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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?

#161

Post by jollyllama »

It depends on what you consider interesting. I look for:

+work in person

+biz is generating revenue

+there is a physical system that the software interacts with that I have some degree of physical access to

+Follow other interesting and likeminded colleagues you've met to places that they go.

Other things:

+Look for places that greybeards tend to stay around.

+not in the trendy part of your city. It's gonna be in an older, more run down area. Or outside of the city in a burb or more rural area.

+Usually, the tech isn't going to be sexy. You probably won't be working with cloud tech, at least not exclusively.

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

#163

Post by mbg721 »

mcv wrote: post #123
mbg721 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part sounds like "Don't be perceived as a cost-center," but I think most big-lumbering-org departments have figured out how to plead their case. That's a lot harder to do with something like teaching, where there's a large supply of candidates and everyone agrees the job is socially valuable, but confounding factors make it very hard to measure any individual's contribution.

Is there a large supply of teachers? My impression is that lots of countries have a teacher shortage. And that's partly because society doesn't value teachers as much as it should. Over a century ago, teachers were still considered among the important people of the town (together with the mayor and the local notary), and commanded some respect. These days they're often seen as glorified babysitters despite having man…

There is at least a large supply of new, cheap teachers. It's essentially the only adult profession that high-school and college students know (in the US) besides what their parents do, and you can get into it from a starting point of any major. I'd still say the big issue isn't that society doesn't want to value teachers, but that it's terrible at identifying good ones, so it ends up being a race-to-the-bottom.

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

#164

Post by jimhi »

s5300 wrote: post #126
jimhi wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked up self cleaning restrooms and how to purchase. They are extremely expensive 300,000-500,000 USD and break constantly due to vandalism. They appear to be very hard and very expensive in practice. You may be thinking of self cleaning toilets which are not relevant to this discussion.

If current society can build things that land on the moon & mars, along with nuclear ICBMs among other things, but cannot build a self cleaning restroom, perhaps it deserves to fail. I do however think that is not the case, & that it is a comparatively simple issue nobody has given too much of a fuck about yet, as highly capitalistic societies give zero fucks about improving anything the general public may have acces…

Those other things have almost no budget or even have to worry about maintenance beyond the first use (rockets startups are potentially changing that of course).

I think you are overly pessimistic. There has never more a better time in history for a person with an idea to get funding for crazy ideas like this because of capitalism. They just have to make money.

For an idea like this to be worth it and succeed, it has to be cheaper than that person willing to do it manually. High minimum wages and benefits like single payer health insurance will definitely speed this up.

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

#165

Post by Aromasin »

uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #124
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…

Honestly, Facebook has tried to hire me like 3 times now and every time I got a completed offer at a different job by the time they finished organising their 8-step interview process so I never finished it. FAANG might be interesting but their interview processes kill it for me. I have no idea how people find the time to do homework for it + are willing to spend months in this lengthy interview pipeline. (Also there…

Doesn't have to be a FAANG to do something impactful. Many of the other Tech 100 companies have things that you can work on at scale that are fulfilling. I work at a semiconductor company on projects that end up in almost everything, and I love what I do.

The interview process was fine compared to the horror stories I've heard. I had 1 long interview with the manager, then 6 short (30 min) interviews back-to-back with the team over the course of an afternoon. A couple of technical questions but nothing rediculous. They hired me based on credentials, so the tests were ceremonial if anything. It was more about discovering whether I would get on socially with the team.

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

#167

Post by andsoitis »

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…

What you want to work on should still align with the business' goals, otherwise you're just indulgent. So the art is in recognizing and steering towards that overlap.

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

#168

Post by Test0129 »

walleeee wrote: post #109

It sounds like you've discovered what you aren't aligned with, but you don't yet know what you do think is interesting or valuable. The first step is answering this question for yourself. What do you care about? Science perhaps? Pick a field and you can probably find a lab or project in need of research software engineers. Healthcare? Plenty of work in digital health records, computational drug discovery, or so I've…

> Science perhaps? Pick a field and you can probably find a lab or project in need of research software engineers.

I've been in the industry a long time and OP's realization that most jobs in tech are useless or so-called "evil" typically occurs pretty early on. This would indicate to me that OP is probably still fairly young and has a lot of discovering to do about themselves and the industry itself. Interesting work for some definition of interesting is everywhere. One should consider themselves lucky to work on very interesting (read: cutting edge) work at any point in their life.

OP is probably a talented developer but not yet at the level any company will accept them as a research engineer, which tends to be a terminal position on the level of the C-suite. If OP is looking for this type of position it explains why every job they've ran into is web 3/crypto/evil startup stuff. Those are really the only people young, relatively inexperienced but highly ambitious, engineers can get a taste of that environment without going through the corporate crucible for a decade and a half or more.

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

#169

Post by jason-phillips »

uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #144
jason-phillips wrote: post #13

> mind-numbing useless stuff I'm curious, what is your definition for this, in more detail? In the past, I've very much enjoyed some places I've worked (like semiconductors) while others found the place intolerable, chasing the latest wiz-bang frameworks used by fleeting, "disruptive" startups. I've been consulting for the past few years. I love the variability and also the reward from helping others accomplish their…

I've been thinking I should get into consulting for a long time, as I tend to like fixing higher level problems when I arrive at a company. But that seems impossible to break into without already having a network to draw from.

Personally, I don't really have a network. Or I don't use it in that way.

I do have a whole lot of valuable experience, as well as failure-is-not-an-option and customer-focused mindsets. That seems to work well in this environment.

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

#170

Post by sicp-enjoyer »

gampleman wrote: post #24

First, you need to actually value interesting work in relation to other job values (like compensation, good working hours, low stress, making a difference, family friendliness, good management and many others). Generally these will be a tradeoff, but you might find one where the tradeoff suits you. For instance I had a job I really enjoyed at an Earth Observation startup geeking out about maps and space, but the comp…

I have experienced these same tradeoffs.

Of course, in the back of my mind I wonder, isn't it possible to have interesting work AND good management? I don't know why, but it doesn't seem to work out that way.

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