Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#1

Post by obsession » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 8:20 AM UTC

I have been feeling disappointed that I haven't been able to use my computer science degree to it's full potential. 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.

Anyone in the same boat?

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

#2

Post by cetico » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 8:27 AM UTC

Yes. But I understand you, and I agree. I was there. I quit my job in a big tech company a few months ago so I could work on more interesting problems. I started a company a few months, and it's been hard - exactly what I was hoping for.

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

#3

Post by thorin » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:06 AM UTC

There are interesting problems (technical and business) in boring businesses. If you want to work on interesting technical problems you probably need to excel at a technical company. At an enterprise you are likely to find "interesting" business problems which you should really endeavor to solve in the simplest most fault tolerant manner. If you can work out which parts of CS interests you maybe you could find a problem to apply that to or research in depth.

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

#4

Post by anon1253 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:43 AM UTC

Hmm, maybe. I work in Natural Language Processing for medicine, and there are many interesting challenges ... a lot of them still academic even. But the biggest thing I'm worrying about these days are more business oriented. Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing in particular, is nowhere near advanced or accurate enough to fully automate things. So most of my thinking goes into things like "given the limited abilities and limited data, how can we still make something that is useful". That's both a business and a UI/UX problem...which suck up a lot of brain cycles for me. Up to the point that I've become somewhat cynical and wish I was doing CRUD work instead ... since all the hype around NLP usually amounts to saying "yeah no, that's not really how it works, and you'll [the customer] be disappointed if we actually did that". The hype train is both a blessing and a curse

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

#5

Post by stef25 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:43 AM UTC

Completely. After 10 years it's still just data in, data out and the only real challenge lies in deciphering business requirements.

Whenever I have spare time I'm trying to build a solution like Walk Score for where I live, where such a thing isn't available. Hopefully something will come of that.

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

#6

Post by baud147258 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

No, I'm only working on a boring problem. But since I can't say I've got a real computer science degree, I find it hard enough already.

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

#7

Post by maaaats » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

My day-to-day is mostly CRUDs, yes. However, the consultancy-company I work for has various interest-groups. I'm leading one for "Algorithms". We meet (on company time) and do various things related to that theme. Workshops, learn stuff etc. I think it's a smart way to keep us motivated, while also creating knowledgeable consultants.

Some recent activites: 1. Workshop on evolutionary algorithms I made https://matsemann.github.io/walkingea/ 2. Workshop on max flow algorithms people worked on: https://github.com/Matsemann/maxflow-workshop 3. We played elevator saga 4. Lightning-talk bonanza where people prepared small talks related to hard problems / CS theory. 5. This week programming LEGO robots

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

#8

Post by amelius » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

Academics: just take an interesting problem that you can generate potential solutions for, but if you can't, just pick the next problem.

Business: here is a continuous stream of problems, most of them are boring, some of them are hard, but you have to solve them all regardless.

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

#9

Post by thinkingemote » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

What would be interesting for you? What would you like to do?

Does your employment contract allow you to do this in your own time?

For me, I'm more interested in a particular domain, rather than the technologies around it. So, for example, I like marine biology, so the projects (and work) all revolve around that. You might like distributed databases, so why not work around that. Find what interests you, and move towards that direction. Some people have contracts that say that their employers owns all their work even when they are not at work, and some say they cannot do open source work, so this could be a constraint.

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

#10

Post by daniel-levin » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC

Absolutely, yes. Using your CS skills to write CRUD apps is the path of least resistance to create economic value. Where I live (Johannesburg), the demand for CRUD apps is so high that no single firm or group of firms can absorb it all. You can happily create a thriving software development business in Johannesburg without worrying about competition (maintaining standards and hiring well is a different story).

The most exciting thing at my old job was this DFS I had to do once.

That said, there are very interesting tech jobs out there - such as scaling boring old CRUD apps. The high frequency trading space also has many interesting problems. Imagine working on a system where you start to care about nanosecond optimizations. I interviewed (and failed at it, lol) at Optiver [0]. You should check them out.

[0] https://www.optiver.com/na/en/