A very vague comment but here goes: IIRC Italy is a pretty significant partner in ESA projects, maybe there are some interesting challenges in that space?
Ask HN: Technology stall
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Ask HN: Technology stall
#12My suggestion is to try to audit a series of courses. This will force you to concentrate on a particular theme; some of the courses are not self-paced and have a deadline to finish problem-sets (which are Juyptor notebooks where you have to actually do the work, and fill-in the code snippet but not to muck around with setting up annoying IDE/dev environment, autograded with unit tests), so will force you to stick to deadlines.
Here are some of courses that you might (read: actually I am) interested.
https://www.edx.org/xseries/data-science-engineering-apache-... (3 courses on Apache Spark using PySpark and introduction to simple machine learning and distributed computing)
https://www.edx.org/xseries/genomics-data-analysis (3 courses on R, next-gen genomics sequencing, annotation and some more cool computation protocols involved with CHIP-Seq and RNA-seq).
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/scala (4 courses + capstone, spearheaded by Martin Odersky; the guy who is the big-wig in the Scala community).
Also, I'd recommend taking the verified tracks for all of them. This will force you to complete them as money is on the line (if possible ask HR/your boss if it's related to your work, for tuition reimbursement benefit).
Re: Ask HN: Technology stall
#13A very vague comment but here goes: IIRC Italy is a pretty significant partner in ESA projects, maybe there are some interesting challenges in that space?
I was involved with a couple of ESA and EU FP7 projects. They're a joke. More paper than code is produced, and none of the code ends up being used.
Re: Ask HN: Technology stall
#14My suggestion is to try to audit a series of courses. This will force you to concentrate on a particular theme; some of the courses are not self-paced and have a deadline to finish problem-sets (which are Juyptor notebooks where you have to actually do the work, and fill-in the code snippet but not to muck around with setting up annoying IDE/dev environment, autograded with unit tests), so will force you to stick to…
I recommend taking the specializations, but don't expect you will be able to reimburse them as Coursera is unable to provide invoices.
Yeah.
Re: Ask HN: Technology stall
#15You sound unhappy, and if so, it won't disappear without concrete change. Change your job, change your department, change your neighborhood, change your girlfriend, change your friends, change your morning routine, you have to change something or nothing will change. I hope this is self-evident.
Since this is mostly work related, I'd say change your job. You want to find a place where you can work with psychological safety. Psychological safety is the condition where you feel safe to take risks, and be vulnerable to people you interact with. It's proven (https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful...) to be the most important factor in success and employee satisfaction. You cannot achieve this by yourself, it is dependent on the work culture of your workplace, and unless you have enough authority to change the work culture, you'll have to keep switching job until you find a place that has the culture you need to have psychological safety.
Trust me, at first glance, two jobs might appear similar, but work culture is a very subtle arrangement of tiny details that add up to be the most influential factor, and so, it's really hard to know without just trying the work for a few months. But also, each and every workplace will have a vastly different culture. So try other jobs, it's worth it.
Now about your lack of focus, that's normal. Try to work at two levels of attention. Off course, you want to have some fun, learn some new things, be curious. This is your intrinsic motivation, and do not kill it off by trying to tell yourself you need to focus and bore yourself to death to become more "professional". Don't try to have rewards take over it either, value a lesser paid job if it allows you more creativity and freedom for you to learn and try new things. This is the first level of attention, you enjoy the details, the tech for tech's sake. Now also try to think more about the second level of attention, imagine all the code you write is assembly language, and even though such details are interesting, it is mostly the case because it is also easy for you to work at that level. So spend some time learning about the higher level. What happens if I consider all algorithms to exist as tools for me to use, what problems can I become interested in solving at that layer. This is when you realize it takes you closer to business problems. How do you optimize the business needs, with the tools you have. How do you arrange multiple systems together to scale, etc. Unfortunately, most people's CS degree didn't go there, and so going to that level is hard, and most people find hard things less interesting. If you put some more thoughts into hard things though, they start to become easy, and suddenly, interesting again.
Re: Ask HN: Technology stall
#16I would suggest trying to contribute to various open-source projects e.g. in machine learning ("deep learning" is all the buzz). You could pick up a tool like Keras and see if that piques your interest. Similarly, you could try other areas such as security and see if you can contribute to some of the OSS such as Snort or OSSEC.
Personally I find trying to work on an OSS project the best way to "try-before-you-buy".
Re: Ask HN: Technology stall
#17A very vague comment but here goes: IIRC Italy is a pretty significant partner in ESA projects, maybe there are some interesting challenges in that space?
I was involved with a couple of ESA and EU FP7 projects. They're a joke. More paper than code is produced, and none of the code ends up being used.
Wouldn't surprise me if high waste ratio but let's give credit where due. The first, open-source CPU/SOC's were result of ESA:
http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/Publications/LEON3%20SPARC%20P...
Genode OS and some static analysis tools came up under FP7. I bet I'd find more with time.
Re: Ask HN: Technology stall
#18My brother in law worked in IT in Italy. He ended up quitting and working for a US company. Makes a lot more money.
Italy is so far behind when it comes to the internet adoption, it's not funny. It's also a rather poor country, especially among the young generation, many young people live with their parents till 35-40. So you're much better off making (or working on) a project that faces some of the more developed countries (US, Australia, UK, Germany).
Re: Ask HN: Technology stall
#19Most likely you will not be satisfied working on technology in a non-technology company. Find a job where a company considers technology to be instrumental to what they do, and you might see a much better environment. If you can't, move to another country.
This. This is what I've come to realise has been my issue with a lack of work engagement, and the feeling of creative atrophy and itchy feet. I don't want to be the "magician" digital/developer person, to be doing things where technology is the sideline - need to be within a digital team, working to a common purpose. Hopefully find that once it's safe to move on from my current role.
Re: Ask HN: Technology stall
#20First to your lack of focus. I had the same issue. I jumped around various languages like Scala and Closure and D. I would jump around background products like Mongo or Arango or PostgreSQL. Probably for the same reason for you: novelty driven by a sense of the industry leaving me behind. I think this is a false sense driven by HN and the like. Startups playing with new things made me feel that my Java centric knowle…
To the initial problem, this is pretty good practical advice. However, the bigger picture is to always remember burnout is the intersection of a long period of hard work coupled with a rising disinterest. Always ask the question: Are you having fun AND are you learning something? If the answer is "no" for both more than 1/2 the time, you need to find another gig. For no other reason than you're going to start sucking at the one you're at while you're consumed by burnout.
We could discover a breakthrough in AI any year now. But the possible is not the probable. Most of the revolutionary work done in computing was accomplished by 1980 or so. What's left at this point is incremental improvements on that. Still lots of work to do, but look outward from computing: there are many, many problems facing humankind right now. The world needs you. Your skill coupled with your humanity could be the difference between saving us from ourselves or a new dark age. Every second counts.