Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

You should quit your current job and find a better one, as we’ve seen in this thread, many people are happy. Maybe it’s a technically challenging job, or maybe it’s a boring company but filled with meaningful work or inspiring coworkers. The job interview is your chance to find out.

In your next interview, mention that you wrote this post. If the interviewer responds “oh yeah, I read that and felt the same and decided to quit this job”, then great! youve learned that you shouldnt even bother finishing this interview. If on the other hand they say “oh, I read that and this place makes me happy” then it’s a good sign.

Take your interviewers off script and feel free to be straight and honest about what you’re looking for and what it’s like there. Nowhere will be perfect, but this is a great way to learn if this job will be a good fit, or another soul-sucking chapter of your life.

A word of caution: managers will bend the truth and tell you what you want to hear. Devs on the other hand will often be incredibly frank if you ask then a direct question.

(I had an interviewer at Google and I asked something like “you sound kinda down, are you ok?” and they told me about how they’re really depressed and their project is terrible and they don’t like their job)

When I interview, candidates will ask me questions like “wow, that problem-space sounds really interesting. Are you planning on adding machine learning etc?”. Recruiters will take this question and run with it, spinning an image of all the cool stuff you’ll get to work on at some future time. I just respond “honestly, no. It’s basically a CRUD app, the tech is nothing special but the area the business is in is very interesting and exciting and you might make a lot of money. If that’s not what you’re looking for, you probably shouldn’t work here since I can’t promise you’ll work on somethjng cool like ML and I’m not going to dangle that in front of you for the next three years before you bitterly quit”

I work as a software engineer for an ISP. We're a startup and so of course our mission is to disrupt the industry. The great part is we're actually doing it!

Fun stuff I've done so far:

- Wrote a library to find the best available subnet given our set of IP blocks, set of existing subnets, and the desired subnet size. This may not sound like a big deal, but we've shown our IP block utilization to other ISPs and they are blown away that we achieve a perfect 100% utilization of each block. (Typically at ISPs of our size this is done manually and so there tend to be a couple leftover subnets in each block which are too small to use).

- Wrote a monitoring system for OLT hardware which A) does not provide out-of-the-box monitoring and B) does not have an API. We actually managed to build a robust system on top of its CLI interface. This is huge for us. If there are hardware or fiber problems, or if a customer simply unplugs their modem, we know instantly. It can even pinpoint where the problem is.

- Wrote a system which is able to talk to our OLTs, core switches, core routers, and customer modems to do things like provisioning or upgrading/downgrading our customers' bandwidth. Again, there is nothing even close to an out-of-the-box solution for this. You have to build real software!

- We have some upcoming products I can't share, but one of the most exciting things right now is that we are focusing on helping our customers troubleshoot their networks. This is a surprisingly complicated thing to do while providing a top-notch customer experience, and we think software is part of the answer.

So, do I feel like I've been using "computer science" knowledge? Not really. Closest thing would be using binary trees to do subnet stuff.

But what I have been able to do is flex my software engineering muscles, go back to first principles, and design software from scratch. No CRUD, no huge frameworks and package managers, just plain old fashioned programming.

(Ok, we do have CRUD and framework stuff. The web browsers have to talk to something!)

A few years ago I applied for a really interesting jobs within Telematics - one of my favorite areas. So I called them, got the CTO on the phone and he had almost no time for me. Then I wrote a mail with my formal application to them. It was appealing and they replied with some coding riddles. I guess I did well enough and was one of 2 or 3 people to get invited. Of course before the in-person interview I studied some Algorithms & Data Structures book. At the same time I did Scala programming although it wasn't expected to know that but people worked with it.

Anyway, during the interview they made me sweat for at least 3 hours. Every now and then also reminding me how good the other people working there are - the one guy having worked 8 years at a company writing DBMS in London. So yeah, after leaving the communication was difficult but the CTO said the people said they liked me and they would hire me despite my shortcomings - I would have to unlearn stuff. The offer was really bad, in fact even the most senior people got below average salary.

At the end I started working at a company that worked on a moonshoot project involving a CAD program in the browser. Even some mathematician who worked in Japan on Robotics was there. Salary was good enough but the people were borderline insane. I quit after 3 months and landed a below average paid job, but with a lot of nice people. I don't regret that. Work was mostly boring but the environment was nice.

Anyways, not living in the Bay Area, I guess things are they different again.

For instance, patient outcomes from a feature you built in an electronic medical record get published in major newspapers.