Raising kids.
Giving them the chance to think and develop ideas, based on my foundation is the most exciting and important thing to me. I can't wait to see what they do.
Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
51–60 of 265 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
#52I work in a small webdev shop, mostly maintaining existing projects, and work can be quite "menial" (as far as front-end can be) sometimes.
What I do find incredibly rewarding is game development. I participate in game jams [1][2] - and the sheer enthusiasm of players with regards to your game is worth every hour of a stressful crunching weekend.
I also maintain a restoration project for a deceased game [3][4], and while the community is small, sometimes we get new people who stumble upon their erstwhile favorite, and there are similar reactions.
So yeah, I think game development can be quite rewarding when you are in touch with your community.
[1]: https://whalesandgames.itch.io/wizsnooks
Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
#53I live in New York running my own wholesale business that doesnt consume a lot of time, makes decent money and has very little headache but I can say the most mentally (and financially) rewarding part was driving through places like western washington state, oregon, alabama and southern georgia to visit local shopping malls to see if any of the store owners would like to start purchasing from me. Just buying a ticket, reserving a rental car, mapping out a route on google maps and just driving from one mall to another along sometimes empty country roads and checking into a motel in the middle of nowhere just to get enough rest and wake up in the morning, grab coffee (big win if they have dunkin donuts or starbucks in town) and start driving towards my next target. Nothing special about it but easily best thing I did during my 4-5 years of running the business.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
#54[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
#55Not quite startup or hobby project material, but some of the most gratifying work is making non-critical, easy to implement changes in your business's workflow! Sometimes users will have minor (or major) issues with the way a tool works - database takes 30 seconds to retrieve a certain type of information, there's no clear path from point A to point B in a frequently used business tool, certain jobs take 2x as long a…
Exactly!
I would argue though that such improvements do not have an impact on the bottom line. Sure, any one of them may improve the efficiency of one or a few employees by say 3%. However, many such small improvements have massive compound effects.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
#56Nonprofits are relatively underserved by tech workers. I've tried to get many of my friends to join me but the allure of bigco paychecks is simply too much. This is a pretty general answer but so's your question :) I think if you pick a nonprofit with a mission that you feel passionate enough about to really give it your all then there's a good chance for you to quickly become a double-digit percentage of global tech…
Working with nonprofits can be very rewarding. I do ~15 hrs/week volunteer nonprofit data analysis and dev work. However, working with nonprofits can also be extraordinarily frustrating, so make sure you have the tolerance and communication skills required to work with people who do not necessarily have a lot of technical knowledge or skills before committing. This is a generalization, of course, but it's worth keeping in mind. Sometimes it is like trying to provide over-the-phone technical support to 50 clones of my parents at the same time.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
#57I didn't really start to feel a sense of job satisfaction or team spirit until I began working in the healthcare, biosciences, and educational sectors. Sure, I'm just the IT guy. I'm not actually arms-deep in some kid's guts, trying to save their life, but the work I do acts as a catalyst, a force multiplier for the doctors and nurses and scientists and technicians who do directly care for people. I personally find great meaning in being part of their work.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
#58I built a freestanding bookcase out of scaffolding boards and scaffold tubes this week, first time doing anything with woodwork since high school and it's been immensely rewarding.
It's particularly hard to work in the real world where there is no undo button or source control. Ordering replacement parts takes a couple of days so all my screw ups have consequences beyond wasting my time.
The end result is a bit wobbly due to some design defects/inaccuracies in drilling, so now I need to figure out how to adapt it. Overall it's saved me about £500 over getting a real carpenter to build me something, and I'd say I've spent about a day on it total, so I'm probably breaking even overall.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
#59Honestly, I tend to be pretty satisfied by just about any job where I'm trusted to do what needs to be done.
The work where I've been frustrated has tended to be in places where there are hard responsibility walls between what needs to be fixed and who's allowed to fix it - which is an especially big deal if you've been a student of project management for about 14 years but your "role" is a developer.
Re: Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
#60I built a coordination site for NGO/volunteer orgs in Puerto Rico who are responding Hurricane Maria. The goal was to replace paper records and tracking with something a bit more modern. The project was fun, had a direct impact on the ground and really helped me develop some new skill sets. Plus it ended up getting me a promotion in the end which doesn't hurt...
Besides that when I can write an R or Python script that automates a process for someone the look on their face is always amazing. What can take them half a day can then be accomplished in a minute or two...