Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 265 posts

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

#241

Post by dkroy »

jjeaff wrote: post #156
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 am similar. But I actually derive a lot of satisfaction from the saas project i created and work on because of the things that the money will help me do. I do enjoy providing a product that helps make users lives and businesses simpler. But everytime a new customer signs up, I chalk that up as more time for my family, more money for travel with them, more money for a retirement income, more money for our dream home…

Haha, okay I will bite. What's the name of your SaaS project?

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

#242

Post by laurieg »

Teaching math to young interested people (9-14).

It was different every lesson. The content was easy so I never had any confusion about what I was actually teaching. There was a lot of freedom to teach how I wanted, so I could be creative with what I taught. Also, the hours were short so I was always fresh when teaching.

I contrast this with teaching languages. Language teaching is a hard slog. There is so much more you need to know when it comes to speaking a second language. Progress is incredibly slow compared to math, and people often move backward. Lack of progress is demotivating to students and teachers alike.

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

#243

Post by dang »

side_up_down wrote: post #195
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…

Thats a great answer but decidedly off topic. He asked a very specific question and you gave a completely different answer. HN, this shouldn't be voted up here. Our biases are showing by doing so.

It's ok if it's interesting.

Edit: I took a closer look and see the point now. It gives a more generic answer to a specific question. Such comments tend to be how discussions get less interesting, more because of the upvotes they attract than because the comment itself is bad.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#244

Post by Schwolop »

The two instances that are equal rank of the most fulfilling work I've ever done have three key things in common - a small cross-functional team, emotional investment in the outcome, writing software that makes hardware do something interesting. The next closest instance missed that emotional investment (it was _just_ work) and even though everything else was great, it wasn't fulfilling enough.

The first was my Ph.D. writing path planning algorithms for autonomous vehicles. We drove robots autonomously across an entire farm. We ran trials combining data from ground and aerial vehicles in real-time. I flew in a helicopter telling the pilot where to go based on instructions from a GUI I wrote that was receiving data from the ground vehicle running my path planning code, sending its data back up to me via a datagram I specified and a threading and networking library I designed. It was a great team of people, and the core group of five of us is still in touch and sporadically working together a decade later.

The second was the early years of my company, Cubescape, which makes Escape Rooms that run without a human game-master. I spent my thirtieth birthday crouched in a pile of dust debugging why a DMX controlled light wasn't properly flashing out a morse-code sequence, and why one particular Raspberry Pi would reboot after our strobe light kicked in. (Nope, not current draw - turns out if you hit the right chip with the right frequency of light, the photoelectric effect can cause a voltage drop. We covered it up with duct tape...) These days I've mostly automated myself out of a job so even though it's my baby, it's still less fulfilling than those early periods.

Everything else I've ever done in (work) life has been less fulfilling than these journeys, and it's really only through a recent period of deep introspection that I've managed to connect the dots and nail down those three key requirements. I'm now looking for what might be next, and using those as a filter on the opportunities - if you think your company fits, please reach out!

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

#245

Post by donmatito »

I have been blessed that the last 3 projects I worked on (roughly past 3 years) were the most rewarding of my professional life.

- a simple hack to connect two Slack teams, just to learn the Slack API, turned into my first solo project to go from ideation, MVP, scaling, pricing (oh god pricing is hard), marketing etc

- helping an education activist spread her new approach to kindergarten education. Not hard technically (built a static page website, a Discourse forum, and organized a few conferences). But judging by the educators' community feedback, it's the most useful I've been in my life per unit work

- joining an early stage startup as CTO, to provide great insurance coverage to freelancers. A project that is at a trifecta of great team, business opportunity, and real social impact to help the "future of work" go in the right direction

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

#246

Post by sifar »

freedomben wrote: post #234
ad_hominem wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any suggestions for someone who has never taken/read philosophy but would like to dip their toe into it?

If you want a more gentle introduction, I recommend (in no particular order): 1. This website: https://www.philosophybasics.com/ 2. The "Philosophize This" podcast (start at the beginning) 3. The "Philosophers in 90 minutes" series (I recommend going in chronological order since most philosophers build on the work of previous philosophers) 4. "The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained": https://smile.amazon.com…

>> There is a giant queue I have left to read, and I've also left off some good ones

Would love to know more about these.

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

#247

Post by marsRoverDev »

zerr wrote: post #185
calummurray wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a little bit of assembly for processor-specific startup housekeeping, but that's mostly reused with small modifications for different boards. The rest of the code base is entirely C, managing functions such as ground communications, mobility (locomotion, navigation and control), thermal management, power management, fault detection and recovery, payload (e.g. science instrument) management and mission plannin…

Curious why you are not using Ada?

We use ada for older projects, I think the move to C was precipitated by the fact that it's hard to hire for ADA and there is not that much external support.

C + MISRA + extensive testing plugs the gaps.

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

#248

Post by marsRoverDev »

thruflo22 wrote: post #228
calummurray wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, to test mobility (locomotion and navigation) we have a prototype model that we operate in an environment as close to the Mars surface as possible (representative sand, slopes and rocks etc.)

The yard in the middle of the Atlas Building on the Harwell Campus? We've been adapting some of the work that the RAL Space team did on the ExoMars Rover for use in farming. We're in London (based in Makerversity atm) if you fancy a chat :)

Similar - the facility in Stevenage; there's a sand dune in a warehouse next to the station on the left hand side (when travelling towards cambridge).

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

#249

Post by marsRoverDev »

rorykoehler wrote: post #177
marsRoverDev wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just outside of London.

Will your location be impacted by brexit?

I will reconsider the UK as a place to live and work if / when it goes through as I have both British and European nationality.

I believe that it is already having a negative impact on the industry as there has been a definite slow down in projects going to UK industry after the vote.

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

#250

Post by calummurray »

imhoguy wrote: post #213
rorykoehler wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will your location be impacted by brexit?

I don't think UK membership in ESA may be impacted with brexit. Norway and Switzerland are members of ESA but not EU.

This is right. As long as the UK continues to contribute to ESA funds, we should get commensurate work in return ("geo-return").

However, our involvement in projects coming from the European Commission (EC), which is EU-related, such as the Copernicus programme ("Sentinel" satellites) could be negatively impacted.

Post reply on HN