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

Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 441 posts

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#271

Post by jlevers »

I'm curious to hear the tips of people who've avoided the extreme boredom/feeling of uselessness that many of the people in this thread have voiced.

I'm working at a startup, about to go into college, and am worried about this myself -- I've already started feeling that boredom a little bit, even though I'm lucky to have a job this interesting at my age, and this is only my second real tech job. I'm planning on majoring in CS and MechE, which I think opens up some opportunities for combining coding and building physical things, which I hope I'll find more fulfilling.

I know I don't want to spend much of the rest of my life writing code that I don't really care about -- how can I avoid that?

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#273

Post by dsd »

dasmoth wrote: post #60
njbooher wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any paper that generates or analyzes draft genomes is a waste of money.

I’ve been out of the genome-sequencing space for quite a few years now, but that seems a pretty strong assertion and I’m curious about your rationale. Is it that the analysis will need to be re-done in future? Or do you think the space is saturated?

Why did you leave? I want out too. Are you happy with your decision?

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#275

Post by zackbloom »

I work at Cloudflare, and I at least feel that we work on interesting things. There, of course, still is components which are CRUD, but there are also people who work on hard crypto, low level optimization, networking at scale, managing petabytes of daily logs, etc.

The jobs exist, but you have to get pretty deep into the right technical universe before you're the right person for them.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#277

Post by xstartup »

Most of my work seems to be boring CRUD work

Ditto! I operate a consultancy which does this for every company, most of which are non-profits. We do CRUD apps on nearly zero profit margin.

High tech fun stuff

We've another ad tech company, where we are writing lots of Rust and Go code. And some auxiliary products which are lot more fun.

I think it's quite difficult to find everything at once place.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#278

Post by loggedinmyphone »

The technical problems I work on are interesting to me personally because I enjoy getting good at the particular subfield I am in. I don't think they're necessarily "interesting" in the sense of "advance the state of the art and publish a paper" but really that's a question for other people.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#279

Post by gm-conspiracy »

glangdale wrote: post #25

I was in the happy position of finding a job (post being a failed academic) doing stuff at the intersection of architecture and algorithms (high-speed regex implementation) and getting to to this for 11 years straight (2 years as a researcher, 5 years as a startup CTO, 4 years as a Principal Engineer at Intel). Got a decent if not ginormous exit too, which was nice. Also got to IMO change the industry - Hyperscan (gi…

This sounds like Starbucks, coffee and coffee beans.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#280

Post by neilk »

tw1010 wrote: post #96
TeMPOraL wrote: post #31

You might as well have asked who among us won the lottery. I've been struggling with this for years now; after 4 boring jobs I finally gave up even the expectation that what I'll be asked to do will be even remotely interesting (or socially useful). The chance of landing an interesting job is absolutely minuscule - the market rewards whatever it rewards at the moment, and that's where jobs flock. These days, one of t…

There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within. I think it's an effect that we're not quite prepared for as we reach closer and closer to science dotting all its i's. It's as if childhood primes us to think that life is all about figuring out what the heck is going on around us, and as…

It’s far from a perfect fit, but I think Marx’s theory of alienation comes close to what you’re talking about:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienatio...

I don’t think “existential angst” fits. As the name implies, you get that just by existing and being trapped by the limitations of being a mortal human.

You’re talking about the specific meaninglessness of modern work. Marx suggests that capitalism affords us some real freedoms, but at the cost of our feeling of purpose and solidarity. And, Marxists would argue, this makes us easier to exploit.

Marx and his inheritors failed to produce systems that solved this problem, and maybe that indicates that the problem is deeper than just forms of ownership and control.

But as a problem description, I think he was onto something.

Post reply on HN