Ask HN: Any decent jobs that one can coast through? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any decent jobs that one can coast through?

5 pointsgiantg219 comments

Are there any jobs or industries that are easy and on ecan just coast in? I'm tired of my current company always wanting to squeeze more out of me without more pay. I'd rather have an easy job that I can just coast at instead of constant politics and pressure to advance.

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No progress since the last time you asked?

"Ask HN: Where Are the Easy Jobs?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28854348 by giantg2 | 8 months ago | 22 points | 39 comments

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26721951 by lmueongoqx | on April 7, 2021 | 2022 points | 1115 comments

and possibly "Ask HN: Where can we find the unsexy jobs?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31001537 by throw1138 | 72 days ago | 247 points | 220 comments

No real progress so far.

I have an interview to switch to a different team in my company. That should cut back on the context switching and allow me to focus on one stack, and mostly UI at that. It will still have the corporate policies and BS like any other team at the company. I'm hoping there's another idea I haven't heard yet. I'll check out those posts. Thanks!

Government jobs are usually easy to coast through.

Also, places with lots of B and C players usually are easy to coast through. The thinking is you can do less, still be better than these people, and not get fired. The trick is to not show you know TOO much though. Otherwise you'll get a ton of work on your plate that these B/C players can't do.

What if I'm a B or C player though?

Then find places with lots of D/F players :)

Any tips for finding those?

If u know of any, look at their Linkedin profiles

Get a job at a government contractor; I haven't done shit in several months. I hate it though because of the constant politics and my lead being generally incompetent.

Yeah, I'm trying to avoid places with politics. If my current job didn't involve so much office politics then I would probably say I could coast here. But working on the politics is one of the more annoying parts and definitely takes up some time.

The grass is greener. You don't wanna be coasting for your own development.

It depends. Some people might want to have more time + energy working on side gigs/projects that they eventually want to turn into a full-time business.

If one's development doesn't matter and hasn't been rewarded, then it seems it's a moot point. Who cares if I stop improving if my job is one that I can coast at and still get paid? I'll never be a highly paid dev. Total comp is finally a bit over $100k this year due to a company wide bonus.

You can coast in a lot of jobs at Google and Microsoft (speaking from experience). It was a bit of a trap for me though, and wasn't a great feeling coasting though as I wanted to build / achieve things.

Any tips on how to get placed on these coast teams at FAANG? I'm currently working on a side project and it would be awesome to have a FAANG-income working 20-30 hours a week so I can grind on my project w/o having to sacrifice my savings.

For me it was time and luck. Some patterns I have noticed:

1. Product groups suck. Avoid those unless you want to feel the burn.

2. Avoid sales engineering where you are either billable, have targets or have a million customers.

3. Find a group/area going through lots of growth (cloud is the spotGCP/Azure/AWS). It's much easier to ride the macro waves. Avoid groups with lots of competition/in-fighting.

4. Make friends and be good company. People prefer good company over good workers.

5. The longer your tenure, the more likely you are able to engineer whatever role you want to have. You will also have the network to support you.

> Product groups

do you mean the people working in product. i.e. PMs?

I doubt I'm good/smart enough to even get into Google or Microsoft.

The perception these companies has created is totally bullshit and you are self selecting yourself out.

Although these companies create artificially high barriers, most of the work is pretty ordinary and my colleagues are pretty ordinary too. That's totally OK because people would be very unsatisfied and leave if they were working too long below their ability/aspiration.

Sure, there are the big throbbing brains here and there but that's maybe a few percent. Most SWEs are just stringing APIs together, doing boring YAML work or whiling away their days in meetings.

Wow, that's a bingo on my day today. Literally started with a meeting, did some API integration work, and fiddled with YAML a bit. Just a run of the mill small healthcare software company, but there's work to do and the people/leadership are pretty good, so I can't complain.

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