out of college for a non-profit (only company that would hire me) involved about 30 minutes a day of actual work.

notacoward · 5 years ago

As others have said, working for a non-software (ideally non-computer) company is a good place to start. Pay will be relatively low, you'll have little choice about the technologies or types of programming you work on, but the pace/intensity will be very low too. If you become the expert for some in-house system written in a language or framework nobody else even heard of that can be even better as long as that system lasts. Some people have even made careers out of building such systems as contractors and then making money off them for years, but that only works for people who have no ethics.

zoomablemind · 5 years ago

You may be underestimating the job impact on availability of time for your hobby.

Most of the jobs trade your time for money with a varying degree of premium and committment. The full-time lets you calculate how much hobby time you could theoretically expect. This would be interrupted time.

Part-time may allow more hobby-time, but is often limited in span, before you'd need to find another part-time.

Similarly, the consulting service. It may allow more freedom, but requires rather high admin effort, which eats into your hobby time. Also, this depends on your skill and the niche.

Finally, a hybrid approach - work hard in high-paying position (full/part/consult) for a set period of time (years) to accumulate the needed funds. Then embark on a hobby expansion stretch, hopefully, with some noticeable result. At the conclusion (of funds in bank), embark on the next job/money-making phase. You may need to find a way to 'explain the gap'.

At some point in this journey, the solution to the puzzle may just offer itself to you, or may be rather forced (familiy, medical, or economy issues).

Good luck!

dijit · 5 years ago

I had your dream job. The catch, though, was that I was so passionate about my job that I pulled all nighters on and off for years. In the end there was nothing to do but petty maintenance as all the issues were automated away, I kept looking for more things to do, fun things.

Ultimately I got bored and left.

I was a “sysadmin/devops”. If that helps, though usually developers don’t think they need sysadmins anymore.

throwboat210407 · 5 years ago

Love this question. I've worked a few of these and have many friends in similar positions. Looks like people have recommended some of these already, but from my experience:

- Any type of "analyst" position in a (big) healthcare, banking, or college/university. If not "analyst", then a job description that involves both systems administration + programming (actual app development, not just scripting).

Working in big healthcare/banking is usually very secure and very little work unless you happen to land on an A team (which you won't unless you prove exceptional). I have friends in healthcare who "own" legacy applications. Their job is simply to maintain ancient classic ASP or PHP 3.0 applications that are "critical" to business functions. This amounts to a few hours of work a month (!) when the unicorn server running the app has a hiccup and needs a reboot.

Banking can be the same. I held a remote job for a many-billion-dollar-a-year-US-bank doing ASP.NET development and we would be given something like 2-3 months to fix a vague bug like "this report in the admin takes 15 minutes to run can you make it faster?" Then you would look into it and discover said report was running against a server with 256 MB of RAM running DB/2 off of someone's Raspberry PI duct-taped underneath their desk because they couldn't get their official request for a VM through IT. Oh and they had never written a SQL query before so you just rewrote their abomination of CURSOR hell in 15 minutes and suddenly the report was down to 10 seconds so who cares - time to relax for 2 months and watch videos about growing tomatoes in custom-built built hydroponics tubs (I love you Jeb Gardener).

College/university. Side note here: keep any eye open for any job that requires specialized knowledge of massive legacy/clunky applications, e.g. PeopleSoft (Oracle), SalesForce, SharePoint, etc. I had a gig for a few years at my alma mater helping to migrate their student information systems from a home-grown system that worked (but was legacy DB/2) to an Oracle PeopleSoft system that categorically did not work but had a 50 million dollar budget. They started migrating 3 years before I got there, and to my knowledge, are still migrating/facing issues to this day.

The work was hilariously easy: my task would be to work with the integration team to attempt to get a report of all students in our department meeting x, y, z criteria. Since we were working with Oracle directly, any request took 2-4 weeks and never was fulfilled as they outsourced 100% of their development work and the developers couldn't get anything done.

- SMB consulting, avoiding application development. I think someone mentioned answering tickets already which is usually pretty simple, but inevitably you'll end up getting promoted at most consulting gigs. That said, you can get a nice cushy job just installing servers, racks, desktops, etc. It's a bit of physical work sure, but usually most consulting shops have this stuff down pat - 2-4 hours for an install of <x>, 6 onsite hours for <y>, 2 monthly hours for maintenance, etc.

- Technical writing. This is niche as you need to find a company that actually cares about their documentation, but if you're halfway decent at writing this can be an incredibly low-key easy job. Most people are downright terrible at writing and it shows in their documentation (just take a look at most public API docs!). I know an out-of-work writer who got a gig from UpWork to basically fix grammatical errors for an entire API's documentation that turned into a permanent gig as the company was a startup with zero non-technical folks and they absolutely loved her ability to turn their gibberish into human-readable docs. She got to work directly with consumers who greatly benefited from her work and the job was cake as writing came naturally to her - hardest part was learning what some of the technical lingo was.

ht85 · 5 years ago

How about instead of trying to dig a hole somewhere, you find a job where you can provide great value on very little hours?

I moonlight as a consultant, and I generally work for whatever the going rate is for a decent hourly hire in the space. I do web-apps as it is my specialty, and select projects with familiar tech / business logic so that I'm productive quickly.

What I do differently then most is that I invest time up front to understand the company, and understand the why behind the projects I have to do. It allows me to spend a lot of time shaping my work instead of implementing. I'll try to find better alternatives, question requirements, etc. I do it in good faith, trying to uncover unsound specs and find 80/20 solutions, which in the context of companies outsourcing dev work to random shops has a ton value.

It doesn't make the projects themselves more interesting, but this approach is challenging in itself and it keeps me on my toes.

Once I've figured the how, I get grinding. I do long, 8-12h crunch sessions, fasting and fully in the zone. During each of those I can do an amount of work that is perceived to take about a week.

I do most of those up front (avoid last minute surprises), take some notes on some of the roadblocks I encounter in case someone asks for an update at any point, and set the project aside. I then turn it in a bit before the expected deadline (which is sometimes explicit, sometimes not).

Ethics are hard but truth is I'm not even ashamed of it and have on multiple occasions admitted to doing that to managers / execs when I felt they were open-minded people. They still get excellent value for their money and I get paid incredibly well for my time. Win-win.

The alternative would be to try to charge 200-300$ an hour, but companies generally don't want to deal with the perceived risk and are very reluctant to pay consultants higher than their most expensive employees .

smdz · 5 years ago

Work at an org where you think you could be considered at least a 4x engineer. Even better a 10x. I could be a 4x/10x/100x engineer someplace, and a 0.25x at another.

Learn to automate stuff at your job. It works at programming jobs too.

Prefer the workplace is a product or SaaS/product company. My experience with it shows that it has a lower cognitive load after the initial 6 months to 1 year of hard work. Yes, you have to put in extra effort early on to reap the benefits later on. This does not mean programming more, but understanding the product in depth and in domain.

On top of that prefer an established product which has sizeable management and team size. Things move slowly here.

Stay away from lead/architect/management roles - it would be unethical to take up any of those.

Prefer a development (programming) role. Over the years, I have realised that "time is elastic" with programming roles.

Keep away from consulting companies/consultant roles. Some of those pay well, but then you are not looking to earn more.

In ideal situation I would recommend leaving toxic places - but embrace and learn to manipulate workplaces that give more importance to "visibility" than "actual work".

And the last piece: All of the above should be temporary for few years - it will hurt your psyche the longer you keep doing it. Explore and change your earnings to something that will work for you long term.

natch · 5 years ago

Work at Google. They seem to have many thousands of people who do very little. Just look at their product quality. The atrocious performance of their Gmail spam filtering for example. It catches emails sent by Google itself, from Google, to people who have signed up with Google for the emails, and dumps them in the junk folder as gmail spam. Think about how bad that is. They’ve had 20 years to fix this. That’s just one example.

Clearly Google is the kind of place for a person like you.

iainctduncan · 5 years ago

I'm a musician and developer/architecture consultant. My goal since day one of tech work 15 years ago was "fund music life better", so I hear what you are saying. I currently average half-time and make a comfortable middle class salary.

The big thing to realize is that there is a huge difference between "I want a job where I can do minimal work and mostly do my own thing while still getting paid" and "I want a job where I can earn my living in 2-3 hours a day". I have done both, the first when young in non-tech fields, the second for the last 15 years in tech. I work very hard on those 3 hours a day, in a role where deadlines can never be missed and we are part of $100M+ transactions. I take that work very, very seriously. But I get paid enough to do my 18-20h a week and spend the rest of my time pursuing the arts, with no pressure to have to figure out how to monetize my music (a very nice thing).

If you're after the second, (hard, short work, for high money), you want to find specialized expert work where you are (as you astutely pointed out) out of the production loop. Consulting is the best thing I've found. When I'm on a gig with a client, they get me 100%, totally focused. When I'm off the gig, no one expects me to get back to them sooner than a day, allowing me to do grad school in music. The key to finding this work is to become an expert in some subfield of tech, and get really good at the human side. Writing, pubic speaking, negotiation, client relationship management, project and timeline management, etc. Not many techies want to get really good at those "soft skills", but if you do, and you are an expert in something, consulting firms will value you highly.

Another good option is contract tools development or freelance contracting for folks who need code only occasionally. Lots of companies will hire part time contractors to improve internal systems, and you're still out of the product deadline loop. I've done that too and still do it sometimes for scientists. Python and SQL are good for that area.

HTH

throw827123 · 5 years ago

I worked at a startup for over a year. You would think the hours would be crazy but it was the opposite. This was a semiconductor company and I am in physical design.

The list price of our tools cost over $1 million per license. We had a special deal for the first year for extremely cheap licenses. We taped out our chip and then the management spent the next year trying to get investment and/or sell the company.

During that time other people were developing improvements but I had no licenses to do anything. I attended 2 meetings a week. We were already working remote 60% of the time. I basically did a lot of hiking, reading, and projects at home.

This lasted over a year until I lost faith in the company and found another job. There are people still there 2 years later including two who do very little.

throwawayxjc · 5 years ago

As someone that spent years working 2 - 8 hours a week on their real job while getting top performance reviews, here's my slightly unethical tips.

- Choose a megacorp where you're far away from the value being created. Analytics at a e-commerce site? No. IT at an oil giant? Yes.

- Cherry pick what you work on, image is everything. Focus only on project that make you look good and (ideally) others don't understand. Work on them a couple hours a week and make it seem like you spent all week on them.

- When interviewing make sure your manager doesn't have a technical background in what you're going to be doing.

- Build relationships. This one is critical. Just genuinely try to be helpful when others are in a rut. Get to know your boss on a personal level.

You'd be shocked how achievable this is at a megacorp. Personally I used the time to launch a variety of businesses, but be warned choosing this path can be a double edged sword. Sometime's it's the amazing but other times you can slide into a funk when you feel like your life isn't going anywhere.

whateveracct · 5 years ago

remote job at a BigCo

get hired with years of experience to anchor your starting level nicely high

rake in salary, bonus, stock, benefits

once you get the tribal knowledge you're pretty much tenured so long as you seem busy and available

might be a little low on the tech side..but that just means more time and energy to use your tech skills for your own purposes

tluyben2 · 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

xakpc · 5 years ago

Maintain and support existing successful products is the laziest job ever.

I know a developer who single-handedly supporting a product - like a couple of days in a month for a full-time salary. He is paid because he is available, not because he works. He led a team that built this product, then dismissed it and supporting the product from then.

Usually, it is possible in non-tech companies, where you don't really care about the domain, just ensure that everything works fine.

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj · 5 years ago

I can respect this opinion and as I get older I realize how little I actually care about work. I am not really passionate about tech, security, etc, I just know a lot about it. I basically never talk about it with anyone, I have absolutely no interest in meetups, and I don't care about the news (past the minimum needed to keep up to date for my job)

The only thing I care about is money, and making more money. I don't care about your company mission, I don't care about D&I initiatives, I don't care about culture, just money. I will do an excellent job, better than anyone else, if you pay me well. Even though I don't have any passion for the work, I still do an amazing job because I know it will directly lead to more money.

I don't think its a big deal to want to skate by as long as you actually get work done. Just find an SE job in a company that doesn't harp about its culture.

IME the more they talk about D&I, the more annoying the company will be about brainwashing everyone to drink the corporate koolaid.

Stay far away from any SaaS companies as they usually want devs to do support or be on call for their shitass app. I don't know what skills you have but most lower-level programming is much easier in terms of not dealing with BS. Anything involving JS nonsense (frontend or backend) will involve a lot of product and people.

amarant · 5 years ago

A wise woman once told me to figure out what my passion was, and work with that.

While that's not always possible, in sure you can find some kind of job that is at least moderately interesting to you, and that you won't mind actually putting in the work for.

I kinda get where you're coming from, but I think you have the wrong solution. You don't care about the product you're working on, so find one that you do care about! Slacking off at some lame job you don't like is the way to depression, steer clear of it!

gamesbrainiac · 5 years ago

Product Owner Positions would be ideal. They have the least amount of deep work, and the most amount of decision making/meeting work, which you can zone out of.

hnarn · 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

amarant · 5 years ago

When I was in middle school, I was thought that this kind of behaviour was what brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that the capitalistic system prevented this type of behaviour from occurring, thus spawning rapid progress.

I guess the tendencies are still there, but I don't think a capitalist society will make it easy for you. Try and vote for someone pushing UBI maybe?

Whatever you do, don't become my colleague please, I'd hate working with you (and I'd probably get you fired pretty quickly as well, or at least try)

throwaway17392 · 5 years ago

Job at a corporate or a company providing B2B products, a small corporate with 100-500 is most bearable. Of course, you need to proof yourself for the first half year or so. Also there are occasional crunches. Actually it can be a win-win as long as you know what you're doing. (E.g. avoid the busy work.) Corporates have a lot of strange politics going on, nobody will ever know or even care. Good luck, although I can tell you that it can still be soul-draining but I can relate to choosing a job for some time to charge up.

johannes1234321 · 5 years ago

Yes, many jobs are working on projects one isn't interested in. It's a job one has to do ...

However to me it seems you're trying to make it worse.

What about trying to find a job in a field you are passionate about? Assuming you are an experienced software developer you should be able to analyse problems and solving problems. These are qualities not only in software.

There's a large field of things one can do outside a job, which can be interesting. Be it with a NGO or some other area. Such jobs won't pay much in money, but they can give you a purpose. Instead of writing code for solving a problem which you don't care about solve problems you find relevant.

Maybe also only for a year a two and then see how things are going.

cutler · 5 years ago

For a start cut-out front-end JS. That's a serious time sink these days. If you thought working around IE compatibility in the early 2000s was bad wait until you get sucked into a sizeable React project.

sangnoir · 5 years ago

Go into academia - not on the teaching side. I highly recommend being a software developer in a non science/non-tech University faculty (so you're not involved in research coding). The Arts or Humanities may be ideal, especially if you're reporting to a non-technical manager. It checks a number of your boxes:

* low salary

* low expectations. Dean wants a new checkbox on the site? Tell them it'll take a week or 2. They won't care - unless money is on the line

* no chance of career advancement

* lots of free time to pursue your interests.

WhompingWindows · 5 years ago

Consider: you may become depressed, unfulfilled, and unhappy in this life. I had a position that was around halfway to what you want, government database coding, and I was miserable. I think becoming fully "chilled out" is ideal, because being "half chilled" and half "in-the-hotseat" gave me whiplash a few times. I developed lazy habits over time, my work output suffered, and all that free-time on my hobby wasn't as great as I envisioned.

You know the story, it's Christmas, you're the only one in the office this week because you're new and your PTO is garbage, you're young and have no family to go back to anyway. You stroll in an hour late through the side door, check emails briefly, okay no one is here, then you fire up the YT clips or the novel reading or whatever it is. By 3pm, after 5 hours of pure faffing around, you surely deserve the christmas cookies left in the break room. By 315, you're pooped, time to head home, sneak back through the side door, and you're off to use the screen at the apartment.

Is there some nagging feeling in your stomach? That you could've explored the database, you could've dived into that long-term project you've thought of. You could've been writing up a research proposal, searching for new grants, or helping someone at a volunteer organization. Instead, you're "half on" so you're half-assing your life, not fully relaxing, not working at all.

Honestly, it wasn't for me. I want to feel fully into what I'm doing, and having to half-ass my way through a boring job was causing serious depression. I'd only recommend this if you can use less of your ass, preferably remotely, and if you're sure you won't have a crisis of meaning in life.

brainzap · 5 years ago

I found office it, tech support, SRE, cloud engineer pretty relaxing.

AlwaysRock · 5 years ago

Look for work at universities. They tend to be pretty slow and have middling pay.

onetimeusename · 5 years ago

> The pandemic made me realize that I do not care about working anymore. The software I build is useless.

This has happened to a lot of people and I am wondering what that's about. It's happened to me also. I realized my job is useless and the primary benefit goes to the sales guy who sells my services. Did the pandemic cause this? If so, how?

anonymouswacker · 5 years ago

Government contracts for development/consulting.

lolsal · 5 years ago

One of the challenges you will face will be being good enough to be able to work independently and without much oversight, while staying out of the leadership/management tracks.

You will have to learn to walk the line of being very reliable, but not over-delivering.

This is important because I think you have two primary options:

1. Aim for a full time low compensation with a job that you can easily do in 10 hours a week. You tend to still have to be "available" for meetings and stuff throughout the week, so this is less ideal.

2. Aim for a part time high compensation job and negotiate your availability/workload. For example, aim for the top end of your salary, but ask to work only 2-3 days a week for 40-60% of the salary. This is hard to get. Not a lot of places will go for this; they want team players working more than 40 hours a week. Some places do, you just have to ask, and be able to actually sell them on the idea.

The real answer is 'passive income', but that's a different ballgame. If you're just trying to work less, I would do one of the above (and I have done both personally).

kerfufle · 5 years ago

Wow I've been a software engineer nearly 15 years. When I was younger and had more passion in my career I would come to this site then I realised tech was largely full of annoying people with big egos and most of us spend our careers endlessly rebuilding the same shit in slightly different ways and it's quite rare to actually make big money from startups / equity and soul destroying trying to do it. I find it's also getting harder to avoid difficult ethical positions and compromising your own values with many of today's roles in the tech industry.

A repost of this thread on Twitter caught my attention.

I now work in a software job I'm much more comfortable with having gone through a number of much more technically challenging and 'successful' roles. I basically took over as the sole developer for a tiny family software business. The pay is not quite as good but once I'd proven myself I got to do things how I wanted and am respected by the family that run the company. I rarely now work long hours, often completing tasks in less time than I estimate they'll take and occasionally taking time out of my working day for myself. I don't feel remotely guilty for doing so - it's a role where the expectations and bar are much lower than I'm used to. Regardless I've delivered several sizable paid projects, usually about one a year while doing odd bits of support and development for the company's existing clients. It's the closest thing to running a business of my own without taking on the hassle and risk of employing people and managing the books etc. So I'd say it's a pretty good deal. However I am still beholden to some slightly idiotic decisions our customers make and have to deal with them directly but I don't mind - the variety is part of what attracted me to the job. I get involved in everything from pre-sales, producing quotes through to delivery and occasional support of the software.

It's hard to find a job role like the one I'm in but I think the starting point has to be that you have an idea of what you're after. The more you consider what opportunities there are that are not the usual tech nonsense you start to see there are definitely options out there.

I would say you need to have some motivation and contentment in your job even if it is fairly minor things otherwise you will probably end up depressed and start to subconsciously sabotage your own life and career. If you start to feel guilty about how little you do that's a good sign you've swung too far the other way.

All that said I would say good luck to anyone taking this path. Ultimately it has left me much happier to give up the aspirations of becoming CTO of some fast growing company and chill out doing my own thing. I spend time with my friends, family and my wife without the grinding stress of a high-flying job and the constant worry that I'm going to be called on in the middle of the night or work late or a whole weekend without any warning.

Life your fucking lives people.

3maj · 5 years ago

I made an account to answer this question.

I work at a major bank, >50k employees, this is where you want to be if you don't want to do anything. Most bank managers and executives are old, print out an excel sheet and use a ruler old. The bar is also set so low at most banks that with 2-3 hours of work you'll get stellar reviews and managers will think you're a god.

geogra4 · 5 years ago

I feel like if you did enterprise Java development for a large company you could get lost in the machine pretty easily. Just keep your head down and meet your deliverables and you should be safe.

theodric · 5 years ago

For me, it was a move into a (technical/site) management function in an international satellite office of an American company. I got paid handsomely (near top of achievable normal income in country and well above expectation for my age/experience) and only had to work as much as was necessary to maintain stability. This led to plenty of time for hobbies, because I was judged only on keeping my region running and out of the news. Lots of work at the outset, little once I figured things out.

Now, I'm in a (functional/people) management job that requires more focus, but pays three times as much, in a different and more expensive country, so it probably works out to around 2-2.5x as much. With the recent addition of a competent senior manager under me, I'm able to slack off a bit - a bit, not a lot - and play with my hobbies between or during particularly brain-dead calls.

tl;dr management, and fill the ranks under you with good people. I know you said you didn't want to manage people, but unless you're VERY good with creating novel AI, it's probably the fastest route to your goal. I recently did a farm management course with a guy who hammered home the idea that you need to focus on your desire/objective/goal, really understand what you consider important, and not set obstacles for yourself at the outset that would prevent you from getting there. His frequent refrain is that he could meet his goals "in prison" as long as he was willing to be flexible about how he achieved them. Give it a think. If you get to pick the people, having a weekly sync is a lot less effort than trying to write software part-time.

Another important area for you to focus on is cost management: if you can go, or make a 2-to-3-year plan to go, somewhere that the money you have now will buy a house outright, you can potentially live off a hell of a lot less. Reduce your monthly living expenses to exclude a mortgage or rent and include only food+utilities+tax+insurance+hobbies and you may find that you can get by with part-time employment, seasonal work, or time-limited contract work of your choosing. There are many flavors of this: go work in the sandbox for Raytheon, do a month on and a month off on a rig, get a job on a ship, go do a stint at a mining camp when you need cash, etc. All of those places need people with tech skills, and they're probably full of people who are in it for the money and because they love the vast expanses of free time between deployments.

N.B. I'm American, and have been in Europe for 18 years-- so yes, if you're in the USA, a move to somewhere with a more healthy work-life culture could potentially be realistic for you to consider. The Netherlands is not a bad place if slacking in English while maintaining a high standard of living is your goal.

wayoutthere · 5 years ago

Enterprise Architecture. Your whole job is to maintain spreadsheets and diagrams that don’t change often, attend meetings with solution architects to work through integration points, and draft reference architecture patterns. You need to understand a lot about tech and a little about business and it does tend to be a more senior role. The pay is awesome though, and I do maybe 5 hours of real work a week.

Pure technology work of the form you describe is the realm of offshore. It has very little value to the company so they generally aren’t willing to pay for someone in a country with a high cost of living. If you do find a job like this, expect it to be offshored when the company wises up. EA is a good mix of needing a technical background but also being in a position that is highly variable by company and not easily outsourced.

1-more · 5 years ago

I think the move is to get into something where you can be a big fish in a small pond for like a year, maybe 2, and then get a certain degree of respect/responsibility where you can delegate and coordinate. Then just skip delegating a lot of work to yourself. I have seen this happen in Ad Tech. I bet there's room in a dying behemoth like Yahoo (are they still dying though? IDK) for you to do this. Godspeed!!

skizm · 5 years ago

I've been on the lookout for something like this since maybe a year or two after leaving school. It is really tough to find a job with everything you describe. You can generally find most of these things, but having the job also be remote is where this really falls apart. Do nothing jobs aren't too hard to find, but actually having to go into an office and pretend to work for 40 hours a week gets draining pretty fast (a few months tops for me).

You might not want to hear this, but I landed on the fact that I should get the highest paying job I can, and actually work until I'm around 35-40 and have a mortgage paid off and a bit of cash in the bank. At that point I can pretty much coast on easier jobs and do 6 month contracts / 6 months no work for the rest of my "career". I can stomach working for 6 months if I know there is a long break each year.

Either way good luck. I'll be monitoring this thread for more ideas :)

deeteecee · 5 years ago

It doesn't look like you don't like working but similar to everybody, we have other things we would've loved to do that doesn't generate the income.

Anyways, I always thought big companies fit the bill for this even though I've only worked in startups myself. Actually, aren't sysadmin/IT roles also often great for near nothing? I'm also thinking about doing these jobs at places like schools/universities where expectations are low.

jordemort · 5 years ago

Sysadmin roles where you don't have to care about the product are definitely a thing, you just need to look outside the tech industry - think low-tech manufacturing and service industries. There are a lot of roles out there that can be low or no touch, as long as the email is flowing and the printer is online, although a lot of those kinds of places might not get the concept of remote work even a little bit.

If I really wanted to work as little as possible, I think what I would try to do is develop a customer base of local small businesses that aren't big enough to have their own dedicated IT person, help them get things set up, and then sell them monthly support contracts that include maintenance and some low fixed number of included hours for incidents.

mtnGoat · 5 years ago

Based on the things I hear here, any FANNG will meet your needs. Most of the Google engineers here seam to brag about only working 8 hours a week.

mimixco · 5 years ago

This is a great question and I appreciate your candor. Having been through a similar stage w/ my tech career (I was trying a switch to the art business), I think there several things that meet your requirements. You said you're ok with teaching and helping people remotely. There is s*ton of money in that. I did it with Shopify and other platforms. You can hate the platform (I surely did) and still help people (who wind up happy) and you can charge a lot.

If you can find a niche where you know the platform (ie: your average skills are amazing to the biz owner who has none), you can charge $100/hr and work the 2-3 hour day you want and probably be fine, depending on your spending. The premise we used for Shopify was that, by teaching you, we got you "off the teat," so the teaching was high value and we charged accordingly. Did everything through Zoom-type meetings.

gitastrophie · 5 years ago

OP should get a security clearance and a nice government contract. I did this for a while in my 20s and the work was super minimal, but your clearance/"expertise" combination gives you some protection from being ousted.

During this time, I was able to attempt to start my own company on the side, travel, and do things that were really exciting to me and gave my life more balance and meaning.

Since then, I have changed jobs and now work in the private sector. I now devote my soul to the company for some altruistic goal that seems less altruistic by the day. I still find meaning working here, but I still think being able to balance out work with other fulfilling things is important and I definitely have less opportunity to do so. I will say, however, that I could take more initiative to optimize my time and do other fulfilling things in what time is available.

Ultimately I do want to have kids one day and have to think about stacking some cash, which for me means less balance, while trying to not sacrifice meaning. I think the journey is about optimizing for different lifestyles at different points in your life and going really hard to achieve any and all goals you have at the time.

So, OP, go get your government job and start that side gig, but do it at 110%. Not a lazy 50%.

whydoineedthis · 5 years ago

why do you think devops/sysadmin work doesn't exist anymore? Either DevOps or IT is what you are looking for.

Anyway, if you find this holy grail, please let me know

joelbluminator · 5 years ago

Government jobs or established non tech businesses (e.g a developer for Nike or Coca Cola).

zffr · 5 years ago

A friend basically had exactly this for a while. He was an analyst at a big company who primary needed to run manual analysis on excel spreadsheets.

He learned a bit of programming and found a way to automate it almost it entirely.

He enjoyed the extra free time for a few months before feeling guilty telling management. They ended giving him a small promotion and cutting the team by 1/2.

Maybe you should try to find a non-tech analyst role somewhere. So long as you keep the automation to yourself, maybe it will work out.

lhorie · 5 years ago

Surprisingly, the type of job you're looking for does exist - I know someone in a role where they spend very little time actually working - BUT you may not like to hear what I'm about to describe.

The role is at a unionized utilities company. The reason there's little work is that seemingly simple tasks are usually estimated in the order of days (or sometimes weeks). There's little opportunity for career advancement since the unionized nature makes every role stable/comfortable regardless of contribution to bottom line. But through the same token, most work can be considered busy work: tweaking header font sizes to please the whims of some higher up, re-fixing regressions caused by mediocre peers and the like. Decision making is done by higher ups and for the most part you just work on tickets that are triaged for you. The work is on the flagship product, but it's so dysfunctional already that it doesn't really matter if you care about its quality or not.

The upside is the job is fully remote, and the workload is typically in the range of 10-20 hours per week, if that. Pays above national average too.

The downside is, don't expect to come out of this job with up-to-date skills. It's also extremely unfulfilling and meaningless work. It's easy money but it's also easy to get trapped in a rut if later your career goals change (yes, this happens as you get older)

My advice is actually to look for the opposite type of work: challenging impactful work. Happiness is a function of accomplishments. It's alluring to covet for less work, but IMHO that's the "grass is greener on the other side" phenomenon.

robertakarobin · 5 years ago

Try being a product manager of a web service at a big corporation. I stopped and went back to programming because of how little there was to do. You said you don't want to manage people, but in my experience all I had to do was:

- E-mail calendar invites for a meeting

- Show up to said meeting

- State the topic, point to an engineer at random and say, "What do you think?"

- Zone out for the rest of the meeting, zoning back in only if it sounds like the conversation is starting to get off track

- 5 minutes before time is up, say, "OK, it sounds like we're agreed that we're going to do X?"

- Go back to coding side-projects

It's a funny job, because even though it's very easy to coast, it's also fairly high-visibility and in my opinion very necessary. Without a dedicated person to spend 30 minutes a day watching over meetings, things seem to very quickly go off the rails.

lazydud · 5 years ago

This is something I think about all the time. I think I got really really lucky. I'm probably the only person I know who came out way, way ahead especially in the pandemic. I basically got to go on vacation for a year while still getting paid.

So my first two jobs were at startups where my co-workers were ex microsoft and google people. It kicked my ass but I was grateful for the training. I got super burned out so took a job at a hardware company that had a great brand, but I could tell that their software was really subpar and the company was more old school and "family" oriented. I never planned to stay longer than 1 year but the pay was 50% more and I "only" had to work 9-5 and Fridays most people took off early. As scary as it was at the time, I quit after 1 year to work on a side project and try the digital nomad thing out.

Well, less than a year later, the company called me up again because they needed to fill an immediate role. They needed someone with specific language skills as well as knowledge of our products. I honestly was still enjoying funemployment. So I gave them what I thought was an insane salary request and they said it was ok!

My role was all over the place since it was a new team, in a new country and to this day I really don't know how to explain it to people. The first phase was me doing a lot of prototyping work, to see what was possible for our new product. But as things settled and we were able to hire more engineers, I was able to step back more and more. The 2nd phase was me turning into a sort of walking encyclopedia. Since the company did kind of a shit job documenting things and had custom protocols to communicate with the hardware, I became the goto person. But the problem is that I don't think I know that much either, I just was forced by the team to get really good at Slack, Trello, Github search foo.

And now we enter the final phase. I had an accident with my knee and had to work from home for almost a year. During this time, I was probably a bit depressed, but also just tired of uninteresting mangerial type work so I wasn't even doing my minimal tasks as a human search engine. I kept thinking any day now, I'm gonna get a talking to from the boss, and that's when I'll finally get to say I quit. But it never happened! I think part of it is the unique situation where the people in the US thought I was busy with the foreign branch, and vice versa. When in fact, I was not engaged with either and sitting on my ass all day hoping for my leg to recover faster.

During my 1 on 1 review, I was very candid with my boss about my thoughts on leaving, the fact that I wasn't engaged by non-tech work etc... He was very understanding and said that he would fully support me moving to other parts of the company, and pretty much giving me a pep talk saying how I wasn't that bad. It was bizzaro-review, with me saying how shit I was and then him arguing MY case that I was a valued member.

Final phase part 2: With the pandemic in full swing, and still recovering, I spent a ton of time hiking. With the whole company going remote, I think everyone started to get in on the slacking off bandwagon and I was pinged even less than before. It started with an hour hike in the beginning to multiple days just gone in the woods. I think I visited every state park in a 1 hr radius. And STILL nothing bad happened. I could usually still answer something on slack in the middle of the woods. In the summer they gave me permission to work remotely from europe since everyone was remote anyways, and it would help with my ability to catch the timezones of both teams. I would spend entire weeks just being a tourist doing nothing but the occasional emails.

That all said, I think sometime this year I'm going to quit again and make the move to SF. As awesome and rare of an opportunity this is, it just feels... wrong. Skillwise, I've been stagnating. The only interesting tech stuff and learning comes from my side projects. I feel like the most knowledgeable person in the room all the time, which is really scary because I'm an actualy dud compared to the startup coworkers.

I don't know if you _can_ seek this situation out on purpose, but here's what I would look for:

1. a "family" company that respects work life balance. An older company, European maybe (like spotify etc), non software focused, privately held etc 2. a more senior-ish role. A jr dev is gonna be watched and "developed" so I think you need to be the one at the top looking down 3. build up trust and domain knowledge - I _did_ work my ass off in the beginning and somehow became the de facto knowledgeable person after a bunch of people left 4. role that works across timezones - normally this would suck and you would work a lot more, but with #1, you end up working less because people will assume you are working with the other group 5. look for a larger / growing team - this let me step back and delegate my job away 6. have a cool ass boss - I get along really well with my boss. Without all this undeserved trust and praise, I would probably have been canned 7. Be the type of person who doesn't want to be lazy - I don't think you can just jump straight into a job with the "dud" mentality. You have to "trick" people into thinking you actually care, and the only good way to do that is not to trick them but be genuine, then slowly let that attitude wither away by monotony and bureaucracy :) . Also, if you actually are really competent, then you don't have fear of being fired, because you know end of the day you could just "try" and then find another job. Only with this lack of consequences can you start pushing the boundries

throwaway928312 · 5 years ago

Waymo! 4-7 hours of meetings per day, but only 0-30 minutes of work. Hobby with headphones.

tristor · 5 years ago

I would heavily advise that you don't do a devops/sysadmin job. I think you'll find that your idea (probably as a software developer) of what that work entails is grossly incorrect. It has /higher/ expectations than most developer positions, because your changes has more direct impact on production with less guard rails. Career advancement possibilities and salary may not be there, but the expectations are very high, and it is usually highly involved in the product if the product is something served over a network (SaaS/Cloud).

gcheong · 5 years ago

Something in a financial services or similar large, bureaucratic, corporation where your job is to maintain an ancient system that everyone is afraid to change too much because all the greybeards that originally built it are gone but the company depends on it for some basic need. Note that this system will always be targeted for replacement by ambitious managers wanting to make a name for themselves but most projects will fail at the implementation stage if they get that far so you should be able to milk this cow for a fairly long time.

ashika · 5 years ago

i suggest you read 'bartleby the scrivener' by herman melville[1]. bartleby is most famous for the scene(s) where he tells his manager 'i'd prefer not to' when asked to do basic parts of his job. the full short story is much richer than its most cited line, however, and it could be helpful for your situation. bartleby works hard at first, but then starts acting more and more eccentric, eventually sleeping overnight at his workplace. his manager is the narrator and the slow transition of his perception of bartleby is fantastically done by melville.

also in this vein, somethingawful had an ancient story about a guy who got reorg'd into a position of no responsibility that was pretty great. i can only seem to find the third installment[2] of the series, though. like bartleby, he begins by doing good work for a while. but where bartleby's abdication of duty is intentional, driven by something like a depressive episode, somethingawful-guy's company slowly just stops asking him to do things as waves of reorgs and mergers leave him 'on the heap, but without any references' as it were. the zany antics of avoiding his hr dept are quite fun and i think the whole thing should be dramatized.

[1] https://www.owleyes.org/text/bartleby-scrivener/read/bartleb... [2] https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=26...

robomartin · 5 years ago

> I do not care about working anymore

My first reaction to this statement was not kind. Then I read through some of the comments and thought about it a bit. The reality is that, so long as you are OK living within the constraints your choices might impose, sure, why not, work as little as possible.

In my recommendation I'll take the entrepreneurial path. What you are after is what the VC community might call a "lifestyle business" (usually used as a pejorative, in my opinion).

So long as you are not looking to build a massive business you can do quite well ($10K a month gross income?) if you find the right niche.

While I hate to suggest this, Wordpress came to mind, perhaps at the top of my list. It's a massive ecosystem with an equally massive number of opportunities to solve problems with tech. I don't think you have to necessarily be a web designer for hire to make money. Creating an extension could be a rewarding pursuit that could also generate "lifestyle" business. If you are frugal and save your money you might be able to also survive loss of revenue due to competition. Since you don't care about work I am assuming you might not care about doing battle with competing products by making yours better.

As for working two hours a day and getting paid for eight. While I am sure such jobs exist, I would urge you not to think this way. Some might not understand this due to not having business experience. There's nothing worse than an employee who does not care. Business and entrepreneurship is very hard. It is far from the glamorous life some might imagine. If you are paying someone by the hour (rather than by the job) you expect them to devote that many hours per week to help you make things better (whatever that might mean).

If you figured out how to automate your job and get eight hours of work done in two hours. Great. It is fraudulent to then assume it is OK to get paid for eight hours. The expectation would be to use the newly-found time to go find solutions for other problems. In fact, a good manager or business owner would likely give you a raise or a bonus for what you accomplished and encourage you to attack some other area of the business that could benefit from such an approach. I know that's what I would do, no question about it.

Another interesting take, again, around Wordpress, might be to see if your domain knowledge due to your hobby (I don't think you said what it is) could have some value there. For example, if the hobby is entomology, maybe you can develop a plugin that entomology dealers (universities, enthusiasts, whatever) might be willing to pay for due to the domain knowledge that went into it.

The advantage of choosing the lifestyle business path, in my opinion, is that you get to choose just how hard you push and when. You could choose to work very hard for six months to get something off the ground and then coast from there. In general terms, it's hard to live well without effort. And asking others to support you because you are not interested in working isn't an ethically supportable position. That doesn't mean you can't make an investment in your lifestyle by making an effort for six months to a year and come out of it ahead of the game.

In some ways the pandemic was the perfect opportunity to do such work. Sadly some wasted the chance to better themselves. My next door neighbor invested this time playing online games, smoking weed and drinking. He is a winner.

In my case, I decided to hunker down and design a couple of products. One of them was a complete flop. Being hardware/software these experiments can cost real money. The other one is looking like it might make it. We have a customer who might start ordering 1K units per month and has the potential to grow that run rate to 10K and even 20K units per month within twelve months. Other potential buyers could be in the same range...so this could be a product that we could sell at a rate of 50K units per month. To get there I worked 12 to 16 hours per day, pretty much seven days a week for the last year (just me, nobody else, the entire pandemic so far).

Like I said, business and entrepreneurship isn't easy. Find something you might be interested in and invest enough into it to create a nice $100K to $200K a year lifestyle business. It isn't impossible.

LazyDev199 · 5 years ago

I used to be a founder and got burned out when building my last company.

I'm now working at a dysfunctionnal 300+ppl company as a freelance developer. I've been in full remote since before the pandemic, I'm charging 900€ a day, 22 days a month in a country where the median salary is 3k€. I pay around half in taxes and keep half for myself.

The company is disorganized, talents flee to other companies in a pretty competitive market so I'm not too worried about my job. I'm well spoken and I can explain my job to my managers.

Projects get spin up and shut down for legal reasons (ie: a deal is made with a retailer in Asia, then the deal is shut down because the retailer merges with a competitor), I just get reassigned, work a few months and then move on.

The company I work for is attached to a huge european retail company. The retail company pumps cash into the company I work for every year to keep it alive.

I log my daily activities as part of a personal project, I usually spend 2/3 hours doing deep work, in the morning, after our daily stand up meeting. In the afternoon I take walks with my wife, read, work on personal stuff, but stay available on Slack just in case someone pings me.

I havent worked more than 16 hours a week for the past 4 months according to my daily logs. I only had to work really hard for a couple of months about a year ago when a project had to be shipped and the senior dev in charge of it left without warning

It's a very unusual situation to be in with such a high salary but it's fairly easy to find a gig like this as a freelancer in a large group / a bank while raking in 620€ a day before taxes.

I wish you all the best, I probably won't do this all my life but I'm enjoying it while it lasts after spending the last 3 years working 11 hours a day on average, week-end included.

imwillofficial · 5 years ago

I respect your relentless honesty. Good luck

azhenley · 5 years ago

Lecturer at a small university.

Lendal · 5 years ago

Saying you like helping people contradicts the earlier statement that you don't care. You care about helping people. That's actually how most of us get through the day. We may not believe in the product(s) our companies make. But we care about the people who do, and helping them achieve something they believe in can be good enough as a career.

hahathrowaway · 5 years ago

Fantastic question and something I can relate to entirely.

How many times can you write the same stuff on different PowerPoint slides? How often can you help an organisation to reorganise their marketing campaign structure (that all perform the same anyways)? How often can you reengineer the same problem over and over again and always end up with roughly the same output?

That's just all precious time down the drain. Your time is so much better invested doing things that actually make you happy: Spend time in nature, push yourself in sports activities you enjoy, discover new places around where you live, start gardening, read a bunch of books, learn how to cook, or improve your DIY skills. Whatever helps make you you - that's how we should be spending our time!

I work in IT consulting and here's what I found works for me to some extent:

1. Be knowledgable in your field of work, courteous, and command some amount of respect towards you - be there when people need you (but don't be there for them too much, see my third point),

2. Delegate, delegate, delegate. Never offer straight away to take care of stuff for people just because you know you can solve their issue. Verbally, be knowledgable yet unreachable. Compliment others on their skills and delegate right into their smothered egos, and