
Ask HN: Newly realized “hacker”. Cry for help - karqat
I&#x27;m a software developer... or so I think... then I realized recently that in truth, I am actually a hacker who has been trying to find an outlet for creative problem solving, and not finding it in my chosen career.<p>Tl;dr. What do I do with this realization? I&#x27;m losing my sanity, and having aneurysms on a daily basis: over the overlording by management; over the smell of big client money controlling everyone&#x27;s words and actions, instead of having the hard conversations of how to build something correctly... the first time; over the paradigm mongering; over the complexity and inefficiency from head to toe, from dev team, product lifecycle, or business...
Are there jobs that people with a hackers mentality are more well suited for? Is there some role or position I should be looking for? Or should I be looking for the right kind of company or team? Am I simply barking up the wrong industry? Where do I go, what do I do?
Help.<p>Please see my original post below. It didn&#x27;t fit within the 2k character limit, but it gives more context to my question.
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pixpop
You might find embedded systems development more up your alley. The hardware
is always broken in some way and you often have to get very creative to work
around those deficiencies. Especially when there's an ASIC involved.

You'll get to experience a whole different class of aneurysms ;-)

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karqat
but how do i get into it? Where do I find those jobs? What do they want to see
on a resume? What koalafications?

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calcsam
Dude, come to Silicon Valley. Whatever kind of development style, methodology,
personality type, will make you happy, you'll find it here.

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karqat
3 years ago I participated in a software boot camp. As a satcom operator in
the Army, I thought it was a natural prgoression. After the boot cam, I
plopped myself in a chair at a start up and that "That's it. I've done it."

It wasn't long after that when I thought to myself, "That's it?" Work became
boredom, a slog, fighting with IDE's, and IDE managed references, fighting
with merge conflicts, 3-4 hour sprint planning, philosophical debates about
paradigms and methodologies... corporate personality surveys?? Software
developers were supposed to be people who learn and solve problems, and do
both of those things as efficiently as possible... or so I thought?

Today, it's been 3 years since that feeling began to sink in. I'm now in my
5th contracted position, and having been on 7 or 8 different projects and 9 or
10 different teams, I am getting this sinking feeling that this is simply the
nature of software development: Complexity for the sake of the ego of the
architect, unintelligible code bases, inefficiency of process, inefficiencies
of SOFTWARE process, horribly written code, business needs superseding the
purview of a scrum team (without which, why even bother with scrum? Isn't the
point to keep the business out of telling a software team to do its job?)

Luckily, while I was at the boot camp, I recalled my time in the military,
communications systems, command line. All this time that I've been payed to
sit in a chair, and not accomplish much else, I've been at home, delving into
any and every subject I can possibly imagine. I've become a bit of a bash
fanatic, I always have some form of linux on hand, whether one of my phones,
my raspi, my personal laptop, or a vm on my work pc. I'm constantly building
tools to automate stupid processes I'm required to do at work, and expanding
my vimrc.

This last week, I started digging into assembly and optimization patterns in
C, and I came accross an article, I'm sure many of you have read.

[http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-
mel.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html)

If not, I highly recommend it. It's an entertaining read. This naturally took
me to the home page of this particular site. Curious, I started clicking
through page after page, and I began to identify with some of what this
website was saying. I remember picking up a book at a store called Hacking:
The Art of Exploitation (2nd edition) I remember it clearly with its yellow on
black text, and its stark appearance. I remember it because the chapter
headings were written with hexidecimal, which I thought was very hackerish of
the author. And I read the preface where he asks you to combine 1,3,4, and 6
using only the basic mathematical operators to equal 24, and I pondered this
question the entire trip home, which was a 2 hour drive from the city I was
visiting. This website made me realize, maybe I'm a hacker... trying to be a
corporate software developer.

Tl;dr. What do I do with this realization? I'm losing my sanity, and having
aneurysms on a daily basis: over the overlording by management; over the smell
of big client money controlling everyone's words and actions, instead of
having the hard conversations of how to build something correctly... the first
time; over the paradigm mongering; over the complexity and inefficiency from
head to toe, from dev team, product lifecycle, or business...

Are there jobs that people with a hackers mentality are more well suited for?
Is there some role or position I should be looking for? Or should I be looking
for the right kind of company or team? Am I simply barking up the wrong
industry? Where do I go, what do I do? Help.

