Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

>Why? I've discovered over the years that I am far more excited by making customers happy than by doing technically interesting work. I've come to see the technology as a means to an end, not the end in itself.

100% agree. I'm a Data Scientist and I'm supposed to have one of the most exciting and sexiest jobs in tech. But after many years of doing this I've come to realize that working with good customers and seeing them happy is much more rewarding than playing with the latest machine learning thing. New tech is just the thing that makes it easier to tackle a customer use case.

There's a strong relationship between the quality of the people I'm working for and my sense of the work being interesting. If the people I'm working for are unrealistic a-holes no amount of technical novelty can make up for that.

I know how you feel. Most of it is chalked up to where you live, then the company you're at, and then the team you're on.

The first two are pretty easy to remedy if you're young and adventurous enough, but the last one might leave you searching for a long time. I've up and moved all over the place, and never stopped searching. After 10 years in this field, I've finally got a job that really brings me satisfaction. What most people don't tell you is that it's all about your boss. If your boss knows you, and helps you reach your potential, any job can be fulfilling. Most bosses aren't that good though, and they will stifle your growth and make your life miserable because their boss is doing the same to them.

The real key is to know yourself, know your skills, and advocate for yourself tirelessly. Make yourself accountable, and then deliver. People will take notice, and if they don't, pack your bags and move on to the next spot and try again.

I'm Director of Engineering for goin.org now, and I'm doing exactly what I love to do: understand a business problem really deeply, and then construct a series of large software systems to automate those business problems. Software engineering in it's truest sense is what I love. Structuring systems and code so that they all scale easily, and adding new members to the team is easy because the code is setup in such a way that new people can get up to speed and start contributing right away. Technical debt can only be allowed for an immediate life or death business situation, and once we've made it through, it is reconsidered and fixed.

yea, mee too.

I’ve spent the last three years (straight out of college) teaching high school computer science. I’m headed to graduate school in the fall, but I’ve loved teaching, and think it’s a shame that fewer CS people go into the field. (Pay isn’t as good as in tech, obviously—I think teachers at my school generally make in the $50-80k range—but from a meaningful-work perspective, things are so much better!) A few points:

* My colleagues and I sometimes gripe about parts of the job, but we all agree we’re never bored. We are shifting to a new environment (new classroom) every forty minutes; there’s a ton of meaningful human interaction; and the life of the school depends so much on the particular kids in your classes / the whole school each year. And the pedagogical questions are really interesting, too (more on that in a moment).

* I’m lucky to teach at a school that supports a four-year computer science curriculum and has given me the autonomy to to do whatever I’d like with it. There are plenty of areas I didn’t study in my undergrad CS degree (networking & concurrency, operating systems, distributed computing/cryptocurrencies, combinators and monads) that I’ve had the chance to dig into (read about, plan lessons about, develop assignments and demos about) in teaching my more advanced students.

* CS pedagogy nationally is in a strange place. There is a political push (and a good deal of funding) to get CS in every K-12 school. But very few people trained in CS go into teaching, and there is little consensus about how it should be taught or what curriculum should look like. Companies like College Board, Code.org, as well as corporations like Apple are stepping in to provide curriculum and training to teachers, but these curricula (in my opinion) leave something to be desired, partly because these companies have other interests. For example, Apple wants everyone coding Swift on iPads, and CollegeBoard wants people paying for AP exams. Things are in such a state of infancy now, though, that by getting involved in the community (going to conferences, blogging, creating high-quality materials, setting and example in your classroom), you have a chance to join the debate & help build a better consensus around how CS can/should be taught. There are a number of people doing awesome work already, and several really stellar CS programs at high schools across the country. But we need more!

* It’s really amazing having diverse colleagues whose interests span many disciplines: I have colleagues who have PhDs in physics and English and Classics, who direct plays, translate poetry, write novels... In the tech industry, the majority is young, male, white or Asian, and consumes a similar “cultural diet” of news sources, books, movies, hobbies, etc. It’s nice to be somewhere a little less homogenous.

There are a hell of a lot more poor people than there are rich people.

It’s also a hell of a lot easier to take advantage of them, given they generally lack the education or resources to protect themselves from predatory businesses. I struggle to think of McDonald’s as “helping” poor people. It’s putting food in their mouths, yes, but if McDonald’s were more concerned with the health and financial wellbeing of their customers as opposed to exploiting psychology to get as many people to impulse buy as much junk food as possible it would be an incredibly different company.

The goal of a company is not “help” its customers, the goal of a company is to exploit any and every untapped source of wealth. If it can do that by hurting someone who doesn’t know better, it is going to.