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Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#191

Post by sam_lowry_ »

r0b05 wrote: post #75
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #58

> I would kill for a job that feels even remotely useful or interesting. Public service as a freelance contractor. No, really. Depending on where you leave, this may pay good money (Netherlands) or next to nothing (Poland). But there will be many useful projects to work on.

What are some examples of this?

I got into public service recently and immediately had to work on a service for "less important than 112 calls" and a service to find a nearby doctor.

A couple of other projects I touched are rather meaningless, but this 50/50 ratio of meaningless to meaningful projects is a refresher from years spent in banking or Silicon Valley focused data-shmining corp.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#192

Post by lentil_soup »

uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #89
psim1 wrote: post #82

> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups Everything? No, you're looking in the shiny techy places. Counterintuitively, interesting tech jobs are found in boring, established sectors. Get on the boring, common sites like LinkedIn and Indeed. Consider healthcare, automotive (not Tesla, but Ford), or even higher ed. If you want interesting, and not just a bi…

I've been thinking of looking at healthcare as this seems like an obvious good area to make something useful, though I was only finding weird startups doing things like "mental health coaching subscription app on mobile". You might be right with the boring sites, I tend to look on those tech recruitment platforms (or really most of the time I just let the recruiters come to me).

I'd look outside of the startup world for healthcare to avoid CRUD apps. Look at bigger players (eg. Siemens), look at bioengineering institutes around your area, look up who your local university's collaborates with, check out who's making the cool machines at your local hospital and go for those :p

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#193

Post by dboreham »

Only accept jobs from people you already know well and trust. Obviously this introduces a recursive problem, so you might need to take one or two not so great jobs first in order to catch your hare. For those, select jobs where the people you meet are impressive. Don't care so much about the product, market. Focus on the people.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#195

Post by ThePadawan »

psim1 wrote: post #82

> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups Everything? No, you're looking in the shiny techy places. Counterintuitively, interesting tech jobs are found in boring, established sectors. Get on the boring, common sites like LinkedIn and Indeed. Consider healthcare, automotive (not Tesla, but Ford), or even higher ed. If you want interesting, and not just a bi…

My mileage varies heavily - I'm using LinkedIn as a main source for open positions, and it's 90% what OP describes.

There are positions listed by, let's say, a local insurance company, but they are, as you say, boring - so they just post the job offer and wait for candidates.

Recruiters post a job, then post that same job with 5 other titles, then repost all of these twice per week to bump them up in the candidates' queries.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#196

Post by nend »

giaour wrote: post #70
neilv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall hearing of (non-opensource) proprietary code being shown in an interview. Is that common in some circles? In a startup, I think I'd have to get an NDA from everyone, even if the code was mindless bulk glue code -- if only to avoid having to later mention that practice to investors who are checking our IP diligence. Would the following alternative work for you? In a great engineering environment, people…

This may happen more at large companies than at startups, but having interviewees sign NDAs is normal, isn’t it?

Depends on your definition of normal. I've interviewed with 10 companies or so over the last 6 months, ranging from FAANG to series B startups, all US based.

One company asked me to sign an NDA, they're a well known public but non-FAANG Boston based company. I didn't have a problem signing it but I also don't really see the point.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#198

Post by kod »

xeromal wrote: post #151
BoumTAC wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it really happened like that in the US ? It seems like a total different world. Here in France, if I ask for something during the interview process with the recruiter, I will get a response like this: "Sorry we don't do that in our process, so goodbye" and they move to the next candidate while I'm out for this job.

Nah, this person is delusional. I don't even know why you'd want to see their code. I'm sure plenty would explain their processes and how they code, but they're not showing you their code unless it's already public which would be a moot point then.

That person is not delusional. I've successfully asked for and been shown code as part of interview processes with multiple companies.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#199

Post by ehnto »

uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #81
ehnto wrote: post #52

> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups that are just making useless services that clearly won't go anywhere. Find a business that makes money from software, small product-owner companies are often really good to work for, preferably one that supplies/supports your local community. You can actually find that in agencies pretty often. When you've got a bu…

Definitely agree, though I wonder where you find those types of jobs? I recently tried looking at government jobs but didn't find anything that was either remote or near me. Not sure where to find the rest. Because indeed, almost everything I find on tech recruitment platforms is either big corps (often doing nebulous B2B things) or VC backed startups that clearly don't really provide real value besides making VCs ho…

I cannot at all speak for all government/big organizations, but there is a certain level of bureaucracy, inefficiency and tedium that I don't personally find enjoyable so I steer clear of those now. There's probably some really great teams within big orgs out there who have managed to carve themselves a comfortable niche but I bet those are even harder to find.

I personally look for companies with less than 100 people, usually much less, in smaller cities. At least in Australia you can find lots of great bootstrapped small businesses doing project work for clients or product-owners of their own software products. But you have to go find the businesses rather than find the job offerings, then just check out their careers page.

There's probably not many in SV, since VC sucks all the air out of the room in the tech industry.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#200

Post by ehnto »

the_only_law wrote: post #181
navbaker wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to look at either the private companies or university-affiliated research centers doing the actual research and implementation of technologies for the government rather than the government itself. There are loads of these places that don't require living in DC or have a ludicrous application process. Just to throw an example out, US government spacecraft operations have a large presence in Colorado, so there…

> You need to look at either the private companies or university-affiliated research centers doing the actual research and implementation of technologies for the government rather than the government itself. Oh these guys won’t touch me. I don’t have any formal education. I do agree that many have some pretty interesting jobs.

Uni's have a hard time hiring, so you'd be surprised. If you can show equivalent industry experience then they'd probably love to have you as most universities are full of ex-grads. They really appreciate industry experience. But just my personal experience here, because I didn't go to university I was not ready for the bureaucracy and inefficiency, I had to leave. In industry it's usually high pressure, get things done fast. At the university it was high pressure but slow as molasses, working through processes and finding the humans you need to do their parts of the process, then convincing them to actually do it.
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