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Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
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Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
#2I sit in a chair, in front of a panel with many lights, and another panel with many buttons. And I press the buttons rapidly in some specific order to make certain lights go on or off.
Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
#3I currently work at an ad agency (we call ourselves a "boutique data-driven marketing company") in Milwaukee. My official title is Developer, but I do a lot of things: I manage servers, code applications (HTML/CSS/Javascript, but also C, R, and loads of shell scripting), research new concepts, automate existing workflows, and so much more.
Before I did this, I worked as a freelancer doing one-off website jobs for small businesses. Finding clients was easy, but I started dreading the same work everyday. I'm much happier doing what I do now, but in a while I want to start a non-profit with some co-worker friends.
I'd want that non-profit to be education-related. Education is a really important space to improve, but adding "technology" to an already-bloated space is useless. I feel too many organizations try to add tech for tech's sake, when it's already impossible to get a class into a computer lab and make effective use of that time. Educational software needs to be thought of differently. Another crap webapp that tests students is a detriment to every student that has to suffer through it. Educational software needs to allow students to explore nature and the world around them.
Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
#4I sit in a chair, in front of a panel with many lights, and another panel with many buttons. And I press the buttons rapidly in some specific order to make certain lights go on or off.
You work on the USS Enterprise?
Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
#5I work as a software developer on a product that provides a remote desktop environment whose activity is recorded. This isn't the main business of the company I work for; they do contracting work and use this environment for auditing purposes. I mainly do JavaScript/HTML/CSS and some C/C++/Python work.
I neither like nor dislike my job. I like the people I work with, and I get to architect things and play with new technologies, but I'm not in love with my work. I accept that, I don't think I'd find any other work environment in this field to be that different.
Honestly, I was happier when I was serving coffee. My favourite job was when I was in the geophysics field and was sent all over the world on mapping projects. The mining/oil industry crashed though, and that's over for me unless I amp up my education. It wasn't the job itself I liked; it was being sent in these wonderful locations that I'd never get to travel to otherwise, free of charge.
Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
#6I sit in a chair, in front of a panel with many lights, and another panel with many buttons. And I press the buttons rapidly in some specific order to make certain lights go on or off.
Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
#7I make coffee, drink it...
I also eat biscuits.
Sometimes they make me write some code, so we can buy more and better cakes.
This is only the morning, afternoon it's wine.
My official title is Developer, but I call myself "Responsable cuisine / employé du mois"
This is my first legal job, so I don't know if it's my favorite.
Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
#8Current job: leading four-person, client-focused software development/design company. I'm the "managing partner" and spend ~80% of my time writing code/technical architecture and 20% on personnel/payroll/admin/marketing/etc.
I'm trying to take the best parts of a law firm (explicit focus on mentorship, got-your-back partnership mentality, treating people like skilled, autonomous professionals, good pay) and apply it to software dev. I expect a lot out of people but give them the tools and space necessary to get things done. We're going to build a product in 2016.
I have about 8 yrs experience as a working dev. Last job was at a startup that grew explosively but had massive tech/architecture problems of its own making. I wore a lot of hats at this place over 3 yrs including dev, ops eng/head of ops, and some product management on our API (we were a developer tools company) but ultimately got sick of shoveling shit behind repeated poor decisions made over many years. I was a founder before that for a company that had a small acquisition, and before that I worked at Microsoft for a while.
Favorite kinda depends on what you value. I get the most professional satisfaction out of my current job; we do things at a reasonable, sustainable pace, and don't have "crunch time". OTOH there's a thrill at "up and to the right" you get in venture tech that's hard to replicate. You'll probably make the most money in bigco tech, but if you save and invest well in your 20s, you can start to replace a lot of wage income with investment income pretty rapidly in your 30s.
Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
#9I sit in a chair, in front of a panel with many lights, and another panel with many buttons. And I press the buttons rapidly in some specific order to make certain lights go on or off.
I do that too! Sometimes it feels silly and a bit depressing to spend my days turning colored lights on and off, but at other times I think of it differently:
I'm writing in a number of languages that (apparently) many people cannot understand, let alone be fluent in. This language allows me to write things into existence, entire complex structures. In fact, within the bounds of the virtual (mostly), I can create pretty much anything I want!
As a child I created a game that my father actually got addicted to. I didn't need paper, pencils, scissors, or any other things that I'm not too good with. Just a computer and a knowledge of it's language (Object Pascal).
As a teenager, I created realistic environments that many people spent hours immersed in, sneaking, attacking, finding secrets, and whatnot. And while I did need a mouse and some special visual tools for that (UnrealEd and JkEdit), it also involved 'writing'.
And now, as an adult, I created my own tools for journalling and time tracking, etc., a number of 'online publication platforms', and even a few minor things that escape the bounds of the virtual. And all by writing in these special languages! It still feels like magic after all these years.
While sometimes I wish my work felt more 'real', like the tables a friend of mine 'hand-crafts', I still sometimes stop and marvel at what I can do with just a text editor and a laptop. And now more than ever before it's possible to create things that actually do stuff in the 'real' world. That might be my next big focus.
And I didn't even mention how all this makes me enough money to not worry about making money, or the fact that I have an amount of control over the results that I suspect many other people would envy.
I try to remind myself of that when I'm faced with some ridiculous CSS hack, a silly request from a client, or a weird bug hidden in the ridiculous amount of layers of abstraction at the basis of my day to day work.
Re: Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?
#10I left college at the end of freshman year to work as a product/software developer at a vehicle data company. It's an absolute blast; my team is great and the environment couldn't be better. After 4:30, I have total freedom to work on side projects without distraction. I'm learning more than ever before and I'm meeting all kinds of interesting people.