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Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

#11

Post by jo909 »

staticautomatic wrote: post #4
jo909 wrote: post #2

I sit in a chair, in front of a panel with many lights, and another panel with many buttons. And I press the buttons rapidly in some specific order to make certain lights go on or off.

You work on the USS Enterprise?

No, but we also call what we do "enterprise".

I forgot that I also push around a little puck on the table that also changes the pattern of the lights depending on its position, and I have to push it to a different specific place and press a button. I repeat that many thousand times per day.

Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

#13

Post by lior9999 »

I'm a hardware engineer at Apple on the Accessories team. This is my first job out of college (dropped out of my PhD program to join Apple) and I absolutely love what I do.

My team is great, everyone here is insanely knowledgeable, and the work is very meaningful. I honestly feel like I've learned so much more in the last year working for Apple than I have in my entire life.

Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

#15

Post by ggambetta »

I'm a Software Engineer at Improbable (http://www.improbable.io).

Before this I worked at Google for four years, and before that I ran a small game development studio (http://www.mysterystudio.com) for almost 10 years. Improbable gives me the best of both worlds -- the speed and the impact your day to day work has in a startup, and the world-changing ambitions of Google.

I get to work on very challenging technical problems, building core systems from scratch, within an engineering culture and people of a caliber comparable to Google's, but perhaps even more motivated because we're more invested in the success of the company. I'm enjoying every minute of it!

Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

#16

Post by engi_nerd »

I work as a flight test instrumentation engineer. This is an electrical engineering equivalent of a "full stack" position because I do everything from troubleshoot individual strain gages to analyze test data to look for trends and causes of problems. I like this job and it's definitely my favorite job...but then, I've only had three different jobs.

Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

#17

Post by germinalphrase »

davisr wrote: post #3

I currently work at an ad agency (we call ourselves a "boutique data-driven marketing company") in Milwaukee. My official title is Developer, but I do a lot of things: I manage servers, code applications (HTML/CSS/Javascript, but also C, R, and loads of shell scripting), research new concepts, automate existing workflows, and so much more. Before I did this, I worked as a freelancer doing one-off website jobs for sma…

I teach in k12 in the Madison area. If you're developing concepts and want 'end-user' feedback I would enjoy taking part.

Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

#18

Post by benbreen »

davisr wrote: post #3

I currently work at an ad agency (we call ourselves a "boutique data-driven marketing company") in Milwaukee. My official title is Developer, but I do a lot of things: I manage servers, code applications (HTML/CSS/Javascript, but also C, R, and loads of shell scripting), research new concepts, automate existing workflows, and so much more. Before I did this, I worked as a freelancer doing one-off website jobs for sma…

Just wanted to say that I totally agree with your third paragraph and (as an educator) have a suggestion - the current grade management tools like Canvas feel like they're about 10-15 years old. Making a better one that's open source would not only cut down on the ballooning administrative costs that are contributing to the problems with education right now, but could also contribute to making classes more hands on (by allowing the teacher to branch out beyond tests into more creative forms of assessment).

Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

#19

Post by dweekly »

I run a small R&D lab for an unnamed subsidiary of the company that owns Google. Our mandate is to come up with new technologies that change the economics of telecoms, which, if we are successful, may help get hundreds of millions of people online. My coworkers operate a carrier neutral metro fiber network in Kampala and other coworkers are busy building crazy fast internet for America.

I like this job.

Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

#20

Post by rudenoise »

I'm a software engineer. I work on a contract basis, contracts last 3 months to a year. I've recently made CI pipelines, Win 8.1 apps, IOS apps but mostly web-apps. The pay is good and the people I work with are cool.

I don't love it though. It's OK. It'd be better to code 20% of the time and observe, talk, think the other 80%. I think that this might make me more efficient and more productive.

My best job was my first. A guy had a profitable web-site and no technical knowledge, there was no notion of best-practice, and he hired me to do everything/anything. The environment was smokey, the equipment shoddy and the business practices disordered. I was straight out of uni and free to make any decisions I saw fit, any mistakes were on my head.

[edit] Thinking about it, it was the shear honesty of the place. I don't think anyone even tried to dress up what they were doing in jargon or exaggerations. Words like 'passion' were never applied out of place.

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