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Ask HN: High paid job with low accountability?

40 点作者 lazythrowaway超过 10 年前
This question is a bit toungue in cheek, but I am wondering if it is possible to shape a career towards the title goal.<p>I am pretty successful in my current work life - Under 25 with a 100k ish total compensation. I&#x27;ve always pushed myself, but lately I just feel lazy.<p>I&#x27;ve heard stories of boring positions in big companies where you don&#x27;t have to do much of anything, you don&#x27;t learn anything, and you don&#x27;t advance, but you can collect high salaries if you get the position and there&#x27;s not a lot of work expectations.<p>Is there a way to reliably get a job with a decent salary, but one can coast along doing very little from 9-5?

30 条评论

JonFish85超过 10 年前
It&#x27;s probably a gamble. I&#x27;d imagine that these positions are at a company that&#x27;s doing reasonably well, and hasn&#x27;t had to make cuts anywhere. From what I&#x27;ve read, Yahoo had lots of these positions pre-Marissa Mayers--the company was just coasting along, not really having to change anything, but when she came in with energy &amp; force, these kinds of people were the first to go.<p>I&#x27;d say this is a terrible thing to aspire to: you&#x27;ll dread work. It&#x27;ll be a matter of how many hours a day you&#x27;re going to play tetris, and you&#x27;ll end up just trying to pass the time. Passing 40 hours a week is tough to do when you&#x27;re not really free. And heaven forbid the company blocks your ESPN&#x2F;Fark&#x2F;Deadspin&#x2F;whatever you&#x27;re reading. The stories you hear about these boring jobs--do the people who have them love them? I&#x27;ve never heard of someone with minimal responsibility actually <i>enjoying</i> their job. Sure, everyone loves an easy week now and again, but after that, a boring job really drags.<p>Boring jobs will eat your brain. There is no fulfillment, no pride in your work, etc. And ultimately, you&#x27;ll probably end up weeded out, unless you&#x27;re &quot;lucky&quot; enough to stay hidden in the folds of the company long enough to retire.<p>And what happens if&#x2F;when the company hits a rough patch and realizes they can remove you? Your marketability is at a minimum: you&#x27;re making a lot of money, have no new skills and are on the same job market as people who have actually worked.<p>Best thing to do would be to find a way to make money at something you enjoy. You don&#x27;t have to make a lot of money, but enough to coast with minimal expenses. Do you really want to spend your life doing nothing, accomplishing nothing and with nothing to show for your years? It doesn&#x27;t have to be anything in particular, but spending 40 hours a week doing nothing for a career is a gigantic waste of time, resources and energy.
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ChuckMcM超过 10 年前
By and large I have concluded that except in extraordinary situations that job doesn&#x27;t exist. Sure a lot of people will look at job from the outside, not knowing what it entails, and make statements&#x2F;generalizations about it requiring no work to pull down some big salary, but having been on both sides of that window my experience was that it was an illusion.<p>That said, at an abundant salary and a young age, you can go the mr money moustache route. Save your way into an early retirement. That is probably the easiest thing to do, then any money you make from working is just &#x27;bonus&#x27; and you can take jobs that pay less, don&#x27;t challenge you much, and are perhaps less stressful. I expect you will get bored though.<p>The situations where you can get a sinecure (the name for the job type your looking for) is when you are in a relationship with the ownership and simply your presence is valuable enough to justify your salary. Some very large names in a field for example can get by with just having their name on the employee list as their &#x27;value&#x27; to the company. You can also find spots in companies which are actually covers for a differently funded activity. An acquaintance of mine worked at a restaurant which was used to launder cash from some criminal group. There wasn&#x27;t a lot of business so they didn&#x27;t have to do a lot of work, but they got paid anyway. Granted it was at a much much lower wage but I expect there are larger companies with similar alternate agendas.
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aggieben超过 10 年前
I think if I were you (25, statistically likely to be single), I would live in the cheapest accommodations I could stand and use the mostly-excess portion of that 100k to buy rental homes in cash. Do that for a number of years, and it won&#x27;t be long before you have passive income and you can make your 100k and work at whatever thing makes you most happy.<p>If you don&#x27;t like real estate, then pick something else: save a bit longer and buy a pizza franchise. Save for a few centuries and buy a football franchise. Buy some other kind of small business. Learn an investment strategy that makes you a few percentage points annually.<p>&gt; Is there a way to get a ...decent salary...doing very little from 9-5?<p>This is generally called <i>passive income</i>, and you don&#x27;t get this on someone else&#x27;s payroll. You have to get there on your own.
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notacoward超过 10 年前
At many medium-to-large companies, being the CTO or in the office of the CTO fits this bill. I&#x27;ve worked with many such people who were brilliant and&#x2F;or hardworking, but I&#x27;ve also worked with many who just liked to fiddle with stuff and either throw it over the fence (where it inevitably had to be rewritten) or just never finish it. Generally &quot;staff&quot; (as opposed to &quot;line&quot;) positions are a bit like this, because you can basically ride on one person&#x27;s power&#x2F;reputation and you only have to please them. A lot of &quot;architects&quot; also have responsibilities so vague that it&#x27;s hard to say whether or not they&#x27;re doing their jobs.<p>Mostly, though, it&#x27;s less a matter of the position than of strategies you can use in any position. A perennial favorite trick seems to be working on multiple projects reporting in to bosses who never talk to one another. I&#x27;ve seen people perfect the trick of telling each boss that they&#x27;re working on stuff for the other, until both essentially give up. At a company where reorgs are frequent so that many people nominally report to managers who have no oversight of their actual work, you can even get people who literally appear nowhere on the org chart but still get paid. It sounds like a joke or a movie plot, but it&#x27;s true. I&#x27;ve seen it. I have to admit I&#x27;ve been tempted to &quot;fall between the cracks&quot; myself, but I&#x27;m just not that kind of guy.
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frequentflyeru超过 10 年前
Run for Congress...<p>No accountability, don&#x27;t really have to do anything, high salary, no real job requirements except age and citizenship, not a lot of work expectations, and if you are an incumbent your re-election rates are 90% for House and 91% for Senators.<p>Perfect fit.
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taternuts超过 10 年前
Get a job programming at a medium-large .NET or Java shop that moves slow (the more dated their stack, the better!)
segmondy超过 10 年前
You have a problem and it&#x27;s not your job, it&#x27;s your laziness. you are 25, you can&#x27;t coast through the rest of your life being lazy. If you try, at some point you will fall, and when you fall, you will fall hard. Your problem should be to find a way to motivate yourself to work even harder and earn even more.
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nilsimsa超过 10 年前
Basically any middle management position in a large enough company.
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le_douard超过 10 年前
I will tell you about my story. I am not at 100k but at equivalent given the quantity of free benefits I get in the country I am working in.<p>I am currently on a job I have taken for Visa and quick Money (mostly visa though). Six months later I had milked all the experience I could get out the tech and people I am working with.<p>Basically I went from a high accountability role in a startup in Europe where as a Junior coder I was entrusted with big services and decisions (technical decisions) that could undo the company if I messed it up. And now I am doing fairly PAR level corporate internal services in JP company, using &quot;good old&quot; stacks of technologies where the most cutting edge aspect is that we use the latest version of PostgreSQL. I am basically doing undergrad DB 101 data modelling within a team that do not care about the technical quality of its product.<p>Everyday I dread the boredom I feel at work. And If I didn&#x27;t commute with my wife (she is the high of my days) every morning I would have probably become a statistic during the rainy season.<p>On a bright note: I have already found the next thing that looks really interesting, new and well compensated. I am currently shaking off that funk the projects I have been working on have put me in.<p>It was difficult keeping morale up, I must say that I was on the fringe of depression. I felt exhausted even though all the work my managers could put on me was done, tested and pushed to production before most people were in the office (again: used to start-up pace here), and then you guys (HN) enter my day (at 9 flipping 30 AM) ... I have never been so well informed in my whole life.
deweller超过 10 年前
I&#x27;m in a position like that right now. And it is driving me crazy. Sure the pay is good. And the responsibilities are well-defined and reliable.<p>But the challenge and enjoyment is not there. I find myself working like crazy after hours to carve out a new career while still maintaining the income of the day job.<p>The balance between stressed-out and challenged can be hard to strike. But I know that for me I need to be challenged to be enjoying my work life.
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dpweb超过 10 年前
Our sales VP once called this - dig yourself a hole and sit there for 10 years.<p>If by &#x27;low accountability&#x27; you mean - don&#x27;t do much work - it definitely exists and is all over corp IT shops. I would separate out the technical positions from the management positions.<p>A manager usually doesn&#x27;t do much real work, they have a team to do the work, but does often bear the responsibility to higher up mgmt, and will get canned when things go bad.<p>A dev works very hard, but once you become an expert after years of specialization in say a particular language for framework, you can coast because it takes you 30 minutes what a junior person may struggle with all day.<p>I&#x27;ve met all kinds of devs who are very sharp, they make over 100k and they don&#x27;t &quot;work hard&quot; at all.
brogrammer90超过 10 年前
Any enterprise company that&#x27;s all aboard the .NET and Team Foundation Server train. With the daily scrums, sprint planning, and interruptions from the stakeholders, taking a full work week to create one table in Oracle&#x2F;SQL Server is par for the course.
serve_yay超过 10 年前
A company that makes use of tech but is not a tech company. The problem is finding one that treats its employees well... basically I found myself in the position you describe. I stuck around for years but ultimately decided it was not good for my career long-term. On the other hand, I was pulling right around $100k, working from home, realistically putting in 2-3 hour days most days. I went entire weeks without doing any actual work beside sending a couple emails, if that. But it didn&#x27;t feel cool, like I was getting one over. It made me feel like shit.<p>If you find something like this you absolutely must supplement it with lots of self-directed learning or you&#x27;ll stagnate and be totally stuck.
wellsthrowaway超过 10 年前
Join Wells Fargo. We have a lot of people like that. Plus you can work remotely!
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philrykoff超过 10 年前
I believe everyone has their &quot;department they don&#x27;t like&quot; and where you ask yourself: what do they do all day?<p>For me, it&#x27;s Governance. The governance departments of big companies do not produce a product the company sells (maybe it can be argued that they take a role in producing the image of the company, though). If they don&#x27;t do their job properly and other departments of the company do not comply with whatever they are governing, they can always blame that department. And their jobs are well paid as their role is seen as important from a higher management position.
narag超过 10 年前
Best answer IMO is JonFish85&#x27;s. You really don&#x27;t want to do that. But if you want to trash yourself, who are we to prevent it? It&#x27;s not the job or the company in particular, it&#x27;s the circumstances. Some ideas:<p>Look for a big company. Easier to hide in them.<p>Find a place with internal fights. Same reasoning.<p>No external competition is a plus.<p>A lazy boss is a treasure. A very busy one is a close second.<p>Never be just under &quot;the line&quot; (between managemente and technical).<p>Have reports. Make them do everything you should.
DanielBMarkham超过 10 年前
Advice.<p>If you are one of 3 trusted advisers who have a 1-in-3 chance of providing critical business advice for a multi-billion-dollar company? You&#x27;re worth every penny even if your batting average sucks.<p>The trick is to get into that position. You usually get there by making lots of real-world decisions for yourself for your own multi-billion-dollar company. But -- I&#x27;m sure there are other ways.<p>Good luck!
falcolas超过 10 年前
Line coder at a huge company (such as Oracle). You can&#x27;t make many major changes without going through bureaucracy, and you don&#x27;t have the leverage to even begin to navigate the bureaucracy. Do what you&#x27;re told, and reap the benefits of decent monetary compensation and golden health&#x2F;retirement benefits (AKA really good 401k matching).
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pseudometa超过 10 年前
Government&#x2F;Military contractors are a great place to start looking, particularly where there is a lot of legacy technology.
mh_yam超过 10 年前
Most people I know who are in this situation are<p>1) Old<p>2) Have tons of experience and worked hard earlier in their life<p>3) Have lots of connections that prevent them from being fired<p>I&#x27;m sure there are employees at large companies who collect 6-7 figure salaries and do little to nothing on a day-to-day basis. However, they can only do this because of their past merit and connections.
jk215超过 10 年前
Probably anything government tech related.
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boca超过 10 年前
Reminds me of the &quot;forgotten&quot; employee. A lengthy but a very interested read:<p><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;site&#x2F;forgottenemployee&#x2F;</a>
api_or_ipa超过 10 年前
Off topic, but now have you secured a 100k job at 25?
noodle超过 10 年前
Supporting legacy products in a large company.
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steven777400超过 10 年前
This is pretty dangerous. Another poster mentioned Yahoo pre-Mayers. Generally, positions like what you describe are either politically protected: a manager with a large number of reports has more &quot;importance&quot; than a manager with few, so some managers try to inflate their staff, or, the position has just slipped through the cracks as times change around it.<p>The problem comes when you&#x27;ve been in that position for 10 years, doing little to no significant work, not building or honing any skills, and suddenly a new management comes in and cleans house, and you&#x27;re gone. Now what?<p>I work for the government and we have a lot of folks like what you describe, but with less income. As long as they show up for work and answer a few emails, mostly, they can get by. This works, I guess, if you&#x27;re just a few years from retiring. But we do sometimes get aggressive politicians in office who promise to &quot;cut the fat&quot;, and we have had cuts and layoffs in the past. So imagine yourself, at 25, you take a position and intentionally don&#x27;t learn, don&#x27;t advance, and just do the minimum to collect the salary.<p>10 years later, you&#x27;re 35 and still working with Java 6 on some legacy system that needs 2 hours a week of maintenance. That&#x27;s your whole job. Suddenly, some political upheaval happens and a bunch of folks, including you, are laid off.<p>Can you get back in the game? Of course. Would it be a lot easier to get back in if you took that time to keep your skills at least somewhat up to date?<p>That said, I&#x27;m very sympathetic. I&#x27;m a computer programmer because I&#x27;ve always been good at it. When I was a kid, and in high school, and so on. That&#x27;s the only skill I learned. But I don&#x27;t like computers. New frameworks don&#x27;t excite me, they make me feel tired. When I go home, I don&#x27;t want to play with the newest technology or even gadget. I dream of getting out of computing all together, but, nothing else would bring the salary combined with the light workload. It&#x27;s a &quot;bronze handcuffs&quot; situation (I say bronze, because, as a government worker, my salary is too low to qualify for anything else). I had a job for a while teaching remedial basic math to adults, which was pretty neat, but it was part-time, no-benefits, low wage. That&#x27;s the kind of thing that is fulfilling, but doesn&#x27;t pay the mortgage.<p>Even so, I read HN. I sometimes do make time to try new ideas, even small ones. I&#x27;m not using node.js or angular, but, at least I&#x27;ve heard of them and know what they are. Don&#x27;t become the guy that hasn&#x27;t heard of them [where them refers to whatever is fresh] and doesn&#x27;t know what they are... Or I worry you&#x27;ll find yourself in a very difficult spot in a few years.
satchute超过 10 年前
Yes it&#x27;s possible, the guy next to me makes 80K and does next to nothing.
SergeyDruid超过 10 年前
Interesting, are you employed or self-employed?
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bsg75超过 10 年前
Marketing.
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inzax超过 10 年前
Government. More specifically, get contracted by the State Department in Wash DC. No lies when I say, very low accountability and lots of pay.<p>Think 86$ an hour when jobs that are supposed to take you 2 days to do are setup for 2 weeks of work. So lots of doing nothing.<p>Speaking from experience. Its a lazy persons wet dream.
jacquesm超过 10 年前
Bankrobber?<p>You&#x27;re not just asking for a high paid job with low accountability, you&#x27;re also asking for a place where you don&#x27;t have to learn (so a stagnant field) without advancement that&#x27;s an area of the cube that is totally empty as far as I know.<p>I suggest you get off your ass for the next 10 years, save like mad and then retire from your savings at as low an expense level that you can get away with.
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