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Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#91

Post by lotsofpulp »

uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #68
lotsofpulp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are the people at the top? How do they “decide” revenue minus expenses? Are you claiming there is widespread fraud in SEC filings? If you are referring to many industries becoming controlled by a handful of large organizations, then people working in trading and finance have nothing to do with that. That is in the political arena.

I'm not talking about specific people, just in general. People making decisions in companies are looking for revenue, and what brings money isn't necessarily aligned with public good. A lot of things that would be good for people/society have no good way of really being profitable (unless lawmakers do something to rebalance the game to somehow help them). And a lot of things that are profitable are objectively bad fo…

I agree, but I did not get that context because it seems unrelated to my response to mcv.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#92

Post by neilv »

giaour wrote: post #70
neilv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall hearing of (non-opensource) proprietary code being shown in an interview. Is that common in some circles? In a startup, I think I'd have to get an NDA from everyone, even if the code was mindless bulk glue code -- if only to avoid having to later mention that practice to investors who are checking our IP diligence. Would the following alternative work for you? In a great engineering environment, people…

This may happen more at large companies than at startups, but having interviewees sign NDAs is normal, isn’t it?

I haven't seen NDA on interview from many startups in the Boston area. (Which is good, because I minimize the number of NDAs that I sign, and just try to be professional and collegial.)

The first NDA for an interview that I recall was from a big tech company, and most of it could be paraphrased as something like "Everything we tell you is under strict NDA; anything you tell us, we will treat as public domain" (or maybe it was more like nonexclusive license to use; I forget for certain which that particular company said, since I've also seen the latter since).

Later, I think that company reworked it to be more like "Don't tell us anything that could be proprietary to someone else!"

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#93

Post by mbg721 »

pm215 wrote: post #62
roenxi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock manipulation isn't really a "well paying job" though. The person making money isn't drawing a salary. The key insight that explains the situation is that we pay based on how easy it is to replace someone. If you are doing a critical job that everyone can do (like cooking) then it is unlikely to pay well. There has been little success by systems that pay people based on how important their job is.

I think that's an important part of it. I'd add another factor: the global economy and financial system is an impossibly complex construct that nobody understands in its totality and which as a result is very difficult to control and predict. Some companies and people manage to find parts of the system where they can essentially tap into a stream of money. Jobs in that area then tend to pay rather more than you would…

That part sounds like "Don't be perceived as a cost-center," but I think most big-lumbering-org departments have figured out how to plead their case. That's a lot harder to do with something like teaching, where there's a large supply of candidates and everyone agrees the job is socially valuable, but confounding factors make it very hard to measure any individual's contribution.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#94

Post by uVacCXNiiJCTnYB »

krisoft wrote: post #86

Don’t look at job adverts. Figure out what interests you. Find people who do that. Figure out how they got there and how you yourself can get in the same position. > It honestly makes me feel like my skills and time are being wasted. Stop wasting them then. Hint: work is not necessarily the thing which will scratch that itch. If after plenty of introspection, and trial and error you find that the kind of things which…

That's pretty much where I currently am. "easy" job, the rest of my free time is spent on open source side projects. But it's just not a great feeling to be paid to make nothing useful, and to have so much of my life be effectively wasted time.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#95

Post by robofanatic »

uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #85
rglullis wrote: post #76

Why don't make your own job? If you are so smart, surely you can go ahead and find something interesting to build...

I'm building something interesting but it's not something that will make money, because it's an open source tool and open source devs generally don't get paid for their work lol. Outside of that, and outside of the obvious snarkiness, the whole "why don't you make your own job" thing isn't a real solution. Not everyone can be creating companies, otherwise who would be working at those companies? I don't have much sec…

> open source devs generally don't get paid for their work lol.

have you seen this https://github.com/sponsors ?

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#96

Post by BoumTAC »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #87
BoumTAC wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it really happened like that in the US ? It seems like a total different world. Here in France, if I ask for something during the interview process with the recruiter, I will get a response like this: "Sorry we don't do that in our process, so goodbye" and they move to the next candidate while I'm out for this job.

What do you mean by "something"? I am in France and if an candidate does not ask me "something" at all it is usually a big red flag.

By "something", I mean something different in the process like in the comment. If you ask to talk to developer or see some code, or meet the team for a day, you will never have a positive answer. Recruiter will say it's not possible and disqualify you.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#97

Post by germinalphrase »

ipaddr wrote: post #88
germinalphrase wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“teachers, that positive trait is punished financially due to the high number of applicants” There are teachers shortages throughout the country. States are rushing to reduce certification standards. “A high number of applicants” isn’t the cause of low teacher wages.

Low wages are the reason for low applicants. High standards are another reason for low applicants.

There are multitudes, and they differ across the country. I will add though that “high standards” in many states is as low a bar as ‘generic bachelors degree’ and/or ‘experience relevant to content area’ and the shortage persists.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#98

Post by atemerev »

Interesting means different things for different people. For me, crypto is still interesting (maybe because I didn’t earn any significant money from it yet, though there sere some lucky moments).

Rule of thumb: interesting pays a lot less, because there are much more skilled people willing to work on “interesting”. This is why there is no shortage of people willing to enter the academia, despite abysmal working conditions there. But hey, at least you get “interesting”. I also entered the academia after 15 years of working in the industry, for the same reason.

So, what’s interesting for you? Health tech? Climate tech? The military? Intelligence analysis? Pure mathematics and type theory? What moves you?

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#99

Post by uVacCXNiiJCTnYB »

mxuribe wrote: post #51
uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting but what I find hard is getting a foot in the door when changing expertise field. In my case, I'm generally a mix of full stack dev and game dev (specialised in HTML5 game dev). I want to do more systems stuff (particularly Rust), and I've recently created a scripting language with a VM from scratch for a game engine as part of a side project. But I don't have any commercial experience or keywords…

> ...I recently got rejected at one job at the CV stage for "not having enough React experience" because my last job was in Vue so I wasn't technically using React in recent years (even though it's an extremely similar area of expertise)... Ah, yes, the same old story that HR (or hiring manager) took the job description waaaay too literal, and missing the idea that a halfway decent technologist or developer can/shoul…

Yeah, I'm pretty bitter about it too. I've seen it in both industries I've worked at, it's so bad.

Actual technical recruiters will contact me and be interested despite me barely matching their stack, and I once god hired on a job doing a technical test on a language I had (almost) never used before.

But if I try actually applying to a job with my CV? Often rejected because I don't have keyword X. The same company would probably hire me if I came from a recruiter lol

Re: Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

#100

Post by wwkeyboard »

gampleman wrote: post #24

First, you need to actually value interesting work in relation to other job values (like compensation, good working hours, low stress, making a difference, family friendliness, good management and many others). Generally these will be a tradeoff, but you might find one where the tradeoff suits you. For instance I had a job I really enjoyed at an Earth Observation startup geeking out about maps and space, but the comp…

And interesting companies don't have to advertise their job postings as far and as wide to get a bunch of candidates. So you have to find the companies first then watch for a posting that fits you.
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