I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office. Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me. I might be happy doing that kind of work part-time and remotely (almost nobody offers part time work) or I might want to do that later in life.
I read a post about Gumroad here on HN, and that's how I want to work. The way Gitlab does it is also very interesting.
There must be other people who feel and think the same, and the post is just a way to try to reach them.
That should literally never be the case for a developer though.
You can always be improving the documentation, increasing the test coverage, optimizing for speed/bandwidth/complexity/some other metric you've measured, working out how to measure something, learning new tools or tech that could be applied to a project, working on a spike for some future feature that needs upfront research.
If you see those things as "the boring bits" that you don't want to do then you're not a developer. You're a hacker. You want to hack what you see as the fun stuff rather than developing complete, robust applications that can ship. That's fine, and loads of fun, but no one will pay you to that. You don't get a role like that unless you're some sort of programming savant on a par with the likes of John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard - someone has proven they can invent amazing things by being left to their own devices. Unfortunately, you really need to prove yourself first before you can land a gig like that. If it was easy we'd all have done it.
The way it is worded, it would sound to me, as a hiring manager, that you might not finish the work. Because we all know the prototyping / experimentation part of a project is the most challenging and rewarding. Taking it live will involve dealing with the boring parts.
I am not claiming you _are_ such a person, but you might want to make it clear.
people typically get jobs because they have bills to pay, not because it's fun. If you are in a position where you don't need to pay the bills with work, then you're in a great position and can have fun all day long - so why not just do that?
If you work on something that also turns out to be marketable then you might even end up with a viable business that you love working on.
But surely they do a lot of boring work at those companies too, as in all tech companies?
The only times this ever happened to me was while I worked in the gaming industry and I absolutely still had work available - but we had some pretty rough overtime expectations that lead to constant overtime even if a different department was behind.
On principle I would just sit there and relax as best as I could in the office if my team wasn't behind. But, keep in mind, that this was also all unpaid overtime at the employee's expense because thank you EA lobbying and a terrible industry. I occasionally lost money on these evenings since transit would shut down and I'd need to cab home.
Now that I've left the gaming industry I doubt I'll ever be in that position again and I continue to have oodles of work in front of me, though, due to ADD and such - I often have trouble with motivating myself to do the boring bits they are part of the job and go with the good.
Many people find it very difficult to understand that money is not always a motivator. This is a particularly difficult concept for managers to deal with.
If an employee is not motivated by additional remuneration, or in the case where they do not require an income, the relationship between employee and employer is fundamentally different.
The boring bits _are_ part of the job.
> I only have one life, and I just don't want to be paid to "stay around and do the boring bits", or at least not full-time and in an office.
The part about "in an office" is a fair goal, but if you want to avoid docs/tests/support/refactoring work, don't do this job. Writing code is just one part of it, any way you take it, and avoiding the rest is cutting corners. Even our consultants have to write tests and update docs.
Yeah, I can see where you are coming from. Some people want to look for part-time jobs because they want to spend more time with their passions, kids, parents, or friends.
I've been working part time, fully remote last year and it was wonderful. I don't think I'd go back to full time work.
After achieving enough trust with the company, I negotiated working alternating weeks. Having a 9 day weekend every 5 work days is incredible. Yeah, I didn't make much money, but I spend that time on my startup, so maybe it will pay off one day. Either way it is a lot more fun!
I’m a little ADD, so my most hated work is paperwork and administrivia. Nevertheless, I recognize that it is sometimes necessary (documentation, performance evals, collecting metrics, etc.) and I just get my favorite coffee and suck it up (the work, but also the coffee).
Programmers have arguably the least boring jobs in the world (we can literally automate all the most boring bits except for certain types of paperwork/administrivia) so to hear a developer complain about doing a little bit of boring work smacks of a special brand of entitlement to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Just as an example, having to stay in the office if there's nothing else to do for the day was absolutely soul-crushing for me.
This only happens at terrible, un-enlightened companies who are more willing to waste both of your time and pay you a little less than they are to either give you meaningful work or let you go to the beach but stay on-call. Bosses should not be babysitters.
Maybe nothing you want to do, but I doubt there was nothing to do. Improving docs, tests, small refactoring to old code to make it more readable are a few examples.
IMO the boring bits are boring because there's no time spent to make them not boring.
On all layers of society there are tasks that are under-tooled and under-organized and if you make them worth doing, people will enjoy doing them 24/7.
