New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Should I leave a dev job where I'm paid for doing almost nothing?

Ask HN: Should I leave a dev job where I'm paid for doing almost nothing?
12 by asteria | 18 comments on Hacker News.
I’ve been very dilemmatic about my current career situation and I’m hoping I can get some advice from the people here at HN. I've joined my current company 3years ago as a web developer. By the end of my first year with the company, they decided to offshore most of their technical work. I was subsequently promoted to be the project manager to manage the offshore vendors. On paper, I’m currently a project manager. But I'm really just a middleman between the internal users and the offshore vendors. On average, I only spend about 3 hours a day sending emails to vendors. I usually spend the rest of the hours doing my own things. I've lots of freedom at managing my time too! Because I can have long lunch breaks, I've recently started moonlighting through a freelance assignment to teach programming during lunch time at places within 30mins distance from my office. It's crazy how I get to do my own things during office hours while still getting paid! I literally have zero stress and I’m so happy every day. It doesn’t feel like a job at all! However, lately, I’ve started to worry if this is going to hurt my technical career in the long run. I'm pretty sure my current job has nothing great to boast about at interviews when I've to move on to a new job. Although I still continue to learn newer tech on my own such as React, Angular, etc, it's worrying to wonder how much of these counts as real experiences when I really need to find a new job. A part of me feels my current job is a rare find and I can't bear to just walk away. It feels silly to find a more demanding job just for “work experiences” when I can earn additional income through freelance gigs during office hours! But another part of me is also telling myself I should leave this job asap for the long-term good. Has anyone been through a job like this before? What path did you take and how did things turn out? Would you recommend that I stay at my current job for all the perks?

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