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Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

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

#361

Post by yread »

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…

I was in the same place 5 years ago. I've decided to quit and find something worth doing not just making more money. Since then I'm working in a support role in cancer research for not exactly faang salary but it's definitely worth it.

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

#362

Post by donatj »

I'm twelve years out of college and I wrote a BTree for the first time since college this year. It'd been primarily CRUD up until this year, I've been with this job for upwards of six years, but it's been shifting into more hardcore data stream processing and I've been getting to write a lot of multithreaded high performance code utilizing cool things like hyperloglog's and cuckoo filters. It took twelve years but I'm finally getting to use a little of my comp-sci.

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

#363

Post by buckminster »

emodendroket wrote: post #204
lkrubner wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I use scare quotes because I disagree that the approach is rational " Agreed. For the most part, going to church is not economically rational. For the most part, having children is not economically rational. For the most part, being monogamous to one's spouse is not economically rational. For the most part, patriotism to one's country is not economically rational. In a slightly different sense, going to space, or c…

I think there's something to the Hume quote about reason being a slave of the passions.

Hume was right. I recommend The Righteous Mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

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

#364

Post by iforgotpassword »

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…

> pushing the humanity forward, or alleviating a social problem for some group of people

Isn't this what humans like to strive for? Making an impact, being remembered after death, thus living forever. That's one of the things a family (with kids) helps you get over, you know, the whole "living on through your kids" thing. If they don't end up as homeless drug addicts, it probably kinda works.

I've taken a job at a university two years ago. Pay is much lower than before. Haven't felt anywhere close to overworked or burnt out ever since, even though I've stayed until late at night occasionally when we fucked something up by deploying without any proper testing again, because hey, it's such a tiny change. I'm not doing frontier science or anything, we're just working on a custom netbooted Linux distro that also runs windows vms via qemu-kvm, for teaching environments. A lot of what we do could be dismissed as NiH-syndrome or creating solutions to problems that have already been solved by big companies, but as long as someone is paying for it I'm good with this job. Because there pop up a lot of problems or requirements that are just interesting to solve by yourself, actually not just for fun but for actual use cases. Nothing game changing for humanity, not for millions of people, but for some. And I will interact with them directly, and sometimes they tell you that they like the system you helped develop. That, and the fact that you're not in competition with your coworkers or another team or anything really makes for a great work atmosphere that I'm currently really enjoying. I don't know how long I can/want to stay, but for now I can say it greatly improved my overall happiness.

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

#365

Post by abj »

davidjnelson wrote: post #301
rumcajz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting work is done by open source hobbyists at night. What remains is what you get paid for.

Who wants to work on monetizing open source by working hard to create a reliable way of paying the project creators to do the interesting work as what they get paid for? Now that sounds meaningful. Email me if you agree.

Would you mind elaborating on what you had in mind?

It's a good idea. There should be an easy way for a small team to capture the value that their open source project creates. There are a variety of crowdfunding platforms like Patreon that are doing something similar. CodeMill and Bountysource are paying developers directly for adding features.

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

#367

Post by ben509 »

In college I took a break to work on a startup for a while... that folded, so finally finishing my degree, I went into the military. They actually paid me to play OPFOR in war games and jump out of airplanes. When I realized that you get pigeonholed by your initial choices, I decided I wasn't going to make a career of it.

The next step was government contracting. That was a pretty cool company where we actually got the title "Computer Scientist," and it was pretty exciting as we worked on some interesting big data analytics problems and actually did some computer sciency stuff with natural language processing and entity extraction.

And that was great, except they started to have management issues. So I took a friend's advice and applied to AWS, where I got to work on a fairly new service team. I started to appreciate all the cloud hype, here we had a service that let you request specialized hardware on demand, so you fire a big blob of JSON off and set up a whole network in minutes.

After a while, the stress of the pager was getting to me, and I was tired of working deep on the backend and not being able to explain what I did to regular people. So now I work in consumer finance. I work on a financial methodology optimization engine. The problems are surprisingly fun, though it's complex as all hell and I'm procrastinating as usual... (And, granted, most people can't follow me beyond "oh, I have a 401k" but still.)

Moral of the story: at no point would I say I had a dream job, every one of them had some downsides and no one job used my CS degree to its full potential.

But in all of them, there were definitely projects where I felt I made a notable contribution. Over the years, I've definitely got my money's worth on that degree. All I've ever done is looked for interesting jobs, not so much asking "is this is my life's passion" but "are these people doing interesting things?"

(Another thought: some areas like government and finance are shockingly primitive, technologically. If you find a company that has smart people working in an area that's primitive, you can be one of the first movers.)

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

#368

Post by matt2ray »

carapace wrote: post #203

First of all, let me point out that this: > Most of my work seems to be boring CRUD work where the challenge is gluing libraries together or figuring out business requirements. Actual interesting technical problems seems to be mostly wrapped in ready-made libraries / SaaS services. ...isn't a problem. It's a sign of maturity of the field. In 2018 most problems that you can solve with a computer should have an off-the…

>Second, you've got to take into account that NN/ML/AI et. al. is going to "eat" a portion of all programming work within the next fifteen years or so.

Are there any repos I should look at to learn this? How is this possible when even humans can't read sarcasm online? I'm genuinely blown that this is even possible?!?

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

#369

Post by matt2ray »

drmeister wrote: post #43

We are developing a matter compiler. We are working on designing molecular Lego to assemble them into new catalysts, therapeutic compounds, atomically precise membranes and sensors for proteins and small molecules. The goal is to make molecules that can do everything that proteins can do and that can be designed by human beings with computer assistance. We've developed a programming environment with a custom compiler…

Does one have to be a graduate student in chemistry?
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