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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?

#201

Post by [deleted] »

agentultra wrote: post #142
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.

There are software engineers with decades of highly specialized knowledge and skill whose day job is writing batch report scripts and tweak templates. They get paid a quarter of a million base . And they could be replaced in a heartbeat with a junior engineer: schlepping database queries into text files has been bread and butter for decades. It's the bugers-and-fries of programming. Salaries don't correlate with valu…

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by lifthearth »

yodsanklai wrote: post #176
uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FAANG is mostly 3 steps. 1. chat with the recruiter 2. screening interview 3. on-site interview You normally get an offer after 3. EDIT: I'm downvoted, but this was my experience at Google/Facebook. There were exactly three steps. There can be more if they ask a follow up if you're borderline in some of the interviews but it's not the default.

My experience was FAANG was dragging their feet but another massive tech company hired me in 3. They make a decision if they want you almost immediately based on your experience. If the answer is no they'll keep your in the pipeline just in case. Your first year is the real interview IMO.

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

#203

Post by Zvez »

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…

I achieved this state of 'you can choose whatever you want to do here, you are too useful to loose' on my previous job and it was pretty great. The main problem with this is you have to invest couple of years to get proper reputation. But you need to be mindful about what you actually get for your efforts. I've started working at [faang] a year ago and now I'm pretty sure I've wasted this year. While I got my share of good reputation, the team I'm working in is basically an island. There is no visibility to other teams, so I can't convert my local reputation into ticket to choose projects I like.

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

#204

Post by walleeee »

uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #186
xtracto wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I think the question still stands: I would kill for a science related tech job. But these are not found on indeed, HN or even LinkedIn. The post-doc job I got after my PhD was through one of my Viva examiners, who forwarded me an email from some science email list. Theres no way I could have found it without him. There are EU Framework Programme projects that have good funding for research, but you need to know w…

yeah I have absolutely no idea. When I look on linkedin, google, typical job boards and others, I mostly find startups.

I've had some success cold emailing researchers and asking about openings in scientific computing. Worst case they just say no. Also look at university corporations, e.g. AUI, UCAR/NCAR, etc. They sometimes hire staff programmers and/or contractors to farm out to federal agencies. Universities themselves may also post staff developer positions; these can be an entry point into a scientific discipline if the role allows you to make connections with people in the field. Another option is government agencies themselves, e.g. in NIH and CDC I think there is some recent demand for bioinformatics developers.

It's probably better to identify an organization you're interested in first, then look at their job boards. Aggregators likely won't list as many of these roles.

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

#205

Post by uVacCXNiiJCTnYB »

jackling wrote: post #187
inglor wrote: post #29

> How do you find interesting gigs? Get really good in a specific field you care about - for me that was platforms and programming languages but you might really enjoy other stuff. When I say really good let me emphasize that's not exceptional, I am in no means a great programming language designer or web platform person or developer in general. Once you get beyond a threshold - you'll find a lot of people who deeply…

Any advice on how to contribute to open source? Everytime I want to, the project seems too big and the issues too complex. Either that, or someone else has already started working on an issue before I can ask to take it on.

It's a bit hard to find something. Usually, people who contribute do so because they're users of a project and want to fix bugs or add features, so that's one way.

Other than that, most of my open source work was just created by myself. If there's something you think could be useful or interesting, just make it and open source it.

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

#206

Post by fruzz »

Ask yourself to define "interesting" using concrete terms.

Are there specific fields you want the company to be in? List them.

Are there specific roles you want to be in within the company? List them.

How much of your time do you want to spend doing feature development vs maintenance? List that.

Are there specific stacks you want to be using? List them.

What size/phase of company maturity do you want? List it.

Go from there.

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

#207

Post by Zvez »

roflyear wrote: post #131
neilv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can also argue that is is almost impossible to show code to you for very simple reason: showing couple of files won't make any difference for you anyway and you can't just transfer your codebase to a person. The only thing you can do is to sit candidate to a laptop with the codebase for couple of hours, but I doubt anyone will go that far.

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

#209

Post by sicp-enjoyer »

uVacCXNiiJCTnYB wrote: post #184
sicp-enjoyer wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsolicited advice: I think you're right, nobody will pay you for it. Every serious programmer interested in game dev writes engines as a hobby. Just search through GitHub. It's partly because it's just tech exploration fun.. If you're serious about games you should make a game. Build an engine too, but only build what you need for the game. This will guide you in making the countless tradeoffs necessary to build an…

I worked in the game industry for years and left it, I've made games before. The engine I'm making is for a very specific need (initially made to help someone else make a specific game), a few people have been using it to make their games, but it's a pretty niche thing for narrative games - https://get-narrat.com/ I'm making it for fun, but I don't expect something like that to ever make money, for that I'd need some…

Sounds like fun. Disregard my comment then.

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

#210

Post by dont__panic »

- Sift through the buzzword crap. Be prepared to spend days looking at company web pages and job listings without applying to any jobs at all. I'm not interested in web3, AI, fintech, or adtech. So 90% of jobs go straight to the trash. But it's worth digging into some opportunities in case they're just effective marketers using buzzwords to bring in more applicants, with a genuinely interesting actual job.

- Set up recurring searches with diffs of new jobs that match your language/framework/environment preferences. Much better than continually sifting through the same listings. Better yet, find something that'll allow you to blacklist crappy companies you'd never work for -- Facebook, Google, IBM, Oracle are on my blacklist.

- Find niche communities with hiring listings that better align with your interests. I work in documentation, so I'm a member of Write the Docs, which has its own job board. Hacker News Who is Hiring has a lot of companies that are too small for my liking, but medium size places do occasionally advertise -- it's your job to find them.

- Don't go to overboard on filters. I learned this from apartment searching: listers frequently make mistakes. Filtering too hard on "2+ bathrooms" would have omitted my current rental, which was erroneously listed as 1 bathroom. If you filter too hard for "MUST HAVE >150k COMPENSATION" or any other criteria, recruiters will post incorrect listings that you'll end up missing. Human intuition on an unfiltered query can often find diamonds in the rough that no amount of filtering would ever identify. So occasionally just... look at the HN Who is Hiring page, with no filters, and click on things that look interesting. You might be surprised at what you find.

- ABI (Always Be Interviewing) -- the more you interview, the better you get at it. Interview candidates at your company to better understand the interviewer side of things -- it'll make you perform better in interviews, too. There are all kinds of recruiter tricks used to manipulate you. There are all kinds of tricks YOU can learn to better learn about a company before you sign an offer. You should try to learn as many of these tricks as possible so you won't be bamboozled by them in the future.

But it mostly comes down to time and patience. Great jobs are few and far between, and often have Achilles' heels of their own as well -- a crappy vacation policy, no 401k match, etc. Figure out what you're willing to compromise on, and wait for the opportunity to arise. And when it comes, don't be afraid to pounce.

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