Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
I&#x27;ve worked in a few different capacities and have seen this happen, and seen previously excellent developers decide they simply couldn&#x27;t take the pressure and head out for something easier.  I can respect the latter and provided your interest isn&#x27;t in attempting to &quot;get away with pretending to work[0]&quot;, desiring a less demanding role somewhere else isn&#x27;t something worthy of &quot;flak&quot;.<p>Onto advice: I had a friend who worked at a shop that did high-end bespoke software centered around compliance management automation&#x2F;assistance software for complex manufacturing operations.  The company didn&#x27;t have a product, but wrote a <i>ton</i> of software tying various things together, along with a 25% solution that they&#x27;d customize out for each customer.  This guy wasn&#x27;t the original author, but had become the SME for nearly the entire solution over about 8 years.  He was a bit older than me; I think 45 at the time, had an unexpected fourth child, and effectively started looking like a train was hitting him every day.<p>I was working for a large telecom, at the time.  I was <i>not</i> on their development team but was a full time developer[1].  Backend-only dev <i>definitely</i> exists depending on the languages you&#x27;re writing in (though you&#x27;ll probably have to write a line or two of JavaScript from time to time).  Sysadmin work <i>definitely</i> exists at large companies; I know we had a <i>large</i> team (referred to as &quot;Infrastructure&quot;) in various capacities (<i>nix was broken into a few teams, CDN was its own group).  I had worked with two of the Unix teams at various times -- by God, you&#x27;d be </i>amazed* at how many things are done <i>a command at a time</i>. No scripts.  I assumed it was some policy&#x2F;fear&#x2F;craziness.  Nope, the manager of the team was a good friend so I asked him: entirely skillset.<p>There isn&#x27;t enough background about your current job, so I&#x27;m not sure how close my recommendations will be to what you are already doing, however, I&#x27;d strongly recommend looking into the largest companies in semi- or non-tech sectors.  Check they&#x27;re IT ops&#x2F;dev organization; note whether they&#x27;re using a third-party[2].  If you want that &quot;back-end only job&quot;, look no further. Our 7 or 8 most important systems served only massive global multi-nationals[3].<p>You&#x27;d be surprised how many organizations have <i>large</i> DBA teams.  I&#x27;m not knocking DBA work; I&#x27;ve worked with <i>great</i> DBAs, but at a past job, all but one of the 6 member team did much more than run a commercial profiling tool, and add indexes from time to time.  Bear in mind that <i>every</i> infrastructure job at the company I worked at had an on-call requirement which involved being willing to be awoken at any hour of the night for a week to remote-in for emergencies.  It&#x27;s pretty common to have an on-call requirement.<p>But let me tell you how I hope it turns out.  My buddy took my advice and ended up getting an &quot;Easy Corporate Job&quot; -- in office, but with a promise of 3-days remote in 6 weeks.  I remember him telling me that the job was <i>so</i> boring he finished all of his &quot;daily to-dos&quot; for the week in the first couple of hours on Monday, scripted half of them out his life and had the other down to a set of commands he could run to reduce the time required to complete.<p>He said &quot;Duuuuude, this job is <i>so</i> easy. I work as hard in a week in this job as I did in a day in my last and my boss <i>has never seen someone work so hard</i>!&quot;  His burnout ended in a couple of weeks.  His boss let him work from home &quot;anytime he wants&quot; at week 3.  He never returned to working &quot;his ass off&quot; like he did at the last job, and he has been in the same position for years.  He&#x27;s made new friends on the team, who respect him for his abilities and his boss loves him -- I think partly because he&#x27;s not using the team to step-stone into a better role.  There <i>really is a place for people who are OK staying where they are</i>.  That&#x27;s not me, but I count several among my friends and I have enjoyed working with many who &quot;handle their piece of the puzzle with expected results -- no more, no less&quot;<p>It&#x27;s been a decade, but I used to interview developers at big-corp.  We used get the bottom of the barrel of the resumes.  Nobody wanted to work for BigCorp &quot;process-driven-agile-buzzword development shop&quot;.  The thing of it is, I observed that the development shop[1] basically did everything that I&#x27;ve done at every dev shop I&#x27;ve worked at, since.  But the &quot;reason&quot; they do the things (stand-up&#x2F;retrospective&#x2F;back-log and on and on) but instead of being used in support of Agile&#x27;s goals, they&#x27;re basically used as a kludge to reduce the amount of change that applications experience. Guess what that means for a large dev shop?  They&#x27;re all pretty bored.<p>I was under infrastructure in my role at at BigCorp (various levels, including under the CIO at once; it&#x27;s not as cool as it sounds but it&#x27;s fun to say).  I saw how little was expected of those employees and steadfastly refused all attempts to move me there.  I eventually left the company because I wanted to work on things that were more difficult&#x2F;interesting and 90% of my co-workers &quot;just showed up every day&quot;.  And BigCorp will let you work remotely, even pre-pandemic, but it can be tricky and pulled out from under you from higher up, so the risk of a &quot;Yahoo!&quot; happening is pretty easy.<p>[0] Too often I&#x27;ve been on the receiving end of this individual, and because &quot;at the end of the day the job has to get done&quot;, if your job is to pretend your job is important and pretend you&#x27;re working hard, history has shown that I&#x27;ll get the work, and you&#x27;ll get in my way.<p>[1] There&#x27;s a comment in my history explaining -- probably several -- but I was part of a small team developing software for internal infrastructure with full autonomy with regard to the technologies&#x2F;choices I made, but had to write what was needed in the priority the company wanted it.  I wanted <i>nothing</i> to do with the development shop for reasons that will become apparent.<p>[2] This isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad thing; might even be good depending on how the arrangement is.  I know of one support person at a large company who works through, I think, HP (maybe IBM?) supporting servers at a few datacenters.  He&#x27;s technically required to be at the DC in a few very limited circumstances (one of which is <i>not</i> &quot;first-time setup&quot;, they&#x27;re installed by another group), but he was working remotely well before the pandemic.<p>[3] Meaning, basically no e-commerce.  You&#x27;re managing an important ticketing system&#x2F;status reporting service and a million custom internal apps for managing the business that were written a decade ago and Walter retired last year.  We had a two-node web site running a Sybase back-end for our most important apps most of the time I was there.