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

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

#201

Post by 2474 »

dreta wrote: post #192
scarecrowbob wrote: post #136

Raising my son. Playing music with my friends. Building a home and relationships with my partners. Building my body and mind through long term studies of various branches of philosophical and intellectual inquiry. Caring for specific peoples' specific needs. That all might sound hippy-dippy or unrealistic, but because of the history of our economy we tend to value only monetarily compensated public labor as "work", w…

How is any of this relevant to the question?

Because the question is loosely defined. This was his valid interpretation of the question.

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

laythea wrote: post #183
2474 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My for-pay labor is not as optimized as yours but I treat my job like that as well. I don't need to find meaning or personal value (great if I can) in my job. I get that from my friends and family and the experiences I have with those people outside of work.

In my opinion, it is quite depressing to not chase meaning and personal value in something that takes 1/3 of my living time.

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by kzisme »

Sumaso wrote: post #33

When I was a new grad I was hired at a company that did QA consulting. I was put on a team with 5 other people to create a integration test framework for a insurance company, who was rolling out a brand new software stack. It's probably one of the few times in my career that I had: A) The whole team was responsible for the project, if the framework broke we took the blame as a team rather than crapping on individuals…

On the flip side - I've been at two companies who don't use branches to develop software, and I've never been a part of a PR process unless I was doing it on my own time :/

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

#205

Post by freedomben »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #136

Raising my son. Playing music with my friends. Building a home and relationships with my partners. Building my body and mind through long term studies of various branches of philosophical and intellectual inquiry. Caring for specific peoples' specific needs. That all might sound hippy-dippy or unrealistic, but because of the history of our economy we tend to value only monetarily compensated public labor as "work", w…

I very much agree. I ditto your sentiments.

I've had a few people ask me lately why I've spent so much time long-term (an hour or two a day, for at least 2 years) studying philosophy. It's very difficult to convey the feeling you get when really approaching philiosophical thought in the way Descartes challenged via apple baskets:

> “Suppose [a person] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others? In just the same way, those who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They then attempt to separate the false beliefs from the others, so as to prevent their contaminating the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false. They can then go over each belief in turn and re-adopt only those which they recognize to be true and indubitable.” --René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

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

#206

Post by throwaway5752 »

dreta wrote: post #192
scarecrowbob wrote: post #136

Raising my son. Playing music with my friends. Building a home and relationships with my partners. Building my body and mind through long term studies of various branches of philosophical and intellectual inquiry. Caring for specific peoples' specific needs. That all might sound hippy-dippy or unrealistic, but because of the history of our economy we tend to value only monetarily compensated public labor as "work", w…

How is any of this relevant to the question?

I'm with you. The context was explicit and obviously intended to be work-oriented. Obviously friends and family should rate higher than work. But this detracts from the intended discussion.

My most rewarding professional experience have come from 1) working with a respectful and high-standards team 2) solving a real world problem that is either new or inadequately address by current solutions 3) where I have a really clear idea of the value I add and see how I contribute.

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

#208

Post by sridca »

dreta wrote: post #192
scarecrowbob wrote: post #136

Raising my son. Playing music with my friends. Building a home and relationships with my partners. Building my body and mind through long term studies of various branches of philosophical and intellectual inquiry. Caring for specific peoples' specific needs. That all might sound hippy-dippy or unrealistic, but because of the history of our economy we tend to value only monetarily compensated public labor as "work", w…

How is any of this relevant to the question?

I am with you.

Comments like this indicate nothing but a demonstration of the ad hockery defense of familialism, which is increasingly becoming common here in HN for some reason.

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

#209

Post by tootie »

calummurray wrote: post #100

I've been working for almost 4 years on the on-board flight software for the European Space Agency's Mars Rover to look for signs of water and life on Mars: "ExoMars". It is due to be launched in 2020. Due to the embedded real-time, mission-critical aspect of the software, the strictness of the process and focus on documentation can be frustrating. The space industry typically doesn't keep pace with new technologies,…

I would trade every line of JSX I've ever even looked at to work on something like that.

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

#210

Post by Jemmeh »

yoobi55 wrote: post #176
Jemmeh wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too love fixing things where I can see the person's reaction. It is so satisfying. We are so often removed from the user and don't get that joy. I think as a dev it's a good exercise too, to stay grounded and avoid feature creep or working on things that don't matter too much. I always to try -think- about how my user will be reacting, but that's different than actually -seeing- it. I think it's part of why I like…

I'm currently a solo UX at a start up, and I have dabbled with FE dev for past few years. I am a bit frustrated with how the FE operates with this company, they don't seem to care about ensuring good UX, I'm not even involved in their sprint cycle, they just build things AND THEN ask me to fix the UX if someone points out how terrible the products are. (And obviously with TONS of restrictions saying the codebase/arch…

I do think in some ways, because UX is constantly being pushed back even though it shouldn't be...you do kinda have to learn to work with what you've got. Programming is like that too. There's weird restrictions from legal, stupid restrictions from the platform, some off the wall glitch that you have to work around, etc. Sometimes small UX changes are hard to implement in code and it ends up not being worth doing.

I haven't worked in a startup before. But it's strange to me that a start up would have someone on hand who's work is "not important for the company right now." Aren't startups supposed to run lean? If they won't even -talk- to you about it I feel like your options are limited. If you could actually discuss it, then yeah, maybe you could figure out how to move forward. But 4 months is a long time to not be contributing at all. Though I know that security and UX both suffer from being pushed to the side in favor of new shiny features.

I would:

A.) Have not a full blown meeting, but a 2 minute conversation. Figure out a short example of how not planning UX ahead of time has failed and is hurting the business currently. Then explain "We could prevent this by..." Present problem and your solution.

B.) Use this time to study. This would help with the startup(once they get themselves together) and also your career. Maybe you need more FE dev skills to figure out how to fit the UX in with what they are doing.

C.) Yeah, start putting feelers out. I personally would hate to sit there not contributing. Don't just quit(I assume you need to eat), but there's no harm in just talking to people and seeing what's out there if you really can't make it work at the startup.

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