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Comment by was_hellbanned | Hacker News Reader

The rather unethical alternative is to find a job in a fairly incompetent group at a company that's not extremely tech focused, then spend most of your time working on whatever you want to. I've had jobs (and spoken to many people with similar jobs) where I could accomplish all my tasks within a couple hours of actual, focused effort, leaving the rest of the work week for personal projects, side business, etc.

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The problem that I've found with those environments is that the 60% of downtime you have is usually when people are socializing instead of working. That means it's not actually that easy to focus on your own project. Also the office laziness rubs off and you tend to be less disciplined to work on that personal project than you think you will be. Perhaps somebody out there can consistently pull it off, but I've never seen it.

I met a guy who worked in the tech department of a large department store chain. He was one of a couple hundred programmers in a large cubicle farm. It was a pretty dead simple setup, each programmer got an assignment (generally COBOL maintenance, and new stuff was in C#, I think) that was due in 2 weeks. Rinse and repeat. Just like highschool or something. Anyway, he'd finish his "assignment" on day 1 and spend the next 2 weeks working on his own projects. Only made 40-50K, though (in the midwest).

What is good money in midwest (excluding contracting and finance)?

Where I live, a student coming out of school with a CS degree could expect 55K or so, moving up to maybe 80K after years of experience. That being said, I pay $450/mo for a 1000 sq ft apartment, and gas is < $3/gallon. Cost of living here is nothing compared to the west coast.

There are an abundance of tech jobs at large non-tech companies here. WalMart, for example, is headquarted here. So you get a lot of programmers who don't do much, if any, hobby code and programming is just a job. They get their 4 year degree, sign on with Walmart, work, get married, have a family, etc. Not a very eventful place at all as far as tech goes. I was once on a flight from Texas to Arkansas and sat next to a rails dev from the bay. I was so excited to sit next to a techie and have a chat, and then it occurred to me what a lack of tech community we have around here. This was a big deal for me to meet another dev but to him it was just an average flight.

Not really midwest, but I'm in Colorado - it's not hard to find $100k+ jobs for experienced programmers, and buy a nice house for $250k. It's an amazing confluence of cheap to live, but high pay work.

Plus mountains.

The weirdest thing is that I've worked at places where I couldn't get other people to move fast enough to stay busy.

That is, if I tried to work at 80% utilization I'd always be arguing with people to get them to pick up the pace.

Once I decided to work at 40% utilization I found I got along better with people. My boss bitched me out once for "not being fully committed" but he quit the next month, so things went on for another year when my new (absentee) boss told me that we ought to let the guy who has temper tantrums all the time get his way because I'm more flexible than him... A recruiter called me the next business day and I was outa there..

What I did in a previous situation like that went:

   Phase 1: Get angry at people being slow.
   Phase 2: Write tool to make slow people incapable of being slow.
   Phase 3: Profit.

Phase 2 keeps you busy in while the slow people are slow, so you don't get as angry. Then in phase 3, the slow people become irrelevant so they don't frustrate you anymore. Plus you get recognition for improving the efficiency of the office.

oh, right. this is also really good advice. after learning how to write a yacc grammar, it's really easy to trick "non-technical" people into doing their own programming with with domain-specific languages. JBehave also looks useful for this purpose.

What was the tool and could you turn it into a SaaS?

Excel with VBA, I was an infantry officer at the time. I made VBA tools for every station in the tactical ops center.

Given the nature of the work, I don't see how I could turn that into a business. Also the software was completely amateur; I went to study software when I found out I liked better coding than being an infantryman, as a consequence of this.

I don't know if it's that unethical -- I think there are a lot of jobs where if you made a graph of the worload it would look rather spiky -- IE, sometimes you're very busy, but with long idle times in between. Those downtimes are a good opportunity to work on pet projects or learn a new skill for career development. I think most good employers will recognize that if you're otherwise good at what you were hired for.

Sometimes they don't know what they hired you for. As in have no idea how the task should be done and how much time it can possibly take. That can be unethical.

If you have spiky workload and work on fun projects or just learn, I believe that to be fine.

upvote, because while i don't know if it's ethical or not either, that's my situation, although i didn't recognize it as such when i first started.

i've used the "variable workload," justification before (at the suggestion of a manager, in fact), but i think an even better justification is that i've taken a major salary cut compared to my previous cubical-oriented, corporate job. also, i try to spend the extra time developing skills that, while not necessary this week or month, might be useful later.

there was a post a day or two ago about "money is freedom," and while i guess that's true, freedom from money can also be freedom.. or something. i dunno, my reasoning is probably flawed, but i feel like i'm learning a lot, eating well, and pretty alright with my job at the moment. a lot of the original post seems like post-PhD(tum) angst to me.

Now I'm imagining a website where people post about jobs they have that are like this, and try to get others hooked up with jobs at in these groups.

The logo would be a circle of vultures above some roadkill.

Warning, this story is long and will drain your time if you start reading it because you'll want to know exactly what happens.

Man, I remember reading this and I loved it. A saga of corporate wastelands. I know deep down that it's too hilarious to be real, but I like it anyway.

Brilliant! Made my day. Thank you, sir.

I was stuck in that situation this time last year. I could knock out my daily work in maybe 2 hours (mostly babysitting some Excel spreadsheets) and spend the rest of the day building my own skills. So long as I was really good at alt-tabbing no one knew (or they just didn't care).

Once I had built up enough savings, I jumped out and tried (and failed) to start my own company before joining up with a TechStars team. Worked out pretty well in the end: if I'd been in a "good enough" tech job, I probably wouldn't have taken that leap and wound up in an awesome job with a great team.

I see a flaw in this, as being surrounded by fairly incompetent people will have an effect on you by osmosis. It will slowly erode your skills/happyness/motivation.

Nothing unethical there. Its the responsibility of the manager/lead to assess skill set and the amount of time one should spend on a project.

The unethical part comes in when you're purposely padding your estimates, delaying response, feigning work load, or profiting from a side business. The last one depends heavily on your work agreement, state law, and how the company chooses to interpret things. I know of a guy who was outed by coworkers for doing side work, but after review, management decided it was fine as long as he wasn't using the work phone for side-work calls.

Of course, nothing is black and white, and rationalization is just as strong an intoxicant as overreaching corporate policies are.

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