Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?

I am currently working on a side project that aims to provide the defunct on-line / multiplayer functionality for an old game.

The positive feedback and joy I get back from the community, is really awesome :)

Also fiddeling with unknown file Formats and stuff, reveres engineering and re implementing defunct stuff is great fun :D

Security auditor in 2009/2010. In that job I was traveling the countryside of Afghanistan and visited the major US Army bases to provide information security assessments and write reports. I got to see some of the exotic landscape and talk to many different interesting people. I also got to go on flying adventures that aren't allowed by passenger carriers in the US. This was incredibly rewarding for the reasons not related to the technical qualities of the job.

At the end of my tour I read the ISC2 course book for the CISSP and passed the test on the first attempt. So now I just tell people to read the book and take the test from a management perspective and people look at me like I am crazy, because the test is so hard.

My most rewarding job for purely the software angle was being the A/B test engineer at Travelocity from 2010 to 2012. I learned to master walking the DOM. Some of our tests were extremely ambitious to the point of wildly defacing large areas of complex pages on the site. Your code had to be defect free and execute before the regular areas of the page displayed to the user. Some of our experiments comprised multiple various pages and required altering the browser history and moving people around the site in non-standard ways.

I learned to master my JavaScript browser interaction skills doing this job. You could not wait for framework or library code like jQuery, because it loaded too slowly and would bias the experiment. You simply had to learn to do the job against the actual web technologies. You also had to learn to execute quickly, because there were always more experiments demanding attention than we could ever get to which means potential lost revenue. It was always challenging and always rewarding. This job is what elevated me to a senior developer.

This is the interview question I ask every candidate

I would contend those fixes -do- add to the bottom line.

Making a user's job take less time frees them to do other things. Those other things may have value; that value is only captured because of the time saved due to your effort.

Even if that time becomes effectively 'free' time for the user, that increase in happiness and morale makes them more likely to be more productive in other areas, less likely to leave the company (however small an effect), etc.

Don't dismiss something that makes someone's life easier as having no monetary value just because you can't easily quantify it.