101–110 of 209 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working in easy or boring stuff for a lot of money is nice if you need it, but miserable if you're an intrinsically motivated person.
One can exercise motivation outside of work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being bored for 10 hours a day when you have the capability to do so much really is terrible. Couldn't agree with you more.
Having worked in startups for most of my career, I see a lot of engineers who yo-yo between high paid, boring jobs in FAANG-esque companies and burnout-inducing early stage gigs.
Whether that's the particular mechanism or not, I think this bears investigation.
”Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just droppe…
The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…
I understand and agree with your point but I think this site overvalues CS graduates by a lot. There are bright minds everywhere, doing math, physics, literature, medicine, law and a long etc. That "some" minds, because of greed/need-to-subsistence or whatever the reason choose that path is a shame but hardly a loss in the great scheme of things. Most intellectual pursuits are already fiercely competitive as it is.
The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…
> How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I think it goes something like the Open Source saying "that person doesn't owe anyone their intelligence to work on so-called important problems for free, just because it might be nice if they did". Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to pay more for that, than for ads, or find a way they don't need to earn money to live at the sta…
> Recovering the key was usually instantaneous, but to help people feel like they’d gotten their money’s worth, we’d put on a little animated show like a Hollywood hacking scene with lots of random characters that gradually revealed the right password. and later ... > I’m currently looking for work in a staff or senior staff engineering or data scientist role. If you’ve got interesting technical analysis or optimizat…
That animation was 20 years ago. The author probably has different priorities now?
This may be the plutonic ideal of a Hacker News story. It's also sort of a Travis McGee story but the salvage consultant is a cryptographer.
”Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just droppe…