I'm going to agree with Dan Luu by asking where I can find more of these sane companies. I want to spend an honest 6h a working day improving a product (Terraform and Webpack are not the product) and spend the rest of my time tending to my garden.
I am with you. Complex architectures where you have to fight it even for simple changes is a recipe for burn out as you paddle and paddle and you are stuck in the same place.
I think about this almost daily while slogging away in hundreds of lambdas, working on the world’s slowest app server. I think maybe 10% of our effort rubs off as business value. Maybe less.
They are great. You will get time in the garden, that's awesome.
Vacation someplace with no phones? Out of the question. Weekend in a 3rd world country with character and food and sketchy internet. Not gonna happen.
You want to optimize for free time in the garden by all means you can do it, but you loose out in other places, you pick up other work (taxes, systems etc).
Edit: Down vote away, I live this life now, my tomatoes are delicious and I make yogurt too!
Not sure I understand your point. I do my work, doing development work and managing a small team.
Still never work weekends (no phone, no email, no slack), spend time in my garden and just came back from a no-phone vacation.
Salary is above the going rate where I live - the work is remote and salary is based on company headquarters.
Taxes are in line with the country I live in.
Not really seeing any downsides here, and as expected morale is quite good overall at work... But finding this company was extremely lucky/difficult.
I learned long ago that I cannot write quality code for 8 hours per day. I need to have several hours of meetings every day just to ensure I don't overdo the coding and write bad code.
Sure I can write code for 14 hours a day, but it will be bad code, sometimes even negative productivity as I introduce so many bugs.
Running a business, even a "lifestyle business" is so substantially different from a job - requiring all kinds of very different tasks, and risk-taking profile - that it doesn't seem reasonable to assume that someone who's looking for such a job is actually looking to run some business.
I know several folks with niche business that pay various levels of their bills.
Software for youth sports, photography, asset tracking, vendor tracking, niche issues in CC Processing, facets of insurance and billing (coding).
Niche businesses happen all over the place, and finding one (for me) was a lot of trial and error, that niche business pays my "bills" and I do consulting work (sporadic, interesting and high value) to round it out (and keep me on my game).
Dont think of it as a business right away. You're going to "play", you want to build them quickly, you want to host them cheaply, you want to toy with selling them. Your managing disappointment and failure, your learning lessons and keeping it FUN. The moment you start dreaming that it's going to "make it big" is the moment you have to reel yourself back to reality. If you can say "what did I learn" and have a list of things you got from it then it was a success. At some point you just find one that clicks and it grows.
