Pretty much every single company out there has boring programming work to do that would be redundant if they could solve some harder problems (which they may or may not be aware of). Competent programmers will notice the bigger picture and attempt to solve the hard problems. If you want to be hired specifically for hard problems, try academia or some research insititute / R&D department.
Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
51–60 of 71 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
#52We work on hard stuff (http://vicarious.com/) and we're always looking for exceptional people
Re: Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
#53I don't know how you feel about working for the military-industrial-tech-surveillance-state but companies or universities that get DARPA or IARPA money work on stuff like flying and/or self driving cars, autonomous systems etc (Lockheed, Honeywell, Carnegie-Mellon, Raytheon, for examples). Of course these things will ultimately be used to crush humanity's soul, but they're interesting software and technical challenge…
I work in this industry, and have spent a number of years in R&D. In my experience, the vast majority of software R&D projects are not weapons/military related, and include things such as cyber security, healthcare, big data, cloud computing, etc. A lot of it is aimed at developing innovative approaches to reduce costs in various government/military processes both through automation and doing things more smartly and…
Sorry, but I don't think there's a distinction to be made, other than one of degree unless the implication is that improving government/military processes is not aligned with the long term goals of the military.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
#54Defense sector is full of hard problems. A PhD helps, but even with a BS you can be working on very challenging things. When I worked at a defense startup we were designing protocols, writing VHDL and drivers for logic implemented in FPGA's, doing formal analysis of algorithms, doing data visualization, etc. Different people were doing different things, obviously, but even the junior folks were tackling problems that…
I would like to strongly discourage anyone from working in the so-called "defense sector", which should be (at least in the US) more properly called the "war sector".
Working to enable the more efficient murder of ever more people is highly unethical. Unfortunately, there are plenty of unethical people willing to do this bloody work. But hopefully you are not one of them.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
#55This is a good question. I've worked in a lot of different domains and can tell you that:
1. They all have boring parts
2. They all have interesting parts.
3. Doing the interesting parts well can be very challenging.
CRUD is only boring because of the generally repetitious nature of talking to the database, but repetition usually means that it can be generated. Whenever possible, I write code generators for that sort of thing. This is not only more interesting and gives me time to solve the more interesting problems but also allows me to produce more and better code than I could just typing it all out.
You could get a PhD, I suppose, but hard problems generally require the insight to see them and the willingness and ability to work on them. Sometimes ability requires a PhD, but that's not a given.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
#56I can think of a lot of scientific "big data" applications that would be very challenging problems. There are many domains that need to create & automate better systems that Collect > Organize > Parse > Visualize data. Weather, climate, ecology/species, traffic systems, etc. To do these right would be very challenging and would have a big impact on the world.
Now some self-promotion: I'm looking for a full-time partner to help me with Atlastory, an app that visualizes all of history on a map. This fits with the idea above. It's a simple concept, but there's huge engineering & design challenges involved: imagine all the geographic data involved in Google Maps, now multiply that by 1,000, and figure out the easiest way to obtain/retrieve/display that data.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
#57I'm running into the same problem. I am tired of CRUD apps, I just don't see myself doing anything new or exciting with them . Last year I was approved in one of the top tech Universities in Brazil and started learning C and C++ and this year I'll engage in programming competitions.
By the way, I've already failed 2 math disciplines in my University and I'm doing them again. But I'm good at programming and I'm becoming way better at Math. Someday after I graduate, I'll try to work for Google or Facebook, do you know if they'll turn me down for the fact that I have failed some math classes (even if I later was approved on them)?
Thanks everyone.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
#58It sounds like going to a Disney Land and complaining that all rides are easy. If you want tough and challenging rides go to SixFlags. If you want to tackle tough challenges may be ruby/rails is not the ideal place. Perhaps learn C,C++ and implement faster ruby or javascript interpreter or implement a distributed filesystem in ruby or java. You can also contribute to the rails framework.
I've learned that ruby/rails is not the place to go for tough challenges. Agreed. My question now is where do I go from here?
If you like computer graphics, there are also tons of interesting problems in that field.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
#59Defense sector is full of hard problems. A PhD helps, but even with a BS you can be working on very challenging things. When I worked at a defense startup we were designing protocols, writing VHDL and drivers for logic implemented in FPGA's, doing formal analysis of algorithms, doing data visualization, etc. Different people were doing different things, obviously, but even the junior folks were tackling problems that…
I would like to strongly discourage anyone from working in the so-called "defense sector", which should be (at least in the US) more properly called the "war sector". Working to enable the more efficient murder of ever more people is highly unethical. Unfortunately, there are plenty of unethical people willing to do this bloody work. But hopefully you are not one of them.
We're living in the Pax Americana, the most peaceful time in human history, enabled in no small part by total American military technological superiority.
Not to mention we're posting all this over a network created for the American war machine, using protocols created by a company that is a key part of the military industrial complex (BBN), which was founded by people from a university (MIT) that was then and is now one of the largest non-profit defense contractors in the country.
Re: Ask HN: Where are the hard programming challenges/jobs?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had money and free time, then I'd love to do research on my own. Thing is, I need a job to pay the bills :( I'm thinking of getting into freelancing and using that to float me as I get to do more and more research.
This is the strategy I'm currently implementing. I've been doing freelance work while working on research with physiological sensors as computer input. You'll need two things to get started doing this sort of thing: standing out as a member of your community so people come to you, and an understanding of business needs. If you really want to make the switch, shoot me an email. I'll give you some tips on making the tr…
Sounds like you could write publicly about this, it sounds fascinating :-)