Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

Sounds theoretical. Salary is fixed and if there’s a supply of alternative workers and resource scarcity mentality then allowing employees free time makes them more valuable to and easier to engage by competitors. Qualatative arguments go out the window when the shoe strings tighten in my experience.

My ideals agree and I’ve banged my head trying to maintain boundaries with my managers, now 5 jobs in. Experience is with VC in Bay Area... work life in Minneapolis was pretty chill tho, 2 longer jobs there with good people.

I've spent the last four years helping produce a IMAX/Giant Screen film featuring 7.5 million images from Cassini, Hubble, and SDSS with no CGI/VFX.

http://insaturnsrings.com/

I spent most of that time writing the software that downloaded images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, located the galaxies in them, cut them out, and placed them with the correct location & scale in the animation software. The best part for me has been getting to work on a project I really believed in, even though I had absolutely no experience with films or astronomical imaging. I just jumped into the deep end and had to learn as I went.

Writing code that puts things on a 6 story tall movie screen is such a different experience than pushing code to an app server to serve up banking apps. Hopefully the work I did here will go on to inspire someone else to have the same love for space that I do.

The formula for me seems to be: high impact combined with how ingenious I personally judge the project that be. I guess I want to be a wizard, casting benevolent spells for a grateful public.

I’ve been lucky enough to have been paid to write open source code on multiple occasions. That’s a great shortcut to having a big impact on the world. The best stuff I ever did was something other engineers told me was impossible - but I did it and it was good enough that other people went and built businesses around it. Or, in one case, a project that my manager told me I was doing too much for became the foundation for an entire community’s work.

However, probably the best for me was an algorithmic art project in the early days of social media. I was in between jobs and when I had the idea, I barely slept for a week. The code was terrible although the idea was interesting. Once the work was released, it was a modest sensation, and people were talking about it around the globe. One commenter even said it made her cry. I am still enough of an engineer that I had this “NAILED IT” moment. I remember looking at clubgoers on a Friday night, people I’d normally have felt irritated with/envious of, and thinking they had no idea how to really have fun.

Lately though, I’ve found a slightly different source of satisfaction. In my last job, I started to manage some people and found it extremely satisfying to help people with their careers, particularly young engineers. I also led projects to reduce hiring bias.

(You might notice that few of these high satisfaction projects had to do with how much money I was paid or whether it was something my manager wanted me to do. Still looking to square that circle.)

In my experience, consulting work of about ~ 1 year duration has been the most fulfilling project I have ever worked. It's not that I did not enjoy doing my own startup, but you have to give too much of your personal time and energy.

I had the opportunity to work with one of the government agencies, where I joined as a Lead Consultant and had to curve out the architecture, technology stacks, write boilerplate codes as platform, hired 2 Developers, work with the client to develop mockup, convert business into technical requirements, do hands-on development, make presentation to the clients for each iteration, rollout product, give training to end users and finally give credit to the team to have accomplished all these.

So, essentially it's like building a product but you will be doing all these while someone is paying you and without having to go through the financial stress. I have found this to be a great advantage over the startup.

I often envy the life of high end consulting hands-on architect who go to conferences for training, speaking, write Proof of Concept projects on new architectures/technologies, write books for various publishers and I am sure they must be earning more than any startup including equity!

I really enjoyed organising non-profit bike expeditions (Berlin to Copenhagen and Copenhagen to Oslo) to help people take the first step out of their comfort zone. Planning to do more of this.

IT-wise, I stopped contract work and built TravelMap. It's not going to save the world but I find it really fulfilling. https://travelmap.net/blog/travelmap-story