Ask HN: Where can I work if I'm just a good developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where can I work if I'm just a good developer?

9 pointshdhp13 comments

I live in the Bay Area and I’m exhausted trying to prepare and interview like I’m a 10x ultra high performing engineer that will transform everything I touch into solid gold if just given the chance. The truth is, I’m not this person and I don’t have any interest in becoming this person. I have a solid set of skills that I’ve worked hard to achieve, I take pride in my work and work well with others, and I’m confident I can do a good job once hired, but I am someone who does not want my work to be the defining characteristic of who I am. I just want work to be work and how I pay my bills so that I can do the things that bring me joy in life outside of work.

I feel like I’m at a crossroads in my career where I would need to do an enormous amount of self study, interview prep, and personal projects to get to the next level where most of the companies I have interviewed at seem to expect people to be at day one, and if I’m being honest with myself I don’t have the interest to do it anymore. I don’t want to spend my free time this way after already working a full time job where I write code all day, I’m not interested in learning the minute intricacies of technologies I already use at work, I have other ways I want to spend my time frankly.

Are there companies that exist that have a more realistic expectation of hiring and performance standards? I’m not asking for a free lunch, but just something where it’s enough to show up, put in a good day of productive work, then go home. I honestly feel like we (software engineers) take our profession and ourselves a little too seriously in general. Doctors get paged in emergency situations and might have to wake up in the middle of the night. The fact that I can be on call and have to wake up at 4 AM to debug an issue with an analytics dashboard is just ridiculous. Some companies are actually trying to go to 996 work schedules to “win” the AI race, like what is going on here?

Pretty much every company has some software component to it these days, even if it’s for internal tooling. Find a normal company and work on that stuff, not a “tech company”.

Aren't a fair number of them are outsourcing/contracting that out, though?

Not all of them, and he just needs one.

Depending on what he’s willing to tolerate starting out, he can also turn a job he might not like on paper into a development job. I started out doing sys admin work. Eventually I started building tools to help myself, which I then shared with the team. Management saw the value in that after a while and built a whole team around what I was doing and now I have a software engineer title. It wasn’t a fast way to get there, but it’s exactly the kind of job the OP seems to be looking for. When you’re a developer outside of a hardcore development team, people treat you like a wizard for doing fairly basic things.

True, although both of those are hard roads in a way. Finding one of the small number of tech or tech-adjacent jobs at non-tech companies can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, since you have to comb through so many companies looking for something they don't foreground. And turning a non-dev job into a tech job is even harder since you have to first get (and probably do a decent job at) the non-dev job.

It may be that this is inevitable. In fact it may be why these jobs have the advantages they do, because they're hard enough to get to that they're ignored by the people rushing for the "10x ultra high performing engineer" jobs.

The future of software is likely self employment. A lot of people haven't realized it yet but AI makes the corporation obsolete.

There are probably tons of companies that fit this profile. I don't have any tricks for finding them, but you're going to have to do the research on companies including asking current employees. If they have a very rigorous interview process then you might want to skip that company.

996? I’ve been working hours like that for a long time.

You might like working in aerospace.

My sincere advice: move out of the Bay Area.

Sure but where to?

Raleigh Durham triangle is low COL with a lot of lower case t tech jobs. And doesn’t seem to be in the crosshairs of the government.

Definitely wouldn't recommend

Highest concentration of software engineering jobs are in the Bay Area, especially well paid ones. Even in LA is hard to find good software engineering roles outside of FAANG

In the Bay, the ratio of companies<>candidates is higher, ie. there are fewer candidates per engineering role than pretty much anywhere else

To OP: being in the Bay Area you might be perceived as a better candidate, even if subconsciously. So maybe try getting a remote job while still there, then move somewhere else. Or just keep looking. Especially here on HN, in the Who is hiring threads, there are plenty of well-funded startups that can pay good salaries and struggle to find engineers (but only hire locally in the Bay)

Move away from the Bay Area.

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