Ask HN: Sources of remote dev work with minimal human interaction? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Sources of remote dev work with minimal human interaction?

Hi everyone,

I am in a situation that I feel some of you can relate to, so I wanted to pose this question in hopes of generating some resources for myself and similar people. I've had a few developer jobs so far in life and on balance, I haven't really liked any of them. When I ask myself why, the reason is always the corporate bullshit that I must endure. I find the actual job of being a developer quite fun and enjoy solving problems and building things with code. I also have no troubles with the interpersonal side of developing, as far as working in a team and being a decent coworker is concerned. What I cannot stand is the corporate environment and it's associated crap and rituals. I don't like being "obligated" to put in extra time with my colleagues on team events and retreats. I don't like daily stand-ups that are about talking about what you're up to so you look busy, rather than sharing (both ways) useful info with the team. I don't like a lot of the personalities I have to interact with at work (IMHO, certain departments/roles attract people who I feel are inherently dishonest or manipulative. These people creep me out and I wish I didn't have to be so close to them every workday). Many who read this will be able to add a lot to this list of complaints, as I can too.

What I want is a remote dev job where I close tickets. That is, one where the gig really is cash for functioning solution that meets spec, code standards, and QA. My ideal world would be where I log in somewhere, pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life. Does anyone know of any remote work where the hassle is just engineering related? I will specify that I am not interested in simply transitioning the interpersonal bullshit to a Skype-based model, so team-intensive remote work won't suit this requirement. My greatest thanks for any insightful thoughts or resources you guys can provide.

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I recommend learning how to put up with these things. Just stop caring about them. Treat it like laundry or dishes. You don't have to enjoy it, and there's no reason to get emotional over it. Just do it and move on. In particular, the job that you describe doesn't exist and where it does is exactly the type of development that's ripe for outsourcing.

If you can't find a way to play the game without emotional investment, then perhaps look for jobs in lower-paying sectors where you're less likely to encounter ambition and bullshit.

For example, have you looked for development jobs in the nonprofit and/or public sectors?

Nonprofit/gov't work in general can attract bad personalities, but IME the software development shops within those organizations tend to have very few of the types of people you want to avoid. The pay/prestige is low enough relative to other development work that you mostly get "true believers".

Universities (software development departments, not research groups!) are also typically nice laid back work environments.

Medium-sized non-software companies with small development groups (5-10 people) can also be good.

However, do realize that in all of those situations you are trading standups and TPS reports for daily interactions with non-technical end users, which come with their own set of frustrations.

Disclaimer: I'm a salesperson which I suspect is department number one on OP's list when they complain about dishonest departments they don't want to work with.

I really don't agree that non -profits or government are where to go if you don't want to have to deal with inane business bs. In my experience selling in to both for the last year they're both chock full of forms and meetings for the sake of forms and meetings. Just people going through the motions of what they think business is without the talent to do it properly nor the genuine need or market mechanisms to punish /reward those running things effectively. Tons of politicking and busy work creation.

The most straight forward business people to deal with are the highest ranking in the most overtly profit oriented businesses. They want to make a buck, you want to make a buck, you have simple common ground to build on when interacting.

You do mention "ambition" though which OP doesn't. So maybe you, them, and me all have different ideas of what shit people to work with are. I do think that OP is likely to get "corporate crap and ritualed" to death in any of the non profit businesses I've seen the internals of though.

I do second universities though. I have a developer friend who works for one and it sounds like exactly what OP wants. He's mostly left to his own devices working on tickets.

One thing to be aware of with the nonprofit/government work you mention is that it's the other Hotel California, from the Silicon Valley one -- you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. That's overstating it, but even developers with nonprofit/gov't accomplishments that should be impressive to dotcoms will have trouble moving back.

If you consider moving back to industry after some time in nonprofit/gov't, I think many in dotcoms will tend to assume you're not good, even if you've been doing similar or harder work as you would've in a dotcom. Because who would've turned down dotcom kind of money (fair enough), and the chance to have impact (questionable logic, to people saving lives and liberty), and the chance to work with the best people who are them (now it's getting circular). Most of their data points are from people who chose dotcoms, they see lots of gov't/nonprofit-related dumbness in the news, and we all have prejudices about things we don't know.

If you're not coming from another dotcom, besides your skill/aptitude being suspect, you're also probably being judged with suspicion in some exclusionary (and questionable) idea of "culture fit". It's not just women and some other underrepresented socioeconomic groups who can be marginalized on this basis.

BTW, if OP thinks they have an unusually low tolerance for BS, I'd like to suggest two possibilities: (1) maybe they really do have an exceptionally low tolerance, and pursuing what they are asking for is a top priority; or (2) maybe they're reacting to some bad experience that's not representative of industry as a whole, and they'd find a more representative culture to be tolerable, and a better environment in which to learn to work within reasonable levels of BS.

(Regarding #2 above, I'm sympathetic. I quit a prestigious job at a place I really wanted to be, which led to an aversion to one particular bit of "BS" that I'd previously tolerated, but which foreshadowed untenable problems. I've turned this particular thing into a cultural litmus test for the prospective employer, which has caused me to turn down a lot of opportunities that probably would've been fine, after the initial BS. OP's situation might be similar: not wanting to get burned again, and being very cautious, to the point that they're ruling out too many opportunities.)

Actually I don't entirely agree. There are many actually interesting government projects that may not pay great but will certainly impress interviewers who just implement button x on app y. It's not as hard to move out as you would think.

+1 ^ or if you (as you have here) have identified this as a important point, find a manager who agrees and work with them.

I have had the good luck to work for managers who handle the bureaucracy and I talk to other devs as needed and submit code

...pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria.

  1) respectably specified
  2) clear acceptance criteria

That's where 95% of the work is. That's what generates all of the interpersonal crap. I hate to be quite so blunt, but you're asking something like "why can't I just do the easy part?"

You can but you'll likely collect proportional pay. (ie the below mentioned $5/hour overseas outsourcing).

On a completely unrelated note, most outsourcing projects fail because they hope they can magically skip 1 & 2 and the outsourced labor will just genie up a working product.

"Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." - Edward V Berard

This is a fantastic quote.

Jesus!

That's 95% of the work? Suppose, we do really have two those things established, say copying an existing system or feature, do you honestly believe that there's not much else to do, because the people-in-charge did all the thinking and hard work, and all that is left is peasant programming work!? I'm sorry but that really reeks of self-justified corporate bullshit that OP was talking about.

I'm a software developer, a pretty good one, and I agree with them.

Writing code is, for the 95% to 99% case, easy. (That last 1% to 5% requires anywhere from cleverness to brilliance.) It's figuring out what needs to be written that is very difficult. It's the part that involves actually talking to people, understanding their needs, having empathy for those needs so as to help you refine a solution from "it'll work" to "it's good", and only then does hands-on-keyboard programming matter.

And most of it doesn't; it can be slapdash and it can be duct-tape-and-chewing-gum and as long as it correctly solves the problem at hand--which was identified and planned against long before a programmer ever thought about a line of code!--it's fine.

Programming is not easy. Programming is specialized labor. But it is the implementation of a strategy. Why would the implementation matter more than having the strategy in the first place? This is why well-paid programmers (outside of the inflated FAANG market, at least) are positively brilliant and working on high-value technical problems, decision-makers and leaders of people, or both.

I think you are conflating two unrelated things just by assigning the same percentages. Stating that coding is 95-99% easy doesn't necessarily means that it only accounts for 5% of the work. Yes, I perfectly understand the words you have emphasized. I do believe you are a pretty good developer, but please don't get the impression that people who questions the stated 95% work allocation is a asocial code monkey who is incapable of empathy.

> Why would the implementation matter more than having the strategy in the first place

Who said that? Noone is saying that programming is more important. On the other hand, I see I lot of people saying programming is trivial and not important. I wouldn't have objected if it was at least 25%. But 5%? That's probably true if you're just gluing frameworks together all day, but even then...

Is it not really absurd to claim that the person deciding things and telling people what to do is doing almost all of the work? But suppose that maybe there was a lot of nuance and research involved, and the resulting specification is very detailed. If that is the case, the programming involved will not be trivial either, hell it might be even harder.

> Writing code is, for the 95% to 99% case, easy

> Programming is not easy. Programming is specialized labor

D-did you just contradict your self there? I'm not sure what are you getting at anymore.

That's 95% of the work of a project manager. That was at least, until some charlatans realized that you can make big bucks persuading people that not doing your job is a great way of doing your job.

Hey, I also dislike large company politics and have managed to more or less accomplish what you've described here with freelancing.

You'll never get 100% away from interfacing with fellow humans, but I've found that a couple of factors in the types of gigs I favor have made my life mostly free from company life:

1. Find gigs with small companies. And by small I mean like 1-3 people max. My favorite are the solo founders who built a SaaS app and are quietly making bank and need a developer to maintain it. Speaking of which, 2. Find gigs where you can become "the guy" (or gal) for your client. These smaller companies often don't need a full time developer and can't even afford one anyway. My favorite setup is 10 hours a week indefinitely where I basically do what you described - acquire ticket, write code, make pull request. You are the secret weapon for the client's success.

How do you get these kinds of jobs? Do interesting or impressive technical things in public and don't be in a hurry. I've collected around 4 of these over the last few years and now make a very good living working less than 40 hours a week. I never really have to do "the hustle" of freelancing because these gigs are very sticky. I've never had anyone let me go, and in fact in a few cases I tried to leave but they then offered me an even better arrangement to stay around. Contrast this with the horrors of Upwork - freelancing doesn't have to be like that.

I don't really know how I would ever go to a normal 40 hour a week job now. Happy to chat with you or anyone else about this if I can help, my emails in my profile.

If you distill your benefit to your work as

* Open ticket

* Write code for ticket

* Submit to QA / release

You basically described how many places outsource development. So you are now competing with $5 an hour body shops overseas.

The reason I and many others hire local people, or at least people who want to contribute is to brainstorm and solve problems together with. Just turning specs into code is not worth paying someone 10x the overseas wage.

Now all your problems I understand. Perhaps try working at a smaller shop somewhere? Maybe a company < 20 total people, especially one that isn't 100% developers. Tons of little companies need a dev or two, but they don't have any of the standup and paperwork type stuff. Just some problems to solve, and a reasonable pace of life. Basically "boring backoff" type jobs.

FWIW the least political job I ever had was at... Microsoft, in the dev tools division. Seriously, less politics there than at the tiny tech company of about 15 people where I met my wife. That was almost 25 years ago, but I’m still amazed at how meritocratic it was.

My vote is for boring, unsexy industries that are always needed. Non-software focused. Warehousing. Power companies.

Preferably an industry halfway to monopoly. Companies that don't compete every day for survival don't worry as much about raises and have much less politics, because people aren't always on the edge of being fired.

There are a lot of interesting problems in those industries, but they're not flashy, so they rarely attract coattail riders, corporate cutthroats, and empty suit salesmen.

And frankly there are very few compelling and accessible problems in software at all in the private sector for software as such. Interesting problems you can use software to solve, yes. Interesting software problems (that aren't better situated at a research program at a university)? Not a whole lot.

Avoid volatile markets that suffer speculation or primarily employ low wage workers or minimal skills workers, or both. Not because poor or uneducated people are tough to deal with-- ime they are more pleasant than the college educated a lot of the time-- but because it makes it very easy for companies to lay off large sections of their work force. (Think agriculture or construction.)

Speculation causes booms and busts. Low wage work does the same as the market for work expands and contracts. Insecurity makes people cutthroat, and if they can fire their main workforce and rehire identical cogs two years later, then your job supporting those people can come and go, too. High skills labor force makes a company think twice about letting people go, because they might be hard to find again later. (You can fire your Fortran programmer, but good luck finding a replacement quickly and for the same price in two years...)

As you point out, leadership at a company can change all of this. They can foster a better culture. The problem is knowing this in the first place about an employer, attempting to get located inside the company wherever that magic happens, and then the insecurity of not being clear when the magic will end. (Either because you don't know what created the magic to begin with or because it's dependent on person exoduses that can't be predicted.)

I had the same experience...at IBM. Still the biggest company I've worked for and the least bureaucratic. I know that this was pure luck based on where I landed but I think big companies often get a bad rap and people assume that there's one culture so it's good to put it out there.

Seems like the team leads at Microsoft including Dave Cutler, etc. all the way up to Bill Gates rewarded the meritocratic process more than any other company at the time.

I imagine stack ranking unleashed the worst in interpersonal dynamics though

I'm one of the founders of a company that fosters a network of coders and this was one of its main ideas when we founded it - minimize the amount of communication overhead and allow coders to focus just on coding. Practically, you're getting assigned with Asana tasks that you tackle one after the other. Naturally, you can't avoid communication at at all but if you want, you can limit it to communicating pull-requests/scoping/QA etc.

Normally I wouldn't solicit people to sign up on HN, but since you asked for sources I figured I'll take the opportunity to help fulfill your search: https://www.codersclan.com/, if you sign up, mention you are the poster from HN and I'll make sure to speed the process up for you. Do note that the hourly rates start from $30/hour and that right now we're mostly looking for WordPress or front-end devs.

Another source you might want to look at is https://remote.co/ I think we even advertised there in the past, but naturally the type of work you'll get will depend on the contract you land.

You might want to state here that you only pay via Payoneer, and your pay schedule is net+10. Both of these are terrible.

Net 10 is terrible? Who are your clients?

I have spent a fair chunk of my 25+ year career consulting. Net 10 may not be the best terms, but it's far from terrible. $30/hr, on the other hand...

Being paid in 10 days isn’t the end of the world. It’s not fantastic, but it’s far from terrible.

But I have no idea what payoneer is. Unless it’s a weird way of saying “wire transfer”, then yes it’s probably terrible.

It's not 10 days; Net term is a month, plus 10 days, so you get paid once a month, 10 days into the next month.

Edit: That totally disregards that it's paid via Payoneer, so you'll also have delays in transferring your money from Payoneer to your pocket, which could take days more.

Oh. My mistake. Yes that is fucked.

Edit: are you sure that’s the definition of “net 10”?

From https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/2017/5/7/accounting...

> Net terms. "Net" means that the full amount is due for payment. Thus, terms of "net 20" mean that full payment is due in 20 days. The term may be abbreviated to "n" instead of "net".

From https://due.com/blog/10-invoicing-terms-need-know/

> Net 7, 10, 30, 60, 90

> These imply that the net payment is due in either 7, 10, 30, 60, or 90 days after the invoice date. For example, if the invoice was dated June 10 and you used one of the most used payment terms, Net 30, then the payment would be expected before July 9.

Edit2: the referenced site even says the same, presuming they handle invoices end-of-month:

> Payouts are sent on a NET + 10 basis. It means that for every work completed and approved in a specific month you get paid for it on 10th of the next month. E.g. if for work completed and approved during September you'll get paid on October 10th.

So I’ll restate my original point: payment 10 days after invoice is not terrible. It’s not fantastic but it’s not terrible.

Oh boy; I know, and I hate these terms as they can mean different things to different people/companies.

From their faq:

"When do you send payouts?

Payouts are sent on a NET + 10 basis. It means that for every work completed and approved in a specific month you get paid for it on 10th of the next month. E.g. if for work completed and approved during September you'll get paid on October 10th."

This is basically Net 30 + 10. It can get even more complicated by internal payables cycle.

Edit: When seeing things like Net+10, always asks what the Net term is; it could be anything + 10 days.

EditEdit: That 10 days you're referencing would be from the end of the month, not the beginning. From the beginning of the month, you're 40 days out. With legit corporate work, or direct to legit customers, this can work; when you're subcontracting to seo shops like this you won't even know you're not getting paid or have to fight for it until the next month.

I don’t think that’s what most people would see as “net 30”. Terms are always from the invoice date, which in their case seems to be last of the month.

While I have no direct experience in their system, Zerocracy[0] appears to exactly match your requirements, modulo your salary or hourly rate. Yegor Bugayenko, aka yegor256[1] online, is very prolific in writing and talking about Zerocracy, among many other topics, e.g.[2] Zerocracy imposes penalties for talking to other developers, instead of communicating solely via tickets and other shared documents, which must limit the politics you detest.

[0]https://www.zerocracy.com/toc.html

[1]https://www.yegor256.com/about-me.html

[2]https://www.yegor256.com/2014/04/20/how-hourly-rate-is-calcu...

While people may dismiss such a system for now, Yegor's prediction is that essentially all software will be delivered this way in ten or twenty years.

"Zerocracy imposes penalties for talking to other developers, instead of communicating solely via tickets and other shared documents, which must limit the politics you detest."

It always makes me chuckle when someone tries to replace bureaucracy with bureaucracy.

I had to check on the definition of bureaucracy, but I don't think this applies. The algorithms of Zerocracy are implemented via an "AI chatbot", for double buzzword bingo. I think bureaucracy requires humans, no? The better developers seem to be quite happy with the system, like being good at closing tickets or answering questions on StackOverflow.

Meta: The comments here are largely criticisms of the poster.

What norms should be established for Ask HN? On Reddit it is expected that the premises of questions may be attacked, "me too" replies left, or jokes made. On Stack Overflow questions that can be answered with specific information usually are, but questions are frequently edited for clarity and to remove editorializing.

What is the unique value of Ask HN and is this the type of question and responses we want more of?

Yeah I was sort of disappointed with the general response here as well.

"If I don't think your experience is valid, _it is not valid_. Oh you have that experience? Well it's wrong. Get a new one."

The fact is that it was upvoted because it is - to some degree - a shared experience, an experience which resonated with others. If we invalidate these experiences, we don't fix them - we suppress them. You may be able to invalidate engineering problems, but it does not work the same for interpersonal ones.

I dont know, i found it interesting that a lot of people are denying OP's issues. I think it is a kind of stockholm syndrome - people need to justify their current situation and legitimize it in their own eyes. I generally like Ask HN the way it is and i dont find it problematic

I have to admit that in a recent Ask HN I got downvoted for criticising the poster. It might have been better to say nothing. It's hard to judge, though, because sometimes, on balance, it's the best advice you can give. I can answer the question you asked, or I can answer the question you should have asked ;-)

I kind of think of it like the original question being, "I'd like to jump off of a cliff and I plan to strap pillows to myself to break my fall. What are the best pillow for the job for under $20?"

Upon reading the question you think, "Should I answer? If I don't, maybe this guy will jump off a cliff. If I tell them the best pillows for breaking your fall for under $20 without mentioning that the pillows definitely won't work, that's probably the worst thing I could do. If I say, "Um... your plan is probably not great. Pillows aren't going to save you from jumping off of a cliff", it's pretty negative but perhaps that's what the OP needs to hear.

With this particular question, I suppose it might be easiest to ignore it. However, I know I've felt exactly the same way at times in my career. Honestly, even now, if someone could provide me a TODO list of technical tasks and leave me to it, I'd be on cloud 9. It's would be especially good if they didn't complain when I do what they asked but the business suffered because they asked for the wrong thing.

There are actually some jobs that are a bit like that, but in my experience you always get bitten in the end. The programmer is always blamed, rightly or wrongly -- for the very reasons that the OP is unhappy with corporate culture!

I could answer: Do some freelancing and target small startup companies with pigheaded CEOs who have no idea that they actually need a development team. Most of those people will swear up and down that they know exactly what they want and that it will be 100%, for sure, the very thing the company needs. As long as you have a thick skin, you can take their money, ship them their software and when they inevitably blow a crater in the ground for themselves, just don't return their calls. I know lots of people who make a good living doing this.

But that's not what I think the OP asked for. They asked for a thing that doesn't exist. If they are the type to get hyper stressed out about inter-personal relationships, then going down this track is the wrong direction to go. So what do you do? Give them the answer to the question they asked, knowing that it's going to lead to unhappiness, or give them the answer to the question they should have asked?

To answer an earlier Ask HN, this is the kind of comment I save to reread in the future by replying to it.

Well-paying jobs like this exist (I have one), but you need to be lucky to get one. You need to find a remote-friendly/first workplace with a good manager who knows you and trusts you, and then you need to push some more for those additional freedoms you desire. Simply say you're not doing stand-ups anymore. Chances are if they're already remote-friendly, then they can be nudged to give up even more control as long as you deliver.

Good luck and don't give up, it's worth it.

To twist this slightly more positively: standups where remote or wfh people can join in and watch silently, and instead of forcing everyone to say something, just let people share what they want. And have a doc of notes for people who missed it and care. Way better than traditional standups.

The concept of a “stand up” generally doesn’t work for remote, because remote often means “9 hours time difference”

Regardless, standups are stupid. It’s another ridiculous process invented by managers to look like they’re doing something.

If developers need to know what others are working on because it affects them, they’ll ask.

I recently moved from a job that was onsite, had a management component, and was nearly 100% human-oriented to one something like what you're asking about. I'm now fully remote with few close co-workers on an essentially self-driven project.

It's wonderful for me, but I have to caution you that it is both a career limiting move and that you still have to do what corporate asks (and they will). That will include status updates, presentations, design review meetings, meetings with legal, required training, etc etc etc. I spend about 1 day out of 5 on this and still occasionally deal with "what have you done for us lately" style concerns.

Part of this is probably due to it being early days, but you should be aware that even in these very flexible, very remote jobs people still have to justify your headcount. And that means you will need to spend time telling those people how to do that.

Minimal interpersonal skills are a workplace requirement. I would either try to learn those skills or see a medical professional to see if there is an appropriate diagnosis that can help you seek out a role that accommodates accordingly. I promise you that the other people in the office aren’t there because they love you or each other. They are practicing social skills that they have learned, some so well that they do so unconsciously.

Not gonna lie, you're not going to find a job that requires zero human interaction.

I understand the "interacting" with humans can be tough. But as humans, interacting is what we do.

I am not saying there is no jobs like that, or you won't be able to find a job where you could do that. But there will always always always be some sort of corporate "crap" to put up with.

I think there's a very large scale of "corporate" crap though, and so why not seek to be on the low end of that scale? I've worked at a bunch of companies at this point, and I can tell you for a fact that there is a big difference in company cultures and the amount of bullshit you have to deal with. My current company, for example, is around 20k employees, and the bullshit runneth over. The last company I worked for never got above 40 people, and while there was still obviously some stuff that wasn't perfect, there was almost zero bullshit to deal with.

Just as an example, at that job I still interacted with people quite a bit, but almost non of it was mandated; people worked together to get shit done, and were trusted that they could reach out when they needed help etc. At my current company, it's all lowest-common-denominator; everyone has to use the same processes because some people will just sit around and do nothing if you don't make them tell everyone what they're doing all the time.

Anyway, to the op, I would say that you probably won't find something with close to zero interaction, but I do think you can absolutely find places where the vast majority of the interaction is fruitful.

I've had subcontracting roles like this in the past. Still not zero interaction, but if you build a network of strong people and you're known for getting shit done, what I've found is other developers that know and trust you are more than happy to subcontract work out to you, and that tends to be very low-overhead from an interaction perspective. The last time I did this, I had zero contact with the actual customer (which can be a downside to be honest sometimes); the dev with the contract and I would just sync up so I knew what I was supposed to be doing and I would just go off on my own and get it done, then we'd sync up for the next thing, rinse and repeat. In my experience, as long as you get along really well with the other dev(s), this is pretty close to what it sounds like you're looking for. But this does require building up a network of people who are willing to subcontract you out work, which isn't always easy.

What you probably want is to start your own company in the form of “solo founder”. No boss, no colleagues, just “the problem”.

"the problem" being getting people to pay you for something of value, right?

i wouldn't rule out "start your own company" but there needs to be some more clarity and purpose behind it beyond "i hate putting up with BS from other people in corporate jobs". moving towards something defined will be more productive than just moving away from something.

that's an important mindset shift from 'how can I avoid this' to 'wow there are so many cool opportunities in the world'.

This is a good idea if you have a high risk tolerance, and either some savings or investors. But before you hit product market fit it can be pretty difficult.

You would probably have to communicate in some way with clients if you ever wanted to make any money.

Someone would.

AFAIK building software is a collaborative event. What I mean by that is, most of the time, we learn what works better as we get into the process of building it. So, the ideal world you are expecting is not practical. Even if some work can be specified to that level of clarity and details, it is better to build a tool that takes in this structured spec and build the feature.

But, I hear your concern about working in a setup which feels ineffective. My suggestion would be to pick teams that are small (2 - 3 devs) with a well defined goal. Keep your interactions effective and short with this small group.

Standups and iteration planning meetings have value. Unfortunately many follow it as just rituals instead of seeing the real reason behind doing them and the value it provides. You don't need to call them as standup or IPM as long as what they are achieving are met in your project. That is the whole point of being agile.

Have you considered becoming an independent developer and creating a small but sustainable product. Examples like Pinboard or perhaps Overcast and similar one-man businesses come to mind.

The OP reads misanthropic to me, and that's a large stumbling block to what you suggest. Building good products generally requires quite a bit of talking to people. And the (personally, financially) valuable ones very often plug into all that "corporate bullshit", so understanding it--and understanding why it exists past the prima facie cynical explanation--is often important, too.

I have to disagree. You don't have to be a misanthrope to be fed up with the wasted time in a company environment. Making your own product is a lot of fun and requires interaction with your users which is an entirely different, and motivating thing. Having done that for 10 years, i can not justify the time wasted doing futile things or meetings in a typical company environment.

Yes, I suppose so. There’s also the support side of things, which is likely to involve quite a lot of “bullshit”.

I do not get why cooperations make it so hard for people who simply want to do their job with minimal bullshit. You would think the free market gets rid of such inefficiency, but evidently the free market is not efficient enough for that.

Why is it not efficient enough?

Perhaps it has something to do with propserity. Prosperity allows bullshit to grow without bounds because bullshitters cannot experience complete distruction if they can easily feast on our prosperous wealth, so they can easily maintain their illusions and fakery.

I see two possibilities:

1) You and the OP have discovered a trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk just waiting to be picked up.

2) There's value in what the two of you consider "bullshit".

What about the fairly obvious third possibility that some processes are simply inefficient and/or unproductive (and even counterproductive)?

For example, a manager reads a Medium article and mandates that everyone on the team spend 2 hours everyday documenting what they did yesterday.

Certainly you'd agree that there is not positive value here - maybe even negative value! This may very well be "bullshit" work!

Of course, we can find "reasons" for anything - even spending 2 hours a day on documentation - but that does not mean they are good reasons. (In fact, they are probably post hoc rationalizations.) We should not assume that just because something is the way it is, it is immediately value-adding. Nor should we assume it's immediately value-subtracting. We just shouldn't assume, which unfortunately, (2) does.

It's both.

Of course there is value in such bullshit. It rewards the status drive of those who can play the game. Those who don't, get only negative value out of it. Overall, productivity probably suffers. But those in charge do not care because bullshit games allowed them to get where they are and stay there.

I meant value to the shareholder. If there is none, then that trillion dollars is just waiting for you to grab it.

I'm not a coder. I am a remote worker. I basically have the thing you want as a writer.

I wish someone would create the service you are asking for. I don't think it exists at this point in time.

However, I share this list of remote work platforms pretty often:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...

Best of luck.

With my current colleagues, we actually started with more frequent Zoom calls and standups, but as we built trust, we got rid of these. (Sometimes however I think it's still necessary, even if we don't rationally understand why, just to see someone else's face periodically).

Now we just communicate over Slack, close tickets in Asana and document everything in Nuclino. Generally, if we're feeling anything ("Hmm this process seems inefficient or useless"), we simply express it, and change it. If that meant more bureaucracy, we'd do it. If it meant less, we'd do it too.

The most important thing is to communicate how you feel and why. I feel encouraging this culture really comes down to good organizational management and good product management (especially when it comes to feature requirements), not any kind of engineering process.

I definitely appreciate this perspective and plan to keep it in the back of my mind - this is probably what some developers are thinking even if they don't say it!

So if I keep this handy, people will say: "Oh, it's already been said, and that's okay! Now what? We can figure this out."

"What I want is a remote dev job where I close tickets. That is, one where the gig really is cash for functioning solution that meets spec, code standards, and QA. My ideal world would be where I log in somewhere, pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life. Does anyone know of any remote work where the hassle is just engineering related? I will specify that I am not interested in simply transitioning the interpersonal bullshit to a Skype-based model, so team-intensive remote work won't suit this requirement. My greatest thanks for any insightful thoughts or resources you guys can provide."

I have been contracting for the last 10 years and I have a contract like this now. It's great, I've been completing tons of work for the company, but it's not the norm.

I report directly to the CTO of the company and talk to him almost daily. I have no daily standups and almost no meetings. Everything is as needed. IE: If we need to meet with someone in the company. we schedule a short meeting. Everything else is through our main ticketing system.

"pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life"

If you want a better quality of life, choose companies that don't rely on software as their main source of income and have been in business at least 5 years. I usually only choose companies that utilize software, but the main product is not the software itself.

My motive is that I have side businesses that I also run during the day.

Consulting companies are probably the worst in terms of work/life balance. I worked for a consulting company that had hundreds of clients and multiple projects all going on at the same time. The pressure was crazy.

They originally hired me to get a project done in 3 months (down from the original estimate of 1 year). When I started working on it, they told me I had 7 weeks and pushed me every day until it was done. Luckily, I was able to figure out some better ways of completing the required tasks and got it done in time.

As far as pull a "respectably specified ticket" goes, this might be difficult. Most of the time, people don't know exactly what they want and part of your job (unless it's a very large company with a layer in between you) is to decode someone's request and translate it to software. It will almost never be as easy as seeing a ticket with perfect requirements.

But it really does sound like you should be contracting. You won't need to be part of any gatherings or useless meetings, because a company is paying you hourly.

"If you want a better quality of life, choose companies that don't rely on software as their main source of income and have been in business at least 5 years. I usually only choose companies that utilize software, but the main product is not the software itself.

My motive is that I have side businesses that I also run during the day."

This post really resonates with me.

People on here always tout the idea that you don't want to work for a company where software isn't the main product because then you're in a 'cost center' so it drove me into a job at a faang company. Now that' I've been at one for a few years I see that it's just full of people chasing clout so they'll work themselves into the ground.

Trying to work on side projects is futile when you're expected to work lots of unpaid overtime so if you have any ambitions outside of work you won't fit in well. I wish I had known this earlier on.

Remote work is also a good option if you want to work on a side business/other project. At minimum, you save your commute time, which can be used for so many other things.

"expected to work lots of unpaid overtime"

A great thing about contracting is that you are paid for every hour you work. It has more risks (less stability than a full-time job), but it definitely can give you a better life balance, if you want it.

Companies are also less likely to give you overtime if they need to pay for it. Most of the time, I have to get overtime approved.

It really depends on your goals. Working for FAANG is good for some developers, because they want the prestige, you can make really good money, and you get to work on some really cool software. I don't care about any of that. I just want to make a living while I'm working on my next business.

The business is my goal.

Could you elaborate on the overtime culture you've experienced at said faang company?

I have a job that's almost like you describe.

I'm a software support engineer. (A job some find undesirable, so it keeps the field open and provides a decent pay scale.) I don't get paid 'by the piece', but I do work remote and don't have to put up with much office-nonsense. I really like the job. Maybe you can find one like it.

About 'piece work', I think that'd be a hard game to play. There are lots of talented programmers all over the world, and some of them live in low cost areas to live. (Very low cost.) I'd hate to compete with those kind of folks for a paycheck, even when I win I wouldn't win much.

Good luck to you!

Don't act like you want to act and be proactive.

People will use you as you act. If you are someone who is always quite, never has time for team events, never interact much but works on tickets in good quality, your team lead or manager will learn to use this for them.

I like to have a team with everyone engaged but if i have someone on my team i can give a ticket and they just do it in good quality or don't mind if i tell them how they have to rework it, great.

Make sure you are not in a start up. There is stress and direct communication needed. Look for something less edgy, less modern. Something which works but is not that interesting and good defined.

I think the answer you are looking for is algorithmic trader.

Work only for the whims of the Mr. Market. When your making money, the only people you have to deal with is the people you pay.

I would say bitcoin trader, but well that didn't turn out so well.

Bitcoin continues to be one of the most lucrative trading opportunities, but automated trading has become highly competitive in the past 4 years. Much higher levels of knowledge and abstraction are now required in order to get returns which were formerly almost accidentally possible.

Not sure if my sarcasm was properly illustrated.

>> I think the answer you are looking for is algorithmic >> trader.

And the OP could lose his shirt and a lot more if he doesn't understand all the details that go into doing this to make a living. Then he will surely be forced to take a job with continued corporate annoyances.

Not sure if my sarcasm was properly illustrated.

oh, ha, no, sorry, I didn't get that.

You and I generally feel the same way here. I freelance remotely with very minimal human interaction. Often I will go weeks without interfacing with a human.

As far as sources for that type of work, you have to treat it like a business. Get clients and keep clients that need ongoing and long-term work. Between that and referrals that just come in naturally, I essentially never have to source work. I always have more than I need.

It also helps to have strong call skills. I have gotten quite good at communicating via phone or similar whilst remaining a lifeless bag of meat in IRL social situations.

In my experience you’re describing remote “consultant” work.

I haven’t worked in an office for over a decade, I generally work with smaller companies who aren’t obsessed with “doing agile” or scrumping or koombaya boards.

My current major client uses slack and we probably chat about either bugs or new features on 3 days out of a given week, but mostly it’s just working on tickets.

This doesn’t necessarily work well for all roles or clients but good clients generally just want the result.

What technologies do you usually work with? Some tend to have more corporate use and thus may be harder to find less corporate-y clients.

I did that work for a while. Basically, they were outsourcing to me because they can't fill their local position. I did charge higher than the local rate though (London). But you'll need to go through the client acquisition first and there will be emails, payments, etc... You know: freelance bullshit.

There are ways to avoid corporate bullshit:

- Start your own product. But you might face some government bullshit.

- Trading. Probably the best if you want to avoid any human interaction. While you are at it, move to a tax-friendly jurisdiction and pay 0 in taxes.

This is almost exactly the specification of offshore workers. I pay anywhere from $5/hr-$100/hr, depending on skillset.

I'm not sure if this gets you a modest quality of life where you live.

check this out - http://www.admcloud.net/en/ACDN

They have a pool of tickets and developers outbid each other to win work. I think this is what you want. Honestly, I find this type of work to be very depressing.

Team events are there for a reason - to build team bonding and coordination. I'll recommend you to get a coach to help you get accustomed to corporate life. As they say - if you can't fight them, join them.

They should put up a ticket to install SSL on their site.

In my opinion if you are looking to compete solely on output and not relationships and understanding of the context of the problem solving (which is what "please put it all in ticket for me" says to me), you are commoditizing yourself. After a bit, I think you'd be competing against the rest of the world.

I'd rather avoid competing against smart people with lower fixed expenses, than you very much.

You get what you put out?

If you keep quiet, but regularly update your tickets and/or PRs with just the facts, do people still bother you?

I work in a position that is exactly as you’ve described. To get this sort of position, I searched for small companies that have a developer position that I’m well-qualified for.

To be fair, I started on-site and became remote when I moved away. Also, I’ve never worked for a big company because I knew I’d hate all of the stuff that you described.

You can work for yourself. Make and sell your own software/saas products. I pay myself well, and have a six figure number of users/customers, but have never spoken to any of them in person or on the phone. I do answer emails but that could be outsourced if you really want zero human interaction.

In my FAANG experience, the people with deep technical expertise can simply say "no" to most of the corporate b.s. The environment you are in now may be too distracting a place to build that expertise however. A startup or smaller engineering org may be a better fit.

> FAANG

Let's be inclusive and start using FAANGM in an honor of Microsoft

Well, as for now $1T are MAGA

that acts like bleach for the original MAGA

I applied for a remote place that advertised exactly this. What is your skillset?

I work that way on upwork, no phone/video calls or hourly roles. Limits me but its a second income.

Topical might work this way.

This sounds like an ideal working arrangement, in contrast with the likes of Upwork where you have to sell your soul to the client, and the marketplace.

Also interested to know if such jobs exist.

I think the issues you describe are a function of company size. If you find one that is under 50 (or even under 20) people, there will be basically zero corporate fluff.

You re either looking for freelance-type work, or why don't you start your own thing? You can look at indiehackers for some inspiration.

Have you looked into toptal? They sound kind of like what you are looking for. Haven't used them though, so not totally sure.