281–290 of 441 posts
I know it's not always possible to simply add "make my own job obsolete" to your own job description, but sometimes those who question how things are currently done are the ones who are asked to change it.
The interesting problems being wrapped in ready-made libraries and SaaS services is an engineering success. As a profession we have managed to take a hard thing and change the cost of it from some number of expensive engineers for some years plus maintenance on it to $29.99/month.
But that means that if you want to work on interesting problems of this kind, you need to be in a company that is building that switch from requiring an expensive team to off the shelf. And to identify that, you need to have a broad understanding of your domain, and where the pain points are that are shared but aren't worth the money for individual companies to solve.
Or you need to be at a company that is big enough that it can afford to work on those problems. Boeing, for example, has dumped a huge amount of effort into spline libraries beyond what the rest of the world has. At their scale and for what they do, it was worth the investment. Facebook wrote a replacement database backend (RocksDB) because the space savings it gave them over InnoDB far outweighed the cost of having a team build it.
It's a well known fact in other engineering disciplines that all the detailed physics and math you learn in college isn't what you use most of the time. The Engineering Commons podcast has [links](http://theengineeringcommons.com/episode-124-mad-skillz/) in one of its episodes to a number of studies MIT did on this subject.
Your other option is to say, "I don't want to be an engineer. I want to be a scientist." And then you have to look into the rather fraught career path of a researcher.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sydney is a relatively bleak place for getting a good selection of tech jobs. There are the obvious BigCos, then... not much. I may have to Make My Own Fun - another startup?
You could do your own startup but it’s really hard to do it in Sydney because even though the economy is doing well you don’t get the funding. What I mean by that is just not seed but all the stages required to be a behemoth. US has it. They live and breathe tech. 5 largest companies by market cap are all Tech. They eat other tech companies for billions of dollars. Everyone and their dog in SV has a startup on the si…
It is a nice place to live, though, and the Atlassian guys proved it's not impossible to build a pretty kick-ass startup here. There's also a pretty decent pipeline of smart people around. Part of my hope is that you can do smaller-scale stuff here without the Go Huge Or Go Home mentality of SV. What would be interesting is to work on things that interest me, make some money and influence the field. I don't think SV is mandatory for that.
I'm hesitant to post because there is so much anguish here about winning the lottery for interesting work. I have been extremely fortunate in my career. I'd say I won the interesting lottery. I started very early by today's standards, taking my first programming class at the local university when I was in 5th grade, back in '76. At 17, in '82, I had a game company selling nationwide in Sears & KMart a few Vic-20 game…
BBSs?
What was your first computer?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am thinking about blogging about this I'd probably read it.
Me too.
That was slightly off topic, wasn't it? ;)
Am I working on interesting technical problems? There were some interesting problems in the past, but I'd say just a few each year, which is definitely not enough. I still find it interesting to work on personal projects, even though they are not that different from the games I'm making at work. Just putting the game architecture together, so every part fits nicely into place, is still fun.
I also don't write code outside of work, because I just don’t see anything computer-related as a path to satisfaction or happiness. Forgive me, but I think this is a positive sign of personal development- computers are ultimately so simple that I don’t really think they can do anything truly interesting. And they lack all sense of physical accomplishment, as opposed to cooking or gardening or fixing up old cars or a million other things.
This was one of the reasons I went to law school after getting a CS degree. I now practice law, focused on patent litigation. My experience generally has been that the work is more varied, and there is more learning as opposed to mechanically doing. Sometimes I get to deep dive into interesting technical topics. I’ve taken things apart and reverse engineered bits of software and worked with experts. Plus I am deeply…
I have been considering making a switch from software engineering to patent law. Are most patent lawyers employed by large law firms or is it common to work for yourself or in a small practice?
For patent prosecution (drafting of patent applications and advocating before the patent office to get them issued), there are some solo practitioners, and probably more small practices than there are for patent litigation, though the big firms do prosecution as well.
I'm CTO of a machine learning/computer vision company, and quite a bit of the team's work is "gluing libraries together" -- but even so, it's an intensely interesting, rapidly evolving field. Plus I get to play with pixels and cameras and VR. That being said, I paid my dues in the 90's and early 2000's doing web services and boring J2EE and gluing Java to native and PHP to Perl to CGI [bleech]
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…