141–150 of 264 posts
Another suggestion is to befriend people you find interesting and smart, and see what their jobs are.
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.
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.
Salaries don't correlate with value at all. It's a highly political thing.
I think the most interesting jobs technically are in developer tools or developer infrastructure companies. This includes companies building databases (e.g. Cockroach, Neon.tech), compilers (e.g. JetBrains), CDNs (e.g. Fastly, Cloudflare), hosting (e.g. Digital Ocean). These companies hire frontend developer, backend developers, core systems developers. You don't have to be a genius or a CS grad. You can always get i…
On the other hand I've found those companies hard to break into because they often expect you to have specific expertise in things like "very high scale applications" or specific low-level things.
I only tried Gitlab I think, and never really heard back.
> 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…
> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups Everything? No, you're looking in the shiny techy places. Counterintuitively, interesting tech jobs are found in boring, established sectors. Get on the boring, common sites like LinkedIn and Indeed. Consider healthcare, automotive (not Tesla, but Ford), or even higher ed. If you want interesting, and not just a bi…
So I have experience in higher education (for decades), as a consumer of technology, as well as the key player in implementation of software for campuses: This is a field with many opportunities for technology growth, but there are two problems. 1. Many of the ed tech "solutions" are just pretty packaging on the same three services (scheduling, generic student/institution information databases, student tracking). The…
3. There is limited or no budget for software that does new things, only for software that manages existing core issues
Which then makes 2 a bigger problem. Does that fit with your experience?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because people who value specifics about a career or have a passion do it more out of that passion because they know it doesn't come with high pay. Take teaching for example. Also people working for non profit or other socially beneficial companies probably know the company budget goes to help more people not to pad CEO pockets... The lowest rung of essential jobs are the easiest ones to get so those most desperate f…
No, that's not what slavery means. Stop redefining words because you want them to have more of an impact. This behavior has become very trendy over the last decade or so and it's frankly quite literally genocide.
I think the most interesting jobs technically are in developer tools or developer infrastructure companies. This includes companies building databases (e.g. Cockroach, Neon.tech), compilers (e.g. JetBrains), CDNs (e.g. Fastly, Cloudflare), hosting (e.g. Digital Ocean). These companies hire frontend developer, backend developers, core systems developers. You don't have to be a genius or a CS grad. You can always get i…
That's probably true. The work I always love the most is building tools to help other people at work... On the other hand I've found those companies hard to break into because they often expect you to have specific expertise in things like "very high scale applications" or specific low-level things. I only tried Gitlab I think, and never really heard back.
In my last job search, I swore up and down that I’d not settle for money again, but would actually put effort into getting a job I wanted. It didn’t work out.
Almost every job I applied for, I got ATS screened out of. I remember looking at one job and thinking “oh yeah, I could do this”. The job wanted experience with some tool I’ve used numerous times over years to assist with debugging/hacking etc. Unfortunately, that’s not a concrete job or project I can place in my resume.
In the end, the only people willing to talk were people who had jobs that were basically what I’ve been stuck doing my professional career.
There are way I can think of to get around or, but they’ll just take so much time, that I’d rather just waste my time/money going to learn how to do something else. I’ve been burnt out on programming since before I did it professionally anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's a good way to make yourself hard to replace, but they're probably gonna want you to keep doing the thing you're hard to replace at.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The best paying jobs are often parasitic. Like stock manipulation. Or you could look at it as part of the process of allocating society’s resources towards more productive ventures from less productive ventures. It is not the perfect mechanism, but if anyone has a better idea, they are welcome to share. I would credit at least some people working in finance for opening up the ability for any financially illiterate…
How exactly are you equating "stock manipulation" with the ability to "buy broad equity index ETFs at near zero cost" ? That's clearly not what the OP was referencing.
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…