> look for dysfunctional companies

This theme is common in the thread and is wildly wrong.

First I recommend reading Bullshit Jobs to get some perspective on how others have fulfilled your goals.

Big, rich, process-driven companies and institutions are the easiest to do the least work in for the longest time.

Process is the toxin low-effort thrives on.

An admin role at Google pays more and works much less than an engineering role at a dysfunctional company.

If you look at (rich) university departments the admins are impossible to fire and work very little despite being paid only about 30-40% less than a professor with multiple postdocs working five to ten times as hard.

Anything in government: remember, process is where you thrive, and big rich city and state governments have incredible amounts of process.

I think this is the better advice here, and fits with some comments I left elsewhere in this thread about people I know working at MSFT and putting in only a handful of hours a week and still getting raises and promotions.

It's easy to do little when everyone expects everything to take forever because of how heavy the processes are in the organization.

It's not necessarily just processes.

There are also more experienced people who are just very good at certain types of tasks with the result that they can bang something out in a half day and everyone else assumes they must have spent a week on it. They're still generally available the rest of the time but they can produce what's considered high quality work in very little time. Of course, one needs to have that skillset and it helps to be mostly autonomous.

Working in govt is the way to achieve what OP wants. Especially in positions that are unionized. We call these people "lifers" or "gamers". They know how to game the union seniority system. Most of these people know how to phone in their work just enough to not get noticed and hop from one seniority-based position to the next before anyone catches on. By the time they've put in their 25 years, you've got a guy who majored in chemistry getting ready to retire from a senior software dev position. You can't fire them because they're union and it would take 6 months to a year to get all the documentation in order. And by that time, they've transferred to a different position.

Is THIS why Satya Nadella is so keen on getting everyone back in their cubicles. It makes everyone look like they're banging on their keyboards, nevermind that they're sending pictures on .... Teams? Can you do that on Teams? We use Slack. I was curious why he thought, "So much work gets done around the watercooler." I just thought he was a holdover from an earlier time. He's a smart dude, I'm not denying that. And I'm not young, but I'm not really working, usually, when I'm chatting in the snack room.

Maybe I'm too low level, though. That's a real possibility. I 100% admit that.

I think what he meant was that by being together and discussing problems we solve them a lot faster. This is absolutely true in my job. If I didn't know my team loved being remote so much, we would have been back in the office as soon as was safe.

Yes, we do solve problems faster if we're around the watercooler, but we're also miserable, and wondering how to escape. Be careful what you wish for.

pretty sure it's not safe yet. unless you're in israel/new zealand.

> Process is the toxin low-effort thrives on.

I'd argue it's even more sinister than that; too much process can very quickly cause engineers to burn out, and since they aren't reprimanded in any serious way for not doing much work, they can sit and feel depressed without anyone even addressing it.

You've just described my reality

I think it's a reality of most of the giant, brand-name companies. Near the end of my time at Apple, I was certainly underachieving (hence why I quit), largely because I became incredibly burnt out from the process.

> Big, rich, process-driven companies and institutions are the easiest to do the least work in for the longest time.

You kinda need to weasel in there first. When I worked at Intel (& to a lesser extent, Microsoft and IBM) there were literally hundreds of little 5-10 person b.s. boondoggles that did nothing of value but had management that could spin like Rumpelstiltskin, just took the company for a ride. Get several levels of that management going and no one has to really produce anything, they just need a manager to create paper-thin goals and hit those. Why? Because managers want to retire on the job and with enough nepotism it is entirely possible to scratch each other's backs. Problem is, they are very defensive about bringing in anyone that could upset the applecart. If you find one and burrow in, enjoy it!

Yes to university or government jobs as being good places to "disappear" and still earn a decent salary (with generally very good benefits). It's also very unlikely you will get fired once you've been around for a little while.

> An admin role at Google pays more and works much less than an engineering role at a dysfunctional company.

There's two issues here:

1) The op asked for a technical role, so comparing an admin role to a technical one isn't helpful.

2) You're presuming Google is not a dysfunctional company.

I think point (2) is actually the more important one; reading through your comment, the type of "big, rich, process-driven" company is you describe is exactly what I thought of when the gp said "dysfunctional".

The only extra qualifier I would add to the gp is to "look for uncool dysfunctional companies". There are companies (like Google) that have what I would describe as a "cult factor", where they're able to create enough mythos around the brand that "good", hard-working, attentive & talented people want to work there purely based on the "culture" associated with the brand (and also having that brand listed on one's resume). This creates a competitive environment where the scale & bureaucracy might not be sufficient to save you from scrutiny.

The ideal place is somewhere exactly as dysfunctional as Google, but without the same reputation attached to the brand.

At least as far as Google is concerned, this hasn't been my experience. I spent ~6.5 years there working an hour a day at the most (cue Office Space, meeting with the Bobs) and AFAIK didn't raise any alarms. In fact, when I left, my colleagues complimented me on my "work ethic".

It wasn't just me doing that either. Most ppl are too busy focusing on whatever life goals and illusions they've crafted for themselves to really scrutinize what others are doing and even if they realize what's happening, why would they care?

Good to know. I haven't worked in Google myself so I can't comment from first-hand experience, but I've heard from other Googlers I know that this is very much not the case for them. Could be office location/team dependent I'm sure.

I guess in any large enough org you're likely to be able to find this in some areas.

You're not wrong, but I also firmly believe that most if not all dysfunctional companies are extremely process heavy.

I think more dysfunctional companies are constantly working hard and sprinting... in circles.

They are making no real progress, but on the inside they’re all working hard at accomplishing nothing.

There's definitely lots of overlap in the venn diagram of "process heavy" and "dysfunctional", but there are plenty of each category that is not the other. Lots of industries require process, and lots of startup type places are dysfunctional without being process heavy.

Yes, they are either over-heavy on process or over-heavy on micromanagement

Each creates different kinds of misery, and could be exploitable by OP for his goals.

The over-process version is likely more durable (both the org not imploding soon, and the position lasting) and potentially less interpersonal misery.

Specifically, stay away from the tech industry.

1. Look for a smaller antiquated company or department that doesn't understand IT, and has few if any in-house IT professionals. Make sure the role doesn't include user support. Look for "Operations" jobs.

2. Look for positions that have a TON of manual work. Search for "prepare daily/weekly/etc... reports." and similar job functions.

3. Automate as much of it as possible.

4. DO NOT TELL ANYONE that you have automated those functions.

(optional - ethical constraints)

5. Insist on working from home so you can work for multiple companies simultaneously.

Early in my career (23 years old) I made the mistake of automating (rule 4) and bragging about it. I wrote some scripts that automated AutoCAD drawing calculations and spit out some spreadsheets. It would save a draftsman or engineer the entire morning of work every business day.

Naive and hungry for recognition, I even did a couple presentations about the process and was very proud of myself.

Later, I was reprimanded by an 'old school' director for taking shortcuts and changing processes that were well-established. There was no process change, my script performed the same calculations that a draftsman/engineer would click and commit to paper every morning.... zero room for error.

My boss was also reprimanded for letting the 'new kids they hired' run amok and do things however they liked.

They still used my script though and began giving our group new responsibilities to manage with the time I had freed up.

I was in a role that hit 1 & 2 for my first 'job' out of college in 2008. They told me that I couldn't go on vacation if I didn't finish my entire 2 weeks worth of work once... so, I automated all of it. A couple button clicks right before I left town and boom, all of my work was done.

Eventually the marketing department caught on that I had a really fast way to build reports and marketing targets that didn't require using a cumbersome db marketing tool and manually generating reports. I shared what I had built, and it royally pissed off everyone else in my role because they thought they were going to lose their cushy do basically nothing jobs. It actually turned into the team building out more tooling + automation, and most people learned valuable skills. The company even sent people to training and paid for tech books etc.

I left shortly after for greener pastures, but overall I think it was a net win.

Items three and four I did at my first job (non-technical).

I had been screwing around with software through my teenage years building AOL chat tools and little mods for games - I never considered it for a career.

I was hired as a data entry clerk when I was 18 at a large hospital. The billing department would work in excel and print hundreds of pages a day for data entry clerks to enter into our insurance billing system.

It took me about two weeks before I realized that if I could get them to bring me the spreadsheets on diskettes I could write a program to input the data into the system for me.

It took me a few days to figure it out and then I completely automated my job for about six weeks.

I was busted reading the Dungeon Masters guide in the middle of the day by my boss.

She asked what I was doing and I explained “I am reading the dungeon Masters guide.”

I explained that I had written a tool to automate my job.

I had not signed a PIIA form and I wrote the software at home on my own computer. I guess the company had no legal right to take it, so she offered me $2000 and a promotion to the IT department to give the company the rights to my software.

I was making $7 an hour, so I was very excited at the 2k.

I took it and they fired 15 clerks :(

Excellent points except (5) Usually immoral and often illegal

Why is it immoral? As long as the asked work gets done there's nothing wrong with splitting your time. How it any different from spending that time slacking off and working on hobbies, which could be monetized (ie art)

It's immoral because to be hired for a 40/hr full time job by 2 companies at the same time, you'll need to lie to both companies, representing to both that you're working full time, while in fact you aren't.

And presumably the lies aren't limited to the interview process. You'll probably have to lie on a daily/weekly basis to keep up the ruse (for example, what will you say when both companies want you in a meeting at the same time?)

A different take: in this line of work especially the “40 hour” requirement is an unethical backdoor way to impose a non-compete condition. It’s not entirely an arbitrary number since the 40-hour week has been customary for decades. But in practice there’s no good reason to demand that allocation of time for an exempt, salaried employee.

If you are paid by the hour it's immoral (and fradulent) to submit a time sheet for more hours than you actually work. However if you are paid a salary, you are being paid to do a job without regard to how much time it takes. If you can get the work done in 10 hours, and your supervisors are happy, then that's all you're obligated to do.

I often see this, but it doesn't match my experience of being salaried (outside the US). There's never a concept of "work done", there's just an endless list of things to do that I tackle one at a time, for 42h/week. If I go faster, then it just means I do more things in that same time.

Are there really salaried software jobs where every day someone tells you "your task for today is X", and you're finished for the day once you have done it?

We have expected productivity requirements on a bi-weekly basis. The expectation is that if you finish 2 weeks worth of work early, then the next iteration you will get slightly more work. Of course this isn't 100%, (obviously someone could just take longer on purpose), but as a manager its pretty easy to tell when your direct reports are slacking off.

Personally I don't think having 2 salaried jobs is immoral. If you're not caught, I feel like it is indicative more of bad leadership than your skill. A good manager should know what someone of X skill level should be accomplishing. If you're only doing half of that, (assuming the other half was spent on another job), it should be fairly easy to notice.

Thanks for the explanation. In practice, it seems pretty similar, the manager has to estimate what is a reasonable amount of work an employee should be able to do. It's just that in my case it's over 42h/w and in your case it's more nebulous.

2 salaried jobs here would clearly be illegal though, even if in practice you could manage manage it by only working half the time per job. There are laws around how many hours you can do in a week, and two 100% jobs would blow over the limit.

It’s immoral to not live life to its fullest or do anything that is not your passions. It’s immoral because you are betraying yourself, when literally you owe no one but yourself anything.

A very Epicurean philosophy. There are other philosophical schools of that come to mind, Kant and Epictetus are diametrically opposed for instance.

Noting that if everyone thinks this way, then civilization falls apart rather quickly.

I don't think it's immoral if you get to accomplish all of your tasks in both companies. For what I understand, companies want you to do the work they hired you for; they make money out of you, otherwise they wouldn't need you.

Maybe a better way to be at 2 companies at the same time is by being completely transparent about working on both places with one of the companies. You automate all your full-time boring work in the first one, and in the second maybe you do part-time, or some kind of work that can align with your own interests.

maybe an etrepeneurial partnership or a flexible deal to get a new product that really interests you without having to commit all of your life.

I've never signed an agreement that says I work 40 hours a week. It has never even come up.

Meh, if they're happy with your work, it's no big deal. It would be immoral if they saw you were automating the same work and decided to fire you or demand you do more.

Salary workers aren't paid for their time. Their paid for their productivity

Bill by the hour, and suddenly they call you a consultant, and it's neither immoral nor illegal. smh

That's called double billing and is considered unethical [0]:

> In law, double billing refers to charging an hourly rate to two clients for the same time spent working. The American Bar Association prohibits double billing. It is tantamount to overcharging, since the amount of time actually spent working on any one client's work is less than the amount billed to that client.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_billing

For lawyers, by the Bar Association... What does that have to do with tech?

If you can charge the amount lawyers charge per hour then it's definitely unethical.

Double the rates, work half the time for each client :)

I never understand this point personally. If you're delivering value to the multiple companies you work for such that they like you, or at least don't fire you, then I don't see anything immoral in that. It's merely corporations who insist on people working for one and only one company at a time when in reality it shouldn't matter.

Completely agree. Do we insist that corporations only sell to a single customer? No that would be absurd. But insisting a person can only sell their labor to a single customer is seen as perfectly normal.

there is a chance you are going to have access to valuable information of competing companies, that would put you in position of power over them, and is a clear conflict of interests.

So it's like a lawyer serving opposing parties in court, nobody's asking why it's impossible

That's only true in that particular hypothetical. There are a lot of possible circumstances without such a clear conflict of interest.

Also, in the lawyer example, someone's freedom or livelihood is on the line. In the company example, it's a company's profits, which has a much less clear relationship to either of those two things, especially in today's world of 250:1 salary ratios.

> and often illegal

Source? As long as it's not explicitly stated, and in my experience, it never is, then there should be no issue with this.

Interestingly, for my current role at Salesforce as part of the employment contract it explicitly states I’m not allowed to work on anything else on the side unless I get explicit permission from their legal department. Including nonprofits, hobby projects, consulting, etc. I don’t know to the extent that anyone abides by that, but they drill at home pretty strongly when you start. The language is far above and beyond what most companies insist about not working on anything with a conflict of interest, and I’ve never seen it before at any company, large or small.

Then again, there’s a difference between something being illegal and it being against your employment contract. You’re not going to go to jail for having a secret second job, but you might get fired. But at least you’d have that second job…

I've only worked at tech companies, and mostly the kind that you want to work at. But basically every company I've worked at has some clause in the employment contract about outside activities. And typically having another full time job would violate the spirit, if not the letter of the employment contract.

That said, some contracting on the side is probably fine, as long as it's not at a competitor.

Correct. Most companies have "Moonlighting" clauses.

It's a clause that originally meant that you couldn't have a 2nd night job, because you would be exhausted in your primary job, but it also includes having a 2nd job in the same hours.

It's very common for employment contracts to explicitly forbid you from working on things during your employment that is not directly related to your employment. An expectation of "loyalty" is also often even included in labor law, even in very left leaning countries in Europe.

yes, which is bullshit because this said loyalty is not reciprocated in any meaningful way, I still fail to see how such conditions came to be.

As I said in a sibling comment, bill by the hour, and they start calling you a consultant, and suddenly this isn't an issue anymore :)

Maybe in the US it is not explicitly stated. My previous contract stated explicitly that I had to work from 9:00 to 18:48 five days a week, and do 1:00 of lunch between 11:00 and 15:00. Anything deviating from that would be accounted in the Bank of Hours and be subject to additional laws regard pay.

That's fascinating. I just checked my contract and it doesn't mention working hours at all.

However, I'm not in tech, and prior to COVID, it physically wouldn't be possible to work multiple jobs remotely. So perhaps this is an artifact of that time.

Some of the other comments suggested there may be actual laws against it, I'll have to look into that.

Off-topic, but I discovered that recent legislation made my wage confidentiality clause illegal.

It depends on the country.

In France for instance, it is legal to have two (or more) jobs but they cannot be with competitors, you have a limit of hours you can work (which means that if your contract states 40 hours work then you cannot have another one), and you cannot have a clause in your contract which you usually do have (in the companies I know at least - tech oriented).

Simply insist on being paid by 1099 and don't live in California.

> often illegal

I think a citation is needed here. It _may_ be a contract violation, but I struggle to think of many jurisdictions where this would be illegal.

Could you share some examples of when this would violate a law?

I thought the whole point of being paid a salary was to not have to worry about keeping track of hours

Except if you are hired as a contractor

5. is like this tweet that suggests there was an engineer that worked at both Google and Facebook simultaneously.

https://twitter.com/arrington/status/1311520168200163328?s=2...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24650817

The issue is that this thread is suspicious, says 'a friend of a friend' so there's literally no way to verify this as being real. It got 20k likes on twitter so it might have just been a made-up tweet to garner a day of fame.

For what it's worth (sample size of 1 - me) - if you are at all competent and bad at setting boundaries, the dysfunction will absolutely frustrate the heck out of you.

Seeing what is broken, knowing that it can be fixed, and having even the slightest bit of motivation or knowledge of how to do so, and how it goes on forever and ever and doesn't get fixed becomes incredibly tiring.

I suppose, if you go into a dysfunctional company hoping to "coast", just be aware, if you are not good at managing boundaries and passing off the "frustration", it might be a lot worse than you realize.

Just imagine.. if you are spending 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, watching a slow motion wreck.. and powerless to do anything about it... sure, you get paid, but is it worth spending the time?

If I were being paid like $250k/yr+, think I could tolerate it for enough years to retire and go do my own things.

lol, well the slow motion trainwrecks are, in my experience, about a quarter of that. But it's still enough for a comfortable life, especially if you have a side hustle or you're self-teaching stuff that will help your resume.

I know some Google teams that might qualify.

Dysfunctional companies in my experience have been horrible places to work where they work the devs to death and make them do all kinds of unrelated tasks.

This or, these are companies where managers need people to "look busy", which in a "remote allowed" environment will not be possible or will mean surveillance software.

If you're a dev working from home, surveillance software might be easy to get around ;)

Automate some real-looking work processes and just use your personal computer for everything else.

I can vouch for this. Dysfunctional companies have no conception of humanity and you will suffer as you try to squeeze through the cracks, which is much harder than it looks.

Dysfunctional companies consume effort, but they waste it. People work themselves to the point of burnout with little to show for it.

What the original poster needs is a company that is already functioning without them, and does not require any of their effort to keep going.

This is great advice but if I could just add one thing, from experience, and that is, do treat the interview with dispassion. I have consistently found employers (esp in a dysfunctional organisation) often read dispassion as confidence and that is always a plus point.

+1 for this advice. In my experience skepticism and hesitation (within reason) are often highly regarded in these environments, and enthusiastic upstart types are seen as inexperienced / naive, even when that's not the case.

The backhaul VOIP telco space has TONS of companies that meet these criteria.

I'm curious, could you be more specific?

Well I'm not going to name specific companies, but you know those international calling cards that are sold basically everywhere in areas with a large migrant work force? Those cards tend to use these discount VOIP networks.

I assumed WhatsApp audio and FaceTime audio killed that market years ago.

You might also assume Vonage was killed off, as I did until recently discovering they have a multi-billion market cap.

Vonage is supported by people like my parents, who for years have used the landline via Vonage for at most 2 phone calls per month that could have been done via a multitude of apps, yet refuse to heed my advice to cancel it.

Try setting up E911 service for a GVoice voip phone in your house sometime -- you'll run across a lot of web UIs that look >10 years old.

The funny thing about this is that all the people I know who work or worked at Elastic say it's one of the most dysfunctional and toxic environments.

I wasn't in any way trying to say Elastic must be a great place to work, only that the type of places I'm talking about normally have web sites that look like the opposite of theirs.

Slick websites often cover a multitude of sins - in a dysfunctional company "update the website" is something they can subcontract out and point at.

Look for multiple changes to the website with no consistent plan over years.

This is how your life becomes endless putting out fires