
Ask HN: Where are the interesting jobs? - Jormundir
Lately while conducting a job search, I&#x27;ve been running in to company after company that just seem to want another cog in their feature grinding machine. I&#x27;ve been having a hard time finding software engineering jobs that are more than just &quot;crank out web application features&quot; smoothly put as &quot;solving hard problems&quot;.<p>Does your company have a job that is more than just code monkeying? Please post it in this thread with explanation of why it&#x27;s more.
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dljsjr
We're gonna have some job listings up come February.

Might be a tough sell for a lot of the folks here. We're not in the valley;
we're in a small Florida city called Pensacola. And we're not slinging web
apps. And we don't use super-sexy languages, we use Java. We're working on
software for humanoid robots.

I work at the IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition). We just came
in 2nd place in the DARPA Robotics Challenge after SCHAFT, so we're moving
forward with decent funding and we have a Boston Dynamics/Google Atlas robot
that we used in the competition.

We don't suffer from a lot of the poor project management that is endemic to
pure academics; we have a pretty healthy "Agile" culture, so much so that
Atlassian is actually an official engineering partner on our team and
occasionally sends engineers on-site to work with us both with their products
and contributing code to the 'bot itself. Our team is very international
(French, Dutch, Taiwanese, Spanish, American, Canadian, and if you count the
Atlassian folks then we have an Aussie) and Pensacola is actually a pretty
cool town. Plus it's on the beach. If you're interested, take a look at
[http://robots.ihmc.us/jobs](http://robots.ihmc.us/jobs) come February.

 _EDIT_

I foolishly posted this right as I'm about to go to bed, so I won't be
checking in on comment replies. If anybody has questions, contact info is in
my profile.

~~~
geuis
It's really, really interesting to hear someone doing from Pensacola working
on robotics. I spent several years there in my youth. Wish you all the luck.

For anyone looking to move there though, there isn't much to offer. The
schools aren't very good. The local university is UWF, University of West
Florida. It's a _very_ conservative Christian area. Just want to emphasize
VERY. Not a place to raise kids if you want them to have any early advantages
in life.

That being said, the city is very family oriented. I was in Boy Scouts for
many years there (Troop 610 ftw). Despite the overbearing religious pressure
everywhere, I found a livable situation.

The beaches are gorgeous. There's nothing bad to be said about that. Go,
visit, just for that experience.

Maybe things have changed since I lived there. Investigate. But my experiences
say no, look elsewhere.

------
RyanZAG
Not sure a lot of the comments here are getting it: nobody (I hope) is really
interested if you're using Haskell or Angular to "crank out web application
features". That's specifically what he's not asking for. Just because you're
cranking out boring stuff in some strange language doesn't make it "solving
hard problems". Besides for the problems you're making for yourself on
purpose, I guess...

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bliti
I'm an average programmer on my best days. Writing the same things over and
over used to seem tedious, and boring. Day-in, day-out writing authentication
backends, some boring object relationship mapped to an use object, Javascript
to disable a button, a test to asset that a page is rendering correctly, etc.
But then one thing happened. It took me less time to do each of those many
"boring" things. Repetition was forcing me to think about the problem behind
user authentication backends. About the most web-compliant way to disable a
button. How to automate the work of writing the tests. Little by little. One
by one. Line by line I started to become a better. Repetition is not bad. It
is good. It forces you to think about the same problem from many different
angles. That is why I'm more than happy writing yet another API in Django. And
I will be happy in any field with any language. Its the process of growing and
developing my skills that keeps me hooked.

------
tkl
The Kaiser Permanente Medical Informatics team is looking for more software
engineers. You will get to do more than code monkeying, though admittedly,
there is always some time spent code monkeying. You will get to help improve
our natural language processing pipeline to wrangle large clinical datasets
(How can we do phrase chunking in a parallel manner? Can we get down to real
time, sub-second, speeds?). Help improve our internal tools to assist our
physicians and linguistic annotators. Can you use statistical analysis or
machine learning to "recommend" other diagnoses? Or, my own personal
curiosity, sparked recently in office: can we reprogram an FPGA to be
optimized for pattern recognition computations?

If these kinds of things excite you, please send me an email at
Theodore.X.Lee@kp.org. We're based in beautiful Del Mar, CA, btw.

Cheers

~~~
bhousel
Hey that is kind of cool. I imagine you could take the UMLS Metathesaurus and
load the parts you are interested in to a in-memory store for fast lookups.

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psgibbs
I posted this on the "Who's hiring" thread a few days ago, but didn't get much
traction. Basically, if you are interested in science and/or energy, we're
going to be doing a lot of really interesting things spanning physics
simulations, system optimizations, and, yes, 'cranking out web application
features'.

We're literally two people right now, but have a great product, and great
traction. It's not a traditional VC style market or exit opportunity, but our
opportunity/headcount ratio is absolutely massive, and we desperately need to
hire.

=======

Folsom Labs, San Francisco CA, Full-time Software Engineer
[http://www.folsomlabs.com](http://www.folsomlabs.com)

We're building the next generation in solar (PV) system design tools;
basically we make it very easy to analyze the potential value of a new PV
systems by leveraging an advanced physics simulation engine. We've been in
beta for about a year, and are formally calling it 1.0 in a few weeks. We've
got a lot of great traction, and almost universally stellar feedback from our
users. We've also recently received a federal grant[1] to help fund our next
generation of products (and a round of hires).

Everyday we get to deal with a range of problems that few startups get to
offer – we have a pretty modern web-stack [2] (that we actually need, not just
to be trendy), but also get to solve interesting physics/optimization problems
on a regular basis, while also acting as industry thought-leaders. It's a
really unique place in both the solar industry, and as a software company.

We've made it this far as a two-man team, and we're poised for a lot of growth
in the next year, so it's about time we brought on some help. If you're a
full-stack engineer looking to do some really interesting work (and
occasionally put your undergrad physics courses to real use), we'd love to
hear from you.

– Paul

paul.gibbs@folsomlabs.com

[1]
[http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/sunshot/incubator_projects...](http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/sunshot/incubator_projects..).

[2] AngularJS (frontend), Python/Flask (API/Backend), Cython/C (Physics
Simulation Engine)

*edit:reformatted the original "Who's Hiring" post

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lesgrossman
Porn. No joke. Been working as a developer for tube and premium porn sites the
past two years -- by far the best work experience I've ever had. Easy work
environment, make my own schedule, low stress and high profitability.
Worldwide travel with a bunch of partyers. Comfort may depend on your opinion
of the industry, but the benefits are real.

~~~
BeoShaffer
How do you get a job in porn if you don't already know someone in the field? I
never see job ads for it, and when I tried searching on Dice my query was
"corrected" to "port".

------
j45
I think somethings being missed here. Interesting problems come out of the
problems no one else is willing to solve or tackle because they're looking for
something sexier.

The most interesting and random work of my life so far has come from never
saying no, and instead a "let me think about it" and finding a way to get it
done. This, in turn gets you a track record, and reputation for interesting
conversations and problems.

Be a student of problems as a whole and the small boring problems you solve
all become part of interesting solutions later.

------
jtreminio
Maybe start hunting in different industries? I did a bunch of the regular ol'
ecommerce shops, selling stupid shit to people with too much money, before
landing jobs in the education and healthcare fields and I have to say I am
much happier now.

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derekchiang
What I used to do was to browse the companies funded by leading venture
capital firms like KPCB[1]. These companies tend to do non-trivial stuff.

[1] [http://www.kpcb.com/companies](http://www.kpcb.com/companies)

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lsiebert
I see more boring jobs as an opportunity to polish your craft. Especially if
you are more junior, like me, you can learn from coworkers, as well as on your
own. Now if I can just get one :-).

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ibstudios
Sounds like you are sick of other people's ideas.

~~~
DustinCalim
This.

~~~
vertr07
.. is not Reddit.

~~~
socksy
To be fair to reddit, "this" comments get downvoted to oblivion there too.

------
yesimahuman
Not sure if you're more interested in spending time working on an open source
project and getting paid to do it? We are looking to hire in 2014:
[http://ionicframework.com/](http://ionicframework.com/)

~~~
noname123
How are you planning to monetize on it?

And how does it fit in with your commercial products that's like VB for
Bootstrap, jQuery Mobile? Is the open source project going to be the
cannibalized as the backend/engine for those products?

~~~
yesimahuman
We are building a suite of mobile development tools with Ionic at the core,
building on the success of our previous products, focusing on HTML5 on mobile.
Less focused on drag-and-drop though for now.

------
hunvreus
If you feel like traveling, our Shanghai office is currently recruiting both
FT and interns;
[http://wiredcraft.com/careers.html](http://wiredcraft.com/careers.html). We
have an SF office with 2 FT staff and me traveling back and forth and are
planning to open in Berlin this summer, but aren't yet recruiting tech
profiles in the Bay.

Lots of Javascript (AngularJS, node.js), Go and Python. Lots of work on
infrastructure, developer tools and data visualization. Projects are either
our own products or for our clients (World Bank, UN...).

We have a flat structure and expect our team members to take direction and
give a sh*t about what they do.

------
sanxiyn
Mozilla is looking for a compiler engineer who will work on LLVM, Emscripten,
and Rust.

[http://careers.mozilla.org/en-
US/position/o3VZWfwD](http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/o3VZWfwD)

------
thearn4
What is your background? Do you have a particular development area or industry
that you are interested in (web development, scientific computing, etc)?

Government agencies (NASA, DOE, etc) and related industries (aerospace,
defense, healthcare, etc) work on some very interesting and unique problems.
But these jobs are generally more limiting (think legacy languages), often
come with their own sets of cultural overhead (sometimes the antithesis of
agile), and will likely pay less than what you are used to (if coming from
SV). The trade-offs are tricky.

------
pwim
Big companies have big budgets for recruiting, which is why you'll see their
ads everywhere.

Interesting jobs often rely on referrals. You might try attending some of your
local developer events to see what is happening around you.

If there is any technology you are passionate about, you could try checking
out conferences about it. You don't necessarily have to attend - just try
checking out the list of sponsors / speakers. Companies that are involved with
conferences tend to have more interesting jobs.

------
zbruhnke
We're logging into 700+ banks and bill providers already (right now its just
two of us and I am the only engineer) and we've only been working at it for
four months.

We're building the most advance financial data API on the market and we've got
ideas that go well beyond traditional scraping.

Though we're starting with a kind of "Twilio for finance" our long term goal
is actually much different and I'm happy to share that with you if you want to
drop me an email(its in my profile).

But lets suffice it to say you won't be building basic CRUD apps. We believe
in automating tasks to our core and if our plans go as expected we'll be
competing against companies that have hundreds or even thousands of engineers
but building a company that I think can scale to the same revenue levels with
less than 100.

We're a startup and we're very early stage (Pre-seed) but we've already turned
down a $4MM acquisition offer and we're in this for the long haul.

To be clear the question we set out to answer when we started this was "If
Google built intuit today, where would they start?"

I think we're off to a pretty good start and would love to chat further if
that interests you at all

------
WadeWilliams
We're hiring across the board at Local Motors.

We run ideation, design and engineering challenges on our responsive
Django/AngularJS based platform, and we are white labeling this platform at
armycocreate.com (to develop soldier solutions) and at a location to be
announced this spring (for a fortune 10 company).

Our core site at localmotors.com is based around automotive innovation -- we
currently are manufacturing the Rally Fighter (rallyfighter.com), Verrado
Drift Trike (verradodrifttrike.com) and the LM Racer (localmotors.com/racer)
in our Microfactory network. We currently are headquartered in Phoenix, have a
Microfactory in Las Vegas, and are expanding to the East Coast in the spring.

In the past we entered and won the Experimental Crowd Sourced Vehicle
challenge hosted by DARPA in 2010 when we produced the XC2V in under 6 months
time from design to delivering the vehicle to President Obama.

Our tech team is currently about 10 people deep ranging from server admin, db,
UI/UX design and Python/JS Engineering roles. We currently only list a Front
End position on our Jobs page but we're definitely interested in expanding our
Tech Team, building some native iOS/Android apps.

This is much much more than a code factory... we're actually developing real
products whose inception happens on the web platform. Our in-house knowledge
is deep in design, engineering and manufacturing of physical products rooted
in automotive -- but we certainly could use more help on the web side of
things. We've got a great core on our tech team right now but we've had the
hardest time finding talent in the Phoenix area.

If you've got the skillset and experience we're looking for, you'll have a
huge amount of influence on the platform's direction, in addition to the
opportunity to crank out some super cool features that solve real problems --
but you'll be able to choose your own destiny, which for me is almost more
interesting than just one or the other option.

We're not totally against remote work but we'd prefer you to have a presence
in one of our Microfactory locations, or at least have the ability to spend a
significant amount of time (>30%) in Phoenix at our headquarters, at least for
your onboarding period.

Please contact me directly @ wwilliams@localmotors.com if you are interested.

~~~
RollAHardSix
"Expanding to the East Coast in the spring" \- Interesting! Where too?

------
ganjianwei
I work at a 50 person (20+ engineers) startup
([http://www.tellapart.com/](http://www.tellapart.com/)) that works on real
time personalization for retailers. Here are some specific things we're
working on that folks might find interesting:

\- Rearchitecting our data system to use the lambda architecture
([http://www.manning.com/marz/](http://www.manning.com/marz/)) so we can build
better personalization products on top of retailers' customer data.

\- Building and improving machine learning models to predict user's behavior
and what users want based on a ton of datapoints we collect for hundreds of
millions of users.

{my_username[-3:]}@tellapart.com if you'd like to find out more

------
MyNameIsMK
Try working for a small business NOT IN TECH. Things get interesting fast. You
will like it.

------
msutherl
Look at the conspicuous large corporations: Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia,
Qualcomm, Samsung, AMD, Amazon, Apple. Plenty of interesting jobs for
engineers in this companies.

On the flip side, consider something like product management.

------
sssantosha
We're working on fixing this exact problem. I'm with Mighty Spring
([https://www.mightyspring.com](https://www.mightyspring.com)) and we're
hiring.

We're building a tool for job search that takes into account not only what
someone can do - but what they'd _like_ to be doing. We want to show people a
path to get from where they are to where they'd like to be.

Most of the companies we're helping are startups - early enough to be at the
problem solving stage instead of the feature add-on stage.

------
OafTobark
Honest question but what are some examples of what you're looking for. I get
the question but I'm not sure I can be certain what qualifies as a good
answer.

FWIW, I'm not hiring, I'm just curious.

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calinet6
Companies don't have this, because it's very rare for a company to define
their core purpose, to understand how it relates to employee motivation, and
to communicate it clearly both ways. They generally don't understand that what
people want in "culture" is not foosball tables and free snacks, but the
opportunity to do work that matters and be truly valued for it. It would be a
huge cultural shift for most companies to align their values in this way, but
it would be immeasurably beneficial.

Companies: get on that.

------
mclarke
Mike at Standard Treasury here. We're hiring engineers to help us redefine the
way companies integrate with their commercial banks. It sounds unsexy (at
least compared to robotics mentioned elsewhere in this thread), but there's a
massive opportunity in front of us to build APIs for banks. We're not cranking
out features; we're selling a full developer experience and ecosystem. Let me
know at mike@standardtreasury.com if you'd like to hear the rest of my sales
pitch!

------
mpascolutti
As part of the R&D team of UniCredit I can safely tell you we do more than
just webapps with this new "en vague" js framework. Our aim is to push forward
technology inside the bank to whatever direction we see fit. Lots of reasoning
right now is on data visualization and manipulation (add the word "big" to it
yourself). We also patented some hw stuff (pretty unusual for a bank). We're
based in Milano, Italy (but we might expand a little bit).

Feel free to contact me.

------
JeuneeSimon
We've hacked Google glass and Apple's Touch ID and I think that's pretty
interesting...and maybe qualifies as more (at least in my book) Lookout is a
mobile security company that is has the largest app behavior dataset and is
using that big data to protect our 45+ million users and detect things like
widespread Russian SMS fraud. If that's interesting to you, feel free to learn
more here: www.lookout.com

Cheers! Jeunee jeunee.simon@lookout.com

------
bevacqua
Not exactly what you were looking for, but if you take a look at
[https://github.com/bevacqua/frontend-job-
listings](https://github.com/bevacqua/frontend-job-listings), there's lots of
job boards interesting companies (and then some) post their listings to.

[https://github.com/bevacqua/frontend-job-
listings](https://github.com/bevacqua/frontend-job-listings)

------
furqanrydhan
I feel it's pretty rare to work for a company that isn't about "push this
out", check out The Monkey Inferno
([http://bit.ly/monkeyinfernojobs](http://bit.ly/monkeyinfernojobs)).

I working started here about 5 months ago, it's pretty much a place where you
can just run with an idea and you get to just be you.

email me if you have any questions: furqan@monkeyinferno.com

------
krsmith35
I think the really interesting jobs are the ones we will create by 1) applying
our technology lens to the real world to develop ideas and 2) connecting with
each other in a more meaningful way than the standard discussion thread.

The days of smart technical people being content with something listed on the
careers page are almost over.

------
wlievens
I'll add a European perspective here: we're a growing tech company in Antwerp,
Belgium. We design and sell CMOS image sensors for all sorts of medium- and
high-end markets. We're looking for an additional software engineer right now
(team of two now). Contact me if you're interested!

------
blooberr
My friend left the bay area recently to work on visual effects for movies.
These are real challenges with concrete ways of assessing if you're doing your
job (does it look good?) Also requires heavy math and computer science skills.

That might be an option for some of you with a similar background.

------
maccard
I'm also interested in this - I'm graduating in August with a Masters in CS,
(degree in engineering), and all I can find are the likes of Google graduate
program, (or other similar sized companies), rather than R&D-style
positions...

------
dgesang
"Bad news: Unicorn jobs don't exist, at least not for long." \- Philip Guo
[http://pgbovine.net/unicorn-jobs.htm](http://pgbovine.net/unicorn-jobs.htm)

~~~
noname123
I read the article. Why not work at a intellectually undemanding dayjob like a
barrista or waiter or bookstore clerk and then work on an interesting open
source project on your own free time?

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
I'm actually doing this right now. Working at a Target warehouse and on my
startup and projects when I'm off. The problem is there are 2 kinds of jobs
generally, physically demanding and mentally demanding. If you do something
mentally demanding you will lose all motivation to work on your own projects
when you get home. When you work a physically demanding job where you can
daydream and think while at work and come home to code, don't bother because
you'll be physically exhausted at the end of your shift. The perfect match
seems to be finding a part time job. 20 hours a week, no more no less.

------
147
Where are you located? I hear Matasano Security is a great place to work at.
In fact, I sent Thomas an email earlier if there were openings for an
internship. No response yet.

------
feverishaaron
Check out mPATH.com - We're solving some hard problems in an interesting way,
and we have customers knocking down our doors.

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factorialboy
> Ask HN: Where are the interesting jobs?

In your mind. What's interesting or boring get's decided there. ;-)

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5vforest
We're trying to make sure that Healthcare.gov never happens again.

dobt.co

