Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

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 the bigger thing the market rewards is writing a web-based CRUD that's 99% chrome, 1% of actual functionality. Extra points if you can get some user data to sell to adtech industry.

(My own criteria for "interesting" these days are a bit different. I'm not looking for "interesting technical problems", as in advanced CS stuff, but "interesting outcomes" - pushing the humanity forward, or alleviating a social problem for some group of people. I find it hard to even find companies that apparently work on something like that, and even then it seems they have to do lots of boring work as well.)

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EDIT: Then again there's this topic that has been casting shadow on my happiness for a long time, that I finally seem to be able to define. Maybe our civilization has finally crushed my soul, and I noticed it just now. But it feels to me that the revealed goal of our market-driven world is to abstract everything away with money. The end-game is that as an individual, your responsibility in the society is to pick a skill - whatever skill - that makes you money, and then to use money to solve everything else with your life. It doesn't matter what you do, there is only one meaningful meta-skill - making money fall out of the system, into your bank account.

Maybe I'm just realizing something obvious that parents should have taught me when I was a kid. I don't know. Maybe it was wrong of me to seek meaning in the things one does? Maybe that approach is no longer supported by our civilization?

How about doing some academic work?

With the explosion of NGsequencing there's no shortage of data or data-magician positions, and there's many challenges with social impact

I admit that - given my life situation - I'm biased towards jobs that at least have a chance of also letting me put bread on the table ;).

That said, I'm also having hard time separating academic work that helps things from that which just adds to the noise - grant-chasing, paper-generating studies. Any advice on that?

I work at a boring company but I manage to get interesting projects to work on. I left CRUD behind about 5 years ago and I couldn't go back now. I just don't find most business logic problems interesting enough.

The transition for me came when I started a new job and my first project was to fix a slow batch job. Then I managed to get a second performance improvement project and soon I was the performance guy focusing entirely on performance projects. I really loved it.

Then through side projects targeted at problems I saw at the company, I built valuable tools using new open source tech and I got made tech lead of a new platforms team, solely focused on resolving technical problems and improving the system. Since then I have been an R+D engineer and now starting as a big data developer at the same company.

I am no genius, failed my interviews to get into big tech companies. I am a pretty big fish in a pretty small pond, I am known as one of the best technical guys in the company, which opens many doors and gives me a lot of freedom to move about inside the company and get some of the most interesting technically focused projects.

I've been very lucky in finding a job that has a good mix of typical 'trench digging' (read web app development) and really cutting edge algorithmic work. We are a 3D printing startup that use 6 axis robots + extruders to print large scale geometries. Some days I'm implementing CRUD REST APIs, today though I happen to be working on Octree based collision detection.

Finding jobs like this isn't easy and mostly requires luck - my last job was very different, it was just maintaining a plain old CRUD app. Not the most mentally stimulating work, but it's probably 90% of the work that gets done on a day to day basis by software engineers.

Try looking for people who are solving a problem that is technical in nature. Business problems use technology as a tool, technology problems require development of brand new tools or the use of existing tools in novel ways.