131–140 of 441 posts
This can be seen in medicine and law --> Doctors vs PAs vs Nurses / Lawyers vs Paralegals.
But in tech, which feels like it should be as meritocratic as others, the links between technical challenge/pay/value creation are much harder to find.
You might as well have asked who among us won the lottery. I've been struggling with this for years now; after 4 boring jobs I finally gave up even the expectation that what I'll be asked to do will be even remotely interesting (or socially useful). The chance of landing an interesting job is absolutely minuscule - the market rewards whatever it rewards at the moment, and that's where jobs flock. These days, one of t…
Are you me?
You might as well have asked who among us won the lottery. I've been struggling with this for years now; after 4 boring jobs I finally gave up even the expectation that what I'll be asked to do will be even remotely interesting (or socially useful). The chance of landing an interesting job is absolutely minuscule - the market rewards whatever it rewards at the moment, and that's where jobs flock. These days, one of t…
> alleviating a social problem for some group of people Not sure what you mean by "social" problems specifically, but when you alleviate a problem for a group of people, they pay you, and that's what a business is. I realized recently what a useful abstraction money is, because when money came about we didn't have the ability to create a massive blockchain keeping track of who did favors for who, and when. So it's a…
You might as well have asked who among us won the lottery. I've been struggling with this for years now; after 4 boring jobs I finally gave up even the expectation that what I'll be asked to do will be even remotely interesting (or socially useful). The chance of landing an interesting job is absolutely minuscule - the market rewards whatever it rewards at the moment, and that's where jobs flock. These days, one of t…
There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within. I think it's an effect that we're not quite prepared for as we reach closer and closer to science dotting all its i's. It's as if childhood primes us to think that life is all about figuring out what the heck is going on around us, and as…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about doing some academic work? With the explosion of NGsequencing there's no shortage of data or data-magician positions, and there's many challenges with social impact
I admit that - given my life situation - I'm biased towards jobs that at least have a chance of also letting me put bread on the table ;). That said, I'm also having hard time separating academic work that helps things from that which just adds to the noise - grant-chasing, paper-generating studies. Any advice on that?
* top-tier peer-reviewed conference.
* paper abstract and introduction.
If I am not convinced that the problem is interesting by introduciton, I will skip it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within. I think it's an effect that we're not quite prepared for as we reach closer and closer to science dotting all its i's. It's as if childhood primes us to think that life is all about figuring out what the heck is going on around us, and as…
I agree. Maybe there is a word for that? Personally, understanding the "big picture dynamics" of systems is kind of an intellectual porn for me. I loved doing that for as long as I remembered. It always came with the sense of control - understanding the systems means you could tweak it to your liking, if you so desired. Finally realizing that the system in which we live is basically uncontrollable by an individual wi…
https://wiki.snowdrift.coop is probably the best introduction right now; the main site is in the process of being updated.
My suggestion : forget you CS degree, drop the idea of doing something interesting during your work hours, think about it as inevitable procedure to earn your montly salary. At 5pm run away from your office and focus on whatever you think is interesting.
I was in the happy position of finding a job (post being a failed academic) doing stuff at the intersection of architecture and algorithms (high-speed regex implementation) and getting to to this for 11 years straight (2 years as a researcher, 5 years as a startup CTO, 4 years as a Principal Engineer at Intel). Got a decent if not ginormous exit too, which was nice. Also got to IMO change the industry - Hyperscan (gi…
Ah! Inspiration. I'm a Sydney-sider and though I'm relatively satisfied in my current position, I'm having a difficult time finding the next job that could satisfy my computer engineering background. Software engineering has become a byword for web development/Java, (or selling your soul to work in HFT...) Where would you like to work next?
My initial consideration is to develop and host a sort of public Wolfram Alpha, but specialized for climate data queries and visualization. I'm open to other suggestions, as I'm currently in the process of architecting the system and reaching out to climate scientists for feedback on what they need that isn't well-served yet.
Once all the infrastructure work is done, I'd be happy to contribute to climate modeling more theoretically. But for now my prerogative is to develop a central repository for as much climate data as possible, normalize it as reasonable, and store it in a queryable format.
There are interesting technical problems here due to the scale of the data, the variety of its native (raw) formats, the frequency with which each source updates and the types of information involved. But speaking directly to the title of this post: I don't think anything I'm doing is strictly an unsolved technical problem, it's just a complex technical undertaking. There are plenty of data serving and processing pipelines for this that have already been proven capable.
My suggestion : forget you CS degree, drop the idea of doing something interesting during your work hours, think about it as inevitable procedure to earn your montly salary. At 5pm run away from your office and focus on whatever you think is interesting.
I'm all for work-life balance and working on passion projects on the side.
But do that many people really think of their developer job as a salary and a daily grind?