Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

I completely misread this the first time round, so, to clarify just in case: the idea, as I read it, is to surface unanswered stackoverflow questions.

(I thought it was something about listing answers underneath questions or something, woops.)

This is indeed a VERY interesting idea, as the whole of Stack Exchange has pretty much hit saturation point now, where 99% of questions have already been asked.

The main challenge is that only Stack Exchange has the page metric data :) indicating what pages of unanswered questions are being visited the most.

The same thing goes for family. One should not look for family to fill every aspect of your life.

Same here. I used to seek jobs in technologies I like. I finally got some. It made me realize that even working with my favourite tools becomes a chore if the product is bullshit.

I'm working on a team that is miniaturizing a synthetic aperture radar system.

The amplifiers, processing, and data storage used to take up most of the space of a small cargo plane. Then it got down to four half-racks. Now it is the size of a dishwasher.

We hope to get it drone-sized. It is a never-ending series of interesting technical problems that span the entire STEM range, including RF, network, system, electrical and mechanical engineering, HPC, data science, voodoo-mathematics I will never understand, system administration, and plain old software development.

Everyone here is expected to cross-train in various disciplines. My background is CS but since starting here I have done electrical and mechanical engineering work including diagnosing micro-fractures, visible only through a microscope, in connectors on a bunch of VPX chassis stuff, caused by bad soldering work by the manufacturer.

On top of all of that once or twice a year we all get to go on operational deployments of the system. This year we went out and imaged thousands of miles of coastline, 6 engineers crammed in a tiny airplane hopping from airstrip to airstrip in support of a coastal erosion monitoring program. Data scientists are expected to haul around amplifiers and radar engineers are expected to live patch code while in the air.

The only reason I got this job was because I was a bored programmer teaching a Linux course as a side-hustle and a bunch of engineers came through and started asking questions way beyond the scope of the class. They were radar guys struggling to learn Linux and a couple of post-class drinks later I had an interview.

I guess my only advice would be to have a side-gig and network as much as possible, peppering everyone you meet with questions about what they do.

If what they do sounds cool, ask for an interview.

A lot of people have told me that I would never use the maths, physics and CS I have learnt at school... and the opposite happened! In my job (at Distran, a start-up based in Zürich - founder), I had to use a lot of maths, electronics, physics that I learnt at school. Most of the people here are using their scientific/technical skills to simplify experiments, create new algorithms etc... of course this is the 10% part of the job as implementing ideas take most of the time. And you have the gluing part as well.

My answer to you would be to work in a start-up where a broad spectrum of tasks are to be solved by a single person. Hardware start-ups in particular need to cover an even broader spectrum...

One aspect I found very important was to "choose the good combats", something that is worth to fight for, so that even after years you are still motivated and proud of what you have done. E.g we are making a gas detector that have obvious good effects on mortality or environment.