Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

Non-technical academic (Grande École in France) here. I'm at the edge of technical issues every day, though they fall just outside my responsibilities as security consultant and Risk Analyst (they are for the architects to deal with).

My technical knowledge/know-how (acquired over years of Linux, BSD, HN, etc.) still gives me an edge in understanding issues my clients face.

I'm not dealing with technical issues per se, but I can make the link between tech teams and management/non-tech: what one party expects from the other, whilst not sinking into a bottomless pit of unreasonable requests and expectations.

The work is fast-paced (~8 hours at most/project, over the course of ~3 weeks) so I have to adapt to a number of situations, where tech people might deal with said technical problems - and I can give them my 2 cents.

I'm also using my free time to work more on my machines, etc.

Haha no. Lots of problems here but every time they're solved we go back 5 steps when we get a new set of software from the vendor and have to solve them again. And trying to automate that just means more steps to do every time we get a delivery because we have to retrofit all those scripts into the new software set, which we never know what actually changed and if our scripts will even work with the new stuff.

I'm currently working on a very interesting problem, currently we are making software that makes automatic phonetic transcriptions: https://github.com/persephone-tools/persephone

The quick summary is that you take audio files which you process then run through some models that do labelling and at the end you get out transcriptions in the international phonetic alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

In the past I've worked on things that were very boring but also things that were very interesting, sometimes even in the same company. Even if you structure your career to try to spend as much time on interesting problems you'll still run into some boring stuff. If you really want to work on interesting problems it will likely take some effort with deliberate planning and you may end up making less money than if you did other work but these are the decisions that you will have to make. Try to find things that interest you and give you opportunities to master whatever it is, this tends to make work a lot more fulfilling whatever you do.

Incidentally in this language project I've done some work on a Web API that's mostly routine but it's very satisfying because I can very directly see how it makes a lot of other people's lives a lot easier. There's some very clear impact there and it makes some otherwise routine things a lot more enjoyable.

Well there's some noise like in everything else in life, but I don't think there's any empty studies (okay there's even a few cases of lying which is sad beyond words but thankfully they are very few i think).

Why does this noise bother you? Besides, keep in mind that the grant-chasing doesn't happen because of greed, it happens because people want to continue doing science and that's the only way to maintain an active lab.

I could shit on the state of academic publishing for days, but at the end of the day, there is an overall positive direction in this 'academic endeavor': the creation of knowledge.

I find this direction much lighter on my consciousness than "generate value for the shareholders"

Yeah a good point.

I think the issue here is order: solving which first. Algorithms motivate you, Handling interface demotivates. So start with the motivator.