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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?

#131

Post by roflyear »

neilv wrote: post #40
rethab wrote: post #9

> I've also found that interviews don't tell you much about reality. Always ask to see code and talk to engineers about what their days look like. I believe there are very few legitimate reasons they won't show you their code, but more likely if they're refusing, it's because they're hiding something. When talking to an engineer, ask them how their code goes from idea to production and have it explained in detail . T…

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…

No, it isn't common. As an engineer you know it doesn't matter if you're shown some code (what are you going to do? memorize it?) and signing an NDA should be a thing anyway if they are concerned about secrets, so what's the worry?

But, if you have any real experience in the industry (rather than making up fake advice which sounds good on the surface) you'll know that few companies will show their code, because there is little to no benefit to them doing so.

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

#132

Post by DoughnutHole »

dan-g wrote: post #107
gniv wrote: post #78

Sometimes you can get lucky and land an interesting job, but I think getting to do interesting work takes time (and luck). An anecdote from my past as an illustration: When I started my job at [FAANG] I was assigned a project. It was not mind-numbing, but not sexy either -- modernize the infrastructure while not messing up the site. Being new, I gave it my all and was rewarded a couple of years later by having the op…

This resonates with me, and I recently read (yet another) Cal Newport book that helped me codify the feeling into words. “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” makes a lot of good points, but IMO chief among them is building up career capital that you can use to leverage to work on things you’d rather be doing. In this example, you earned so much capital with the boring project that you were able to spend some to work on so…

The important thing to note is that this is not a passive route to the good stuff - there's no guarantee that being a good soldier will get you rewarded with interesting work. There's probably as many examples of excelling at the more mundane work getting people pigeonholed into the role of the reliable maintenance guy who couldn't possibly be moved off of a project because it would fumble without them.

And then you have the companies with work cultures that like to boast about doing "interesting" work - in companies like Google you get nowhere doing important, mundane maintenance work. You'll only get promoted for making the new shiny thing even if you're reinventing the wheel - it's the reason any new Google product that's not a main driver of the business gets shelved after a couple of years.

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

#133

Post by alkonaut »

Unbeliever69 wrote: post #106

Startups perhaps? I look at my startup. Complete greenfield project. Never been done before. Industry disruptor. No ceiling for the growth potential of our product. Developers engage the full stack. Never boring. Fully remote. What do we make? CADless vertical CAD software (web app) for the construction industry.

Sounds interesting. Is there a website?

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

#134

Post by epr19 »

7373737373 wrote: post #43
mcv wrote: post #8

The weird irony of our society seems to be that the most useless jobs pay the most, while the most essential jobs pay the least. A lot of important work is being done by volunteers and charity organisations. The best paying jobs are often parasitic. Like stock manipulation.

Interesting downside of human psychology/market dynamics, if many want to help others e.g. as nurses or teachers, that positive trait is punished financially due to the high number of applicants

Yeah, the "passion tax" is real unfortunately. :/

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

#135

Post by lotsofpulp »

astura wrote: post #113
lotsofpulp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish we all could just earn the same amount In your society, what is the incentive for someone to clean up diarrhea in a gas station restroom?

People who clean up diarrhea in public bathrooms don't get paid well. I did it a few times at a job where I was making minimum wage.

The question is in the context of a hypothetical society where everyone is paid the same.

In our current society, cleaning diarrhea in bathrooms is low pay is a consequence of lack of UBI (i.e. incentive to feed and house yourself) and high supply of people willing and able to do the job of cleaning bathrooms. Although, with a combination of lower fertility rates and lower immigration rates, I expect that to change.

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

#136

Post by jvolkman »

In my case, I ran into an old coworker on the street that was working in a space that sounded interesting, and now I've been working with freight railroads for 3 years after spending ~15 at giant, well-known tech companies.

But it depends on what you mean by interesting? We build SaaS products for railroads. Day-to-day, that often means writing software that looks similar to other industries. APIs, web interfaces, relational databases, cloud hosting, etc. I wouldn't say every line of code I type is particularly interesting.

But when I'm feeling annoyed at working on some mundane feature, it's easier for me (relative to previous positions) to step back and remember that the overall space is full of interesting people, history, and different methods and processes that I would've otherwise never known about. And I still have that some of that childhood fascination with trains.

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

#137

Post by mcv »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #56
QuarterReptile wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume he's talking about Congress, and by 'deciding' he's talking about them making regulations that effectively have the US government underwrite long tail risks while leaving profits privatized for larger financial institutions.

I understood mcv’s comment about “stock manipulation” being part of the highest paying jobs to refer to people working in finance, such as HFTs.

HFTs are definitely what I was thinking about. I remember reading about "quants", brilliant engineers working for investment banks to optimise their HFT algorithms, because that pays more than using their skills to invent or build things that are actually useful to society.

But the same is true for many other professions. I also remember reading that the highest paid engineers are working for Google and Facebook to optimise ad placement. CEOs get paid a lot even if their company does things that harm society. There's an entire industry just to help large companies avoid paying tax.

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

#138

Post by achillesheels »

mcv wrote: post #103
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.

We also pay people based on how much power they have. People with lots of power and influence have more pull to ensure better pay for themselves. That power may come from being hard to replace, but it can also come from other things. Even bad CEOs that run their company into the ground, who really should get replaced, still draw significant pay on the way down, and may only be hard to replace because of the power the…

Sir,

I disagree that shareholder value is a curse. I recommend The Visible Hand by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. who noted that over the last century there has been a shift from family-managed businesses to managerial-management which has more loyalty to themselves and abstract owners of the company, creating these kind of effects wherein a subsection of the managerial class can hop and skip through executive management irrespective of the tire fire they leave behind. Or, similarly, the churn and burn of certain speculators seeking immediate gain through capturing the business’s organizational structure to serve its own, as mentioned, selfish ends. Contrast this to the historical need for going to public markets, which is to quickly raise funding to continue to scale the scope of a business firm’s productive assets :)

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

#140

Post by goodpoint »

ragebol wrote: post #20
mcv wrote: post #8

The weird irony of our society seems to be that the most useless jobs pay the most, while the most essential jobs pay the least. A lot of important work is being done by volunteers and charity organisations. The best paying jobs are often parasitic. Like stock manipulation.

Agreed. Why is that though?

Because people trade salary for ethical values. Many are are willing to do ethically good things for less (or no) money. You have a full spectrum:

- save the whales, feed the homeless, maintain Linux distributions: 0 money

- clean floors in some company: $

- software development for the average company: $$$

- software development in "fintech", real estate, make weapons, or other somewhat questionable thing: $$$$$

- write algorithms in some FAANG to manipulate people using ads: $$$$$$

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