They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech.

Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.

I used to work in a Customer facing role at a Enterprise Software Company that sold up and down the Fortune 500. I got to see a lot of different tech stacks.

Many use a lot of proprietary software, which can be a type of hell nobody understands till you end up as an expert in a niche area and spend your day dealing with vendors and tech support to fix anything. After 5 years you are an expert on "EnterpriseSoftwareCorpA On-Prem Elastic Scaling Stack and Integration to EnterpriseSoftwareCorpB On-Prem Data Stack" which nobody really sees as valuable, so you are now trapped in your career.

I know a bunch of people who wisely let go of 10+ years of their experience in some aging software so they could start again as an AWS solution architect. I'm sure it's was brutal doing that in their 40s/50s, with family, etc. It was tough, but 2 years later they are in a far better career position than those who are still praying for something to happen with those Enterprise stacks.

Yeesh I feel that way working at a FAANG (or MAGMA or whatever it’s called this week). I’m an expert at our internal systems and platforms, but that’s not a skill that’s transferable anywhere else.

This was probably the most surprising thing about working at a FAANG company (although in hindsight it shouldn't have been). What, you all don't use Jenkins, JIRA, Spring, insert-OSS-or-other-well-known-tool-here and instead have all this crazy internal stuff I've never heard of?

Question: Are the system you using open standards (e.g. RESTful APIs)? Do they have Data Models that follow some sort of sensible standard that allow for interop with other systems via sensible mechanism systems?

A lot of the hell that is enterprise software is how systems talk to each other. I'll give an example. Project is started to bring data from Vendor A Product into Product from Vendor B. Vendor A claims system is "open" but there is no documentation outside of some cryptic .NET examples. Even when a successful connection is made, the data and data model makes no sense and nearly impossible to map to what users see in UI.

Vendor A gets a call. Vendor A repeats "open" and brings an "SME" to explain data model. SME is really a Sales Engineer who concludes Vendor A has another product that will expose the data in usable way. Start evaluating this product, and it turns there is a lot overlap between features in Vendor A new product and Vendor B's product. Plus, you still need to use .NET and a proprietary connection to get data from A -> B. Plus,Vendor A's new product does data transformations in a black box..nobody knows what exactly.

Vendor A and B are pointing fingers and each trying to make a case for why their product needs to do X features. Nobody understands this .NET library, so a consulting company is used to build data pipeline from Vendor A -> B.

Granted, a lot of the above wouldn't be acceptable today and a lot of these types of systems are going away and being replaced by ones that are actually designed to be interoperable with other systems. This type of story is hopefully going away sooner than later.

I use a lot of proprietary systems in my current job at extra-big company, but at least they use stuff like SQL, RESTful APIs, etc. I can understand our Data and how it maps. Those are transferable skills.

I can only hope that FAANG isn't building systems where everything is proprietary and make no sense to anybody outside of the Eng team that built them.

I have never worked at FAANG but have had coworkers + have friends that have.

I'm under the impression that gRPC is popular, and in some places GraphQL.

I prefer AAA - Amazon, Alphabet and Apple. Netflix is irrelevant, while Facebook is too evil.

It's kind of funny: I dealt with more garbage proprietary stuff (NetSuite for example) at my previous job at a tech company, but use almost all open-source stuff at my current job at a manufacturing company.

Manufacturing is in an interesting space right now. There's a lot of hype around Industrial IoT (IIoT) and IoT 4.0. A lot of companies are using that hype to ask for budget to migrate their systems to open source and systems which are more open.

That being said, companies like GE, Siemens, and PTC are trying desperately to capture that space as well with their Saas/PaaS.. I won't say they are crap, but it's just more lock-in under the guide of "open." One of them has already gone the way of Watson.

YMML will vary in manufacturing. If you can jump to one of these companies that is on their journey from legacy systems to more open ones, you can definitely land in a good spot. Just ask the right questions when you interview there.

I've worked with such niche enterprise software before. It only pigeon-holes you if you let it. One I worked with was, at the time, a VB6 based application for trading bank debt built on a combination of SQL Server/Access (SQL Server was the source of truth, but entire data sets would be pulled into a local Access database for reporting...). It had no integration points to speak of, not even a reliable report runner (had to run reports manually through a GUI). Over the years, they were doing a piecemeal transition to .Net, but I never saw a .Net only implementation while I worked with it (I left the company in 2012).

A lot of my Python expertise on Windows comes from working with that system. I used Python because 1) I already knew it, 2) I could easily run parts on either Windows or Linux and 3) all of the internal APIs I needed access to had Python wrappers available (or I could easily write one in Boost Python at the time). I forget exactly which Python libraries I used, but there was some Win32 COM going on, some ctypes and other Python based GUI automation, as well as a lot of process management (reports tended to hang quite a bit needing killing/restarting) and ETL work.

I spent roughly 7 of my 9 years at that company working in part on maintaining the integrations of that 3rd party system with our own internal systems. Yes, a significant chunk of my time at the company, but what software it was is just a footnote on my CV. Instead all of the interesting integration work I did and the efficiencies gained are elaborated upon (e.g. with 8 hours of development effort, I was able to automate away a previously 8-hour manual task that had to be done monthly).

You are describing my positions today. FML

Thanks, it's so reassuring to hear this.

Fair warning, many non-tech F500 may be less of “places running their setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter grandfathered into an affordable Edgecast plan running a LAMP stack on Debian using borg for backups?”

And more of “places running near archaic .NET/JVM versions that somehow manage to combine bureaucracy with lack of organization”.

Mind you, it can get even more archaic than .NET/JVM ("hey, never change a running system, plus, even if we wanted, we wouldn't have the money to pay for it")

A friend runs a small consulting business and he recently took on a customer running NetWare and a bunch of server side software. I'd take .NET/JVM over that.

The non-tech F500 I worked at several years ago is doing everything they can to abandon .NET/Java in favor of low-code tools. Their engineers are jumping ship and they're having a hard time finding replacements.

>in favor of low-code tools. Their engineers are jumping ship and they're having a hard time finding replacements.

I have a friend who works for a major low-code software company. They're doing quite well financially because of all the excitement around low-code. The product is good if you stay within the boundaries of what it can do. Some managers people think they can replace their enterprise Tableau/Spotfire/PowerBI license with low-code and they get bitten very badly.

Finding engineers for a low-code environment is a challenge. You need to understand software development well enough that you can build something because loops, conditional statements, all of those concepts are there. You also need to find somebody who is willing to possibly lock their career into a single tool and forgo the benefits of knowing a general purpose language like C#, Python, etc.

Some companies have success with finding technically minded business people or IT folks who don't enjoy coding and training them. They can thrive and build some nice apps. Lots of folks can't make the leap and fail. Software Engineers are probably the worst bunch to try an convince because the opportunity cost is too high.

My nonprofit works with a very talented Microsoft consultancy to help our transition from on-prem servers to Microsoft 365 cloud. My main contact there (Director of Biz Operations) says they have transitioned most of their custom development from .NET to Power Apps/Power Automate. It's not the only toolset they use, but he says it's the right tool for many small-medium biz CRUD needs.

This is the direction my current employer is headed. I was sent on a week long course to evaluate the viability of PowerApps. While there is certainly some cool stuff in there, it just doesn't feel like we should be moving all our development there wholesale. There is certainly a time and place, or at least that is how it seems to me.

Business / money making / crucial systems? No. Some random HR survey application? Maybe. Sadly Microsoft seems to have convinced a number of folks in our organization that this tool set is appropriate for all our development.

My prior job had a ton of PowerApps apps for very basic internal CRUD stuff. It always seemed like mostly a form builder though

Interesting, there was some low code at the last F500 I worked with, but mostly for very small tolls not requiring much of any business logic.

Majority of the services were older .NET framework projects with some other stuff scattered around. They had a sizable mainframe team, but we’re trying to migrate away from that platform.

You really nailed it with that last sentence.

Small-scale manufacturing is another good spot. I spent some years doing consulting work with a steel processing company. "Boring" tech, but interesting problems to be solved.

This is it. Currently at a local manufacturing company, and their in-house software runs mostly open-source stuff. No major proprietary headache to deal with, it's not a tech company so I'm not dealing with the obnoxious meetings and calls; and since the software I maintain is internal, I don't have to deal with angry customers. Coworkers let me know if something needs to be better, and I make it so. Simple.

I would recommend anybody this approach.

You’re also likely solving very tangible point problems. Dreamy

For that you need a small/medium business where the owners realize that IT is fundamental to their business even if it does not appear to be so... and the amount of people open-minded enough to admit that is not exactly large.

Rule of thumb for Germans, if they write a fax phone number on the imprint or the website looks 90s style... don't waste your time, skip them.

Thanks for the advice. I had an internship at medium-sized manufacturer in California, above SF a bit. Was really cool to be next to a bunch of CNC machines while writing some code. I think I’ll try to find that vibe again sometime.

How close to Sebastopol?

I went to visit out there and kinda dig the area.

Very

> Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.

I suspect that there's a fair amount of overlap—not total, but quite a bit—between companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and well-documented, repeatable, largely scripted configuration, and companies that are on some of the "sexy" tech now. So it might be even harder than it used to be to find a company doing things the "boring" way but who don't have a horrible, barely-functioning mess on their hands.

I'd think some of the nerdier, niche tech places probably run things OK and not super new-school. Something like Rsync.net, maybe. Possibly places that like BSD in general will tend not to be on the new hotness. Difficulty: those sorts of places tend to have pretty low head counts so it may be hard to land a job at one (go figure, much of the tried and true stuff Just Works and doesn't require a ton of babysitting if you halfway know what you're doing)

>> companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and well-documented, repeatable, largely scripted configuration

Are there any examples of this? I’m coming up on 20 years into my career and i’ve genuinely never seen a large company that had their IT function ticking over sweetly. Every single one had aspirations and had some things nailed to a greater or lesser extent but none were “done”.

If anything, things are a LOT better today. The old mis-configured MS Exhange host hanging off the office DSL line is gone these days. The MD / CEO’s password is unlikely to be Password1 nowadays.

> The MD / CEO’s password is unlikely to be Password1 nowadays.

Well, yeah. It’s been 10 years, and we need to change the password every 3 months, also, you told me not to use ‘Password’, so the password is now ‘CompanyName40’

hunter2-2022-Q2

Especially banks on that list. They're slow to adopt new tech due to risk aversion.

Not only risk aversion - they were really early in digitizing their baseline services, so many of them have quite old mainframes by now. It's difficult, expensive, and, as you said, risky, to change old code that the whole organization is operating against.

+1 to this. I've worked in tech but never enjoyed the "upgrade the system every 2 years approach." Banks and financial services are now regulated to be slow, methodical, and dependable post 2008. I found a manager I respect in a group that does work I'm curious about (options/futures) so it's a good fit.

Well, I work in finance and we do a lot of upgrades. We rarely touch the old COBOL systems. But we rewrite plenty of JSF and even AngularJS front ends. In fact, I created a system about 2 years ago that is currently being rewritten by a different team. So it does still change. I have never worked at a true tech company so I'm just assuming the change is slower.

Public utilities are high on that list, too. Old tech, stable IT jobs, good benefits, but (IMO) also boring as hell. My 2c.

Not the case; I work at a bank and we have widescale adoption of Kubernetes and cloud products (in fact most of the major banks do at this point)

If you happen to be looking for a DevOps or SRE role, check a large banks job boards, you'll be surprised how many open roles are available.

The scope of IT at a JMPC or a BAML is massive, and has grown both through acquisition and organically over decades. Virtually any technology you can think of is most likely being used or (at least being supported) by some unit at the bank. In a recent year JPMC's IT spend was $12 billion. In my personal experience (at JPMC) I knew groups who were using Clojure and Scala (while my manager assured me such technology was not authorized at the bank.) I knew of groups on AWS, on e on Azure and some using an internal Cloud Foundry implementation. (My group was running bond monte carlo's in an abortion of an IBM compute grid system straight out of 1992.) I personally knew of Mongo, Cassandra, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server and KDB installations. Kapital - possibly the most famous commercial use of Smalltalk originated at JPM.

The point is - it's difficult to make generalizations about orgs that big.

JP Morgan Chase Bank of America Merrill Lynch

My (rather out-of-date) experience with banks is that they have no problem adopting new tech but they don't retire the old tech. Add in a bunch of mergers and you get an unholy mess.

Yes! See my sibling comment . . .

I work in finance. My point was basically that the industry is usually slower to adopt the new stuff. Of course they will adopt cloud, but are the the first ones or are they 5 years behind the leaders. It seems they also tend to not change COBOL code often and are just adding new stuff in the new tech. So change still happens, but the scope and rate may be different than other industries.

> They’re outside of the “tech” industry. Look at companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500; their IT group uses boring tech.

If only it were so... A lot of teams in these companies are heavily into fad-chasing, so your random internal web app that has 1 user per hour will be deployed in fully-scalable manner on the company's k8s cluster (which is shit, because company didn't put nearly enough people into keeping it running).

Often these are the types of companies that let numerous consulting companies run roughshod over their organization. You end up with a dozen different proprietary systems created by a dozen different consultants/contractors implementing the latest fad.

> under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not

I'll second this. Strongly.

It is not so much boring as more of an amalgam of scar tissue and duct tape that accumulates over time and is a maintenance nightmare. You might run into the rare place that does things "right" with old technology but those are rare.

I do think some new things are "crazy" but I'll take "crazy new" before "crazy old" most days of the week.

"crazy old" likely has years and years of people documenting all the workarounds and hacks that need to be done to achieve X while "crazy new" might not have that much cruft, but you'll be stuck trying to figure it out by pretty much alone

but of course it also depends on how clever the people beforehand have been, is it stuff tied to impossible knots that cross over 5 parallel dimensions, where nobody knows what it does or how it's doing it, just that "it somehow works, so we don't touch it, that guy was a wizard", or is it just layers of faith held together with duct tape and rope, where people tried to fix stuff over years, throwing in patches that "probably should help, I think, maybe", which could be condensed into less than a third of the size, when rewritten...

This might just be stereotype. As a single data point, I work at a large boring non-tech company - my team's ML runs on Kubernetes just like the cool kids do it.

I've seen a lot of modern tech from other large companies too (banks, retailers etc.) - the culture and pace of development might be different but their tech stacks are very up to date. Even if some of those companies have an old mainframe still running somewhere, they have tonnes of other software too, most of it much more up to date.

I'd think it probably just splits to two groups: 1) IT is critical, therefore we'll use modern tech that makes it more reliable or better, VS 2) Meh, It Works™, so why change it? We've got better things to do than figure out the latest pointless tech...(especially the case at smaller places, where there's less budget for the invisible backend machinery)

Running boring stuff definitely doesn’t preclude also running cool stuff!

I do not think you’ll find “straightforward and makes sense” anywhere inside the fortune 500.

> companies 200-300 on the Fortune 500

And I think companies 500-1000 of the Fortune 1000 would be even more interesting to work for.

You've got the wrong impression of what is "boring" tech. A setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter isn't boring, it's frustrating. Saying doing things the old way is boring, is like saying sending your wife out to carry water from the well in a jar on her head is boring. We've got running water now, that has nothing to do with double-digit YOY growth, it has to do with actually reliably and comfortably deploying and maintaining our infrastructure by leveraging modern technologies like Kubernetes.

I don't know how old you are, but now that I have running water I think to my old and boring setup I cringe at how much work it was to replace or add to an existing cluster, or to replicate it for testing out new features. How out of date the software was, and how easy it would be for an APT to exploit some known-for-years vulnerability in a transitive software dependency.

I wish I could afford an SRE in my current startup, but the fact that we can run a decently reliable setup that's easy to keep up to date, expand and modify is thanks to all of that web scale technology trickling down to us small fish.

And why not use borg for backups? We still do run Debian (or Ubuntu, but same diff), if it's good it's good.

I don't think he's saying he wants to go back to getting water from the well, instead he's saying he's got running water and he's trying to join company that won't expect him to terraform mars with the running water technology.

Maybe, but then they're confounding goals. My company isn't web scale, but we still kubernetes-all-the-things, we run two Kubernetes clusters, soon three. One on premise in a "rando datacenter" running both boring old processing pipelines and fancy schmancy machine learning pipelines. And a Kubernetes deployment on GKE in the cloud, that runs a boring old Ruby on Rails + Postgres platform with some satellite microservices, some written in Rust. We're in the boring old sector of real estate maintenance and inspection, but we do it by flying fancy schmancy drones around building 3D models using 100MP photo's and LiDAR scans.

DevOps, DevSecOps, Kubernetes, SRE's, they're all buzzwords because they're powerful ideas that will enable you to run a modern IT company effectively. Whether that company is web scale 100% YoY growth, or "simple" manufacturing automation. If you're going in comparing it to terraforming mars, then you're not opening your mind to what's possible on earth with a little bit of learning new stuff.

There's plenty of usable middle ground between "rack in a rando datacenter" and doing everything on the cloud. You can leverage VPS hosts, or run the bulk of your workload on prem and use the cloud for infrequent scalability needs.

I try to make this point to people a lot and can never seen to quite get it across.

I really like your running water analogy.

Newer technology is usually easier. Especially if you pick the easy stuff.

I used to do all these tricks to work infra jobs but not be on call. Now - is it in AWS? Is the app in a container? Is it deployed with Kubernetes? Then I don't even care if there is on call!

I've woken up to fix Linux servers in the middle of the night dozens of times. And don't get me wrong - I love Linux. I have yet to have my first "kubernetes broke during the middle of the night" call.

Not to say that new tech doesn't have tradeoffs too. But good lord! It's so much harder with old tech. It's like you're purposely doing it harder to prove a point.

In the last 4 years I have yet to wakeup once running everything on my own servers - all of that has gotten more reliable and easier as well.

I've joined such "boring" companies before. Using SOAP instead of JSON/REST. Using email attachments for source control. Having to download every new version of a dependency and attaching it with Eclipse, instead of it auto downloading when I update the version number.

Also my grandma used to have gas lighting and wells. That was fun, but I can't go back to that.

I think people just don't like the uncertainty with new tech, but the old ones can be uncertain too.

Ok, I get your point, but the whole point about comparing mature tech to carrying water on your head before running water is ridiculous.

Who says you can't use Kubernetes and all of your running water tech running your own hardware? Plenty of places do it.

Sounds like you just have worked at places who sucked at updating, maintaining, and setting up their own hardware unfortunately. Which I agree can be a huge pain in the ass if done incorrectly.

Jup! We run Kubernetes in our own little on premise two racks as well. We use microk8s it was really easy to set up.

Jup I've only worked at startups the past decade and never had a mature system administration team so yeah learning the ropes was rough.

My impression is that there's a lot of Kubernetes jobs because all those unnecessary scaling tools come with additional maintenance work. So if you use new & messy technology, you just need more people. My boring deployments (Nginx+Ruby+PostgreSQL on Debian) can be maintained for multiple projects by just one employee, because there isn't that much to do apart from updating Ansible scripts and running them. But on the Ruby side, stuff gets deprecated/broken all the time, so we need much more manpower to maintain it. And Docker/Kubernetes (where everything depends on access to random GitHub URLs) is even a lot more fragile than that.

EDIT: I was considering doing this myself recently, so maybe you'll like the idea, too: Just walk physically to all the mom&dad shops in your area and ask them if they want a free website, if they allow you to put Google text ads on the side. If you have time, you can build those websites and super cheaply host them themselves, and it'll certainly help those shops get their feet wet in the digital age. Plus you build up some ad/link inventory which you can monetize later. The reason why I considered doing it is because I'm 100% sure that people will tell you a lot of technical stuff that they need solved, if you're there and willing to listen. And those small shops are going to need small cloud-free solutions.

When I worked for a small web agency, I loved the fact that when you did a website for someone, you'd be introduced to their entire business model and everything within. It was a great opportunity to help them optimize all the things if they were willing. It lead to doing a lot of add on work like spreadsheet-> program work, physical network setup, ads, logos, kiosk applications, Christmas tree databases, etc...

I loved helping those small businesses but a lot of them don't have a lot of money to burn so going with a monthly rate they can plan on is powerful, as is managing expectations. A lot wanted Facebook for $500. There are patterns that emerge and one could build an in house stack to handle most everything I'm sure, just increase your monthly as they add services.

> A lot wanted Facebook for $500.

Mind explaining what this means? Did they want content generation for posts? Or did they actually just want someone to post what they had on file? Or did they just want advertising help?

My family has small businesses and I've thought about helping others, but the asks seem too all over the place.

>> A lot wanted Facebook for $500.

> Mind explaining what this means?

As a freelancer, what I’ve seen is requests for building a Facebook-scale social network with all the scalable infrastructure and other bells and whistles, mobile app integration, etc., sometimes for a specific community (lawyers, doctors, or some such), that offer $500 as total budget.

A lot of people have no idea how much work is involved in software development. It's just like magic to them.

I've lost count of the number of customers who said "this should be easy, I'm sure you can knock it up in an afternoon" whilst I'm thinking there is probably two years work in what you are asking for.

Mastodon is perfect for this use case, though.

See that’s the way I like to think — sure $500, and I’ll spin up an instance for you. Then $50/mo for server uptime.

Sometimes a customer suggests one little feature for the site and you have to gently point them to the entire business employing 25 people that just does that one feature as an entire program/service on its own, so no, they won't be getting it as some little easy and cheap thing in one sprint, and probably won't be getting it at all, on their budget.

Other times, yeah, they want some crazy machine learning driven whatever with bells and whistles and social and apps on every major platform and blah blah blah and don't get why that will take at a bare minimum dozens of very talented and expensive people, and probably multiple years, to achieve. Which is the "Facebook for $500" thing.

I took it to mean "[...] managing expectations is important. A lot of places wanted something the size of facebook but to only pay $500."

> But on the Ruby side, stuff gets deprecated/broken all the time, so we need much more manpower to maintain it.

Maybe you should consider Perl? I'm only half joking. I have a few Perl projects running unchanged for 15 years and hopefully for the next 15 years as well.

I don't have that much Perl experience, but I was positively impressed with Python CGI scripts. And with statically linked things like C/C++/Go. Haven't tried Rust in production yet.

Plus I still use one service in production which was written in C++ in 2009. It's statically linked and as such the binary survived 3 major OS upgrades unmodified. Around 2015 I put it behind Nginx just to be sure with all the OpenSSL issues being discovered. It was designed to be multi-threaded to fully take advantage of a dual-core Athlon with 2GB RAM. Oh wow is that one blazing fast on today's hardware.

It's not Ruby itself that has features being deprecated/broken all the time, it's the libraries they're using that are changing.

If you built an app targeting Ruby 1.8.7 (~15 yrs old now?) with maybe rack and sinatra as your only dependencies using only the bare feature set that was available then, it would easily run on Ruby 3 with no code modifications. It would be a lot nicer than Perl too I bet.

If you rely on industry standard software libraries however, you have to keep in mind that keeping up with the industry standard is in the bargain.

Software culture plays a role. If there's one big dog successful project around that everyone's using for a particular purpose and that crowds out and de facto kills other libraries that might do the same thing, but that project's leadership just loves breaking backward compatibility every two years (or more) and not providing security updates for older versions... well, you're stuck with frequent, painful upgrades that require code changes. If that's the norm for lots of projects in an ecosystem, it gets hard to do anything in that language without either avoiding many of its most useful libraries or having relatively high-cost long-term maintenance and/or projects that basically just die and have to be replaced with something new if they fall out of view of your developers for more than a few months at a time.

OTOH, if the culture of a language is that mature, popular libraries tend not to receive breaking changes, even if the principal maintainer reads a blog post and falls in love with New Paradigm X, maintenance can be much cheaper/easier, while still using plenty of 3rd party libraries.

Considering how much Ruby borrows from Perl that is one of the better suggestions I've seen here

Don't confuse Docker with K8s. Docker is more for solving dependency management problems than scaling and redundancy which are the problems k8s solves. I highly recommend some sort dependency management solution like Docker or Nix - it makes changing hardware or OSes down the road much easier.

> I highly recommend some sort dependency management solution like Docker

Just to clarify: Docker isn’t a dependency management solution, but for most people it’s an important part of the solution.

> And Docker/Kubernetes (where everything depends on access to random GitHub URLs)

Where is this true? I'd say this ecosystem is more dependent upon Docker Hub et al.

OP probably referring to all the YAML files that deploy services. Many projects share something like "just kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/...".

It isn't. There is helm charts and such that can be hosted on GitHub.

Disclaimer: I own a boring consultancy.

Boring, however, is contextual. We have flex hours. We have unlimited PTO (and frequent reminders to take personal time - I already know the data related to offering unlim PTO and how often people then take PTO, thank you very much). We make over $1 million in revenue a year with 6 people and no plans to have exponential growth, coupled with high margins so that we aren't rugpulled by a rainy day (and to take appropriate profits of course). My employees report high levels of job satisfaction and happiness.

Our focus? Maintaining boring legacy software for low-risk clients. We also do some greenfield work, but we like the stability that comes with working on older cash cow software.

The jobs are out there. We're just not super flashy about it.

EDIT: I appreciate everyone who commented :) if this wasn't a burner I'd totally reach out to some of you!

Unlimited PTO to me would only be interesting to me if you had a policy stating the minimum number of days/hours you must take a year. Reminders are nice and all but (written) policy is better.

Thanks for your input. Somehow my employees manage to take lots of time on their own as ultimately they have agency, not me. There is no cultural blocker to them taking time (that I'm aware of).

More correctly: I state that I do not have a time-off policy. This is mainly to prevent administrative overhead - something that a minimum number of days would require. I know this won't scale, so I imagine we'll have a "formalized" vacation process long term, but I'm not there yet and don't plan on being there for at least 2-3 more employees.

Illustrating the "no cultural block" point: I had an employee tell me on a Wednesday that he needed the week off the next week to unwind for mental health reasons. I moved a few things around with customers and he happily enjoyed the week. That is signal enough to me that my employees feel fine asking for time off.

Unlimited PTO is an expense savings measure so that HR doesn't have to pay out your unused sick time or vacation time when you leave the company.

It sounds good on paper, but it benefits the company, not you.

None of the employees I have in the states they work in require me to pay out accrued vacation/sick time by law, so your point is moot because I wouldn't offer such a benefit anyways. That said, your cynicism is noted.

EDIT: my employees work across 4 states.

Can you share some more about what you do? Looks interesting! Like sibling comment, I'm also looking for remote part-time work. Such opportunities seem relatively rare.

I would love to hear a bit more about how you built your consultancy firm. I've done some consultancy work for local companies, and I'm looking to focus on similar work (helping local companies with ERP system integrations). If you have some time, I would love to connect and ask you some questions! If you can, please reach out to alon@greyber.org. Thanks!

Basically: I built a network and reputation over years as a tech leader in a specific niche (think Java Spring). This was done with articles, speaking at conferences, and building rapport and reputation with peers at these conferences and with co-workers (including non-technical peers). I was the lead developer at a startup for a long time and spent time building the platforms they still use today, which gave me a lot of credibility amongst my peers.

Those relationships were invaluable. The speaking/articles got me into professional networks that then got me referrals. I kept up with former peers enough such that I was able to get both business and employees from them.

I have done zero advertising and have projected $1.5-2 million in revenue this year. Most of that is profit. I'll personally have a net income of over $1 million this year... and at this point I'm spending a good portion of the day playing FPS. ;)

uh, you got a careers page? :)

I'm looking at the replies to your comment asking about jobs/career page etc.

Boring is the new sexy.

As it should be. I provide stability to both customers and employees. In exchange, we work on stuff that other engineers frequently turn their nose up at AND add value to the companies we work for.

And the best part - we're often able to integrate new technologies into older, legacy systems gradually, which is fun for devs and risky-yet-risk-adverse enough for stakeholders. Win-win!

Looking for a remote part-timer? I'm looking to expand my working hours.

What classifies as boring business

My greater point is: beauty (or boring) is in the eye of the beholder.

Some value a high-stress, cutting-edge environment. I don't and my employees largely don't either. Boring == predictable to us.

We are definitely not "move fast and break things" like NPM is. We move appropriately fast while de-risking our customers long-term.

My suggestion: figure out what kind of boring/not boring you like, and find a job that shares those values.

i didn't meant to be critical i trully wanna what businesses are generally seen as boring. as someone who just doesn't have much exposure i only recognize retail businesses. I have no idea what type of businesses are in all the office buildings everywhere.

I did not take your question as critical at all. :)

I don't want to use K8s. But I also don't want to use a manually setup rack in a random DC.

Back in the day when we had to hire a guy to go down to the cage every day to repair yet another faulty machine, we would have given our left arm for the ability to magically spin up a new VM of any size with a baked image by just running an API call. It's freakin' magic.

I also love, love, love plain Fargate. Not as stupidly complicated as K8s, but I can still run containers without ever thinking about managing hosts. Just keep my containers up to date, push new ones, and trigger a deploy. Never have to "upgrade my cluster to keep from using EOL versions" or "migrate ingress to a new API version" or some other ridiculous thing. It just works, and all I have to think about is my app/container.

So much this. I have painful memories of talking a not-very-technical "technical support" guy through the use of `lsof` on Linux (they'd never heard of it) to diagnose a deployment issue. Also of multi-day to multi-week waits to get hardware lined up for our projects.

I miss it not one jot.

Don't confuse faulty hardware with software abstractions of perfect hardware. Those cloud VMs are still running on some hardware somewhere, even it's been abstracted away from your control. And that hardware can and does fail.

But with an autoscaling group a new one magically pops up in the same AZ if an old one dies. You don't get that by rolling your own rack (without having hot spares on hand, in multiple racks or data centers). Not to mention getting a managed SAN basically for free (EBS) and backup/restore, and managed DBs... I'm a pretty good engineer, but I'm not good enough to be an expert at managing racks of hosts, switches, routers, storage, tape robots, databases, etc. And I don't have to be with cloud services. I just press a button and it's all there.

As a software engineer you should not ever have had to be responsible for those things - that would be the job of network engineers and system engineers. For a small company that is only rolling one rack then I agree it makes sense to cloud host a lot of it (especially variable workloads). But keep in mind you can also roll your own hardware and have "the cloud" as your magic machine that pops up if your rack (or the connection to that datacenter) dies.

Except for that one time a new one magically doesn’t reappear… only to find out that the entire region is down. Then you have to explain to the owner that you don’t have multi-region deployments because they didn’t want to pay for it… and you have no idea when it will be back. (based on a true story) At least with more traditional setups, you can have visibility into why/how your entire system is down and can even have a reasonable timeline to get back to running.

How are you going to make money as an entrepreneur if you are afraid to take risks? The risk/reward here is obviously good. You say this because you are scared of failure.

Me, I didn’t really give a shit then nor would I give a shit now. My job was to lay out the risks/rewards to clients. Sometimes, they choose the dumb thing. You can tell them that’s it unwise, but ultimately it’s their wallets. If they don’t want to pay an extra 20k a month just for redundancy, I totally get it.

They lost about 50k in sales that day, still less than the cost-of-ownership for redundancy.

PS. Please keep conversations civil. You probably don’t know me, but I’m the least “scared of failure” person you’ll ever meet.

Where is the lack of civility in my comment? It's okay to say that you dislike what someone said without projecting that discomfort onto them. Enjoy your civil discussions with people that aren't me

> I also love, love, love plain Fargate.

Same goes for the HashiStack. I really don't want to work with Kubernetes anymore simply to deploy some containers.

You must have been running some damn cheap or old or faulty hardware because that is an insane amount of hardware maintenance.

Just leave your SF/VC bubble, move to a medium-sized European city and such jobs will be plentiful. Most likely you'll be maintaining internal business applications on uncool and legacy technology stacks. The value of these applications is mostly for the particular business and your experience wouldn't transfer easily to a new job. The upside is that job security is far greater there. Also, you'll have less opportunities to blog about what you are doing, or to write insightful HN comments because most of what you do is totally uninteresting for the world.

And between income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, you'll be taking a substantial cut in income - for housing which is more expensive, colder weather, and less sunlight.

I'm sorry, but exactly which "medium-sized European city" has more expensive housing than SF?

I'll be moving back to Europe this year, and I find your comment quite funny, given that I am moving to a city with significantly cheaper housing and better weather than where I live now (NYC).

I see you have no health issues, no teeth, and no family to speak of, and very much enjoy car-first public infrastructure. You also have no idea that cultures (people, food, entertainment, experiences) in different countries can be different.

QoL is not only measured in "dollars of income".

The weather and sunlight are heavily dependent on the city - Stockholm and Valencia may be on the same continent but are vastly different in those aspects.

Housing isn't more expensive baring maybe the city centers of huge cities like Paris and London. But housing is much more evenly spread and better connected with transit, so you don't jump from uber expensive dense city core to very far away low density suburbs. Savings from healthcare and transportation, plus pensions, offset the taxes, mostly.

Just find medium sized businesses in any major city - many will still be using these stacks. Just avoid the ones that do not invest or see IT as a cost center (there are many of those). Any decently profitable medium sized business that is willing to invest in reliable IT AND knows that they should be involving in IT in many of their normal day to day processes in order to drive further innovation / optimization is probably a decent place to work.

Come to Southeast Asia if you care about all that. Well, pay is a lot lower, but there's less taxes, more sunlight, lots of old tech, and good cheap healthcare. Also plenty of beaches, islands, and water parks.

Industries that actually run the world and won't be disrupted by whatever VC-funded "Uber of X" whose business model is ultimately a Ponzi scheme. Think banking, engineering firms like Schneider/ABB, tools that are actually used in hospitals, etc. Look for major industry players that provide the backbone of basic infrastructure that you probably never heard of because they're too busy growing at a clip of 2% per year at $2B profit and don't need to crow. And of course the companies that support them

Not sure that financial services (banks) are less likely to be perpetrating a Ponzi scheme than Uber, etc.

Can't argue against that. Although to be fair, the MBAification of the leadership class is turning most places into Ponzis or client-hating Monopolies

The difference is banks will always be bailed out by the government. It's the Ponzi that keeps on giving.

Well Said!

I suspect this where the real "expertise" in Building Software Systems lies. Stable, Steady, Fault-Tolerant, least MTBF etc. characteristics are the name of the Game.

Medical hardware is great. Boring time tested technology and good profits.

All of the non-Web GUI development jobs I see are for either military applications or medical devices.

They also pay much lower than even enterprise webshit, despite requiring increasingly more specialized knowledge.

We do, with a slightly charitable interpretation of LAMP.

We did have a brief stint with AWS, but that's thankfully over, partly because their Aurora Postgres-like cloud thing regularly would thrash to death because it doesn't have anywhere to store temporary data so a biggish join means out of memory, partly because the US law that says foreigners have no right to privacy from NSA with judicial review makes it illegal in Europe to use US providers unless data is encrypted client-side (see Schrems II).

I wish someone would start a sysadm contractor company offering setting up and maintaining servers at something like Hetzner. Take a service fee for being ready to respond to emergencies, bill for hours spent, and let Hetzner bill the hardware. Setting up a server isn't that bad, you can do that with a script, but ongoing maintenance and having someone always ready to respond to emergencies (that never occur, almost) is something you wouldn't mind having a competent sysadm take care of, as a developer.

I think there's a huge market for this in Europe with Schrems II, for those that aren't really deeply dependent on the software stack in cloud services. And you can get some beefy machines at Hetzner for pennies compared to Amazon or Google.

A managed dedicated server?

The answer is to talk to recruiters.

The job ads that catch your eye are specifically tailored for those results. They're usually posted from flashy startups who are high on their own supply. I had many an interview with those types of places, and nothing you could say would be good enough for them. That's why those job posting are always open.

What worked for me was happenstance -- I applied to a job that was posted by a recruiter, and once I was in that recruiting company's ecosystem, they started passing opportunities my way. The opportunities were interesting and had "boring" and relatable tech. If I looked up the job ads for those opportunities, the posting itself sucked and lacked the detail I'd expect. I'd have never applied without a recruiter talking to me about it.

There is a massive demand for developers at small and medium sized businesses. Those businesses have no idea how to effectively market their postings, which is why they use recruiters. The startups that know how to effectively market their postings on WeWorkRemotely and such have the applicant pool to be insanely choosy. If you're having trouble landing something, apply to jobs that are close to what you're looking for, but definitely posted by a recruiter. The recruiters will talk to you, and if they like what they hear, the interviews will pour in.

Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain. I showed someone the models we use to track a customer implementation and they thought we were insane for even thinking this is a good business to be in.

Because the problem domain of banking sucks so much, the tooling is necessarily simple and "unsexy". We like things that fit into a single VM/folder and can be built in 1 click. Anything more complex than this is almost certainly going to fail by default under the combined weight of unnecessary technical complexity and vast (and necessary) business requirements.

It took us until the 3rd year of integration with one of our banking customers before someone in IT even gave enough of a shit to naturally ask the question "so what language/framework/technique did you write <product name> in?" Obviously, we are required to disclose this in legal materials prior to implementing our product, but our customer sees "Microsoft" and rubber-stamps it without much drama. No one else gives a shit about the tech after this phase of the project (which lasts approximately 1 phone call).

You are definitely working at a different bank than I was... Mine had an entire division focused just on internal technology and tooling. Which was actually a bit of a nightmare, because it led to things like building our own cloud with customized versions of off-the-shelf software. Because of course if you ask the internal technology group whether we should build a cloud or buy a cloud, what do you think the answer will be? And of course the publicly-available version is not good enough for our super special needs, so we'll customize it and just ignore the fact that we are now either (a) on a treadmill to keep up with upstream or (b) more likely just ignoring upstream. My company chose b, until eventually years later they realized that those super-special needs weren't so special and had a huge uplift project to get to the publically-available version.

Anyway, the group I worked in was an acquisition with a completely different tech stack. So we were basically completely ignored except for the occasional saber rattling that we should be moving to blessed tech stack. After which we would say, sure give us a project with time and budget reserved and we'll get right on that. Cue the crickets. Also, my group was PCI burdened, so we quickly became exempt from any of the afore-mentioned cloud stuff, because they were afraid we would make the cloud in scope for PCI.

Now, most of the people who I knew were decent have left. But it wasn't about the technology -- the paycheck is enough to get through that. It's mostly around back-to-office mandates. Which is a strange stance, after the company spent who-knows-how-much moving all our machines to be virtual desktops that we could log into from anywhere.

Does your company's name start with Pi and end with co?

> Banking is pretty desperate for talent, probably because no one wants to suffer the complexity of the problem domain

I assume it's mostly because not many decent software developers want to suffer Banking's work environment

What do you mean? you don't enjoy having to cut all the red tape during a pull request to apease the SOC2, PCI, ISO27001, RGPD, CID360, GDPR powers that be?

> Banking is pretty desperate for talent

The salaries don't suggest that, unless I'm at the wrong locations and/or looking at the wrong banks.

Allow me to clarify - You typically dont work directly for a bank as a software developer. You typically work for some vendor who sells software to the banks. We have many banks as our customers.

I totally agree, the range in number of servers/services/technologies different companies use to solve similar problems are SO wide.

After 12 years of growth we are still happily on:

  - 1 Ubuntu server
  - 1 MySQL db
  - 1 Django framework
  - Ansible for deployment

And thats mostly it. Due to Hetzner missing the 27002 certification we moved from metal to Amazon EC2 instances which was pretty uneventful. We also moved to Aurora and the point-in-time restores actually makes me sleep better at night. Relative to Hetzner it's a lot more expensive. Not at all a problem in the absolute sense.

Some years back I had a chance to talk with the CTO of a company very similar to ours, and their landscape was 400+ microservices, 50 servers managed by k8s on Azure Cloud, Service bridges, Workflow engines, 5 different DB engines, etc. It sounded very fascinating, but also quite complicated.

Some of my worst decisions over the years has been not having the balls to say no to current best-practices. I've learned the hard way that even though the pressure of using shining-new-thingTM can be immense it's so important to realise that everything always has pros and cons. The most important thing is trying to really understand _my_ specific problem and _then_ using the simplest and most obvious solution that can work.

Obligatory "Programmers are also human" link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk

> Everything is double-digit YOY growth with impending exit

I'm going to say, on a random job board, this is actually the vast minority of jobs. Most, even at FAANG, have lots of unsexy maintenance that just needs to get done. Even in fancy machine learning land (where I work) 99% of the work is fairly 'boring' in the traditional sense.

Also, there is a strong bias to talk about 'sexy' work outside the company. For a variety of dev marketing reasons. Nobody does a conference talk about the uninteresting boring work that gets done.

I had a job with a lot of ML and Data Science a few years back.

I learned that the job really should’ve been called “Data Janitor”. 90-95% if the work was cleaning data sets and making sure that last update in some ML library we used didn’t mess up something.

> Nobody does a conference talk about the uninteresting boring work that gets done.

Id go to that

sounds like some kind of crypto-free utopia

Small design studios. They still exist and they often need developers to develop “regular” websites using very down to earth stacks.

There’s a ton of business that simply need basic websites and those still need to be developed by someone.

This is a great answer. At a small studio you'll absolutely see some LAMP servers being run in a corner of the office and some deploy pipelines that boil down to "FTP into the server and then copy and paste the files into the www directory."

That is much more common that people probably realize. I worked with maybe 60 or 70 different clients over my years freelancing and not one of them was using anything more complex than a basic shared hosting to host their sites. That’s just the reality for the vast majority of businesses.

Most businesses don’t need anything complex. It’s just basic sites and emails.

There's a ton of businesses with mail servers, ERP systems, workstations, industrial equipment, web sites, and hardware to support salespersons, events, and visitors.

Keeps me busy, and automating as much as I can, before I ride off into the sunset. Sometimes the shiny ring isn't what you need to chase.

Most tech jobs in the country are exactly the kind you describe. Of course if you are expecting a silicon valley salary to go with it then you will be disappointed. Look up any $50-60K IT job in a mid sized city on Indeed.

With the IT shortage it has actually shot up quite a bit - when no one will work your 50-60k job because everyone is chomping at the bit the salaries have risen quite a bit. Medium to large city will not be paying top end tech salary of course but you should be able to make between 100-200k depending on experience and the job.

Sorry. We’re not hiring currently because our system is simple and reliable and we enjoy our excess profits.

Pittsburgh, PA. Every big company here - PNC, UPMC, Highmark, Fedex, Norfolk Southern, Duquesne Light - will pay you $65-70k/year at most. I met an IT director at one of these companies who told me that open source is a communist movement and so he's banned it. The dress code is very relaxed - if you stay late all week you can earn jeans Fridays!

At all of these companies you will be forced to use Internet Explorer 11 and you'll program in a remote desktop Notepad.exe on Windows Server 2012. Doing anything else is explicitly banned. The programming language is a proprietary version of Visual Basic with all the functions renamed and changed slightly so the vendor can control access to the $5k/year documentation, which is still horribly written. You will sign an agreement not to ever ask or answer questions about the language on Stack Overflow too. The vendor of these languages doesn't really exist beyond an email address like "sales@enterprisereadypython.com" - they will gaslight you that this is the real Python and python.org is a scam, "if you're not paying you're the product!". None of your coworkers will know what you're talking about when you mention Git or Linux.

I’ve always wondered how do they find people to work there, especially young people. Do you know their profile?

Most of the younger people have degrees in Computer Information Systems

My question is why would they work there when there's much more interesting things around? Are they just not aware of other jobs, or they are happy with the stability of these ones?

Banned open source? As in open source dependencies? Or just releasing anything as open source?

Open source is as capitalist as it gets for the most part IMO. Public Github = company flexing or CV. Either way….

Work for a heavily regulated private industry: banking, finance, healthcare, energy.

I did startups for 10 years prior. Never ending rat races, constant high pressure deadlines, everything is "ASAP", compensation is iffy (your start ups got to make it).

In contrast, I work for a bank now. Easiest and most well compensated job I have ever had in my life. So easy that I am pursuing additional degrees (which they pay for), and moonlighting my own product offerings, virtually stress free.

They still dabble in some of the tech you mention. But they are much more deliberate about everything. And if they do go with something, it will be around for a long time.

Most jobs aren't sexy. This website focuses on Silicon Valley darlings and FAANGs and unicorn startups, but that's a minority of the available software jobs. There are a lot of good programming jobs available everywhere from banks to intellectual property protection to Domino's.

It can be frustrating working in companies that treat IT as a cost center, but there's still a lot of money to be made there. (And as a bonus, the interviews are ridiculously low-pressure compared to Google.)

The problem is you will also want job security. The answer is to look in a company that is not tech. Lots of companies that have tech in the background, where it’s needed but not driving revenue. However even in that scenario there is a risk that the job could be cut because software wants to eat everything, move everything to a service oriented architecture or automate, or do the same thing using new buzzwords. So you need to look at a lot of parameters score you jump in.

I disagree that coolness of tech has any relation at all to job security. You're implying pure tech companies will always use cool tech. But there are plenty of pure tech companies outside of major cities that primarily use PHP and Rails and Django and ASP.NET and Perl and JQuery and maybe colo servers and haven't seriously changed their stack in 5-10 years if not longer.

I was not suggesting that at all. Cool new tech has more churn actually. I was simply saying, if someone wants unsexy that would also imply they want job security.

If a company has 9 racks with their legacy products and 1 product sounding like the ones you describe, then the job ad will mention the kubernetes all the things product/job, but if you apply you'll be maintaining 10 products where 9 aren't very sexy at all.

So unless the company is extremely young (say younger than 10 years) then there will be tech of all ages and all levels of sexy.

Smartleaf runs out of high-quality third-party datacenters on hardware we buy, install and maintain ourselves, running Ruby on Rails and C++ and Oracle/Postgresql on Debian with borg backups. Is that close enough?

We also deploy with Chef and an in-house application deployment system written in Perl, do monitoring with mon, and understand that a sysadmin is a subject matter expert.

Hiring, too.

Local/regional companies outside of tier 1 cities. Before the pandemic they only hired locally and their salaries were good for the US but 1/3 to 1/2 of salaries in NYC and SF. Companies that were bootstrapped within an hour or two of Philly, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville, Sacramento, you get the picture.

>Local/regional companies outside of tier 1 cities. Before the pandemic they only hired locally and their salaries were good for the US but 1/3 to 1/2 of salaries in NYC and SF. Companies that were bootstrapped within an hour or two of Philly, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville, Sacramento, you get the picture.

This. There are thousands of great "Tier 3" (not FAANG, not Fortune 500, but still large) companies out there in the US that will pay $100k-$200k with great benefits, 9-5 culture, and good job security. The SV startup world is pretty irrelevant at this point with the shift to remote IMO.

Plenty of places like that even in Tier 1 cities!

The middle ground between the places trying to be mini-googles and places running their own server under a desk has been squeezed pretty hard by SaaS/PaaS stuff - you either run your small business entirely on other people's services and sweat OR you have a big enough budget to have the faux-SRE experience.

In my experience only owners who had enough momentum from previous businesses with that setup or who just maintained a fairly small pool of revenue (and so didn't change.)

Also the economy went through a lot of M&A because its hard in the middle, failures are catastrophic, and paying some guy who will probably take you to beer lunches to host your stuff makes you look smart to all the other up and coming CEOs.

It also depends on how boring you want to get. Any company with a mainframe will have a large amount of 'boring' tech stack, even if it is paired with newer offerings. The core might be RPG or COBOL, but there's usually a layer of newer languages around it that has had time to crystalize.

For historical reasons, this is also heavily tied to the adoption of EDI. So I'd start looking for boring tech stacks in areas that have EDI documents associated with them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List

Keep in mind that organizations like you've described may treat IT and other such investments as necessary evils.

Look at industries that typically have a very low level of digitalization. I think I read once the lowest ones are: Oil and Gas, Agriculture.

And then you pick local smaller companies and then you have you what you look for.

Look for small companies you never heard of, in places you've never been.

Come to medical devices. If you aren’t directly working on the medical research part everything else is decidedly unsexy by design .

Sorry to tell you but a lot of traditional companies, well outside of fortune 500 are using devsecops,sre,k8s and all the other keywords. Their legacy sysadmins are having to adopt.

You don't sound too old but maybe stuck on the past a bit? Nothing boring about a LAMPP stack but there are better ways of doing that, the tool for the job and all.

Similar: How to get into cool/cutting edge technical roles without on-call duty?

Nothing makes me want to leave this industry more than having to plan evenings and weekends around on-call shifts I didn't volunteer for and get shuffled around less than a month in advance. My expertise is all distributed systems and database engines =\

On-call requirements is what made me steer clear of SRE or devops/sysadmin roles even though I enjoy it.

We have a friend who’s totally nuts. He thinks about work 24.7.365 because he’s always on call. When we go on hikes he has his laptop in his backpack “in case they page me”…

All my job opportunities include on-call. I'm not an SRE/devops either, just everything is a 24/7 service now =\

And hilariously I enjoy the fire-fighting and deep root-causing under pressure. But 99% of it is waking up in the middle of the night for a faulty alarm.

Unsexy sounds fun until you have to deal with horrific undocumented XML interfaces and obscure proprietary protocols. Automattic have the kind of "unsexy" stack you are looking for (maybe a bit more complicated, but not much).

Don't dismiss this idea too quickly. My son left a floundering startup that was jumping from one trendy tech stack to another. For stuff that wasn't their core IP. And a simple MySQL database would have worked perfectly.

I run a high double digit YoY growth company. We use boring tech as much as possible. Sure we lean into some automation, etc, but only when it really makes sense. Your example is probably too much risk for us. We do most of our work as monolithic docker images running in DO App Platform with managed PostgreSQL. Deploys, CI/CD, etc are all in GH Actions. Most code is Typescript to keep it simple and accessible. A lot of the dev work is also tracked in GH Issues. Dev is done Kanban so you finish your work, pull the next item from the list, and keep pushing on. Very few meetings, etc.

Hedgefunds/podshops might fit what you're looking for. Depending on the size of the place, it might be a fairly lean set up (colo,minimal cloud). Usually they don't need to scale to "web-scale"

Non-boring tech within reason is fine with me.

What is off putting is all this hyper growth series F funding impending exit nonsense.

An independent and profitable company that wants to sray below 50 or so people sounds like a dream to me.

That is basically every tech company founded outside the most expensive cities in the US. :)

It's just that lots of people like living in/near the most expensive cities in the US so you don't see these companies as much.

There's also too boring. I had a job at a software company that uses Rocket UniVerse (https://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/rocket-universe-0/ro...). It upscales a telnet based interface to a windows-like frankenstein that displays on conventional MS Windows pc's. The db is ironically noSQL before they even invented the term. But that interface, that tech...

Look for companies that got acquired by some big company a 3-5 years ago.

I work at Home Chef. We got acquired by Kroger in 2018. It's pretty chill. They don't pay what FANG+ does but its a nice tech stack, lower stress environment, and the workforce is really diverse. The Kroger corporate overlords pretty much leave us alone which is great.

Generally mid market companies like this are a little bit more relaxed. Large enough to have some structure and orgs in place while still small enough to do some interesting work without too much bullshit to wade through.

I would ask instead is connected to the internet or not.

Partly sarcastic rewording: in other words, do you have to track CVEs, updated / broken dependencies, zero-days, encrypt at rest, scale, linguistics, support quick turnaround / Agile, work with people that expect Javascript/Typescript, work with tooling that must run on latest Java or recent C libs, work with managers that think DDD must be followed, etc etc? Sure partly this is just software industry in general, but so many areas of concern balloon when coding for the web.

I know a social media analytics SaaS company, they're pretty successful at ~200 employees and 100% bootstrapped. All their servers are in the basement of the main office building.

I recommend reading Shop Class as Soulcraft:

- Essay: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-so...

- Book if you dig it! https://www.audible.com/pd/Shop-Class-as-Soulcraft-Audiobook...

EDA companies, like Cadence and Synopis are consistently unsexy with their tech choices. It's mostly desktop software in C++ or Java.

I think many places with a setup like you describe don't have in-house staff to manage their tech.

I briefly worked for an agency early in my career where most of the clients had WordPress or Magento sites with low to moderate traffic. They would usually only need a few hours a month each, so it wouldn't have made sense for them to hire full time programmers or sysadmins.

I'm not old - 28 years old, worked in tech since I left school at 19, and my first job was still wiring routers and building servers (like, physically ordering the parts and building them in a lab). I really miss that sort of tech now I'm a "senior software engineer" and it's all remote, all abstractions, and all in a chair.

Places like that are around, but, crucially, don’t have much turnaround and don’t do much new hiring.

The government. I worked for the US state department for a couple of years by way of a major consultancy. Not sure you can get any more boring than that. And you'll make a solid six figures doing maybe five hours of work a week!

You have a right to your opinion, but companies running on AWS tend to be much easier places to work vs companies running on 50 year old mainframes.

I've done both, modern companies make it easy to get things done. Legacy companies are frustrating hellholes.

You might find what you want at India's largest stockbroking platform - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sqMIG7wgg

I have an unsexy job where I automate JIT manufacturing processes, and I love it, despite the hodge-podge and duct tape. From what I hear, our on-prem setup is quite common in our industry, particularly in smaller family-owned shops.

DC. State & Local Gov't. All undergoing massive transformation. Who wouldn't want to try and solve the puzzle of the IRS's new Tax Cloud? Sometimes the most boring inquiries, yield ripest fruits ;)

Look up private equity firms who buy software companies and apply there. The number of software companies that are not on a VC track far outweigh the ones who are and they are in desperate need of good tech talent.

anyone looking to enter the environmental lab/chemistry space can look at pace labs.com and https://www.pacelabs.com/company/about/careers/ Still using traditional client server apps with sql databases with some win/linux services on backend.

Work as a DB admin in an accounting firm or something, and avoid job boards - just apply online through the company website. You might have an aunt who knows of some job openings in her office.

Non-Profits, Small to Medium Sized Businesses. Places where being on the leading edge is a bad thing, better to be near the trailing edge where things "just work" for years.

Lots of government jobs.

But bear in mind, there's a big chance you'll be in a vendor lock-in, with little flexibility to work outside of those tools - at least for the larger organizations.

Maybe smaller cultural focussed hosters, like servus (https://core.servus.at/), or riseup.net

You’d be surprised how much business is still running on paper …

.. damn. Just read the text.

And here, from the title, I was going to advise you to go to Mike Rowe's website, and learn to be a heavy equipment operator, or carpenter, or something.

https://careers.walmart.com/technology perhaps?

Walmart are big Azure users... including Kubernetes, CosmosDB etc.

https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/tagged/azure

Local companies, usually not technology companies.

Hard in the era of resume driven development.

Hi, we do fairly unsexy or unzesty work. I love it as I've gotten used to work life balance and predictability.

Probably government related stuff.

A lot of the companies that do/did this potentially no-longer do it themselves.

E.g. years ago a company might have run their own LAMP stack to host a website or a small online store or whatever.

But in this age of SaaS it is easier for these smaller shops to just use something like Wix or Shopify to handle it for them, complete with fancy wysiwyg editors etc.

I used to get requests to "add payments" or something to websites I used to help out with so that they could basically do an online shop. At the time I actively rejected those requests as there were huge headaches around things like PCI compliance and the like. Fast forward a decade or more and with GDPR and Cookie laws etc it is a total non-brainer to use a hosted service where they handle all of this, rather than spin up your own ecommerce solution.

It does not make sense to roll your own unless you have a large engineering team, at which point you move beyond some random thing running in some random data center somewhere.

Of course not everything online is ecommerce or CMS-oriented - there will be niche and custom stuff that is not handled well by SaaS offerings.

US-based advice only, but start by getting out of any tier 1/2 city (read: effectively any city with unreasonable cost-of-living). Landing any of these jobs will allow you to easily build your network, which can be 100% of your job referrals thereafter. Some examples:

1. Banking or insurance. Both industries provide high-paying, great-benefits, low-stress jobs (assuming you're OK with bureaucracy or can ignore it) using anything from ancient technology to modern k8s. Here are some anecdotes:

a. Friend works at a small regional bank with ~150b in assets. Their job is to maintain (amongst other less important ones) a classic ASP application which generates monthly compliance reports that get submitted to the fed. Critical work but trivially easy (if you know classic ASP!). The software runs on a single potato VM; development is done on a clone potato VM. They don't even use version control for this as it has been pending approval for 3 years... For this, they make $150k + 15% 401k match + unlimited PTO (forced 2 weeks per quarter off). Rent in that area is ~800/mo for a 2bdr.

b. College acquaintance does boring ASP.NET WebForms development for a regional insurance carrier. They cover 7 counties out of 30ish in said state. They maintain the member portal for all insured members, which runs in their local datacenter with failover a few states away. Captive audience, known size, no need for fancy scaling or load balancing as they have one active season (open enrollment), easy to prepare for. They plan on migrating from WebForms to .NET Core MVC possibly in the next 5 years. No need to rush, though! Same as above; six figure, good match, lots of PTO, similar rent.

c. Insurance for a major carrier, remote. Think Excellus/Aetna/etc. Boring ASP.NET MVC development with jQuery. The engineer has no idea what hardware they run, as despite working on production features, they never deploy any actual code - that happens 15 management levels up the chain. Said engineer has heard that, if they want a test environment, it is requested through IT and provisioned via VMWare, but has no idea if that is what production runs on. Much higher compensation than the previous two.

2. SMB consulting. SMB accounts for what, 95%+ of businesses in the US? Hit up any city anywhere and you will find 50-100 small IT/software consulting companies. There is plenty of the pie to go around if you aren't looking for exit numbers. These companies tackle everything. Custom AS400 solutions? Sure why not. Software written on a version of PHP so low you can count it on your coccyx? Sure, we migrate that. Mission critical software running on Bob's Laptop but Bob retired and nobody has his password and now the entire line is shut down until we can find a fix? Yeah, we can fix that. SMB consulting is really where it's at if you want wonky, boring stuff.

3. Education of the higher (college) variety. I did a stint at my uni for ~5 years and they are the very definition of boring. "Cutting edge" for a uni is paying Oracle a few million bucks for an SIS system that somehow runs slower than their custom built AS400 implementation that Frank from IT wrote himself 25 years ago. If you're somewhere modern, you might have some sort of VM infrastructure somewhere, but you'll be caught up in budgeting for at least a year trying to figure out what code to bill that shit to. In that time you'll find another department tossing out an old Itanium with 16GB of RAM that will absolutely just barely run your critical Spring 1.0 application tossed together by some students who haven't quite got to a web engineering course yet.

The biggest way to find these is networking. I have not had a proper interview in 25 years - every single job has been a referral over a coffee or beer that starts with, "So I've got this job, it's a little weird, but hear me out..."

Big Law and Big Auditing are seriously a place where to find unsexy jobs

On the (far) outskirts of major tech cities. Like, 50 miles out.

Try working with an independent recruiter.

What if I told you ... that LAMP is sexy?

As sexy as WIPP? I don't think so!

> Where

On LinkedIn.

This is the best answer that you will get.

Look in healthcare IT :)

academia