That has been tried and if (when) found out will get you worse than fired. Data entry and administrative paper-shuffling often involve highly sensitive data (e.g. medical) and you can put the whole company in jeopardy if you outsource this to mturk or similar parties outside the org.Although I agree in principle that a lot of these jobs could greatly benefit from automation (or even just OCR and scanner).If you have these skills, why not go to a big insurance company or a medical research organization, show off your AI and offer to &quot;digitize&quot; their workflow across the board? Could make big bucks off of that.

Amusing read from way back - guy outsourced his own job and watched cat videos.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;thetwo-way&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;16&#x2F;169528579&#x2F;outsourced-employee-sends-own-job-to-china-surfs-web?t=1617791852500" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;thetwo-way&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;16&#x2F;169528579...</a>

Someone here could just pick up a job as a clerk and then use AI and mturk to do all the work.

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...

First was with a Huawei partner. They do certifications for this, full training, gave a checklist of what to do, and how to handle every error code. It pays bloody well for blue collar work. The work was done remotely at the time.You could probably find similar work with some other tech giant that outsources routine work to agencies.Second was with a major coding bootcamp that had a partnership with an educational institution. The person who created the syllabus went on to do his own course. They tried to hire me, literally saying that I could play games all day, freelance, come in late. The downside is tech moves, so you still have to keep up, even if it&#x27;s beginner level.

Nice. I&#x27;ll look for one of those. I&#x27;d be perfectly content having some designs&#x2F;specs handed out and implementing them.

I would be too afraid that such cash cow dies at the time I still need it and I won&#x27;t have skills to find something quickly again.

I was never the type of person to try to write a framework to solve a tiny little task, but I am probably 50% more effective with my time since I stopped caring about my job. I am not stressed out at all and that makes a massive difference.That being said I probably work about 75% less (~10 - 15 hours a week if I&#x27;m being honest) so the joke is still on my employer.

The positive side of dispassionate people is that they won&#x27;t write a new framework just to solve some tiny little task.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s necessarily a bad thing. I&#x27;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&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;Node.js. Come in 35 hours a week, actual necessary work is 12 hours&#x2F;week. It&#x27;s probably a dead end job, but it&#x27;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&#x27;s too many passionate people in the industry who just won&#x27;t take these kinds of jobs.

I&#x27;m familiar with the &#x27;boreout&#x27; you mention, and have experienced it in a previous job myself. However, I think it&#x27;s a lot more manageable to get around that in a remote environment. Obviously it depends on the job and the amount of (micro)management, but there are definitely plenty of hobbies that I can think of that would still have me available and close to my desk so that I could appear online when necessary.

You could be right. I don&#x27;t know what particular example you&#x27;re thinking about, so I can&#x27;t really debate you on the substance of the matter.However, I&#x27;ve seen people monetize the craziest things (and quite well at that). The more niche, the more money even. People pay good money for the most unbelievable things. The biggest issue is more likely to be market inefficiencies, i.e. bringing buyers and sellers together. But I almost guarantee you that somewhere out there is someone willing to pay a ton of money for that one weird problem you can solve for him with your niche skill or interest.Apart from the difficulties of finding that person or audience though, I&#x27;d be curious to hear what things you&#x27;ve been thinking of that are dangerous or impossible to monetize in a way that allows you to humanly subsist at least.

Absolutely. For example, it&#x27;s very easy to work hard writing and make very little. (Writing in the technical space can be valuable but it&#x27;s mostly by boosting reputation and therefore the ability to make money through other routes.)Ditto for music and many other things that often fall into the category of things that lots of talented people are happy to do for free.

&quot;practically all passions and hobbies can be monetized somehow (even a little)&quot;I disagree strongly. This is a dangerous advice. I&#x27;ve been watching this from the sidelines and yes, someone can get a trickle down that does not even buy you a cup of coffee. But revenue streams beyond that? Highly non-trivial, especially in the niche-hobbies (of which there seem to be an infinite amount of them). Not all things worth doing, are monetizable in my experience (or my experience is horribly skewed).

Well, you could teach that sport to others (as a part-time coach for amateurs, for example), you could create training videos and materials, write books or a blog with tactics, tricks etc. If you&#x27;re not the only person in the world into this sport, I am sure there are many other people who share your passion and would be happy to pay you for materials or training as they themselves will only have limited time to invest in it. You don&#x27;t have to be a pro yourself. If you&#x27;re not a total amateur, there will always be people who know less about it than you, are new to the sport etc. and they can be your audience. Also, consider looking at organizations adjacent to that sport or sports in general. There are a lot, from youth outreach NGOs to sport centers, to clubs where you could work as an assistant or clerk but still your work would have to do with the sport itself. Again, this is unlikely to make you rich but might be an option to work in an area you like. And who knows, even if you won&#x27;t be a world-class athlete yourself, you might manage, teach or support one, that would be pretty great as well, no?I understand and accept what you say about the high-paying all-in job option. It&#x27;s not for everybody and can also be damaging.If you want part-time dev jobs, of course they&#x27;re out there&#x27;s lots of competition and not necessarily a lot of job safety. The lowest end are gig economy jobs (like Upwork and Fiverr) but again, buyers there are sometimes also looking for an easy, reliable, part-time go-to guy for regular jobs that maybe have a unique skill set. You can always give it a try. Chances are that you will not make enough money doing this (most likely) to live comfortably in a highly developed country (I don&#x27;t know how to express this in the &quot;political correct&quot; way du jour but you know what I mean). However, the advantages are guaranteed 100% remote and no long-term commitment, so if you find something better, you can always take it.Wishing you all the best. And seriously, do report back some time how it works out for you. I&#x27;m sure many have the same dream and wonder &quot;what if...&quot;

Just my two cents, but being a coach for children&#x2F;teenagers can be a paying job. Up to you to decide if it&#x27;s better or worse than the job you describe.

&gt; I&#x27;m not sure if there are any ~20 hours a week dev jobsThese definitely exist, at least in some companies. One of my former employers had several developers who worked 3 days (i.e. 22.5 hours) per week.

There&#x27;s always stuff like ecommerce selling gear for said sport. Or similar. Online bookie for said sport etc.

Thank you for your advice. I do not have it in me anymore to get the high paying job and go all-out, unfortunately. I understand the really boring jobs would probably lead to depression and not much else. I think a good alternative path would be to look for real jobs but as a part-timer. I&#x27;m not sure if there are any ~20 hours a week dev jobs, but that would most likely be enough.I&#x27;m passionate about playing a competitive sport. I could spend my days practicing &#x2F; working out &#x2F; thinking about tactics. Unfortunately I am not a world class athlete so money is not an option there :). I&#x27;d just be happy having enough time to go as high as I can on the local tournament scene.

I accept what you&#x27;re saying, and thank you for this observation. I always find it interesting to hear different perspectives.That being said, I don&#x27;t believe you ;-) (I say this with affection). You&#x27;d be surprised what people are capable of doing if economic needs require them to do it. People will do every cleaning job they can get or wait tables if it means they won&#x27;t starve to death or get closer to their dream job as an movie star...I&#x27;ve often thought about this and I would encourage others to try and adopt this mindset: There are always jobs you can do, even very menial ones, if you really need the money (and no, I don&#x27;t mean prostitution). But knowing that you always have options, can and will help you a lot, especially when times get tough.It means you will never have to give up, even if you&#x27;re desperate. You will never have to put up with being abused by your boss for years. You will never have to starve. If you scrub enough toilets (or do the equivalent developer job) to make enough money to buy a suit and travel to another city and try something new, well, you can do it. I think this is pretty central to the American dream, actually. Nobody&#x27;s saying it&#x27;s easy. But you absolutely CAN if you really have to!

This is a bit off topic, but I like to add an observation. You assume in your post that someone could go all out on something the person doesn&#x27;t care about. For me, that is not possible. Most likely also not for OP. But the possibility seems self evident, giving your post. I assume you are a person high in consciousness IRL? In any case, people are truly different from time to time.

&gt; 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&#x27;ve got no responsibilities other than pressing a button, writing a half-page report once a month and saying &quot;yes&quot; on the rare occasion someone asks you something in passing. But it will get old quick.I strongly disagree, it totally depends on the type of person you are. I have a brother-in-law which is into that kind of job (not tech-related at all, he is a concierge. And he is totally fine with this, he lives for his hobbies (surfing, hiking, snowboarding etc), lives with the minimum amount of money he needs (basically to buy gear if it breaks and gas for the van) and... he is happy!It makes you rethink about life sometimes, but I do know for example that I would die of &quot;boreout&quot; for sure. But not everybody.

&gt;I know someone who had to show up 8 hours a day for 20 years without anything to doWell, now don&#x27;t keep us in suspense! What was his job? How did he get it? That&#x27;s kinda the point of this whole thread ;-)Also, yes to your part about people being dead inside because of their job (these exist as well and there life basically ends when they retire... can be equally sad).As for the ancient Greeks, well, that&#x27;s a bit like saying &quot;Bill Gates is free from menial work&quot;. Yes, true in theory but with little to no relevance for our daily lives because his (and equally the ancient Greeks&#x27;) circumstances are just so different. In case of the Greeks, their system was heavily based on slave labor. A comparable level of freedom nowadays (10+ full-time domestic staff plus people who dress you and carry you around in a litter) requires you to be a multi-millionaire and at least slightly deranged ;-)Also, it&#x27;s not like they did nothing all day. Studying, philosophy, military and political careers were incredibly important in ancient Rome and Greece, and I am certain that many an aristocratic young man would rather have spent time in the bath houses or on the forum than practising Greek declensions with his &quot;Paedagogi&quot; (teacher slaves) ;-)The next time we (all) might have a chance to get close to ancient levels of &quot;dolce far niente&quot; for a majority of people, is probably in a post-scarcity society with fully autonomous robot assistants (if they don&#x27;t murder us first). Sure would be nice to focus on wine and philosophy all day, no doubt about it.

Intentionally exaggerating&#x2F;misinterpreting you here, but you can also turn this around and say someone&#x27;s dead inside because they have to turn to a job to get contentment&#x2F;fulfillment.What can or can&#x27;t fulfill someone in their specific situation is highly dependent on their inner constitution, their peers and societal and cultural environment. In ancient Greece being free from menial duties and being able to freely engage in science, philosophy and politics was regarded as the highest state of existence.I know someone who had to show up 8 hours a day for 20 years without anything to do and he&#x27;s practically the most energetic person I know (bordering on annoying actually), spending time with family, gardening, traveling and collecting memories.In practice you probably want a healthy middle way of work and leisure and OP presumably wants the focus on leisure which I can understand :P...Also, monetizing your hobby to a degree that you can be financially dependent on it causes it to no longer be hobby by definition (more like hobby-equivalent work)

Not really relevant. But I finally got a word to describe my feeling at my previous job. Boreout.

I do kinda understand where you&#x27;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 &quot;boreout&quot; (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&#x27;ve got no responsibilities other than pressing a button, writing a half-page report once a month and saying &quot;yes&quot; on the rare occasion someone asks you something in passing. But it will get old quick.I&#x27;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&#x27;ve even heard that in some large companies and cultures with strong workers&#x27; rights &#x2F; labor laws this is actually used as a punishment: We can&#x27;t fire you, so we&#x27;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 &quot;be bored&quot;.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&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;d really like to know what your passions are because practically all passions and hobbies can be monetized somehow (even a little). If you&#x27;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&#x27;re into sleeping all day, there are ways to get paid for that ;-)HTH

I am sorry but from what I know, 30k€&#x2F;year is more than the average wage (net) in most European countries, for a full-time job, mind you. In many countries, like Italy or Spain, it&#x27;s even more like just 20k€&#x2F;year. To US citizens that is often surprising but you obviously can&#x27;t discount the social safety net, universal health care and generally lower cost of living, better public transport etc. in many countries. In that case, 20k€ year can definitely be enough to live on (at least until you have kids).So I fear it is unlikely that you will find a part-time job that pays that much in most of Europe... But again, correct me if I&#x27;m wrong.

Where do you live? In Germany, 30k a year is a half time job in tech.I earn 59 working remote from Berlin for a company in Frankfurt.Im deliberately staying at this firm even though I could earn more elsewhere because I&#x27;ve optimised expectations and flowsI work 40h a week but get it done in half. This is a good thing, for both me and the firm.
I have &quot;Freiraum im kopf&quot; (not sure how to translate that, read clear headspace) to think big thoughts that sometimes feed back into the company.I find clear communication there is absolutely vital. Seeming lazy is the enemy.I made it clear from the start I only answer mails twice a day at preset times (9:00 and 17:00), not because I am lazy but because I am disciplined and orderly.My explanation for not interacting with chat &#x2F; calls half the day is blocking decent time blocks for deep knowledge work. This is true, but not all of that knowledge work is directly for the firm in that moment.I find project managers are problematic sometimes. Their core job is talking to people, so they want meetings to validate their existence. To that end, I time-block my calendar publicly. 
I mark off all non work times so no meetings can be made by mistake in awkward times, and block off knowledge work times as busy. I also have recommended meeting times for non mission critical things like weekly roundups. Grouping these is important.If you are low in the hierarchy you will be pushed around and your meetings will be scattered throughout the week.I negotiated a day for research each week instead of a raise and do a quarterly presentation on whats new in the zooSometimes its crunch time and I work a 80h week but this amounts to about 4 weeks a year max. Being flexible and open to this makes me seem like a team player. 
If there is a crisis Im first on site. The image is important, and I make a concerted effort to make sure its seen.

30k€&#x2F;year would be more than enough.

What salary on the &#x27;lower side&#x27; would you deem reasonable?

Not directly answering your question, but you might want to look into FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). The subreddits &#x2F;r&#x2F;FIRE, &#x2F;r&#x2F;leanFIRE, and &#x2F;r&#x2F;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.

It&#x27;s funny to see the guy thinking you were depressed. You seem actually very excited to myself, not just excited about some boring coding job like most of the people in HN are.Wish you success in that endeavour!

Thanks for the kind words, I&#x27;m absolutely not depressed ! I&#x27;m very happy with my life outside of work. Some days I even feel euphoric being lucky as I am, being able to play my favorite sport and having a loving family.I&#x27;m only trying to optimize by reducing the time spent working and thinking about work, which I never see bringing me anything else than money.

I think the poster you’re responding to is just asking the person to check in with themselves about where they’re at mentally. The original post sounds a lot like myself when I was burnt out and depressed. Sometimes when you’re in that state, you’re looking for a bandaid rather than a fix for the things you’re feeling. I thought it was valid advice, even though it sounds like the original poster is very happy outside their job.Sounds like you might be burnt out yourself looking for a different job? It’s tough to know you’re a good worker, but feel like companies are passing you up. I’m sorry if you’re going through that. Hang in there. It can take a while, but it gets better eventually!

&gt; but please think about it firstThis is not an adequate advice for somebody who has a family to support.I&#x27;d argue that for the most of us, once we go beyond 18-19 years old we can no longer afford to &quot;think about it first&quot; all the way to retirement age.So I am really not sure what actionable point you&#x27;re making here. &quot;Find a better job&quot;, maybe? Yeah, a lot of us are trying that. I guess it&#x27;s filter bubbles thing because I keep being contacted by HR agencies and companies that I want nothing to do with.

There&#x27;s a truckload of options, really. Get more into side projects while ignoring&#x2F;minimizing job tasks, like OP. Try to find jobs that relate closer to what you like (that&#x27;s the great thing in being a dev, you can switch jobs or roles rather effortlessy, if you have CV that proves you are generally experienced). Find more interesting things within your field, or even current role. Simply switch to a nicer company. Get into charity work. Monetize a hobby, start a venture - even besides an existing job. And so on.One thing is important, is that you HAVE to deal with this problem, however convenient it seems to just let things as they are, and &quot;not think about it&quot;. OP was really great at recognizing that there is a specific issue to be solved here.

In my experience shifting to a 4&#x2F;5 schedule won&#x27;t cure your burn-out.  You need to take a vacation, 1-2 week vacation, to really get rid of that burn-out feeling and &quot;recharge&quot; yourself.  And if you come back and within a week or 2 feel that dread feeling again, then it&#x27;s time to move on and find something else.  As everyone else has said, being unhappy ever day is no way to live life.

I think you&#x27;re feeling some depression&#x2F;ennui because you don&#x27;t care for this particular job. I had similar issues years ago which went away almost immediately after switching jobs. I&#x27;d suggest just trying to find a devops job elsewhere at a company you think isn&#x27;t making something totally pointless.

Start a software startup in your free time? Pick a passion and run with it, maybe even try to make a business (or non-profit out of it)?

What would you recommend?I identified myself way too much in OP&#x27;s post. I&#x27;m in my mid-20s, have a job as a consultant DevOps engineer in a boring fintech company, in a project that I think will fail. I&#x27;m full-remote atm, and I&#x27;m already doing the least amount of work that I can do without it being noticed.I&#x27;m really good at programming (based on feedback of my co-workers), and I like doing side-projects (usually video-game related). I can&#x27;t stop thinking everyday that I&#x27;m wasting my skills on, as OP stated, useless software. I&#x27;m not sure that I&#x27;m not being a diva, though.I&#x27;m currently taking the steps to go to a 4&#x2F;5th schedule, but I&#x27;m not sure it will make it any better. I&#x27;ll have more time to do what my want (side-projects + hobbies), but I&#x27;m not sure it will solve what I feel deep down.

Thanks for writting this. This is how I feel for two years and having a random stranger on Internet being able to describe it and says `The world can be a great place with the right view` is reconforting.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to focus on hobbies&#x2F;life and not caring much about working time job - I would guess most people fall on this side, actually (and they don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

I think you question is very sincere and VERY UNIQUE for this community because every other question is asking for the exact opposite. That&#x27;s why there are a lot of interesting replies as well as a lot of interest in the question itself.Is your hobby&#x2F;&quot;passions (which are not monetizable)&quot; expensive? And are you 100% certain they are not monetizable?In today&#x27;s world, I have yet to see something which is not monetizable. Unless you are referring to something which is too competitive - even that can be monetized....though monetization itself might require too much work which goes against your requirement so I understand.

I&#x27;m surprised once again by the nice and helpful community on HN. I anticipated most comments would be people telling me to get my head out of my ass and get to work.I hope you find a way to chill through life.

Partner choice and choice whether to have children are other critical considerations in cost control.

Sure, most important thing is to know yourself and your preferences.In complex technical niche fields jumping from gig to gig is not that easy, though.I was perhaps overtly bleak in the above for the benefit of clarity (it&#x27;s ok not to love your job, but it&#x27;s also ok to concentrate on things you love and the thing does not need to be your job).

As someone who sympathizes with your comment (&quot;tech stack complex and fugly&quot;) and has made moves both ways in terms of salary (high to low for QoL -25%, then low to high again +50%), start with your requirements.OP did a great job of saying &quot;Here&#x27;s what I need.&quot; Until that&#x27;s staked out, you don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s too little, enough, and too much.But generally, minimizing and controlling costs (critically, through city choice) affords you flexibility. High costs = must work high paying job. Low costs = choice between working less, taking a job you enjoy more that pays less, or working more &amp; saving.I&#x27;ll probably switch back to a lower paying job in the next 6 months or year, because I&#x27;d rather work on something I love, and because I&#x27;ll have the financial flexibility to do so.

&gt; My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons.I had a similar job once, where I worked in TV coverage of final table of WSOP (World Series of Poker). I was around the poker celebs at the time, preparing talking points for my boss who interacted with them, even have somewhere a photo of me sitting at the final table. My ultimate conclusion is... so what? Beyond a cool story to share with people interested in poker, there&#x27;s little value in that for me, and I was a poker nerd then.

If you have 10m in the bank and want to be involved in events at that level, you can be: we would just instead call you an executive producer.

My choice of expression was a bit clumsy.By &quot;toil&quot; I did not mean a thing without a worth - a thing you find worthwhile is intrinsically valuable. I don&#x27;t believe you can compute economic value to life experiences.I would call toil anything that does not enable you to rise to the stage of self-actualization in Maslow&#x27;s hierarchy of needs.But like I said my intent was not to present such a non-self actualizing job as bad, quite contrary.

&gt; My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons.Cool.... so what do you do?

On a related note, I think what you might call &quot;low income&quot; service jobs are often more likely to put you in contact with those sorts of people than some middle class job. Sort of like being a maid. Maids work for the rich and the rich are more likely to be those sorts of people. So a maid is more likely to know one of those people than a middle class person and in a way that is quite personal (you&#x27;re in their house, possible living under their roof). I know of cases like that involving well known people. Naturally, the perspective is more quotidian and more accurate than the kind of comical celebrity fantasies middle class people often believe.

I&#x27;ve done some travel for work in my life. I did an extended stay in the UK (I&#x27;m American) when I was young and it was pretty amazing. Many years later I had a gig that needed me to spend time in spots around the US and also some stays in East Asia. All business class and expense accounts in first-rate cities and I hated it. I&#x27;m older now and I have kids at home that I didn&#x27;t get to see. Taking a business trip to Tokyo always seemed like the ultimate Business Guy thing to do but I spent 80% of my waking hours in conference rooms with salary men.You value different things at different times in your life, but looking back I&#x27;m glad I got to experience those things because most people don&#x27;t get the chance.

What are ‘the proms’? And why would anyone want to sit through royal weddings

My job allows me to go back stage at Glastonbury and track-side visits at the Olympics, front seat views of royal weddings, orchestral pit on last night of the proms, and I have a fairly sedantry job of mostly pushing buttons.Colleagues have spent days in jungles building bridges to drive cars over them, have got to know people living in random villages from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and share in their culture, have met and quizzed world leaders, have been to Antarctic bases, and have exposed and brought down criminal networks making lives miserable for thousands of people.I guess you&#x27;d define that as &quot;glorious toiling&quot;, but I could have 10m in the bank and never have to work again, but get to do very little of that.

Congratulations, sounds indeed like a good working environment.

Man I&#x27;m so cynical. As soon as I see &quot;I landed a great job a few months ago,&quot; my thought is just wait a few more months. I hope the job stays great for you.

Nice one! Very close to my own experience and I feel much the same way.

My first job in tech was at the American Red Cross. Easily one of the best cultures I have ever seen. Better than a dysfunctional family.

Congratulations -- I left VC-funded tech for a nonprofit a few years back and it&#x27;s the best thing that&#x27;s ever happened to me (or I guess, that I did).  It&#x27;s certainly not perfect but working in an environment with people who believe in what they&#x27;re doing and genuinely want to support each other has made a massive difference for my attitude as regards work in a general sense.

After 20 years of working and a sense of genuine burnout, I landed a &quot;Dream Job&quot; a few months ago where I&#x27;m doing tech leadership at a mid-size non-profit. We have a small familial team, a set of worthwhile and genuinely beloved public services and mission of doing good. There&#x27;s still politics and revenue issues and all the sorts of stuff that a go along with any company, but it&#x27;s a lot less aggressive. Work-life balance and diversity are genuinely respected. I&#x27;m busy, but it&#x27;s not crazy. In my past I worked on so many gigs for companies I didn&#x27;t care about or downright disliked. Building tools to grab eyes or sell crap no one needed. Working somewhere with a positive mission is so much more valuable to me than working on a cool tech stack (our stack isn&#x27;t too bad, but we&#x27;re not cutting edge either). I feel better about work than I have in a long, long time.And before anyone asks, no we&#x27;re not hiring. One tradeoff is that it&#x27;s a very slow growth environment. We don&#x27;t have VC funds to burn and our business model is very mature.

I feel like I&#x27;m in a similar position on the automation side.I&#x27;ve automated so much of what I&#x27;m responsible for that it mostly runs itself without issue. There are certainly stretches of time where I work my ass off, but mostly it&#x27;s days of a couple of hours of light work and then being available to help people via Slack the rest of the day.

&gt; I&#x27;m the guy with the picture that&#x27;s on puzzle box, rather than having to place each puzzle piece.This is such a great phrase! It so succinctly captures a situation I think we&#x27;ve all observed many times, but I&#x27;ve always struggled to encode it in words.&gt; I&#x27;ve tried really hard to make myself obsolete and do something else, but it has backfired spectacularly.How has this backfired, I&#x27;m curious?I&#x27;m imagining that the future-you&#x27;s fail to seamlessly slot-in, and management types don&#x27;t have an appetite for broken eggs on the way to an omelette, when they already have an omelette in you?&gt; I&#x27;m useful and in essence acting as &quot;an elder&quot; store of information about the past &amp; a slightly clearer view of the future.I wonder, do you feel any anxiety about this?As in, you&#x27;re valuable at $COMPANY_X, but you&#x27;re not challenged to better yourself beyond what you already are. Much of your value to $COMPANY_X derives from skills and knowledge that are specific to $COMPANY_X &#x2F; $INDUSTRY.For me, the anxiety would come from the question &quot;sure, I have this here and now, but would I be able to reproduce this elsewhere, or what this a fluke?&quot;, and it would increase with tenure. :)Curious to hear your thoughts on this, too.

This reminds me of advice I got from the VP of Eng at my first real full time tech job. This was back around late 1999 &#x2F; early 2000. Peak of the dot com era.He told me what most people think of as job security is totally wrong. If you&#x27;re the only person who knows something, you become a liability. But if you&#x27;re constantly teaching and sharing that knowledge you become incredibly valuable to the organization. That&#x27;s when you have job security.Since internalizing that advice, I always try to work myself out of job by ensuring I share anything I know. And I always pass this advice along to others. As you get more seniority in the organization, the way to have more impact and scale is to work through others by sharing your knowledge and helping them get better.

Before I was a manager I used to always try and automate my job away. I was of course never able to completely do this and the result was never actually less work. Once you were able to automate away one task a new one would magically appear.Of course to my surprise me trying to automate away my tasks only increased my value to the companies I worked for and now I, as a manager, try to encourage my reports to do the same thing so that they can focus on more important projects and personal growth.

&gt; I&#x27;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 workThere&#x27;s a class of &quot;crystallized intelligence&quot; jobs which are about what happened before rather than what you do today. There&#x27;s an intersection between that sort of knowledge and a certain fluid intelligence to slot it in where things fit.I&#x27;m in one of those jobs right now, where the last six years of what I&#x27;ve read&#x2F;absorbed is more valuable (as a sort of fast cross-reference in my brain) than what I actually do right now. I&#x27;m the guy with the picture that&#x27;s on puzzle box, rather than having to place each puzzle piece.I&#x27;ve tried really hard to make myself obsolete and do something else, but it has backfired spectacularly.I&#x27;ve written down all of this in documents, trained other people to do the same thing over the years, even built tools to replace the easy parts (right now there&#x27;s an intern doing the next pass of that automation) the effect of which has been to lighten my workload even more &amp; I&#x27;m not missed if need to take a couple of weeks on a roadtrip or something.To do this, I&#x27;ve had to do something which is not volume driven (i.e my output is not a factor of time), so moved away from building web applications to profiling&#x2F;optimizing all kinds of networked applications, where the ability to cut through the stack is useful, but for any given layer there&#x27;s someone who does it &quot;professionally&quot;.This is of course not a long-term parking spot for me, but I&#x27;m useful and in essence acting as &quot;an elder&quot; store of information about the past &amp; a slightly clearer view of the future.

This situation seems ideal, but how would you get people to do the grunt work? This is one thing the current system takes care of with threats, for lack of better words.

I think it says a lot about our society, that this comment is the most highly upvoted in a forum such as this.It&#x27;s clear that if we decided to let everyone&#x27;s basic needs of food, shelter, healthcare, and transport be met unconditionally, the world would look very different. It would not cost us much, maybe even less than we pay in taxes now, but I feel certain it would make everyone&#x27;s lives significantly better. The lack of unnecessary stress and &quot;soul-destroying toil&quot; that anyone would be forced to endure is surely worth it.The only downside I see is that no one could get as extraordinarily rich as a very few people can today. I don&#x27;t see how most of us can&#x27;t be fine with that.

&gt; I&#x27;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 fuglyI think a lot of people can actually relate to this. IMHO, a good way to think about it is to consider that there&#x27;s more granularity to work than a black-or-white &quot;I like my job&quot; &#x2F; &quot;I hate my job&quot;. Maybe you dislike meetings, but enjoy the feeling of triumph after fixing bugs, or maybe it&#x27;s vice-versa. Maybe you enjoy helping coworkers get unstuck with your expertise despite working on a crappy stack. Maybe you take satisfaction in seeing the burndown chart go down each week, or maybe thinking about how to be a better tech interviewer is something that interests you. There&#x27;s usually _something_ - even if it&#x27;s a small trivial thing - that is nice about your day to day.I often think of it in terms of parallels to meditation: honing self-awareness skills lets you realize small things that you might not have been aware of before. Walking to the supermarket might be a tiring chore, but hey look I never noticed that tree blooms beautifully in march, or hey I started to notice a small difference in my stamina, etc. You are in charge of your (limited) attention span, and you can choose to focus on the positive things - no matter how small - and let the rest naturally fall by the sidelines.

&quot;I probably _appear_ motivated but I&#x27;m just a neurotic who hates failing.&quot;  I feel seen.

&gt; I&#x27;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&#x27;m just a neurotic who hates failing. If I didn&#x27;t need to feed and house my family I would have moved to a lower paying position long ago that is intrinsically more motivating.I too hate failing. And many times end up working extra to get things done properly. This keeps me in very different position where my manager, team relies on me, praises me but end of day it takes toil on other parts of life. I have seen many people in my career, who just don&#x27;t work, don&#x27;t bother about product at all, do things at last moments, have literally zero affection for the craft and still survives in industry. I really envy them.I am grateful to have good paying job in pandemic while many people laid off. But these days what I really need is to close my laptop at 5 pm WITHOUT ANY WORRY.

&quot;Beyond that you are toiling, and if you like your job, it&#x27;s glorious toiling like gardening (pleasing, but not important, but you love it, so it&#x27;s great) or terrible toiling for living that eats your soul.&quot;How beautifully put.

&gt; Success and &quot;loving your job&quot; have nothing in common in my experience.This was something I have been &quot;feeling&quot; to be true recently, but really needed some independent validation.

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 &quot;hireable&quot; status.Success and &quot;loving your job&quot; 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&#x27;s glorious toiling like gardening (pleasing, but not important, but you love it, so it&#x27;s great) or terrible toiling for living that eats your soul.I&#x27;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&#x27;m just a neurotic who hates failing. If I didn&#x27;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 &quot;loving your job&quot; have nothing in common in my experience.

OP has the freedom to choose his job and industry.

If you&#x27;re a developer in a big&#x2F;mid company (or a consultant regardless of company size) your input to the product will be minimum to non-existant. And even if it wasn&#x27;t, maybe the problem at the base is something you don&#x27;t believe is worth solving or being solved properly.I&#x27;ve worked on client projects where I think the project is an utter waste of time and money, and other times worked on promising projects but led by terrible people who&#x27;d never manage to make it work. At the end of the day, work is work…

&gt; The software I build is useless.Isn&#x27;t this up to you?

SRE would of course require to be on-site but I think building some docker images and checking if some LAMP stacks run fine could be done remote.

Are these jobs where you don&#x27;t have to work more than two hours a day like OP wants?
Sure there are remote sysadmin jobs but not these kind of jobs where they just want a warm body in a chair.

&gt; And almost impossible to be remote.On the contrary, I find it quite easy. In the last year or so I&#x27;ve been to the empty office three times: twice to restart local VPN, once to sign a contract because I was switching companies.I&#x27;m definitely going to be looking for remote positions in the future.

&gt; devops&#x2F;sysadminWhile these certainly exist, you would need to know what your doing to not need to do much.And almost impossible to be remote.

Well, it&#x27;s a transformative process that not many orgs can implement.. that&#x27;s basically it.Another is a JIRA consultant. You basically setup JIRA and teach an org how to use it.

Agile coaching is it.It&#x27;s literally money for nothing.I&#x27;m not an Agile coach, but have seen enough to know that it really is nonsense snake oil that large organisations will pay incredible sums of money for.I sort of wonder if the negative real value of the Agile industry means the price is effectively limitless, given that the whole thing is a Fugazi so the bill is whatever the buyer is foolish enough to pay.

If the organisation is big enough and dysfunctional enough, your absence will not be noticed for long periods of time. Just make sure whenever you are seen you have the appearance of being in a huge rush.

But that&#x27;s all synchronous work - running courses, giving presentations, coaching people.If their objective is to only work 2 hours a day, the last thing they want is hours of meetings every day where your absence will be immediately noticed.

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

I know right now you want to focus on your hobbies&#x2F;passion and you don&#x27;t need much and you don&#x27;t care about anything else... I don&#x27;t know what age are you but I would suggest that, while try to enjoy your hobbies&#x2F;passion as much as you can, think and plan for the future, and what a dire situation you would find yourself if you&#x27;re in a low paying dead end job for 10 or 20 years... You&#x27;d be basically digging a hole for yourself that would be difficult to get out.

An inhouse DBA (preferably something like SQL Server as it&#x27;s quite straightforward). Get it set up&#x2F;automated (back-ups etc) then the a good indicator that you are doing well is if you&#x27;ve nothing much to do.

Barista FIRE is a term used in the FIRE space that could fit this. You build up less savings but keep things ticking over with a lower level (in terms of stress, pay, and time) job than you might have otherwise. It seems like the OP is looking for a tech equivalent of a barista job.

I was searching this thread for a reference to FIRE, I see interesting parallels too.You can take a serial (work your butt off now, enjoy life later) or parallel (OP&#x27;s wish) approach to work&#x2F;life, but it also does not need to be completely binary. If you can find a position that is sufficiently rewarding but not too stressful, and that allows you to save up enough that you can (semi) retire at, say, 50, that may be a great middle ground.

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.

Really, any company with say &gt;2500 (?) falls in this category. It&#x27;s an entire job of several people to just maintain the worker Inventory (laptops, monitors, etc) room for example. It takes a lot of infrastructure to support a company of size, plenty of people in my 10k person company doing what you want - run the company that runs the product.

That would be nice. I&#x27;m perfectly content watching htop and adding some VMs once in a while while playing WoW.

The best I can suggest is sysadmin for some boring government agency. It doesn&#x27;t fit the &quot;fully remote&quot; part, but otherwise you are free to do whatever you want as long as everything is up and running. You also don&#x27;t need to manage anyone, although you do have to talk to angry users once in a while.

&gt; I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week.Same here! Scrum masters are secretaries on managers&#x27; salaries. They&#x27;re the true winners of the corporate game.

Another vote for Scrum Master here. It&#x27;s only in the past 5 years or so that I&#x27;ve personally seen it as a job in itself - previously, I&#x27;d seen Scrum Master as part of the role of one of the developers or similar.But now in large corps, Scrum Master exists as a distinct job, which appears to require doing very, very little - chairing most of the regular scrum-related meetings (daily standup, planning, demo, and the much loathed retrospective), sending out meeting invites, occasionally futiley butting heads with the Project Manager, and... actually, I think that&#x27;s it?!I&#x27;ve worked with some good people in the Scrum Master role, but beyond being good people to work with, they are glorified secretaries, and really don&#x27;t have anything to do all day.

100% Scrum Masters!If you are actually a good developer and you get a pure Scrum Master role then it&#x27;s almost impossible to not get endlessly promoted and praised and possibly paid better than a developer role itself whilst actually still doing fuck all work. Imagine, you do a standup, ask in the end if anyone has any blockers, some developer or QA will say something stupid about the CI&#x2F;CD pipeline or merging a PR and you&#x27;ll schedule a meeting with the people who need to follow this up and you could actually throw in some suggestions which only a great developer would normally do and the team will look at you as if you&#x27;re some bloody hero for DeNiro and praise you as &quot;the best Scrum Master they ever had who actually helps the team and lives up to their role&quot;. LOL. Then you know you can go to sleep for the rest of the day and nobody will even notice.The only other thing I can come up with which could be easier than Scrum Master is to apply for a manual QA role. I don&#x27;t think I have to say more, but essentially, you will look like you&#x27;ve worked around the clock when really you just click a button at the beginning of the day and then go to sleep again.

I agree with the Scrum Master suggestion, my Scrum Master pretty much just creates meeting invites for 40 hours a week. We have a lot of contracts where we have Scrum Masters just because we do Agile, usually the non-technical types do it.The irony is that Scrum Masters are supposed to not make the team reliant on them but by having a dedicated role for it of course the dev team will make the Scrum Master do menial tasks, if you don&#x27;t might dealing with the Agile bullshit full time it&#x27;s a doss.

This is the best description I&#x27;ve read!

Your cynicism is speaking directly to my soul.

+1 for scrum master. Their mere existence is a strong signal that you are in an environment with a high tolerance for  bureaucracy and low expectations for delivery.

&gt; Bonus points for regularly posting obnoxious agile methodology articles on your companies intranet or Linkedin.To truely leave a legacy, it would be great, if you could also miss what the original intentions and benefits of agile are and go on to raise a few teamleads and middle managers to use your buzzwords in the wrong context.A true master craftsman in this area makes the right people feel more, but the whole organization be less agile. Your work is not completed, until developers visit threads like this to step into your footsteps.

&gt; A meeting here, some buzzwords there and compile the results regularly in lengthy confluence pages nobody will ever read.Uhm, no. I&#x27;ve been a scrum master. Your calendar looks like a lost game of Tetris, everybody above you is wondering why everything is late, everyone below you is wondering why they don&#x27;t get more time. It&#x27;s the anti-thesis of a cushy job.

This is pretty spot-on. I didn&#x27;t get a lot of face time with stakeholders as an individual on a scrum team until our project manager was fired, and I said &quot;f** it, I&#x27;ll be the product owner AND scrum master&quot;.I basically dumped our Atlassian suite, set up our Azure DevOps, including our project&#x27;s processes, boards, and rules. I automated most of our meetings to run asynchronously because we&#x27;re a remote team.Takeaways:
- The team loves me more than anyone on the team because I don&#x27;t force arbitrary bullshit on them like holding them to extremely rigid scrum standards meant to create and highlight artificial scarcities of work.
- Stakeholders (the ones that will recommend me for promotions) know my name and I get to shoot the shit with them in our weekly touchpoints while I show them the metrics that only matter for my team.The easiest jobs are typically the mid-tier levels inside a company undergoing a &quot;digital transformation&quot; (unless your new boss would be from Amazon). These companies are rife with dysfunction and boomers that barely understand how to effectively leverage the Microsoft 365 platform. Cue automating everything, blowing the pants off of older folks like your mom when you fixed her iPad, and basically skating by while making good money (not FAANG great) money.

Anything *agile related bullshit job will do, really.Scrum master, agile coach, what have you. SM certs are easy to get with minimal investment. A meeting here, some buzzwords there and compile the results regularly in lengthy confluence pages nobody will ever read. Automate much of it and maybe generate a graph or two to present during reviews.OP will have to organise retros, groomings, etc. Invent ever changing formats. Remind everybody to stick to the rulez, but don&#x27;t do much else. Keeps people on their toes. At minimal effort.Have regular catch-ups with various people. They&#x27;re essentially coffee breaks, but you pretend to be productive and maybe generate a protocol. Plus you get to suck up to all the important people.Bonus points for regularly posting obnoxious agile methodology articles on your companies intranet or Linkedin.

Listening to other people talk is even more exhausting.

OP does state &quot;I do not want to manage people&quot; which might go against the &quot;you just have to be comfortable with babbling on meetings&#x2F;calls for the majority of the day&quot;.And being in meetings&#x2F;calls can be a very taxing job. Talking is exhausting from my experience at a call centre.

Random may not be the right word for it, but I think you&#x27;re right. Do nothing jobs tend to be snowflake jobs, each one different.A lot also depends of what you consider &quot;work&quot; or &quot;slack.&quot; Is low attention meetings work?One good strategy might be the 1&#x2F;10X programmer. Find a team that sucks, be 10X better than average. Work 1&#x2F;10 as hard. Spend 2 days on 2 hr tasks, etc.

As many of the stories here show, it’s usually easier to grow into a do nothing job. Build rapport for a few years and take on responsibilities that can be automated but don’t tell you automated them. And slip into the legacy projects no one knows or cares about to look at but that need a little maintenance here and there. They tend to build up where you can easily own multiple products that still have to run but don&#x27;t really need more than a few hours of work per month at most. Just don&#x27;t document anything about them or refactor them to be easier to look at lolAgreed on scrum masters. I’d rather go hungry than be on calls all day though

I think it&#x27;s probably fairly random. I.e. you&#x27;re just as likely to have a &quot;do nothing&quot; job in a FAANG as in some other random corps. But I don&#x27;t think you can start doing nothing right after being hired - usually people are hired because there&#x27;s more work in a team that the existing headcount can handle. So, you have to work for some time and then count on &quot;falling into the cracks&quot; - landing in a place where there&#x27;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&#x27;s zero chance of slacking off.BTW2: if you&#x27;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&#x27;s slacker&#x27;s paradise - you just have to be comfortable with babbling on meetings&#x2F;calls for the majority of the day.

Nice, living the dream. You&#x27;re an inspiration. I find devops related jobs the most interesting. I do feel good helping fellow devs and setting up robust infrastructure but don&#x27;t care about the companies themselves or the useless apps.

Hellz yeah.What&#x27;s the best way to inflate your resume? For instance I&#x27;m a mid-approaching-senior fullstack Java engineer. Just say what you did, but embellish so that you seem like you can really build out and maintain big functionality?

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&#x2F;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 &#x2F; linting &#x2F; 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.

&gt;pick a role where you&#x27;re constantly blocked by other peopleExcellent advice.I love how HN still ends up thriving for perfection. If I compile all the comments in this thread I&#x27;ll have the best optimized way to become the ultimate do-nothing slacker piece of crap.

&gt; 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.Also, pick a role where you&#x27;re constantly blocked by other people. So, working in a big company, where every function (renting a VM, setting up a DB schema, adding an AD group etc.) is centralized in one team, possibly overloaded and not too competent, possibly outsourced for cheap to India. These folks can take months to complete simple tasks and you can always say you can&#x27;t move forward until they deliver.Also, working in integration-heavy project. If your codebase calls 8 different systems in your company, they will all fail, have incomplete documentation, unresponsive teams etc. and will result in a lot of waiting and lost time on your end (which is what you&#x27;re after).

Find a medium-sized company with a local monopoly.- They are not competing in their market &#x2F; 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&#x2F;marketing.
- The development dept. is known for saying &quot;good things take time&quot; because they can afford to.
- Career advancement typically isn&#x27;t possible unless a tech lead quits, but they&#x27;re cushy.You can&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;m helping someone who cares more. I invented this coping strategy at points where I didn&#x27;t care at all myself.
- Pick more researchy tasks: People don&#x27;t know exactly what to expect, the work isn&#x27;t as easily quantified. So when you spend longer or don&#x27;t have as much to show for it, that may make sense.
- Become highly available on emergency &#x2F; 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 &#x2F; tech lead: They&#x27;re super busy learning how to juggle management and mentoring, so if you&#x27;re stuck onboarding for more time than normal, they won&#x27;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.

was she an engineer or worked in another part of the company?

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

Didn&#x27;t think about ETL jobs. Thanks !

Totally reasonable thing to want IMO.Try searching for stuff to do with managing ETL&#x2F;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&#x27;ll exceed expectations with 2 hours of focused, intelligent work per day. Not sure how many will be remote though, sorry!

One of the things that springs to mind is coding emails.
Once you have a template that works in 99% of email readers you&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;d code it up and load it into their mailing list software.At the same time I was doing wordpress based &quot;catalog&quot; websites for them, also minimal interfacing with the client and the same &quot;psd =&gt; html&quot; 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.

How about something like making some open source or similar projects related to your hobby and having a patreon that people can support you with? Would depend how large and generous the potential audience is whether that would be enough to sustain you.

I do some pro bono work for local teams related to my hobby. I&#x27;m afraid I would grow to hate the job and the hobby itself if it became real work.

I&#x27;d caution against the non-profit direction!  Some nonprofits that are inefficient aren&#x27;t because they haven&#x27;t discovered means to optimize processes or systems, but rather because of cultural issues...In addition to this add the low pay, plus lots of constant, hot air talk about whatever space the nonprofit operates in.  I&#x27;m sure there are nonprofits out there that are ideal, and still have a need for expertise that you might bring them...but much like all other types of businesses, there are also many crappy nonprofit orgs out there.  (I&#x27;m not referring to nefarious ones, merely ones that are run poorly and would not be great places to work at per your description above.)

Hey, at least you&#x27;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&#x27;s one out there that aligns with your hobbies?

I second this.   I automated my job to the point of only working about two hours a week.  I left because I was bored and my resume was beginning to atrophy.

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.

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&#x2F;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.

Can I ask how do you find those kind of contracts?

You&#x27;re in a fantastic company for networking, and Microsoft is a great partner for many small dev shops. Being a more niche Microsoft partner might be a good differentiator based on the Microsoft name on your resume.

I feel like I wouldn&#x27;t be able to find good contracts but it might be imposter syndrome?MSFT employee, most of what I need saved up but could use a bit more. I&#x27;d love to quit and just do some seasonal work but I imagine competition for the contracts you&#x27;re talking about is pretty stiff and I don&#x27;t have a huge professional network

The second route sounds like something that would be perfect for me. I assume you are in the UK, how does IR35 affect that nowadays?

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&#x27;t heavily IT focussed, but needs someone on staff &quot;just in case&quot;. I once interviewed for a job at a National Library for a 35,000 GBP&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;t exactly what you asked for, but might appeal to you anyway. Recently I&#x27;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&#x27;s intensive work for the duration of the contract, but the money is a lot better than being a permanent employee, and I&#x27;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&#x27;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.

State government or a bank although at a bank, while you don&#x27;t have a lot of work, your monitor is usually public facing.

I’m in the US. It’s not always normal. You might need to support items outside of regular business hours like production updates, or if you’re IT, computers&#x2F;infrastructure doesn’t often break between the hours of 9-5.

If your definition of normal means business takes place somewhere between 7am - 12pm, sure.

&gt; but you are expected to work only during business hoursSurely that&#x27;s normal?

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&#x2F;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&#x2F;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!

&gt; Make a point of fucking things up (on purpose) until your responsibilities get taken away.Ah, right in the feels.When I was younger I had a colleague playing that game, and he was successful.We would go to great lengths to have him not involved in delicate (and stressful) tasks.Looking back, that was dumb. I should have had him involved as much as possible, even if it meant jeopardizing client contracts, customers&#x27; infrastructure or even customers data.I should have forced the company to actually face the issue.So to sum up: yes that is a valid recommendation.

I would characterize this person’s goal as a ‘change of pace’, which is worthy in a long term career. At some point he&#x2F;she might want the pace accelerated again.In a great company you can find the change of pace internally, but unfortunately this not an option everywhere.

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&#x2F;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.

&gt; It&#x27;s very common here and won&#x27;t be a roadblock.Some companies won&#x27;t let you do 24hr&#x2F;week though. They&#x27;ll require at least 32hrs :P

Yes, responsibilities will be adjusted accordingly. On-Call depends a bit on your sector and what the unions agreed. Most of the time one hour on call will count for 0.25 hour worked I think, at least that&#x27;s how it was for someone I knew.And most people simply put their days &#x2F; hours in their e-mail signature so other colleagues know when to expect a reaction. From personal experience this works fine. Half my team is off every Friday and some also on Wednesdays.Companies can and do require 36 or 40 hours though, but most of the time vacancies will list something like &quot;24-36&quot; to signal the possibilities.---edit: for your curiosity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbs.nl&#x2F;nl-nl&#x2F;visualisaties&#x2F;dashboard-arbeidsmarkt&#x2F;werkenden" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbs.nl&#x2F;nl-nl&#x2F;visualisaties&#x2F;dashboard-arbeidsmark...</a>It&#x27;s in Dutch, but as long as you know that &#x27;uur&#x27; = &#x27;hour&#x27; you can read the charts.As of 2020, 72% of men worked 35 hours or more (full-time) compared to 26% of women.

Majority of my team works 4 days&#x2F;week, but do so by working 4x9 hours (36 total) instead of 5x8 hours (40 total). We don&#x27;t really do less work (or take longer for projects).Some observations:* The folks working 4 days are a bit less likely to pick-up &#x27;side activities&#x27; (e.g. help organise an external event, lead some of the recruiting efforts, etc.), because a day away takes out 25% of active time in one go.* Ratio overhead vs work is probably better for the part of the team working 4x9 vs 5x8. It turns out they can miss many of these meetings and still be fine without additional catch-ups. (unfortunately not in my power to just remove it completely)* I believe in people having broad responsibilities (&quot;deliver this project in the best way you see fit&quot;) rather than &quot;work X hours&quot;. We don&#x27;t downscope projects because someone works 4 vs 5 days, but no one has ever remarked on it either. This type of responsibility sometimes means people wrap-up early, sometimes they feel responsible enough to pick something really important up in the evening&#x2F;weekend and take a few hours off on another day.* I think the ~10% difference wouldn&#x27;t be measurable for software (or AI in our case) development anyway, we&#x27;re not a call center where you can measure &#x27;minutes called&#x27;.Final notes:* This is my European&#x2F;Dutch perspective. I understand this trend is stronger in the nordics&#x2F;Germany&#x2F;Netherlands than in the southern countries. Having managed a team in the US in the past, I find it hard to imagine how this would work in the US culture I experienced.* I have no desire to own souls ;)

I work in the UK as a remote architect for a megacorp, working a 4-day week, 7.5h per day Mon-Thu. I work on projects all across Europe and Scandinavian. I moved to a 4-day week a long time back - something like 7 years, I guess.Honestly, I get as much done in 4 days as I did in 5 - I really think it&#x27;s a sweet spot, where you are forced to focus more for a shorter time.Anyways, in terms of team working, obviously some meetings need to be either held without me, or not held on Fridays. Otherwise, it&#x27;s simply never been an issue.I&#x27;ve worked before with developers who work similar hours, and again it&#x27;s never been a problem - we just adjust our sprint capacity&#x2F;staffing accordingly.

I&#x27;ve been working 4d&#x2F;week for 4 years for a small Belgian company. I&#x27;m a software engineer.I&#x27;ve never got any complain from my manager, employer or colleagues about it.I&#x27;m usually taking my day off on Friday. All my colleagues know it, so we will try to schedule meetings for which I&#x27;m required on other days. If that&#x27;s not possible (it only happens a few times per year), I&#x27;m flexible enough to take my time off some other day.I might be 90% as productive compared to when I was when working full-time. This difference is probably too low to be noticeable by anybody else in the team.My gross got reduced by 20%. But considering the way taxation works in Belgium, I&#x27;m only getting about 10% less on my bank account. I also got promoted to a senior role since then, which entirely offset the difference anyway.While it has been working extremely well for me (I spent the additional free time doing physical activities and launching my personal project [1]), it might be harder&#x2F;impossible to get into higher positions (team leader, project manager...) while working part-time.--[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noisycamp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noisycamp.com</a>

I&#x27;m extremely curious about this from a practical perspective. (Disclaimer: American, so probably not the best work-life perspective)As far as company &#x2F; coworker expectations, how does this work? Are responsibilities &#x2F; work adjusted to fit the hours provided? What about being on-call?It seems like something a lot of companies should be taking advantage of, but the desire to own souls fights against it.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;?uri=LEGISSUM%3Ac10416" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eur-lex.europa.eu&#x2F;legal-content&#x2F;EN&#x2F;TXT&#x2F;?uri=LEGISSUM...</a>:“Part-time workers cannot be treated less favourably than comparable full-time workers solely because they work part-time, unless it can be objectively justified.”So, employers can deny requests for shorter working hours, but only if that can be objectively justified.In general, that’s fairly hard to do, given the amount of part-time workers and the diversity of their jobs already in the market.

Yes.This is a page from the government describing your rights: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rijksoverheid.nl&#x2F;onderwerpen&#x2F;arbeidsovereenkomst-en-cao&#x2F;vraag-en-antwoord&#x2F;wanneer-mag-ik-meer-of-minder-uren-werken" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rijksoverheid.nl&#x2F;onderwerpen&#x2F;arbeidsovereenkomst...</a> (you can translate it)I understand that it is fairly strictly enforced, so an employer saying &quot;no sorry, that would be annoying&quot; won&#x27;t fly - they would need a concrete justification.

&gt; It&#x27;s your right by law to reduce your hours for the same pay&#x2F;hour.Is this actually a thing? There are laws regarding this? How do these laws work if there&#x27;s a job requirement itself which needs certain number of hours?

I was going to reply to the parent, but yeah, perhaps going part-time might be the simplest and quickest solution?

I created a part-time jobs board: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;parttime.careers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;parttime.careers&#x2F;</a>I hope it will be useful for people in this thread.

I think that&#x27;s the right approach. The alternative is crunch, but you can&#x27;t have a workplace non-workaholics want to work at that does crunch.

I like this. Deadlines are set by humans and inherently flawed. It isn&#x27;t right to go into crunch mode when a deadline isn&#x27;t met - instead how the deadline was set and how it can be improved should be revisited.

It all depends on context. Most project deadlines are artificial bullshit anyway.And the reasons why a project is not on schedule may not be due to the behavior of people dropping their work at 5pm.Even so, tough luck: in NL most work to live, we don’t live to work like in some other countries.I really resonated with the original question of ASK HN.

NL is a strange place to work in IT, I worked there for a little while doing consulting work.Projects were not meeting deadlines yet everybody dropped the pen at 5pm sharp, I was baffled and amazed at the same time.

France be like what the hell are you talking about.

My wife&#x27;s parents raised 3 kids and paid a mortgage on two part-time salaries. Europe: it&#x27;s where it&#x27;s at for work-life balance.

People in this kind of career easily make twice the country&#x27;s average. If most people can live on that average, then you can bear a 20% salary reduction.

Fine if you&#x27;re single with low rent. If you have a family and a mortgage I can&#x27;t see how this is an option.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;s your right by law to reduce your hours for the same pay&#x2F;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&#x27;s very common here and won&#x27;t be a roadblock.Although this is going to entirely depend on how much money you actually need to get by.

I am not OP but have found myself in his post.I was laid off at the tail end of 2019, a mere week after I returned from my honeymoon. No explanations: money was tight, the higher ups wanted someone out, and I was the only remote worker. At that point I had been there longer than anyone else but the bosses. I was flabbergasted.Then the pandemic hit. With everything going on, I was unable to get interested in any kind of IT position. I&#x27;ve always felt the need to work on interesting projects where I could make a change, somewhere, for someone. Just not this time.I just can&#x27;t. I know I can do great work, I just don&#x27;t want to deal with everything else: most of the people, the stupid and arbitrary deadlines, the fabricated emergencies, the shifting priorities. I just want a task queue, a reasonable paycheck and being left alone.So... idk man, you can spill the beans and let anyone who could find it useful get some of that advice.

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.

Based on submissions, All About Berlin.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allaboutberlin.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;allaboutberlin.com&#x2F;</a>@nicbou
Thanks for this, good quality content.

As someone dealing with life in Germany, I’d appreciate the link?

b-mmxx had it right: it&#x27;s allaboutberlin.com

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&#x27;s sunny outside, I am rarely stuck behind the keyboard.Unfortunately, I don&#x27;t think I could easily reproduce. I wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;s important to me to be able to let the website run itself for a week or two.

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).

&gt; My salary isn&#x27;t bonkers&gt; For me, often it&#x27;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 sprintYou may not think so, but... Your salary is bonkers.

This was my experience with government work and is why I&#x27;m now an advocate for small government.

This sounds like a job a friend has in city government (in the midwest US).  They have to look busy but in the end it sounds like they really don’t do a whole lot (he’s the manager and knows they don’t have much to do but has to maintain head count).

&gt;Most of the times I had under-performed to save my ass from undeserving workload.Sounds like you&#x27;re on their trajectory already

Yes I have seen same productivity patterns. In one company I applied, the most senior developer&#x27;s average skills were less than my junior skills.
I can say I have junior skills but better productivity. Most of the times I had under-performed to save my ass from undeserving workload.

For NYC at least, that&#x27;s fairly normal for software engineers at tech companies. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.levels.fyi&#x2F;Salaries&#x2F;Software-Engineer&#x2F;New-York-City&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.levels.fyi&#x2F;Salaries&#x2F;Software-Engineer&#x2F;New-York-C...</a>

No crap, that&#x27;s significantly more than I&#x27;m making and I work 50 hours most week plus have a requirement to maintain certifications and write cookbooks and&#x2F;or blog posts after hours. It&#x27;s a bonkers salary if one actually works.I wonder if the OP&#x27;s company needs any data engineers.

&quot;based on the East Coast. My salary isn&#x27;t bonkers but I&#x27;m comfortably in the 150-200k range before bonus.&quot;Hope you are not trolling. 150-200K is not only comfortable but one of the top salaries even in East Coast area.

What do your work tasks consist of? It might seem simple to you, but maybe you have unrealized talent.

To be clear: I&#x27;m definitely not claiming to be a 10x, 40x or 100x developer. I&#x27;m not claiming I could do the same amount of work as you or anyone else any faster than you or anyone else could.It&#x27;s more like my managers and product management radically overestimate the amount of time things take. Those are the people choosing how much work they think I should be able to accomplish each sprint and I don&#x27;t do anything to dissuade them from the idea that that seems about right to me as well. I&#x27;m frequently praised by my manager and kidded by my colleagues about how &quot;fast&quot; I&#x27;ve managed to knock out my stories even when only working a few hours the first day of the sprint and submitting my PRs the day before or of the sprint ending. Those same managers&#x2F;product managers work with many other engineers at my company so I don&#x27;t know if everyone at my company is underachieving stealthily or what. As I said in my original post, I&#x27;m honestly as really, really confused as anyone else about what&#x27;s going on, but since I&#x27;m praised in performance reviews, given a decent bonus, been 2x chosen for quarterly awards and promoted internally, etc, I mean, what should I do ? Demand more work ? Yeah, no thanks.

2 weeks&#x27; work in 2 hours seems borderline unbelievable. Do you just radically overestimate the amount of effort every ticket will take? How do your coworkers&#x2F;manager not push back?I can see accomplishing that much work in 1&#x2F;2 the time, or maybe even less, but you&#x27;re talking about spending 1&#x2F;40 the amount of time as estimated.Many people here debate the existence of the 10x developer, and you&#x27;re claiming to be a 40x developer.

Honestly, I think this is somewhat of a crapshoot&#x2F;hard to tell from the job description and the reason I say this is the job I&#x27;m currently in functions exactly how you describe but the job description&#x2F;everything else from the outside gave me no clue before I actually started the job.&quot;Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect&quot; -- in fact, for me, often it&#x27;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&#x2F;groove. My coworkers&#x2F;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%&#x2F;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&#x27;t bonkers but I&#x27;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&#x27;m still confused. I&#x27;m not a genius software engineer, I&#x27;m maybe above average but still not anything special. My coworkers aren&#x27;t lazy or bad either - they&#x27;re all sharp, proactive people. All of this is to say, what you&#x27;re looking for does exist, it&#x27;s my job, but I haven&#x27;t the slightest idea how I would&#x27;ve been able to tell this is that type of job before actually doing it, so alas I can&#x27;t help you very much, though I am willing to answer questions if you may have any.

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

Did you study at Manchester? (I recognise the username format)

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

Until you have a rare medical condition that forces you into bankruptcy because the treatments are not covered. Bad things happen to good people through no fault of their own.Source - filed for bankruptcy due to family member having a rare medical condition. It was a strategic decision, because rich fat cats do it all the time when they make bad decisions. Within 18 months, bought new car at 0% interest, had mortgage within 3 years at very low interest. It wasn’t bad at all.If any other business was ran like the medical industry, it would have been shut down years ago.

Medicaid is free if you&#x27;re income is low (such as by not having a job).  Or in non-Medicaid-expanded states, an ACA plan will be very low cost and have very high levels of coverage.

I pay just about €150&#x2F;month, and that&#x27;s with added premiums for dental and what not. Which is pretty good.

This is a common concern. But public health care really isn&#x27;t THAT expensive. Something like $300&#x2F;month.

This is an argument against basic income - the world can&#x27;t function if everyone simply pursued their artistic desires.

And even income. This is the argument for basic income, people would be free to pursue their artistic desires and inventor ideas.

You have to make poverty wages to qualify for medicaid or be otherwise blind, disabled or 65.  Some states have spend down programs and some states (mostly red states) do as little as legally possible.

It isn&#x27;t and hasn&#x27;t been for a decade (since the ACA)Medicaid is free and of reasonable quality. Or if you can&#x27;t get access to Medicaid because you live in a non-Medicaid-expanded state then a silver ACA plan with 94% cost sharing will be no more than 8.5% of your income (which means free if you have no income).

Just think.  If your ability to get good quality health insurance&#x2F;coverage wasn’t directly tied to having to be employed for those benefits, we all could pursue our passions and desires.

&gt; I think the only possible jobs would be some kind of backend-only dev or devops&#x2F;sysadmin work. But I&#x27;m not sure these exist anymoreActually, if you work for a large MSP (ie, IBM, CGI, DXC) then you&#x27;ll probably be able to find a job that fits all of those requirements. They&#x27;ll undoubtedly have contracts with orgs that just want to outsource managing their infrastructure and that&#x27;s a pretty easy gig.

Yes, in this position you&#x27;d best find a way to diversify some of them or move them to, say, a Proxmox instance.

Well, if you battle-test the &quot;what happens if unexpected reboot [edit: or network loss, or API failure]&quot; side of things for EC2, and validate simulated resource failure for the other bits... wouldn&#x27;t it basically amount to figuring out where AWS&#x27;s *real* status dashboard is this month (eg, specific Twitter or HN thread) and mass-mailing realtime &quot;there, there&quot;s until everything mostly comes back up by itself?

If they&#x27;re all hosted on aws you&#x27;ll have a bad day if it ever goes down.

If you have a good pre-existing network of contacts (or have a modicum of networking skills&#x2F;are willing to do a bit of legwork) I’ve found there’s a constant demand for “low-end” sysadmin&#x2F;devops work for small businesses - usually they just need someone to be on call in case their AWS&#x2F;virtual hosting&#x2F;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&#x2F;yr you can spend for the rest of your life.

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.

Congratulations - you&#x27;re the perfect candidate to work in the IT department of any bank! Attend some meetings, send some emails.... profit!

This phase sounds to be toxic and sick. It&#x27;s almost as if people need a salary to feel useful. What a society we live in.

We all need to feel useful and have a real mission for at least some of the time.That doesn&#x27;t have to come from w**k though. It&#x27;s ok to have a job just to pay the bills and get your fulfilment from other parts of your life.

It sounds to me like you&#x27;re experiencing burnout (possibly lockdown-related) and&#x2F;or have worked unsatisfying jobs and&#x2F;or for not-so-great employers. I worry that the strategy you declare you intend to pursue, while pragmatic, won&#x27;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&#x27;t care about salary works wonders in your favour. If there&#x27;s a job out there that&#x27;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 &quot;mojo&quot; 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 &quot;capable of more&quot;, due to caring responsibilities and desire to pursue other hobbies. Good luck, I think you&#x27;re brave to ask this question on HN and its a nice alternative discussion to workaholism &#x2F; protestant work ethic.

Hey HN,I&#x27;ll probably get a lot of flak for this. Sorry.I&#x27;m an average developer looking for ways to work as little as humanely possible.The pandemic made me realize that I do not care about working anymore. The software I build is useless. Time flies real fast and I have to focus on my passions (which are not monetizable).Unfortunately, I require shelter, calories and hobby materials. Thus the need for some kind of job.Which leads me to ask my fellow tech workers, what kind of job (if any) do you think would fit the following requirements :- No &#x2F; very little involvement in the product itself (I do not care.)- Fully remote (You can&#x27;t do much when stuck in the office. Ideally being done in 2 hours in the morning then chilling would be perfect.)- Low expectactions &#x2F; vague job description.- Salary can be on the lower side.- No career advancement possibilities required. Only tech, I do not want to manage people.- Can be about helping other developers, setting up infrastructure&#x2F;deploy or pure data management since this is fun.I think the only possible jobs would be some kind of backend-only dev or devops&#x2F;sysadmin work. But I&#x27;m not sure these exist anymore, it seems like you always end up having to think about the product itself. Web dev jobs always required some involvement in the frontend.Thanks for any advice (or hate, which I can&#x27;t really blame you for).

Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?