this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Finding "bad" projects (apubtest2.srcbeat.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/cs_career_questions
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I'm a software dev/sysadmin mix, ~8 years' experience, looking for work again after some time off. (Based in a capital city in Australia if that's relevant)

I have no idea how to characterise the projects that I've enjoyed the most or would like to do in the future.

The projects that I've found the most enjoyable are not the ones that you see advertised by recruiters and companies; Kubernetes, cutting-edge, greenfield projects, massive cloud accounts... meh.

Some fun stuff I've done or would like to do:

  • Upgrading that weird service everyone is accidentally relying on but afraid to touch
  • While money pours into LLMs in healthcare, fax machines were still used every day
  • Working out the "low-level" part of the system colleagues put off for 2 years because nobody wanted to read through the boring 400-page ISO spec
  • Maintaining that abandoned 500K line Java system with most errors being RuntimeException with a null description
  • Working in small teams, max 8-10 people

Any tips to characterise this kind of work to focus my job search? I know it's different from working at a software company pumping out features.

Tight deadlines and shoestring resources don't bother me (as long as I get my salary!). Having people who don't take it all super seriously along the way is super important.

How do I look for this? Trial & error? I feel like there must be... consultancies? ... working on these kinds of projcets. Perhaps there's some name or buzzwords that I need to use? Or would I need to talk with one of those mega big consultancies like Accenture?

Of course very open to the possibility that I'm being totally unrealistic and way too picky in a down market.

My bread and butter is working in Go, Python, backend and OS stuff. Networking, Linux, BSDs, that kinda thing.

Thanks all!

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

It might be a good idea to talk to a recruiter about this. Surely there are jobs they know of where they just need people to show up and keep the fort running. That's probably what I'd do. The reason I think that's good is that companies that you would be looking for would not be easy to find in job boards because the flashy big-spend ones would show up the most. A recruiter would have easy access to the other ones, and might be happy to find somebody who actually wants to take them.

FWIW I had never used recruiters until I accidentally answered a call a few years ago, and I got my last two jobs through them and they were both awesome and the whole experience was great. Not all recruiters are like that though, so don't put up with a bad experience.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

The reason think that's good is that companies that you would be looking for would not be easy to find in job boards because the flashy big-spend ones would show up the most. A recruiter would have easy access to the other ones, and might be happy to find somebody who actually wants to take them.

Haven't thought about it like that before, but that makes sense. Perhaps because I had a couple of mediocre experiences with recruiters I've mostly avoided them since. But as I get more focussed in my search that might make it easier for a recruiter to go hunting, too.

Thanks for the reply

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I would just send out unsolicited applications to companies, maybe under the title "DevOps Specialist", and then simply explain what you've explained here.

Like, pretty much any dev team will have a need for someone who enjoys that kind of thing. Usually, it's done out of necessity and everyone would rather work on feature development.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I would just send out unsolicited applications to companies, maybe under the title "DevOps Specialist", and then simply explain what you've explained here.

Cool yeah I'll give that a shot. I've actually never really been able to write it down like I did here, so will be interesting to see what happens. Thanks for replying :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I don't know if this will actually work out for you--but when I did tech support, I noticed that there's a lot of little companies out there making extremely niche products and charging out the ass for them because they're SO obscure and niche, but for the people who need it, they NEED it and like to stay with the weird old niche company's software to avoid migrations and such which are considered big headaches for non-tech companies. And it's those niche products that have weird-ass old code that depends on the most obscure things. And they'll have one or two old programmers that know their shit forwards and backwards on staff--but if one retires or whatever, then they desperately need a replacement with that same mindset of keeping the old stuff running instead of chasing the newest trends.

Maybe target the manufacturing sector--companies building physical machines that need software to control them and have to roll their own in-house stuff? Or the medical sector? Or maybe something like traffic light programming or other infrastructure that will require some niche in-house software being rolled to run really old industrial or infrastructure machinery?

Like, maybe target the non-tech sectors that still have some weird in-house thing that needs to be maintained. Or look for software companies that target those markets and produce one really weird bit of software that maybe only 1,000 customers use but are charged like $25,000 a user seat or something for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

This actually describes what I would do when I was doing projects in the broadcast space (TV, radio, streaming etc.): writing software to interact with weird, badly documented hardware or some protocols that only they would understand. What I could do is list vendors and perhaps target people who are specifically in the broadcast space, instead of just being randomly assigned to projects ad-hoc like before.

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Legacy infrastructure code?