Ask HN: Is it just me or do 99% of SWE jobs offers seem completely pointless?

As a software engineer you're more than half of the way there. A lot of people pivot into this industry with almost zero experience because it's pretty fun and they end up learning computer science along the way.

I'd first start by reading this blog https://noncombatant.org/2016/06/20/get-into-security-engine... and everything it links. Then study them to start getting a breadth of knowledge in the security space.

In parallel, I'd recommend studying real security vulnerabilities in products that use technologies that you have a background in. For example, if you are interested in both Web technologies and C++ ,I'd start studying Google Chrome, specifically it's Javascript engine V8 [1]. There is an entire cottage community of both offensive and defensive people looking for vulnerabilities in chrome so it's a good way to get started because there's a lot of information out there. One amazing thing about security engineering is that you get to learn how all of these amazing technologies work at a deep level, because you need to understand it almost as well as the developer to find security vulnerabilities in it. For example, I have a very deep understanding of how technologies like RTC, Browsers, Sandboxes, and the IOS operating systems work from auditing their code and finding security vulnerabilities.

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=Security_...

> Maybe I'm naive, but it just seems that almost every job out there is about squeezing more profit out of people, and absolutely nothing else, and it doesn't really make me want to work.

You may be naive, but this is right. Try not to see it as such a bad thing.

It sounds like you're looking for a job that does some good for the world and isn't concerned with efficiency.

All the jobs that promise this are lying to naive people to exploit them for profit.

The reality is that even the non-profit world is concerned with the cost of labor. As a SWE, you're essentially a high paid laborer.

"I'm kind of looking for a job" sounds like you're thinking about making a religious conversion to join "the employed". Jobs aren't where your identity should come from. Rethink your position as "I need to trade some of my time for money" and the labor market will make a lot more sense.

> People who work 8 hours a day, mostly for a paycheck, how do you cope without wanting to off yourself?

I'm betting that I'll be able to do the timemoney trade efficiently enough that I'll be able to stop working eventually.

As you're working and acquire capital, you need to invest as much of the capital that you earn as possible.

By investing, you're employing laborers (usually by proxy of a company) to produce capital for you.

Once your capital can produce more than your labor, you have achieved "financial independence" and no longer need to be concerned with finding work.

Given that anyone with basic coding skills can get a job paying $150k+/yr without too much effort, and all work is remote, you should be able to invest about $100k/yr without too much trouble. Without having other financial obligations, you should be able to hit financial independence in about 5-10 years.

IMHO, you're starting from a false dichotomy that insinuates work is inherently a bad thing. Consider that hobbies are generally not things that have some great positive impact on humanity, but they are fun nonetheless.

Work can be the same: people often enjoy the process itself, imperfect and full of ups and downs as it may be. This can be especially true for SWEs because the role has creative and/or intellectually stimulating aspects to it.

The idea of deriving happiness from your actions has been explored at length by disciplines like Buddhism, and it boils down to being aware of where your attachments lie.

You might, for example, think happiness is lying on a beach sipping on Pina coladas or whatever. But fulfillment generally requires achievements of some sort, and on an ongoing basis. You can't really achieve fulfillment without effort/work, pretty much by definition. So a more productive/pragmatic way of thinking is to align your need for subsistence to the pursuit of fulfillment.

Some people are "mission driven", as it were. You might be just such a person. There are lots of people like this. If you look at many leaders in the medical device open source & startup communities you'll find a lot of these kinds of people. Often they have a loved one afflicted with or themselves are afflicted with a medical malady which they can apply their technical acumen toward a solution or an improvement, so they take significantly less pay and/or position than they might otherwise be able to achieve just to work on a problem that means something to them.

Not everybody has an entirely transactional relationship to their work and that's okay. Where you get yourself into trouble is if you let highly transactional people exploit the fact that you might be mission driven.

I have found satisfaction, even in companies not doing something particularly useful, by being able to take on entry-level developers and feel that I am helping to launch their careers. That is a very humanly rewarding thing.

And who knows, maybe one of them will one day start a company that will really change the world for the good.