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Comment by blentz | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been on the receiving end of similar requests before.

“I’ll work for free or nothing if you let me do what I love under the umbrella of your organization because I love it so much.”

I did one or two agreements like this and then stopped altogether. The individual would start their work, others would start to depend on its existence and the individual would leave in a matter or weeks or months because something else better came along for them. There was no incentive to keep the relationship going over a longer term. My organization just wasn’t setup to see any upside to short lived but high quality team members.

Is there anyone out there who does work agreements like this currently and benefits from them? Would love to hear more details. Perhaps that feedback could help Franceso with his pitch.

Franceso please come back in a week and let us know what kinds of offers you received. Will be very interested to see where this goes.

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I have some similar experiences. Especially with people saying "let me do what I love" or "give me a position where I can learn new things".

People like variety - the initial love doesn't last long. After a few weeks/months it gets boring and repetitive. Learning the shiny new tech is only fun until you you've figured out how it works, but the project doesn't end there and you have to deliver a product in the end. But for most people who exclusively want the "position where they can learn new things" fixing the bugs and doing the finishing touches is no longer fun once they've figured out how the underlying tech works - they leave for the next position where they can learn another shiny new tech and you're left with a half-finished project (usually with subpar code quality because this was the first project they did using the new tech).

I feel like this is me with side projects sometimes. Do you have any tips for staying on target?

I generally don’t have this issue in my actual job.

Here's a couple of thoughts. Sometimes not following through might not be about feelings or at least not directly. If you do a project to learn some new tech then the project is not about what it does but about how to do it. So make sure you pick side projects that you think need doing. Find a partner or a group to do the project with or create some way that you make yourself accountable for it's completion. Who are your projects for? If it's for yourself, then is it something you really want or maybe just an idea? If it's for somebody else or some group then create a connection to that group or some people so that you know who you're making it for and include them in the project. That way you have someone to deliver it to and to continue to support. Lastly, maybe it's a decision issue. Maybe you just never really completely decided to do it. How do you know when you've decided to do something?

For side projects, I think there is some value in not being concerned about finishing them. If you're doing them for enjoyment then they shouldn't feel like a job.

But I find defining exactly what done will be on a personal project helps a lot to get completed. I define features are the minimum necessary and once I reach those features I immediately switch to trying to release it. Releasing is always a lot of work so it's easy to put it off forever while constantly iterating on a product. But actually releasing gives a good feeling of accomplishment.

When I get stuck on projects that are very meaningful to me, I chip away at the pieces I don't want to do and allow myself to take as long as I need to complete them.

When I get stuck on projects that are not so meaningful to me, I reduce scope.

Well said. This is why engineers who know how to finish the last 10% are truly valued by good colleagues and managers.

And those who aren't like that by nature are much less useful I suppose?

I don't think so, most teams never do the last 10% on any project ever. They pick the low hanging fruit with the first 80% and if they are thorough they might bring it up to 90%, but 100%? I've never seen such a software project.

I'd say that Total Commander is very close to 100%.

TeX82 as well. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#TeX82:

> Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.141592653; it was last updated in 2021.

But this is my personality. Given repetitive work I become depressed quite quickly. I say this as a 40 yo who understands themselves well. Yes I can struggle through, but this career has brought me to the brink of suicide on two occasions. Working to the grind of an agile development cycle is poison to me, it drains all color from the world. I'd rather break my bones. Where is the space for people of my color? Who dry up and die if asked to write boiler plate crud code and unit tests for fizz buzz UI elements.

Unless I'm solving a problem that's genuinely intellectualy stimulating then I have 0 interest in coding.

Most of us hide the misery because we know that the only outcome of airing it is dismissal either in the short or the long term.

There is no role for us in this career but having sunk so much time into it we have no other option but to keep on going.

You have to do your own thing ... usually that's bad advice but for people with the temperament you describe I think it's reasonable.

Also a lot depends on expectations and finding good partners. In a previous job I worked with another guy as a team. I would start projects and get an MVP out and delivering value - then move on to the next thing. He would go through and essentially rewrite them to be high quality, solidly engineered products, well integrated with the rest of the stack.

We both got to do what we enjoyed and were good at: I am very fast at breaking new ground and delivering new value, and find engineering a bit boring. He was very good at improving existing systems, but too slow and plodding to try out new ideas effectively.

i have the unmet rambling dreams of the first person, and the anxiety-driven perfectionism and revulsion to poorly written code of the second person... so i'm unhappy thinking about unfulfilled ideas, unhappy writing new programs, and unhappy fixing old programs.

"i can only do so much and of course it's never enough"

i want the perfect programming language, the perfect gui library api and theme, the perfect program, the perfect ide... and i can't accomplish a single one

and of course C++ is an all-devouring Cthulhic monster that does everything but poorly, Rust has immature gui libraries and doesn't fully align with my values and desired features (I want linear typing, strong typedefs/subclasses of integer types, polymorphic variants/anonymous unions, prioritizing iterator generators over async), qt is basically legacy code and Qt Widgets is mostly unmaintained but difficult to fork (to build, create Windows installers, and convince Linux distributions to accept behavior-changing bug fixes), and my personal dream project (https://gitlab.com/exotracker/exotracker-cpp) is vaporware no matter how much i burn myself out making it (trying to both explore new ideas, and engineer them well, at the same time).

Personally I love doing the finishing touches but I'm usually not allowed to because the feature or product is considered good enough. It's hard to find a job where everyone really care about quality.

The obvious elephant in the room is how can someone afford food and rent while working on $1 or whatever. If I was a hiring manager I would assume one of 3 things: 1) He is independently wealthy, 2) He lives in a van, or 3) he really expects $50/hour and this is some sort of bait-and-switch strategy.

I'd also suggest people making these requests to try and expand their interests to make themselves more rounded and valuable. For example I'm totally the kind of person that likes to jump from one thing to another cause I like the challenge and I get bored quick otherwise. But instead of jumping ship cause the challenge is gone I try to find a different closely related challenge.

Here's a couple of techniques for anyone looking to do the same:

1. Look at the 'supply chain' of inputs and outputs from your problem area. Are there new inefficiencies somewhere in the stack that you can dig into and solve, and leverage your new knowledge. This could mean a whole new area of things to learn in order to investigate or solve those problems.

2. Never accept the status quo. Every time you're asked to do something else, treat that as an opportunity to find one thing that you can improve in the related systems. Here you'll learn the new system, but you'll also learn how to pick worthwhile areas for improvement.

3. Be reflective and review what you found interesting and what you didn't and dig into the ones you didn't find interesting. Ask yourself why you didn't like things; was it cause it was too difficult to pick up? was it cause you don't like people problems? was it just too big a problem to tackle? Dig in more and ask why again (like the Toyota 5 Whys). Eventually you should be able to find a problem area that you can clearly define and potentially work on to improve.

I realize these 3 techniques won't necessarily lead to 'cool tech problems', but that's kinda the point! If you can get yourself interested in solving related problem areas, you'll find you pick up a lot of useful knowledge and value that you can apply in many other areas you wouldn't have first thought of, all while always jumping between things and not getting bored!

(edit: formatting)

I don't have anything to add to this, only to say thanks - that's decent advice. If you do X, you can learn about Y, and apply it to Z.

If you have a broad interest there's like a million different ways to pivot and branch off to learn different things.

Seems like a weird idea to me anyways, to offer to work for very little money or even nothing, as long as the work is interesting.

To me it seems that time is much better spent on a fun personal (side) project. And who knows ... maybe the side project will earn some income in time.

But that's not the idea is it? The idea is to define the terms, and see what the bids are. Perhaps, if the bids are too low, the decision would be to 'pay oneself' (spend from savings) while working on said side project. But the point is simple - an attempt to find a union of two interests at a price that makes sense.

I did something sort of similar. There are limits to what you can do with a side project, and joining a company gets you access to other people with different skill sets from yours.

In my particular case after finding a good fit with a small startup I told the CEO to just pay me as little as he could reasonably justify and make up the rest in equity (which I was fully aware would likely be worthless). In a different framing, I was "spending" my missing salary by "hiring" some people to do the work I wouldn't want to do - pitching deals, forming business relationships, and negotiating contracts to get me the data that I actually wanted to work on.

Same, sometimes people volunteer to help me code https://coursemaker.org for free because they like the idea. In one case this has worked out well. But in a couple of others the engineers have vanished quite fast. Sometimes I wonder if I made a much more serious effort to onboard/document/give ownership then would they stick with it. What do you reckon - how was the onboarding in your case?

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