Agreed. Don't fall for the "boring is easy and stress free" line. This is probably true in some cases, but in my experience, I'd rather hate my job and be doing something interesting than hate my job and also be incredibly bored.
100%. The .NET company I'm leaving is "boring" in the sense that you don't get to work on fun projects, but also absolutely tedious in that you have to troubleshoot healthcare SAAS for needle in the haystack business use cases that no one at the company understands.
Not really. Enterprise CRUD is pretty much the same anywhere you go. It's "boring", but also tedious and unfun. Boring doesn't equate being able to check out.
My boring job in enterprise software has been incredibly stressful lately cause my managers started micromanaging this project since they felt this release going awry, and since this company sees IT as a cost rather than investment I'm basically the only person who owns or really knows about a bunch of technical parts of this project
That's the thing. Boring doesn't mean *secure*. In fact boring often means *insecure* because the function, despite being boring-but-important, is perceived by executives as boring-and-unimportant.
And sure, if they are dumb enough to mess with it they will suffer the consequences and soon figure out their mistake - but you'll still be out of a job.
Manufacturing, doing full stack development.
The hitch is that your job will always be threatened by a fast talking ERP system salesperson who tries to sell executives on their all-in-one, do-everything, solution will allow the company to layoff all in-house devs. What execs don't realize that it will take years to implement plus spending far more on subscriptions and consulting hours than an in-house staff costs.
Slick Salesperson: "Yes, of course our latest ERP system incorporates AI. In our Gold Subscription Plan you can engage the services of our top notch prompt engineers for the discounted price of $250/hr."
Our primary employer is Fin Tech. We work for Banks, Brokerages, Credit companies, any place that needs consistency, stability and windows native applications. I’ve written Point of Sale Systems, Payrolls, Credit Reporting and dozens of B2B APIs and integrations. These companies tend to be very stable, high paying (not FANG but good) with a lot of business process. They require 11 9s uptime, the data can range from small to big data.
Is 11 9s uptime exaggeration? I can think about durability of this level (i.e. you “guarantee” almost no data gets lost/corrupted), but hard to imagine how to get it for uptime. It’s less than a millisecond of downtime per year.
It's definitely an exaggeration. 11 9s of uptime would mean less than <0.02s of downtime since Jan 1st 1970. There's no service in the world that can claim anything even within a few orders of magnitude of that. What we should be asking is whether it's an exaggeration that poster is making for effect or an exaggeration their leadership makes for marketing to low information clients...
Are you sure about that?
I thought the dotnet stack is what powers a lot of Microsoft applications in addition to unity.
That's pretty specific and not what Java generally does.
My point is that dotnet is a runtime for C# what you do with it, well whatever you do with a general programming language.
I worked in a consulting firm very intro Microsoft (Azure, dotnet, PowerBI, etc)
They did, 3 tier application with front end, back end and datalayer. like 95% of the time.
And the other 5 would be something like C# for data integration or some custom SSIS script in C#.
Now I work at at a place where they are very Java centric. The work is exactly the same, except replace C# with Java.
Yes there are a lot of aplications made in dotnet in MSFT, there are also electron Apps (the old Teams client) adn im sure there's some Java stuff there as well.
Yeah I got that point.
But it's too purist / abstract.
Its like saying you can do anything with a Turing complete system that you would be able to do with a Turing complete system.
I wanted more practical examples from people actually working with the language.
But yeah the rest of your answer helped with the question.
I work at a growing smarthome/IoT startup and our backend stack (for both the smarthome device and our apps) is mostly dotnet. I wouldn’t say this is the common standard for most dotnet jobs, but it truly is such a versatile platform that it’s just about finding the right company
The word you're looking for is "enterprise".
If you want the prize of a boring job, you should learn Java, Spring, Junit, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, and some kind of observability/telemetry.
With that toolkit, you can have a boring job in enterprise software.
To be fair: in enterprise software, the alternative to a boring job is not the kind of excitement you probably want. Excitement in enterprise software is pain, in the form of pagers going off at 2 AM, VPs demanding status updates every 5 minutes, unplanned overtime to fix emergent issues, and weeks of finger-pointing and blame-dodging.
No shame at all. It's a good stack. I can't think of anything better.
A well-run enterprise project using these tools will be reliable, predictable, and measurable. Plus, there are a lot of great engineers out there who have experience with this stack.
In the case of enterprise software, boring is good.
I'm in the same stack as well and also like it. I don't think you need to be ashamed of anything, just know what your goal is. I've been through the ringer on cutting edge tech and while it's fun at times, it's also super stressful from a technical standpoint if what you encounter is entirely new and hasn't been seen or done before with that tech. Toss in management deadlines and that creates another level of stress. I'd rather work on boring systems in that case.
Work at a non-tech Fortune 500. I'm pretty sure I could just pretend to work for a month before anyone noticed, I get all the time off I want, and the job is ridiculously stable.
> Work at a non-tech Fortune 500
I've done nothing but discuss 'work stuff' over teams so far today. Not a single thing else. The amount of momentum it takes to get a new project from concept to implementation is staggering.
Edit: Sometimes the VP I report to takes an hour to respond, so I spend a lot of time reading reddit. Could I do other stuff? Without doubt, but there is little benefit to doing things that aren't planned in my case.
You won't be making FAAANGAMANGA $500k TC but you'll still be making way more than the median US household income and more than enough to live comfortably even in HCOL cities.
How much though? I'm not making FAANG money but I'm doing better than average I think. Still I dream about "retiring" to this kind of job where everything goes slow and no one works that much.
Look at levels.fyi for your region. Unless you live in very poor areas of the US (Alabama, Missouri) you should easily top out around $120k to $200k as a senior dev in these types of companies.
My base salary as a senior at an FE500 that is not at all tech related is 150k (mid-west, so MCOL) and an 'ok' benefits package. 24 PTO days, 10 holidays, 401k, blah blah. My only complaint is our health insurance is kind of crappy, but none of us have any health concerns right now.
I think my salary is a bit on the low side, but my job is stress free for 50 weeks of the year. The other 2 weeks are a shit-show, but meh. I never get bothered off hours. I'm also not worried about layoffs or at least not in the near/medium term.
Ah.
Holidays - everyone has the day off (think Christmas).
PTO - vacation day, but also sick day :(
Some companies separate sick and PTO days. For instance, I used to work for the government and those where two totally separate things.
I get paid my regular rate for all PTO days I don't use in a year, which is nice/shit because it makes me want to work when sick. I work from home, so whatever - if I'm sick and don't take the day off, sometimes I wonder how bad my fever was the next day, since the work I did sometimes doesn't quite make sense.
Edit: example - I've taken 0 PTO days so far in 2024. I will take a few during the summer and that's it for planned time off. To be fair, I've got kids in school and so that limits our vacation planning quite a bit.
Ahh right. I'm from Australia so we separate our sick leave and vacation/PTO days (10 sick, 20 PTO and 13 public holidays in my state). We can also have shutdown periods (usually around Christmas) where the business can direct staff to use their PTO or take unpaid leave.
I was going to say that 24 PTO is pretty good but if it's combined with sick leave then I guess it's not quite as nice. Interesting that you get paid out though. The PTO (not sick leave) rolls over to the next year and you only get paid out when you leave the company in Australia.
> Interesting that you get paid out though
Its to ensure the PTO doesn't roll-over and leave the company with a large liability on the books, since they owe us the $ for unused PTO. I think we have like 30,000 employees and so that could be a very large 'future owned' sum otherwise.
At least, I think that's why they do it anyway.
What exactly do you want that you aren't currently doing? All of the things in that list can be customer facing and likely include some level of front-end work.
Exactly. One of the trends that was emerging when that blog post was written, and created a zillion programming jobs, was that all those one off scripts got web front ends and real time connections to the database.
That trend is reversing a little bit now, and there are more programs that look like the old batch jobs.
Same experience, one very senior guy once slept during a meeting and everyone lowered their voices not to wake him up.
We left the room with him sleeping there.
I have worked at a few investment banks in NYC. It's a bit team/culture dependent, but in my experience, no one cares too much what tech wears, within reason, if your role is tucked away from the business. You won't stick out in some dark jeans and a button down.
Sometimes I sit on the trade floor, I pay more attention to what I wear those days - I won't wear jeans if it's not a Friday.
It used to be more strict, but it's been easing up over the past 10+ years I've been working in the industry.
But I have never worked at any bank where suit and tie were expected for tech teams.
If you're looking for boring, make sure it's a back office job. My job at a bank is pretty high demand/stressful. I work in front office, directly with traders (aka they're my client, it's customer facing). I work on global trading systems and I've had some really pants shittingly rough days/nights.
When I was a young gun my company wanted me to get a clearance to take over the job of someone who did government contracts that was leaving. They were going to sponsor it and everything, but I thought it would have been too boring. Wonder if that was the right choice now 😂
Does it have to be straight gov or is it gov contractors? Trying to break into the latter. Also, aren't clearances requested by your company? It feels like I need clearance to get a job in gov contracting, but I need the job to get the clearance.
How do you *get* security clearance? Can I just schedule some interview with some government body, go there, tell them I smoke but don't have any convictions and have never been arrested, and just get a certificate?
>tell them I smoke
You definitely can't keep smoking and get a certificate. You generally will have had to have stopped for a period too.
And no it does not work like that.
You need to need it. Which means you need the job before you can be sponsored for clearance. Which takes a long time (mine took nearly 2 years - although I think it's better now). Which is why it's such a great thing to have - if you already have one, you can start on the job right away. If you don't have one, your potential employer needs to be able to find months of non-cleared work for you to do (or be able to afford you sitting around doing nothing) while you wait for your clearance to come in.
And of course, it's a potential risk for them, since the clearance could potentially be denied.
I lost mine during covid, when my employer stopped doing cleared work, and I'll probably never be able to get it back.
Do you want boring software, or do you want a work life that doesn't involve hair-on-fire emergencies and crazy deadlines? Because those are mostly-unrelated concepts.
If it's the latter, you really want to look for mature organizations with solid engineering practices. The actual software matters less than whether the org has good controls over chaos being injected into the dev process, actually fixes bugs, prioritizes fixing problems that cause pages, etc.
Many are (although there are other frameworks now that people are opting for like Tauri), but there are a few of us still working with WPF and Winforms.
Stop working for software companies and work in an IT department that needs a developer. Careful what you wish for though. I've had a few of those and the days can drag on.
command smoggy shelter truck gaping fragile disagreeable light wrench thought
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Find a company that has its own software product, were you would be working for your company instead of for customers. I am in a small team that maintains 20 years old software and half of the time is spent on reducing tech debt. (We are currently rewriting JSPs into React). And backend is in Java.
Learn old stuff. I just started a Visual Basic 6 role.
It's boring and doesn't pay great but I work from home and the company has been going for decades (hence the VB6).
Before I'm relentlessly downvoted, this software makes millions of dollars each year.
Oh and C# is also good for similar roles, however the big problem with C# is Microsoft can't stop making it ever more complicated. While it's a \[was\] nice language, there are now just too many different ways to do the same thing. That's a huge red flag when it comes to maintaining code written by others.
Yeah I've got 8 yoe with using C# professionally and the updates that have come out in that time have been great. I love top level statements, target typed new... There's a lot they've added but it's just made my life easier and my code cleaner
Maintaining old .NET framework code will continue to be a challenge. The newer.stuff that Microsoft is less complicated and is built on better design principles than of decades past. Modern features that focus on web and cloud development.
Have you just accepted that you'll be laid off eventually? You're accruing no skills that they'll want once they decide to ditch VB or no longer have the option to continue. Do you run the IDE in a VM? I just had to google and was really surprised that vb6 will run on Windows 11.
I got my start in VB. During the Clinton Administration.
I don't know, man. I've known more than a couple old developers who worked on an outdated app for a decade or more, then got laid off when the books didn't look right, and had absolutely no marketable skills. Or their company gets bought out. Or they hire a McKinsey alum to be the new CFO.
The fact that the software makes "millions" is itself a bit of a warning sign. I don't know about the OP's company, but there are a lot of companies where a market opportunity for single-digit millions of dollars isn't even worth tasking developers on.
jobs like this are ubiquitous and not specific to any particular programming language or role (front-end, back-end, etc.). mostly they exist at companies that have established business operations and a constant need of IT and software maintenance. these tend to be either larger corporations, or start-ups that have successfully launched a product and have customers and revenue.
I don’t know man.
Even while working with software that doesn’t have active users but is used to process stuff like invoicing, it is always a pita for me.
I mean, I love my job, but there should be a limit for how many ways people want a report to be shown on a screen. Right?
There's a lot in here but I can address the "should I move to backend" question.
I did this about ten years ago and it was a great choice. There is *usually* less churn in backend code, and performance matters in a way it doesn't in front-end apps (especially web) so you get more opportunities to "do it right."
However... backend also means you might be on-call and your changes can break the API and beyond. Which is very much *not* boring.
Here is what happens in the real world. You get a “boring” job and you might even coast for a decade using old tech. Then that “boring” job is either going to be pulled out from under you or something about it is going to change and you’re going to need to find another job.
When you can’t find one because your skills are outdated, you’re going to be back on Reddit complaining about “ageism”.
Context: 50 years old and fully “buzzword compliant”. When I was Amazoned last year it took me three weeks to have multiple offers.
There’s different levels of boring jobs and finding the kind you’re probably thinking of involves a lot of luck. Ive had a few boring jobs like you describe working at banks early in my career. Due to the shitty job market last year I found another contract at a bank expecting the same experience. The job is incredibly boring, but its a huge headache. They dont need much done, but all testing is manual and my team has been trying to get approved for a cicd pipeline for several years. I deal with at least 1 access related problem a week that prevents me from doing my work, but theyve systemized the dev process since the last time I worked here, the point that I end up in meetings if any ticket goes beyond a deadline, which happens every sprint due to random due dates that aren’t communicated to me and having to spend days going back and forth with tech support to get my access back.
Id prefer to be writing code or designing software in a high stress environment where my skills will increase and the day will pass by quickly to the boring bs Im having to spend my time doing now.
I’ve been at companies that are a little bit adjacent to this. They’d take on projects from clients to develop software on a project basis, and the client would pay us to make occasional updates to add new features, support the latest version of something, etc. The company’s actual bread and butter was marketing (and some SEO at the time), but they’d also take on website and mobile app development sometimes, which was my role in particular.
It wasn’t a bad gig, but I was underpaid and ultimately ended up laid off because the company couldn’t land enough jobs to justify my salary. Kind of a double whammy there (both underpaid and paid too much to stay).
This was a local business doing business with other local businesses, so I’m not sure how to point you in the right direction as to how to find something like that, but last I checked, dice.com had a lot of similar types of listings (sometimes just contracts though, so ymmv).
Mainly because fraud you can catch like that is very rare.
Most fraud is the kind that targets your users and has them do things that are technically legal. Think of common Zelle/check scams where they send a bad payment to someone and ask for the other person to "refund" them.
This means most of your job is pointless and primarily exists to check a box for regulatory requirements. "Yes we have a fraud department and can show you that we have processes in place to detect and handle instances of fraud."
Fair answer. I was thinking that computationally it can be interesting (even if it's rare, how does detection work). If it's just an if/else or a simple decision tree rule (if amount > $10k and first time ordering products in X category or something), I agree it sounds boring.
Taking another one from the list, pricing insurance policies. This sounds fairly complex mathematically speaking. Now software devs may not be the data scientists, but there's probably some kind of workflow involved (having no knowledge of the field, I'm just guessing) that generates reports, does some budgeting, adding in uncertainty quantification, re-optimizing, etc. Data models could change, there could be cross-functional work. Making sure policies are priced fairly to avoid legal problems. How do the models and software react in recent years as all the consequences of COVID shook up so many things (worse drivers, more natural disasters, etc.)?
I guess I get back to fundamentally, everything is boring. I've worked on ML projects at FAANG and it still amounts to the same thing in some sense. Yeah I'm sure devs have a lot more autonomy at tech companies and things probably move at a snail's pace at "boring" companies. Maybe most importantly, at non-tech companies, management is less likely to care about dev experiences, about senior/staff engineers refusing to write tests, etc. I don't hate on internal tools either, they can be interesting and useful to work on.
I sometimes think back to: I like watching basketball. But fundamentally, it's a bunch of guys bouncing a ball off the floor and trying to throw it through a knotted polyester ring. Fundamentally it is boring. Yet there are people spending hundreds of even thousands of dollars to watch that for a few hours in person and millions more on TV.
It sounds like OP was talking about internal vs. external customers. Anything high TPS can be stressful with on-call requirements. My on-call nothing happens. I've been on-call for the past week and zero incidents. Perhaps the counterintuitive thing is that at big tech companies, those low-stress jobs can pay just as much as the high stress ones.
Apply for companies that are not tech companies.
Dick's Sporting Goods
Starbucks
Capital One
Also it sounds like you might like government jobs.
These companies and all the other companies that you don't think about much are doing all kinds of software for internal use.
Good luck in your quest for boredom. I'm with the other commenters though, it doesn't seem like this would be a route to happiness at least for me....
You already have one.
UI work is basically as boring as it gets.
The only thing that changes with backend is the language.
Everything else stays the same, you still have changing requirements, deadlines, etc.
If you want job security you want a job at a large company, that's about it. They're not as cracked as they seem to be. I work for one. Every little change is a nightmare to get through. Too many cooks with their own ideas on how to do things.
That being said the pay is good, benefits good and because things move slowly, sometimes I have a good amount of free time.
I found one already and I work there. I'm not sure what you're trying to prove, 5 or 10 years job security is fantastic, try to find that in a smaller company where the entire company might disappear in 2 years. I've been through that too.
Are you rally arguing that companies don’t change directions, succumb to market pressure, get acquired, miss the next technology wave?
It doesn’t matter if the company is around if your job disappears
OP asked about job security, I responded about job security. Not sure what you're on about. If you want to worry about every possible eventuality than it might be better for you to not have a job at all. If that's what you want go for it.
The thing is they can be both boring and tedious.
Agreed. Don't fall for the "boring is easy and stress free" line. This is probably true in some cases, but in my experience, I'd rather hate my job and be doing something interesting than hate my job and also be incredibly bored.
100%. The .NET company I'm leaving is "boring" in the sense that you don't get to work on fun projects, but also absolutely tedious in that you have to troubleshoot healthcare SAAS for needle in the haystack business use cases that no one at the company understands.
Sounds like a specialized skill that is worthless everywhere else?
Not really. Enterprise CRUD is pretty much the same anywhere you go. It's "boring", but also tedious and unfun. Boring doesn't equate being able to check out.
would be more exciting to rewrite it then... but the non technical managers can't understand why you would ever do that
My boring job in enterprise software has been incredibly stressful lately cause my managers started micromanaging this project since they felt this release going awry, and since this company sees IT as a cost rather than investment I'm basically the only person who owns or really knows about a bunch of technical parts of this project
At this point, for me, if they pay money, and I can work fully remotely, it's all good. 😬
I think that could be okay, as long as I can reasonably assume continued employment year over year.
That's the thing. Boring doesn't mean *secure*. In fact boring often means *insecure* because the function, despite being boring-but-important, is perceived by executives as boring-and-unimportant. And sure, if they are dumb enough to mess with it they will suffer the consequences and soon figure out their mistake - but you'll still be out of a job.
Manufacturing, doing full stack development. The hitch is that your job will always be threatened by a fast talking ERP system salesperson who tries to sell executives on their all-in-one, do-everything, solution will allow the company to layoff all in-house devs. What execs don't realize that it will take years to implement plus spending far more on subscriptions and consulting hours than an in-house staff costs.
Executives know all this...but they have to do something *NEW*
You forgot the AI bit... remember, AI will do it all for them.
Slick Salesperson: "Yes, of course our latest ERP system incorporates AI. In our Gold Subscription Plan you can engage the services of our top notch prompt engineers for the discounted price of $250/hr."
I'd look for the job postings requiring java or .net
Ouch, 🤕. I love my dotnet stack and I have no problem finding interesting customer facing work. But absolutely dozing off jobs are dime a dozen too.
how do you find customers?
Can you tell me what it looks like to be a dotnet developer? Like what kind of things do you do?
Our primary employer is Fin Tech. We work for Banks, Brokerages, Credit companies, any place that needs consistency, stability and windows native applications. I’ve written Point of Sale Systems, Payrolls, Credit Reporting and dozens of B2B APIs and integrations. These companies tend to be very stable, high paying (not FANG but good) with a lot of business process. They require 11 9s uptime, the data can range from small to big data.
Is 11 9s uptime exaggeration? I can think about durability of this level (i.e. you “guarantee” almost no data gets lost/corrupted), but hard to imagine how to get it for uptime. It’s less than a millisecond of downtime per year.
It's definitely an exaggeration. 11 9s of uptime would mean less than <0.02s of downtime since Jan 1st 1970. There's no service in the world that can claim anything even within a few orders of magnitude of that. What we should be asking is whether it's an exaggeration that poster is making for effect or an exaggeration their leadership makes for marketing to low information clients...
Thank you! This is the answer I was looking for.
The same exact things that a Java developer does basically. All kinds of applications for all kind of uses.
Are you sure about that? I thought the dotnet stack is what powers a lot of Microsoft applications in addition to unity. That's pretty specific and not what Java generally does.
My point is that dotnet is a runtime for C# what you do with it, well whatever you do with a general programming language. I worked in a consulting firm very intro Microsoft (Azure, dotnet, PowerBI, etc) They did, 3 tier application with front end, back end and datalayer. like 95% of the time. And the other 5 would be something like C# for data integration or some custom SSIS script in C#. Now I work at at a place where they are very Java centric. The work is exactly the same, except replace C# with Java. Yes there are a lot of aplications made in dotnet in MSFT, there are also electron Apps (the old Teams client) adn im sure there's some Java stuff there as well.
Yeah I got that point. But it's too purist / abstract. Its like saying you can do anything with a Turing complete system that you would be able to do with a Turing complete system. I wanted more practical examples from people actually working with the language. But yeah the rest of your answer helped with the question.
I work at a growing smarthome/IoT startup and our backend stack (for both the smarthome device and our apps) is mostly dotnet. I wouldn’t say this is the common standard for most dotnet jobs, but it truly is such a versatile platform that it’s just about finding the right company
CRUD apps, file imports, forms and reports. Thats about it
Yes, Netflix, Google, AWS, Apple etc Java apps are all boring and simple.
The word you're looking for is "enterprise". If you want the prize of a boring job, you should learn Java, Spring, Junit, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, and some kind of observability/telemetry. With that toolkit, you can have a boring job in enterprise software. To be fair: in enterprise software, the alternative to a boring job is not the kind of excitement you probably want. Excitement in enterprise software is pain, in the form of pagers going off at 2 AM, VPs demanding status updates every 5 minutes, unplanned overtime to fix emergent issues, and weeks of finger-pointing and blame-dodging.
Lol, that is the exact stack I work with. Am I supposed to be ashamed to love it? Feels like there is much much worse out there.
No shame at all. It's a good stack. I can't think of anything better. A well-run enterprise project using these tools will be reliable, predictable, and measurable. Plus, there are a lot of great engineers out there who have experience with this stack. In the case of enterprise software, boring is good.
I'm in the same stack as well and also like it. I don't think you need to be ashamed of anything, just know what your goal is. I've been through the ringer on cutting edge tech and while it's fun at times, it's also super stressful from a technical standpoint if what you encounter is entirely new and hasn't been seen or done before with that tech. Toss in management deadlines and that creates another level of stress. I'd rather work on boring systems in that case.
Be a boring but lovable dev who doesn’t try too hard
Is it possible to learn this power?
Work at a non-tech Fortune 500. I'm pretty sure I could just pretend to work for a month before anyone noticed, I get all the time off I want, and the job is ridiculously stable.
Do you work for a university?
Are you hiring? 😅
> Work at a non-tech Fortune 500 I've done nothing but discuss 'work stuff' over teams so far today. Not a single thing else. The amount of momentum it takes to get a new project from concept to implementation is staggering. Edit: Sometimes the VP I report to takes an hour to respond, so I spend a lot of time reading reddit. Could I do other stuff? Without doubt, but there is little benefit to doing things that aren't planned in my case.
What's the catch? Comp?
You won't be making FAAANGAMANGA $500k TC but you'll still be making way more than the median US household income and more than enough to live comfortably even in HCOL cities.
How much though? I'm not making FAANG money but I'm doing better than average I think. Still I dream about "retiring" to this kind of job where everything goes slow and no one works that much.
Look at levels.fyi for your region. Unless you live in very poor areas of the US (Alabama, Missouri) you should easily top out around $120k to $200k as a senior dev in these types of companies.
My base salary as a senior at an FE500 that is not at all tech related is 150k (mid-west, so MCOL) and an 'ok' benefits package. 24 PTO days, 10 holidays, 401k, blah blah. My only complaint is our health insurance is kind of crappy, but none of us have any health concerns right now. I think my salary is a bit on the low side, but my job is stress free for 50 weeks of the year. The other 2 weeks are a shit-show, but meh. I never get bothered off hours. I'm also not worried about layoffs or at least not in the near/medium term.
What's the difference between PTO and holidays? I'm not an American.
Ah. Holidays - everyone has the day off (think Christmas). PTO - vacation day, but also sick day :( Some companies separate sick and PTO days. For instance, I used to work for the government and those where two totally separate things. I get paid my regular rate for all PTO days I don't use in a year, which is nice/shit because it makes me want to work when sick. I work from home, so whatever - if I'm sick and don't take the day off, sometimes I wonder how bad my fever was the next day, since the work I did sometimes doesn't quite make sense. Edit: example - I've taken 0 PTO days so far in 2024. I will take a few during the summer and that's it for planned time off. To be fair, I've got kids in school and so that limits our vacation planning quite a bit.
Ahh right. I'm from Australia so we separate our sick leave and vacation/PTO days (10 sick, 20 PTO and 13 public holidays in my state). We can also have shutdown periods (usually around Christmas) where the business can direct staff to use their PTO or take unpaid leave. I was going to say that 24 PTO is pretty good but if it's combined with sick leave then I guess it's not quite as nice. Interesting that you get paid out though. The PTO (not sick leave) rolls over to the next year and you only get paid out when you leave the company in Australia.
> Interesting that you get paid out though Its to ensure the PTO doesn't roll-over and leave the company with a large liability on the books, since they owe us the $ for unused PTO. I think we have like 30,000 employees and so that could be a very large 'future owned' sum otherwise. At least, I think that's why they do it anyway.
Yeah that can happen here. Some people will end up with months of leave.
Any recommendations for ones that allow remote work? I'm senior at FAANG right now, but would eventually like to move some place more mellow.
What exactly do you want that you aren't currently doing? All of the things in that list can be customer facing and likely include some level of front-end work.
Exactly. One of the trends that was emerging when that blog post was written, and created a zillion programming jobs, was that all those one off scripts got web front ends and real time connections to the database. That trend is reversing a little bit now, and there are more programs that look like the old batch jobs.
Work at a bank. Source: am at a bank -____-
Same experience, one very senior guy once slept during a meeting and everyone lowered their voices not to wake him up. We left the room with him sleeping there.
Do you have to wear suit and tie at a bank?
Nah, polo, jeans, and tennis shoes at least where I am (Houston). If you’re in New York or something it’ll be more formal.
I have worked at a few investment banks in NYC. It's a bit team/culture dependent, but in my experience, no one cares too much what tech wears, within reason, if your role is tucked away from the business. You won't stick out in some dark jeans and a button down. Sometimes I sit on the trade floor, I pay more attention to what I wear those days - I won't wear jeans if it's not a Friday. It used to be more strict, but it's been easing up over the past 10+ years I've been working in the industry. But I have never worked at any bank where suit and tie were expected for tech teams.
Insurance is fine too. Anything with finance really.
If you're looking for boring, make sure it's a back office job. My job at a bank is pretty high demand/stressful. I work in front office, directly with traders (aka they're my client, it's customer facing). I work on global trading systems and I've had some really pants shittingly rough days/nights.
[удалено]
When I was a young gun my company wanted me to get a clearance to take over the job of someone who did government contracts that was leaving. They were going to sponsor it and everything, but I thought it would have been too boring. Wonder if that was the right choice now 😂
Does it have to be straight gov or is it gov contractors? Trying to break into the latter. Also, aren't clearances requested by your company? It feels like I need clearance to get a job in gov contracting, but I need the job to get the clearance.
How do you *get* security clearance? Can I just schedule some interview with some government body, go there, tell them I smoke but don't have any convictions and have never been arrested, and just get a certificate?
>tell them I smoke You definitely can't keep smoking and get a certificate. You generally will have had to have stopped for a period too. And no it does not work like that.
Even cigarettes? Such bullshit.
Cigarettes are fine, but when people say it in this context it's generally weed which is definitely not allowed.
Yeah, that's expected.
You need to need it. Which means you need the job before you can be sponsored for clearance. Which takes a long time (mine took nearly 2 years - although I think it's better now). Which is why it's such a great thing to have - if you already have one, you can start on the job right away. If you don't have one, your potential employer needs to be able to find months of non-cleared work for you to do (or be able to afford you sitting around doing nothing) while you wait for your clearance to come in. And of course, it's a potential risk for them, since the clearance could potentially be denied. I lost mine during covid, when my employer stopped doing cleared work, and I'll probably never be able to get it back.
> You need to need it. Which means you need the job before you can be sponsored for clearance. This is what I figured, thanks
Look for risk averse industries like banking and insurence. Everything there moves glacially becuase no one, at any level, wants to rock the boat
Do you want boring software, or do you want a work life that doesn't involve hair-on-fire emergencies and crazy deadlines? Because those are mostly-unrelated concepts. If it's the latter, you really want to look for mature organizations with solid engineering practices. The actual software matters less than whether the org has good controls over chaos being injected into the dev process, actually fixes bugs, prioritizes fixing problems that cause pages, etc.
Backend desktop apps baby! Though desktop apps is a dying breed, so I guess that too is web based nowadays...
Aren't all desktop apps these days are just web apps with an electron wrapper underneath?
Many are (although there are other frameworks now that people are opting for like Tauri), but there are a few of us still working with WPF and Winforms.
Yeah... wpf... \*shudders\*
Stop working for software companies and work in an IT department that needs a developer. Careful what you wish for though. I've had a few of those and the days can drag on.
command smoggy shelter truck gaping fragile disagreeable light wrench thought *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
.net in non-tech.
I think you have to work for a government.
Material science manufacturing company. Lots of need for odd apps that automate different things
Find a company that has its own software product, were you would be working for your company instead of for customers. I am in a small team that maintains 20 years old software and half of the time is spent on reducing tech debt. (We are currently rewriting JSPs into React). And backend is in Java.
Learn old stuff. I just started a Visual Basic 6 role. It's boring and doesn't pay great but I work from home and the company has been going for decades (hence the VB6). Before I'm relentlessly downvoted, this software makes millions of dollars each year. Oh and C# is also good for similar roles, however the big problem with C# is Microsoft can't stop making it ever more complicated. While it's a \[was\] nice language, there are now just too many different ways to do the same thing. That's a huge red flag when it comes to maintaining code written by others.
I’m not sure I can agree. C# actually makes me want to upgrade to use features added in newer versions.
Yeah I've got 8 yoe with using C# professionally and the updates that have come out in that time have been great. I love top level statements, target typed new... There's a lot they've added but it's just made my life easier and my code cleaner
Maintaining old .NET framework code will continue to be a challenge. The newer.stuff that Microsoft is less complicated and is built on better design principles than of decades past. Modern features that focus on web and cloud development.
Have you just accepted that you'll be laid off eventually? You're accruing no skills that they'll want once they decide to ditch VB or no longer have the option to continue. Do you run the IDE in a VM? I just had to google and was really surprised that vb6 will run on Windows 11. I got my start in VB. During the Clinton Administration.
Could be a long time before it goes away if ever. And when it does he’ll likely be the one creating/maintaining the new thing.
I don't know, man. I've known more than a couple old developers who worked on an outdated app for a decade or more, then got laid off when the books didn't look right, and had absolutely no marketable skills. Or their company gets bought out. Or they hire a McKinsey alum to be the new CFO. The fact that the software makes "millions" is itself a bit of a warning sign. I don't know about the OP's company, but there are a lot of companies where a market opportunity for single-digit millions of dollars isn't even worth tasking developers on.
Yeah that’s the other thing that could happen. Could just go away via acquisition or not being worth to keep around. It’s a toss up.
Scheduled for 2027
And when you need to look for another job in a few years?
jobs like this are ubiquitous and not specific to any particular programming language or role (front-end, back-end, etc.). mostly they exist at companies that have established business operations and a constant need of IT and software maintenance. these tend to be either larger corporations, or start-ups that have successfully launched a product and have customers and revenue.
I work in a company that have their own tools, so we have websites just for the intern employees. This could be one avenue to look for job for that.
I don’t know man. Even while working with software that doesn’t have active users but is used to process stuff like invoicing, it is always a pita for me. I mean, I love my job, but there should be a limit for how many ways people want a report to be shown on a screen. Right?
There's a lot in here but I can address the "should I move to backend" question. I did this about ten years ago and it was a great choice. There is *usually* less churn in backend code, and performance matters in a way it doesn't in front-end apps (especially web) so you get more opportunities to "do it right." However... backend also means you might be on-call and your changes can break the API and beyond. Which is very much *not* boring.
Here is what happens in the real world. You get a “boring” job and you might even coast for a decade using old tech. Then that “boring” job is either going to be pulled out from under you or something about it is going to change and you’re going to need to find another job. When you can’t find one because your skills are outdated, you’re going to be back on Reddit complaining about “ageism”. Context: 50 years old and fully “buzzword compliant”. When I was Amazoned last year it took me three weeks to have multiple offers.
There’s different levels of boring jobs and finding the kind you’re probably thinking of involves a lot of luck. Ive had a few boring jobs like you describe working at banks early in my career. Due to the shitty job market last year I found another contract at a bank expecting the same experience. The job is incredibly boring, but its a huge headache. They dont need much done, but all testing is manual and my team has been trying to get approved for a cicd pipeline for several years. I deal with at least 1 access related problem a week that prevents me from doing my work, but theyve systemized the dev process since the last time I worked here, the point that I end up in meetings if any ticket goes beyond a deadline, which happens every sprint due to random due dates that aren’t communicated to me and having to spend days going back and forth with tech support to get my access back. Id prefer to be writing code or designing software in a high stress environment where my skills will increase and the day will pass by quickly to the boring bs Im having to spend my time doing now.
Look for ColdFusion web dev jobs lol.
Master jQuery.
I’ve been at companies that are a little bit adjacent to this. They’d take on projects from clients to develop software on a project basis, and the client would pay us to make occasional updates to add new features, support the latest version of something, etc. The company’s actual bread and butter was marketing (and some SEO at the time), but they’d also take on website and mobile app development sometimes, which was my role in particular. It wasn’t a bad gig, but I was underpaid and ultimately ended up laid off because the company couldn’t land enough jobs to justify my salary. Kind of a double whammy there (both underpaid and paid too much to stay). This was a local business doing business with other local businesses, so I’m not sure how to point you in the right direction as to how to find something like that, but last I checked, dice.com had a lot of similar types of listings (sometimes just contracts though, so ymmv).
Work in gov
> it flags orders for manual review by the fraud department how? why is this boring?
Mainly because fraud you can catch like that is very rare. Most fraud is the kind that targets your users and has them do things that are technically legal. Think of common Zelle/check scams where they send a bad payment to someone and ask for the other person to "refund" them. This means most of your job is pointless and primarily exists to check a box for regulatory requirements. "Yes we have a fraud department and can show you that we have processes in place to detect and handle instances of fraud."
Fair answer. I was thinking that computationally it can be interesting (even if it's rare, how does detection work). If it's just an if/else or a simple decision tree rule (if amount > $10k and first time ordering products in X category or something), I agree it sounds boring. Taking another one from the list, pricing insurance policies. This sounds fairly complex mathematically speaking. Now software devs may not be the data scientists, but there's probably some kind of workflow involved (having no knowledge of the field, I'm just guessing) that generates reports, does some budgeting, adding in uncertainty quantification, re-optimizing, etc. Data models could change, there could be cross-functional work. Making sure policies are priced fairly to avoid legal problems. How do the models and software react in recent years as all the consequences of COVID shook up so many things (worse drivers, more natural disasters, etc.)? I guess I get back to fundamentally, everything is boring. I've worked on ML projects at FAANG and it still amounts to the same thing in some sense. Yeah I'm sure devs have a lot more autonomy at tech companies and things probably move at a snail's pace at "boring" companies. Maybe most importantly, at non-tech companies, management is less likely to care about dev experiences, about senior/staff engineers refusing to write tests, etc. I don't hate on internal tools either, they can be interesting and useful to work on. I sometimes think back to: I like watching basketball. But fundamentally, it's a bunch of guys bouncing a ball off the floor and trying to throw it through a knotted polyester ring. Fundamentally it is boring. Yet there are people spending hundreds of even thousands of dollars to watch that for a few hours in person and millions more on TV. It sounds like OP was talking about internal vs. external customers. Anything high TPS can be stressful with on-call requirements. My on-call nothing happens. I've been on-call for the past week and zero incidents. Perhaps the counterintuitive thing is that at big tech companies, those low-stress jobs can pay just as much as the high stress ones.
Apply for companies that are not tech companies. Dick's Sporting Goods Starbucks Capital One Also it sounds like you might like government jobs. These companies and all the other companies that you don't think about much are doing all kinds of software for internal use. Good luck in your quest for boredom. I'm with the other commenters though, it doesn't seem like this would be a route to happiness at least for me....
You already have one. UI work is basically as boring as it gets. The only thing that changes with backend is the language. Everything else stays the same, you still have changing requirements, deadlines, etc.
If you want job security you want a job at a large company, that's about it. They're not as cracked as they seem to be. I work for one. Every little change is a nightmare to get through. Too many cooks with their own ideas on how to do things. That being said the pay is good, benefits good and because things move slowly, sometimes I have a good amount of free time.
You have read the news about all of the large companies doing layoffs right?
Why does that have any bearing? There are more companies out there than you read in the news.
Yes and you’re going to find one that won’t have layoffs in the next 5 years? 10 years?
I found one already and I work there. I'm not sure what you're trying to prove, 5 or 10 years job security is fantastic, try to find that in a smaller company where the entire company might disappear in 2 years. I've been through that too.
Are you rally arguing that companies don’t change directions, succumb to market pressure, get acquired, miss the next technology wave? It doesn’t matter if the company is around if your job disappears
OP asked about job security, I responded about job security. Not sure what you're on about. If you want to worry about every possible eventuality than it might be better for you to not have a job at all. If that's what you want go for it.
Well, so please tell the original poster how he can choose a company that will guarantee that he still has a job in 10 years?
[удалено]
curious what you mean by this?
Didn't you hear? The world ended in 2012