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Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?
223 points by uVacCXNiiJCTnYB on Aug 18, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 248 comments
I would kill for a job that feels even remotely useful or interesting.

Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups that are just making useless services that clearly won't go anywhere.

I've also found that interviews don't tell you much about reality. I've changed jobs a few times in recent years, every time I had interviews being told about interesting projects, great practices and so on, but once actually there was made to work on mind-numbing useless stuff.

It honestly makes me feel like my skills and time are being wasted. I'll be honest and say I consider myself to be pretty good at what I do (and it's been confirmed at my past jobs where I quickly get that reputation), but I just don't know where to find interesting opportunities that don't feel like either a grift or being a parasite making money out of arguably evil things.

How do you find interesting gigs?




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 option to work on a very interesting project, used by tens of millions, with a clear user-visible outcome. Afterwards I usually had my choice of projects and teams inside that org.

Edit: I guess the actionable advice is to get into a company that is big enough to have _some_ interesting projects.


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 are problems with FAANG type companies being generally kind of evil these days, of course)


Doesn't have to be a FAANG to do something impactful. Many of the other Tech 100 companies have things that you can work on at scale that are fulfilling. I work at a semiconductor company on projects that end up in almost everything, and I love what I do.

The interview process was fine compared to the horror stories I've heard. I had 1 long interview with the manager, then 6 short (30 min) interviews back-to-back with the team over the course of an afternoon. A couple of technical questions but nothing rediculous. They hired me based on credentials, so the tests were ceremonial if anything. It was more about discovering whether I would get on socially with the team.


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.


What about the team-matching portion of the Google interview? I had several post-"onsite" (it was all remote) interviews with interested teams and your performance in these can sink your chances.


Maybe their process has changed at some point? recently, a recruiter told me that they now match with teams based on resume before starting the interview process.

Were your post-onsite technical?


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.


Don't know about Facebook specifically, but for Google and Microsoft, if you let the recruiter know you're actively interviewing and considering other offers, the process speeds up real fast.


For me the recruiter went on holiday and by the time they came back I had a new job lol


I spent a couple months grinding LC before I got my FAANG offers and honestly it was completely worth it, I’m sort of surprised when people feel the opposite.

At the end of the day it’s a couple hundred hours of effort in exchange for years worth of upside. I think when you compare it to the amount of preparation athletes, performers, or service members go through, it really doesn’t seem so bad.


Big part of that then is testing your willingness to servitude.


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 something you wanted to—obviously higher-ups don’t want to lose a good worker.


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 have the companies with work cultures that like to boast about doing "interesting" work - in companies like Google you get nowhere doing important, mundane maintenance work. You'll only get promoted for making the new shiny thing even if you're reinventing the wheel - it's the reason any new Google product that's not a main driver of the business gets shelved after a couple of years.


Yeah, seriously I'd put a big warning on that one. I've been burned many times (and know many people who have) being the nice one who does the hard boring work that no one wants to deal with, only for the company to then make you do more and more of it.

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.


Yeah, this is addressed in the book as well. Thinking about your career in terms of capital is really just a useful simplification, but obviously doesn’t capture all the nuance and politics that one has to navigate in a larger corporate environment.

There needs to be self-advocacy, a little luck, and the willingness to walk away (just like in any negotiation)


What you want to work on should still align with the business' goals, otherwise you're just indulgent. So the art is in recognizing and steering towards that overlap.


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.


At behemoths like FAANG, 95% of engineers are replaceable. The ones that aren't probably joined in the early days and grew with the company. It is very important to grow with a company rather than coming in at the end stages hoping to make an impact. Two equally talented engineers could have widely varying outcomes depended on how they choose their opportunity.


First, you need to actually value interesting work in relation to other job values (like compensation, good working hours, low stress, making a difference, family friendliness, good management and many others). Generally these will be a tradeoff, but you might find one where the tradeoff suits you. For instance I had a job I really enjoyed at an Earth Observation startup geeking out about maps and space, but the comp was pretty mediocre and the management abysmal. But it was enough for my needs at the time and I'm reasonably good at managing up so it didn't bother me too much. Many of my former colleagues left that job dissatisfied, since the tradeoff wasn't to their liking.

Second, always be looking. You are right in observing that 99% of job ads seem totally boring. Partially this can be helped with some filters on job boards, I tend to just filter out "Finance" and "Advertising" since I know that I have basically zero interest in those domains. But the chance that you'll find a great interesting job where you skillset is even vaguely compatible at the time you need it is pretty low. It's better to keep looking well before you need to.

Third, if you meet someone in your field who's working at a place that seems interesting, ask if they're hiring. Even if not, there's a chance that next time they are, the person will remember you. Or perhaps in their next company...

Finally, cultivating a broader skillset rather than a highly specialised one can make this easier, since many interesting companies are probably not doing the exact same everyone else is, so they might need someone who seems more adaptable.

Good luck!


People really forget the first point. All things being equal, everyone wants to work on something interesting. So almost by definition, when interesting things come along people are more than happy to let the other things drop a bit. Pay will likely be a little low (not always). Hours will almost certainly go up, even if it doesn't feel like it since it's more interesting work. The only one I'd disagree on is management, managers like to work on interesting things too :) The one caveat being the org might be more inclined to just promote people who are really good at the technical aspects and don't have any managerial skills.


This is my experience. I have an interesting gig with lower-than-average pay. Periodically I'll take a look at other opportunities because the wages are so good, but most of the time the jobs don't sound better. Mind you, I couldn't pin down what might pull me away.


See the specialising part is interesting to me, because I've found a lot of companies expect you to be very specialised these days, and it really gets in the way of trying new things.

I was originally in the game industry and left it because I was stuck in a hyper specialised niche (web-based game development). I went back to more general full stack, but even here a lot of companies will specifically look for people based on them having multiple years of commercial experience with their specific stack, rather than just holistic experience in the broader area.


You’d be best off looking to join a company that is seed stage or series A. During growth phase is when companies are looking for specialized skills. What are you using for job sources?

Keep in mind though that startups generally frown upon candidates coming across as picky in what they want to work on. You can’t have it both ways. Think it from their perspective. Of course, they don’t need to know about it. And you won’t be working on it if you are at least appearing less productive in that area if they try to get you to work on it ;)

Startups aren’t for everyone though.


And interesting companies don't have to advertise their job postings as far and as wide to get a bunch of candidates. So you have to find the companies first then watch for a posting that fits you.


I have experienced these same tradeoffs.

Of course, in the back of my mind I wonder, isn't it possible to have interesting work AND good management? I don't know why, but it doesn't seem to work out that way.


> I've also found that interviews don't tell you much about reality.

Always ask to see code and talk to engineers about what their days look like. I believe there are very few legitimate reasons they won't show you their code, but more likely if they're refusing, it's because they're hiding something. When talking to an engineer, ask them how their code goes from idea to production and have it explained in detail. This will tell you what type of management they have, what testing/review/deployment practices, etc.. As a bonus, I also like to ask my future peers what they don't like about their job or what they'd like to change.

I agree most jobs are some form of shite, but there are good ones. Being more picky during the interview phase should hopefully allow you to find some of those while weeding out the bad quicker.


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 will give sincere answers to questions, or tell you when they can't tell you (because they don't know, or because of business-related conflicts). What about just asking them what their code is like, and see whether their answer sounds like they know what they're talking about, such that that they could give you an accurate answer.

Variation: if they know what they're talking about, but they misrepresented it intentionally, that's a really bad sign from an engineer. And hiring engineers under false pretenses would be a bad idea, as would setting precedent for engineers in that organization intentionally misrepresenting technical information to each other. (That doesn't mean that a dumb organization wouldn't establish an internal culture of dishonesty anyway, but you'll have to filter out the self-destructive and the scammers some other way.)


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 is little to no benefit to them doing so.


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.


I'd argue that this will absolutely help filter out abysmal codebases made by people who have no idea how to code. I've seen companies like that, I've seen people who don't know how to format code, how to write proper function names in English, hell, I've seen people making Polish comments in an English codebase with grammar errors in their native language. But I agree with other comments, doubt anyone would actually show you code during an interview due to legal reasons.


This may happen more at large companies than at startups, but having interviewees sign NDAs is normal, isn’t it?


I haven't seen NDA on interview from many startups in the Boston area. (Which is good, because I minimize the number of NDAs that I sign, and just try to be professional and collegial.)

The first NDA for an interview that I recall was from a big tech company, and most of it could be paraphrased as something like "Everything we tell you is under strict NDA; anything you tell us, we will treat as public domain" (or maybe it was more like nonexclusive license to use; I forget for certain which that particular company said, since I've also seen the latter since).

Later, I think that company reworked it to be more like "Don't tell us anything that could be proprietary to someone else!"


I don't think the company was trying to be malicious; the double-standard is because they don't want you in a position where you violate an NDA, AND they want to make it clear to their staff (the person interviewing you) not to press you for details.

Agree that their later wording is better, but I suspect good intentions from the start


I've signed NDAs for almost all large company I've interviewed at. But for most smaller startups, haven't had this requirement, as the interviews are more casual conversations. (Also, Boston area.)


Depends on your definition of normal. I've interviewed with 10 companies or so over the last 6 months, ranging from FAANG to series B startups, all US based.

One company asked me to sign an NDA, they're a well known public but non-FAANG Boston based company. I didn't have a problem signing it but I also don't really see the point.


>but having interviewees sign NDAs is normal

I've certainly never had to sign one.


I'm sure it depends on industry, but in my industry there is no way showing someone code during an interview would fly. Zero chance.

A programmer who decided on their own to show our code to someone without nda and a confidentiality agreement would be at best severely chastised and no longer trusted with anything important or dismissed.

But, your mileage may vary - every place is different.


Yeah at my firm an interviewer getting access to and sharing code would go further than dismissal and result in unlocking the cages of the attack lawyers. They may or may not be turned loose but that’s def a DEFCON 2 event.


> Always ask to see code and talk to engineers about what their days look like. I believe there are very few legitimate reasons they won't show you their code, but more likely if they're refusing, it's because they're hiding something. When talking to an engineer, ask them how their code goes from idea to production and have it explained in detail.

In an ideal world it makes sense to have a look at the code and understand how the company works from a holistic standpoint. However in reality I doubt that many companies would allow that to happen at interview stage…


I've asked to peruse source code in interviews and some companies have complied. Never hurts to ask.

I usually just throw out the idea to let my interviewer share their screen and navigate the codebase while I ask questions. This way, we don't have to fiddle with repository access and I can get a glimpse of their organizational culture.


No matter what I simply won't show any code to interviewer due to security reason, no matter how simple it is. It's simply not worth the hassle.


Does it really happened like that in the US ? It seems like a total different world.

Here in France, if I ask for something during the interview process with the recruiter, I will get a response like this: "Sorry we don't do that in our process, so goodbye" and they move to the next candidate while I'm out for this job.


> Here in France, if I ask for something during the interview process with the recruiter, I will get a response like this: "Sorry we don't do that in our process, so goodbye" and they move to the next candidate while I'm out for this job?

Eastern Europe, the same. I asked a couple of years ago what are the credentials of the business unit manager, of the line manager and the technical team lead. They almost laughed me away from the building.


Nah, this person is delusional. I don't even know why you'd want to see their code.

I'm sure plenty would explain their processes and how they code, but they're not showing you their code unless it's already public which would be a moot point then.


That person is not delusional. I've successfully asked for and been shown code as part of interview processes with multiple companies.


From central european here. The initial interview usually has been done by a HR person + someone from the department that is hiring. If that went well there was an on-site tour of the department in question, talking with engineers, looking at their projects including source code and workflows. The only time someone refused to show code was when it was owned by a customer.


Well now you have a career goal - stop working for french companies.


What do you mean by "something"? I am in France and if an candidate does not ask me "something" at all it is usually a big red flag.


By "something", I mean something different in the process like in the comment. If you ask to talk to developer or see some code, or meet the team for a day, you will never have a positive answer. Recruiter will say it's not possible and disqualify you.


Wait, an actual developer/engineer is not conducting the interview ?

To see some code is definitely out of the question, though. But asking about the development process et all I find to be the type of mandatory questions I would ask as a candidate (and expect to be asked as an interviewer) even if I already knew the answer, just because not doing it would be strange.


Judging from sibling comments, this is why you deprioritize or flat out refuse to work on closed source and proprietary software. There are plenty of good companies willing to pay you to work on open source.


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.


I think that's an important part of it. I'd add another factor: the global economy and financial system is an impossibly complex construct that nobody understands in its totality and which as a result is very difficult to control and predict. Some companies and people manage to find parts of the system where they can essentially tap into a stream of money. Jobs in that area then tend to pay rather more than you would expect from their overall social value (and from the value to the global economy of that stream of money existing), because they're locally valuable in increasing the efficiency of the tapping-of-money process. Conversely, important work that happens not to be easily tied to tapping some stream of money is much less well paid and often under-resourced entirely.


That part sounds like "Don't be perceived as a cost-center," but I think most big-lumbering-org departments have figured out how to plead their case. That's a lot harder to do with something like teaching, where there's a large supply of candidates and everyone agrees the job is socially valuable, but confounding factors make it very hard to measure any individual's contribution.


Is there a large supply of teachers? My impression is that lots of countries have a teacher shortage. And that's partly because society doesn't value teachers as much as it should. Over a century ago, teachers were still considered among the important people of the town (together with the mayor and the local notary), and commanded some respect. These days they're often seen as glorified babysitters despite having manager-level responsibilities.


There is at least a large supply of new, cheap teachers. It's essentially the only adult profession that high-school and college students know (in the US) besides what their parents do, and you can get into it from a starting point of any major. I'd still say the big issue isn't that society doesn't want to value teachers, but that it's terrible at identifying good ones, so it ends up being a race-to-the-bottom.


> And that's partly because society doesn't value teachers as much as it should.

Speaking from Australia, I'd probably command enormous respect if I taught some kid programming. Compared to the median wage I'd be roughly doubling their earning power & I could get them a good desk job if they are smart-ish and try hard.

However, I'm legally barred from becoming a "teacher" because I don't have a masters degree in education.

This is probably the heart of why they don't command respect like they used to - it used to be that people worthy of respect became teachers. Now people worthy of respect become some other profession and aren't allowed to teach their high-value skills without jumping through hoops.


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 value at all. It's a highly political thing.


We also pay people based on how much power they have. People with lots of power and influence have more pull to ensure better pay for themselves. That power may come from being hard to replace, but it can also come from other things. Even bad CEOs that run their company into the ground, who really should get replaced, still draw significant pay on the way down, and may only be hard to replace because of the power they hold over the company.

But also: people don't get paid based on the value they create for society, but on the value they create for shareholders. So running a company into the ground may actually be short-term profitable for the shareholders if you manage to keep dividend payouts high. Parasitic companies extract value from society and give it to their shareholders. Lots of companies do enormous damage to various aspects of society, but as long as they don't have to pay for that damage, they can still be profitable for their shareholders.

Shareholder value is the biggest curse ever unleashed on/by capitalism.


Sir,

I disagree that shareholder value is a curse. I recommend The Visible Hand by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. who noted that over the last century there has been a shift from family-managed businesses to managerial-management which has more loyalty to themselves and abstract owners of the company, creating these kind of effects wherein a subsection of the managerial class can hop and skip through executive management irrespective of the tire fire they leave behind. Or, similarly, the churn and burn of certain speculators seeking immediate gain through capturing the business’s organizational structure to serve its own, as mentioned, selfish ends. Contrast this to the historical need for going to public markets, which is to quickly raise funding to continue to scale the scope of a business firm’s productive assets :)


> 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 person to participate in a country’s economic growth by easily being able to buy broad equity index ETFs at near zero cost.

A lot of people do not want to spend their time reading 10-K reports to figure out which businesses to invest in.


In theory that's true, but in practice the people at the top deciding what's profitable aren't working for maximising public good, so it doesn't work anymore


Who are the people at the top? How do they “decide” revenue minus expenses?

Are you claiming there is widespread fraud in SEC filings?

If you are referring to many industries becoming controlled by a handful of large organizations, then people working in trading and finance have nothing to do with that. That is in the political arena.


Not the OP, but "the people at the top" fall into a few categories in my mind...

- Career politicians who are more interested in maintaining office than working for the public good.

- Corporate executives who prioritize profit/stock price over the common good. The Sackler family comes to mind.

- Financiers (of various types) who accumulate personal wealth to the detriment of the common good.

It's possible to be a good politician or a good executive and not be "evil", but there are enough notable examples of the worst of both that both careers are somewhat sullied in the public eye. And of course, it's all shades of gray.


I presume he's talking about Congress, and by 'deciding' he's talking about them making regulations that effectively have the US government underwrite long tail risks while leaving profits privatized for larger financial institutions.


I understood mcv’s comment about “stock manipulation” being part of the highest paying jobs to refer to people working in finance, such as HFTs.


HFTs are definitely what I was thinking about. I remember reading about "quants", brilliant engineers working for investment banks to optimise their HFT algorithms, because that pays more than using their skills to invent or build things that are actually useful to society.

But the same is true for many other professions. I also remember reading that the highest paid engineers are working for Google and Facebook to optimise ad placement. CEOs get paid a lot even if their company does things that harm society. There's an entire industry just to help large companies avoid paying tax.


I'm not talking about specific people, just in general. People making decisions in companies are looking for revenue, and what brings money isn't necessarily aligned with public good.

A lot of things that would be good for people/society have no good way of really being profitable (unless lawmakers do something to rebalance the game to somehow help them).

And a lot of things that are profitable are objectively bad for society.


I agree, but I did not get that context because it seems unrelated to my response to mcv.


It's not the case though that what's most "productive" in the economic sense is also necessarily the most socially desirable outcome. The economy might be optimizing for some objective of productivity (though it's probably imperfect at that by any measure), but I don't think we can reduce it to something simple like "more overall money / goods / services = better", unless we also start looking in more detail at how those are distributed among different groups of people, and what kind of real value it is providing to them.


Of course. But that is again, in the purview of the political arena. Nevertheless, society’s resources are limited, need to be allocated, and hence the work that many do in finance.

A better way is always welcome, but I have yet to read about it or see it.


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.


In an adjacent post, OP writes they were referencing quants and HFT. I would credit them with helping increase automation and increasing liquidity that allow for the extremely low expense ratios of index ETFs and target date funds. Investing used to be much more expensive and investments were less liquid.


Yeah, David Graeber has even written a whole book on the subject: Bullshit Jobs [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs


Interesting downside of human psychology/market dynamics, if many want to help others e.g. as nurses or teachers, that positive trait is punished financially due to the high number of applicants


Also, if you want to help others, the fact that you can do so is itself used as compensation. Greed is rewarded a lot more than altruism.


“teachers, that positive trait is punished financially due to the high number of applicants”

There are teachers shortages throughout the country. States are rushing to reduce certification standards. “A high number of applicants” isn’t the cause of low teacher wages.


Low wages are the reason for low applicants. High standards are another reason for low applicants.


There are multitudes, and they differ across the country. I will add though that “high standards” in many states is as low a bar as ‘generic bachelors degree’ and/or ‘experience relevant to content area’ and the shortage persists.


When I went to school teachers didn't need a bachelors degree they went to teacher college for a year or two. Requiring a bachelors hasn't increased educational outcomes either just added gatekeeping.


Non-public schools can, of course, hire anyone they like. In many - if not most - states, principals in public schools are empowered to hire anyone with relevant experience under emergency licensure laws.

I don’t disagree with your point necessarily, but I also don’t believe it is a significant concern in most places.


Also, horrible work life balance. Partner is a teacher and works till 9 every night.


Isn't the truth really that those are simply jobs a lot of people can do and hence, don't attract much compensation? I would also wonder if there's a way to differentiate oneself in the market so that a good teacher could improve my salary much beyond that of the mean, than an average teacher.


Yeah, the "passion tax" is real unfortunately. :/


100%. And we don't need to look far for examples: game studios treat their staff rather poorly too. Supposedly for the same passion tax reasons.


Agreed. Why is that though?


The best paying jobs are generally the most scalable jobs, as you can derive income from/add value to more revenue streams with minimal time cost on your part.

That doesn't automatically correlate with parasitical roles, but there is an overlap.


Might have some truth to it. Human attention does not scale (ie. impact many other people) very well, and jobs where human attention is crucial, like in teaching & care, don't pay very well.


Yeah, a lot of that motivation lends itself to rent seeking rather than adding value


Intersection of supply curve of people able and willing to do the work and demand curve of people able and willing to pay.


Because taking advantage of market failures is much easier to profit from than producing actual value, and neoliberal political ideologies prevent us from correcting for that with regulation.


Please, feel free to share one single example me of a job you can "produce value" without being out-competed by a machine and/or computer.


I'd value my kids being taught well, me taken care of if I'm in a hospital or old etc. No machine can compete with the human care. Machine can help, but not replace a human.


This is not a satisfactory answer. First, "human care" is not a direct way of "producing value". Second, if these are the only " interesting jobs" we should be taking, how would society be able to afford it?


"Feeling like your job is rewarding to you" is part of the compensation, and to a certain extent trades off against actual money.


Because people trade salary for ethical values. Many are are willing to do ethically good things for less (or no) money. You have a full spectrum:

- save the whales, feed the homeless, maintain Linux distributions: 0 money

- clean floors in some company: $

- software development for the average company: $$$

- software development in "fintech", real estate, make weapons, or other somewhat questionable thing: $$$$$

- write algorithms in some FAANG to manipulate people using ads: $$$$$$


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 for income basically are forced into legal slavery.

And it is slavery. In Texas to rent a 1 bedroom apartment you need to work over 90 hours per week, assuming you earn twice minimum wage, maybe even more...

Those who take the soulless jobs are taking jobs reserved for people just like them who value money above everything else and who will walk over anybody to get it. They're not as likely to have imposter syndrome because they lack humility and are narcissistic. So they're not as likely to be a pushover and accept standard pay...

I wish we all could just earn the same amount but society has decided in a weird way who gets to thrive and we gets to barely survive.. It's not fair but it is what it is.


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.


No, the context makes it very clear that the parent is not redefining slavery.


So a 1 bed appt in the state of Texas costs $1300 a week?


> I wish we all could just earn the same amount

In your society, what is the incentive for someone to clean up diarrhea in a gas station restroom?


People who clean up diarrhea in public bathrooms don't get paid well. I did it a few times at a job where I was making minimum wage.


The question is in the context of a hypothetical society where everyone is paid the same.

In our current society, cleaning diarrhea in bathrooms is low pay is a consequence of lack of UBI (i.e. incentive to feed and house yourself) and high supply of people willing and able to do the job of cleaning bathrooms. Although, with a combination of lower fertility rates and lower immigration rates, I expect that to change.


Said society has fairly simply automated self-cleaning restrooms.

It’s really not that hard, or expensive.


I looked up self cleaning restrooms and how to purchase. They are extremely expensive 300,000-500,000 USD and break constantly due to vandalism.

They appear to be very hard and very expensive in practice.

You may be thinking of self cleaning toilets which are not relevant to this discussion.


If current society can build things that land on the moon & mars, along with nuclear ICBMs among other things, but cannot build a self cleaning restroom, perhaps it deserves to fail.

I do however think that is not the case, & that it is a comparatively simple issue nobody has given too much of a fuck about yet, as highly capitalistic societies give zero fucks about improving anything the general public may have access to.


Those other things have almost no budget or even have to worry about maintenance beyond the first use (rockets startups are potentially changing that of course).

I think you are overly pessimistic. There has never more a better time in history for a person with an idea to get funding for crazy ideas like this because of capitalism. They just have to make money.

For an idea like this to be worth it and succeed, it has to be cheaper than that person willing to do it manually. High minimum wages and benefits like single payer health insurance will definitely speed this up.


Based on the fact that they are not in widespread use already, and I have never heard or seen one, it seems reasonable to assume that they do not exist, or are very expensive, or have some other limitation.

I would be interested in looking at a link for these bathrooms that do not require human labor for upkeep.

Either way, the point is different types of work exist with different difficulties/desirabilities, and people need incentives to do the less desirable and/or more difficult work.

If you expect people to slog through medical textbooks and training for 12 years to earn the same as someone checking out groceries, you might be living on a different planet.


Hard to imagine you’re posting in good faith when using the search engine of your choice with text “self cleaning restroom” comes up with more than enough.

That said, don’t think further debate with you will be anything close to fruitful.

edit:

In the year 2022, anything on the internet containing close to

> I have never heard or seen one

Very much leads me to believe the poster has an incurable case of brain worms


A product being available and a viable product worth buying are different things.

I work in real estate development, and we have built gas stations and hotels, and very recently. Either we are wasting a ton of money by employing janitors and housekeepers by not knowing a viable self cleaning bathroom exists, or there is some other problem with self cleaning bathrooms.

>I have never heard or seen one

>Very much leads me to believe the poster has an incurable case of brain worms

Or it means that self cleaning bathrooms would be such an amazing innovation that every single new retail/hotel/gas station/convention center/Starbucks/airport and ANY place with a public restroom would rush to install.

And yet it is, objectively, not seen anywhere by me in SF/SEA/NYC/PDX/LA.

What is more likely? That the product, if it exists, has severe limitations which make it uneconomical. Or a post on HN is correct that all these airports/hotels/malls I go to, with recent renovations or new builds, simply did not know about them.


> 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 big fat paycheck, these are the kinds of places you will find interesting work, make a difference, and see an impact.


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). There is very, very, very little actual innovation in this space. One or two exceptions to this rule are in the accessibility realm, and are genuinely interesting, but are mostly just knock-offs of each other with little real innovation in the last three to five years.

2. There is a butt-load of inertia behind the big players, and higher ed institutions are notoriously difficult to convince to change anything, let alone their core infrastructure. This is probably the largest opportunity, but the hardest to get into. The companies that run databases for institutions are massive, and ingrained into the culture at most places. But they're also incredibly un-user friendly, and are massively expensive.


Anecdotally, I've also heard:

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?


It really depends. The last two years were a prime time for ed tech that was absolutely missed (outside of Canvas and zoom/teams). There was a TON of grant money and state/federal money that was used for new initiatives. I don't believe any company took advantage of that, and that's to their detriment.

For example; the institution I am working with right now just invested about $500k (on an 18.1mil annual institutional budget, for context) in two new software implementations with our existing vendor, with an ongoing 50k annually for almost zero support on the vendor's part. I did the leg work on finding the fit for that. As soon as the covid dollars were announced to education, ed tech companies should've been just absolutely all over their institutional contacts.

But, it does absolutely fit with what you said. Those new implementations were not 'new' but were new features within existing infrastructure.

It's less about no money for managing new things, but more about finding out how to make administration understand that the 'new' is really just focused on alleviating core issues. Again, from our most recent purchase - this is just a new wrapper on existing data. But, it can free up three full-time staff positions to either focus on recruitment and retention instead of processing, and/or it can allow for an entire department to shift focus and be MUCH more succinct with their processes. Either way, the cost savings was there within 5 years. But No one from the ed tech companies took the time to get to know anything at all about the institution.

Had I not been there consulting, they would've just kept moving on.

The opportunities (and massive paychecks for just a little work) are there, but they're not easy to find. I know 500k and 50k are not big dollar amounts, but that is a substantial portion of the institution's budget for one initiative - they just happen to be a small school. My experience with massive colleges and universities is in line with the small institution as well; there's just more bureaucracy at those places.


My mileage varies heavily - I'm using LinkedIn as a main source for open positions, and it's 90% what OP describes.

There are positions listed by, let's say, a local insurance company, but they are, as you say, boring - so they just post the job offer and wait for candidates.

Recruiters post a job, then post that same job with 5 other titles, then repost all of these twice per week to bump them up in the candidates' queries.


They also post the same position for each country they are hiring. Sick.


I've been thinking of looking at healthcare as this seems like an obvious good area to make something useful, though I was only finding weird startups doing things like "mental health coaching subscription app on mobile".

You might be right with the boring sites, I tend to look on those tech recruitment platforms (or really most of the time I just let the recruiters come to me).


I'd look outside of the startup world for healthcare to avoid CRUD apps. Look at bigger players (eg. Siemens), look at bioengineering institutes around your area, look up who your local university's collaborates with, check out who's making the cool machines at your local hospital and go for those :p


It sounds like you've discovered what you aren't aligned with, but you don't yet know what you do think is interesting or valuable. The first step is answering this question for yourself. What do you care about?

Science perhaps? Pick a field and you can probably find a lab or project in need of research software engineers.

Healthcare? Plenty of work in digital health records, computational drug discovery, or so I've heard.

There is a world of mundane but important work humming along below the turbulence, but it doesn't have the hype or marketing bullshit and isn't as visible. Somebody is writing software to transfer your driver's license when you move to a different state. Someone programs microwaves, somebody else rail scheduling systems, someone else water treatment plants.

If you know what you care about, look for jobs involving it, and pay no mind to web3, fintech, adtech or whatever.


> Science perhaps? Pick a field and you can probably find a lab or project in need of research software engineers.

I've been in the industry a long time and OP's realization that most jobs in tech are useless or so-called "evil" typically occurs pretty early on. This would indicate to me that OP is probably still fairly young and has a lot of discovering to do about themselves and the industry itself. Interesting work for some definition of interesting is everywhere. One should consider themselves lucky to work on very interesting (read: cutting edge) work at any point in their life.

OP is probably a talented developer but not yet at the level any company will accept them as a research engineer, which tends to be a terminal position on the level of the C-suite. If OP is looking for this type of position it explains why every job they've ran into is web 3/crypto/evil startup stuff. Those are really the only people young, relatively inexperienced but highly ambitious, engineers can get a taste of that environment without going through the corporate crucible for a decade and a half or more.


Not really, I've been thinking that for years, it's just been hitting me more recently.

But it seems unlikely for me that anyone in general tech would know much about the science industry or positions of "research engineer" without having prior exposure to that industry somehow.

Like, I could spend 2 more decades doing full stack dev, it would change nothing to the kind of jobs available to me. I'm already as high as I can go in this area without going into management (which I have no interest in)


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 where to look to find them.

Where???


https://biopharmguy.com/career-by-location.php has links to a ton of career pages for individual biotech companies. To find the union of Interesting and Hiring-Software-Devs you'll need to warm up your browser's tab bar and do some manual digging though.


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.


> 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 care about the technology and the conversations become a lot more "here's this cool thing". That often unlocks connections and opens the door to work on platforms and interesting startups.

My work history before going to Microsoft was 3 technical startups - before that I worked on automagically generating and auto-healing E2E tests which was a bunch of algorithms and chromium internals on a technical product, before that I worked on a distributed p2p CDN over WebRTC which was also a bunch of algorithms and code, yada yada.

I believe my open source work unlocked these opportunities and not my fancy CS degree.


That is interesting but what I find hard is getting a foot in the door when changing expertise field.

In my case, I'm generally a mix of full stack dev and game dev (specialised in HTML5 game dev). I want to do more systems stuff (particularly Rust), and I've recently created a scripting language with a VM from scratch for a game engine as part of a side project.

But I don't have any commercial experience or keywords for recruiters to find in my CV outside of what I'm already "expert" in, and it's hard to find companies that will understand that a good programmer can transfer skills from one language to another.

To give an example, I recently got rejected at one job at the CV stage for "not having enough React experience" because my last job was in Vue so I wasn't technically using React in recent years (even though it's an extremely similar area of expertise)


> ...I recently got rejected at one job at the CV stage for "not having enough React experience" because my last job was in Vue so I wasn't technically using React in recent years (even though it's an extremely similar area of expertise)...

Ah, yes, the same old story that HR (or hiring manager) took the job description waaaay too literal, and missing the idea that a halfway decent technologist or developer can/should be able to reasonably pick up any other similar tech/stack...and as such, misseed out on a potentially good candidate. I swear that HR more than any other time in my life behaves more like robots looking to check boxes (or not checking boxes such as in your example). Or, maybe i'm just bitter because i got passed up for nice, interesting jobs in the past, where the candidates they ended up with were less qualified or left the org too soon (re-triggering the same job search again too soon)...plus, i would have stayed a lot longer, and given said orgs lots more of my passion, etc. But, no, i'm not bitter. Not bitter at all. ;-)


Yeah, I'm pretty bitter about it too. I've seen it in both industries I've worked at, it's so bad.

Actual technical recruiters will contact me and be interested despite me barely matching their stack, and I once god hired on a job doing a technical test on a language I had (almost) never used before.

But if I try actually applying to a job with my CV? Often rejected because I don't have keyword X. The same company would probably hire me if I came from a recruiter lol


Yeah I once got a job that way (and believe it or not, minus the test). Job hunting is broken period. /sigh


I’m actually hiring for a role that seems to fit what you’re looking for at a small team. There’s a significant graphical component (so game dev sounds relevant), it’s primarily in Rust, and the front-end is Vue!

And I think it’s in an interesting space, but that’s also why I started this company :)

Role details here: https://allspice.notion.site/Backend-Engineer-Data-Structure...

Feel free to send me an email if you want: kyle@allspice dot io


It does seem interesting, I've wanted to get more into electronics since I played with HDL when following the nand 2 tetris book. Though I'm not super experienced in low level or Rust yet (which is why I want to get into it) and I'm in the UK, not US


It's just the default way to hire. You look at what you want/previously had and see if they have it. As a candidate you should treat this as a sales problem and address it directly. If they are left with narrative they believe it probably won't be a problem.


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.


Check career pages of companies that work on things that you find interesting


Seconded!

This approach has worked for me several times over the years.

It takes time and patience. The companies you target aren't always hiring the roles you want. I've been lucky a few times, with opportunities arising just as I've been laid off, but part of that is the groundwork. I keep looking at them even when happy and secure, and tweak my skills in the right directions.

This can also work for other factors, like nice offices or short commutes. I also keep my eye on the jobs board at a company with a landmark HQ nearby.


Better than that - talk to people at companies that work on things that you find interesting. Catch them at conferences, go for a drink with them, ask them what opportunities there are. They’re likely not listed on the careers site. I’m happy with the jobs I’ve had and they were never listed on a careers site.


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 in doing what you already know and do more of the core stuff over time if you like.


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.


Even worse, I have the experience, just no way to put it on my resume to avoid getting ATs screened out.

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.


Yeah my last few job searches went a bit like that too. Sending CVs to try interesting new things gets not replies, meanwhile I get dozens of recruiters offering me well paid jobs as long as I stay in the same general areas.

It's really hard getting out of the boxes we're typecast in.

I still like programming a lot when I do it on interesting things (which are side projects really), but I haven't had interesting programming at my job in years.


My favorite example would be big datish startups too. The likes of Imply, Dremio, Starburst who develop in a not-too-low-level language from an average developer's PoV. But they are obvious to anyone familiar with the domain.

It used to be the case that the answer to the original question would be "in the Bay Area, London, Berlin, Hyderabad". I guess this constraint is less rigid now but I'm fairly certain it's still there.


These guys already rejected me next my resume wasn’t exciting enough.


Check out the Digital Services Coalition.

https://digitalservicescoalition.org/#/story

Like others have said, it depends a lot on what you find interesting, but these companies are doing good work trying to improve digital services for people who are in or interact with the government.

Sometimes the projects are greenfield and you can choose your stack; sometimes you'll be dealing with legacy code, skeptical stakeholders, and government bureaucracy. Culture tends to be supportive and inclusive, most of the companies work remote, pay is good--but not top of the market--and consulting isn't for everyone, but most days you feel like you're doing something worthwhile with your skills.

(I work for one of these companies)


Thanks! That seems pretty good


If someone is bored at work going to work for the federal government will _not_ improve that situation. Talk about boring and useless work!


> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups that are just making useless services that clearly won't go anywhere.

Find a business that makes money from software, small product-owner companies are often really good to work for, preferably one that supplies/supports your local community. You can actually find that in agencies pretty often. When you've got a business providing a core value to the community and no investors, you can feel a stronger connection to where you work and the community it's in. Usually smaller bootstrapped companies have to be providing a tangible service to the community in order to survive, whereas VC can be lofty and full of non-things and hype.


Definitely agree, though I wonder where you find those types of jobs? I recently tried looking at government jobs but didn't find anything that was either remote or near me. Not sure where to find the rest.

Because indeed, almost everything I find on tech recruitment platforms is either big corps (often doing nebulous B2B things) or VC backed startups that clearly don't really provide real value besides making VCs hope they can get their 10x returns


> I recently tried looking at government jobs but didn't find anything that was either remote or near me.

Hell, I’d be willing to go back in office for an “interesting” job. The problem with the government is what they pay for probably having to live in DC. As well as the horrible sounding bureaucratic requirements and leveling.


You need to look at either the private companies or university-affiliated research centers doing the actual research and implementation of technologies for the government rather than the government itself. There are loads of these places that don't require living in DC or have a ludicrous application process. Just to throw an example out, US government spacecraft operations have a large presence in Colorado, so there are a ton of government-adjacent opportunities for tech work in that sector there.


> You need to look at either the private companies or university-affiliated research centers doing the actual research and implementation of technologies for the government rather than the government itself.

Oh these guys won’t touch me. I don’t have any formal education. I do agree that many have some pretty interesting jobs.


Uni's have a hard time hiring, so you'd be surprised. If you can show equivalent industry experience then they'd probably love to have you as most universities are full of ex-grads. They really appreciate industry experience. But just my personal experience here, because I didn't go to university I was not ready for the bureaucracy and inefficiency, I had to leave. In industry it's usually high pressure, get things done fast. At the university it was high pressure but slow as molasses, working through processes and finding the humans you need to do their parts of the process, then convincing them to actually do it.


I cannot at all speak for all government/big organizations, but there is a certain level of bureaucracy, inefficiency and tedium that I don't personally find enjoyable so I steer clear of those now. There's probably some really great teams within big orgs out there who have managed to carve themselves a comfortable niche but I bet those are even harder to find.

I personally look for companies with less than 100 people, usually much less, in smaller cities. At least in Australia you can find lots of great bootstrapped small businesses doing project work for clients or product-owners of their own software products. But you have to go find the businesses rather than find the job offerings, then just check out their careers page.

There's probably not many in SV, since VC sucks all the air out of the room in the tech industry.


Don’t look at job adverts. Figure out what interests you. Find people who do that. Figure out how they got there and how you yourself can get in the same position.

> It honestly makes me feel like my skills and time are being wasted.

Stop wasting them then. Hint: work is not necessarily the thing which will scratch that itch. If after plenty of introspection, and trial and error you find that the kind of things which make you happy don’t pay enough, then you can try thinking about your work as the thing which you do to support what interests you.


That's pretty much where I currently am. "easy" job, the rest of my free time is spent on open source side projects. But it's just not a great feeling to be paid to make nothing useful, and to have so much of my life be effectively wasted time.


Einstein worked at the patent office while coming up with relativity. Aristotle charged big drachmas for tutoring Alexander. It may not be the dream, but there are undoubtedly many more examples of people who managed to roll the peanut of humanity a bit forward despite doing something else to pay the bills.


krisoft, you are spot on with trying to change one's perspective on viewing your current work differently. I find interesting initiatives to work on the side at Mozilla- Foundation (&Mozilla Corporation for paid work) : https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-you-can-do/


It depends on what you consider interesting. I look for:

+work in person

+biz is generating revenue

+there is a physical system that the software interacts with that I have some degree of physical access to

+Follow other interesting and likeminded colleagues you've met to places that they go.

Other things:

+Look for places that greybeards tend to stay around.

+not in the trendy part of your city. It's gonna be in an older, more run down area. Or outside of the city in a burb or more rural area.

+Usually, the tech isn't going to be sexy. You probably won't be working with cloud tech, at least not exclusively.


I don't. Even in average non-that-evil workplaces the main motivator of those holding the hierarchies is paying off their mortgage. Your creativity, ethics, motivation, experience, skill set are irrelevant - if you're on their way for pay off their mortgage, you're out of the carousel. Occasionally I drop CV to some matching openings and make a video call from pure inertia. Shutdown of Stack Exchange careers noticeably lowered the quality of openings in my pipeline.


> Shutdown of Stack Exchange careers noticeably lowered the quality of openings in my pipeline.

This really sucks because it was the one place I swear that wasn’t ruined by spam everywhere.


> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups

I work in fintech and it is very interesting to me. I've turned down recruiters from 50 countries since getting this job and I obviously don't care if you think money is the root of all evil or some other weird tree hugger babble.

So what is interesting for you?


Something useful that feels like it's worth being made, technically interersting to make (which to me generally means challenging to keep me interested), and with good quality tech practices where you can feel satisfied you've done good work. You need a good balance between "getting things done" and "doing things right".

So ideally I want something that satisfies as much of those things as possible.

I'm not necessarily blanketly against fintech or any other thing, but for example a lot of fintech will just be used to further the interest of people who are leeching the world's money and resources and increasing inequality. So I would feel bad about it.

Some fintech is genuinely innovative useful stuff though


“Something useful that feels like it's worth being made”

Example? What is worth making?

“technically interersting to make (which to me generally means challenging to keep me interested)”

What do you find challenging? Sounds like writing a programming language and using Rust are interesting to you, given your projects?

“with good quality tech practices where you can feel satisfied you've done good work.”

If you don’t mind me saying, it sounds that you know what you don’t want, but do not have a good handle on exactly what you want (or haven’t expressed it) or how to get where you do.

As an exercise, follow up on some of these threads. Multiple people have made suggestions and you have been a bit dismissive. Go a bit deeper. If you want a job programming Rust and building programming languages but find you are not getting the interviews for programming language companies like JetBrains, its possible you could also just take on open source tasks in Rust’s existing community. It doesn’t have to be the core team, maybe one of the game dev rust environment frameworks. What are the pros of doing this? Ignore the cons for a moment since you are feeling stuck. Is it worth being made? Is it technically interesting? Is it good quality tech practices?

I have noticed for me that my interest in programming languages peaks when I want to sharpen the saw. When I want to learn and get ahead of the next wave (our industry is so faddy, I find it silly to ignore it. It’s an amazing way for new people to become the experts quickly in a new area and ride the demand). When I dive into it, I realise that its not so much the language, it’s just a new work environment and opportunity I want, then I dive into a new industry. For me, my passion was really being in something used by millions/billions of people. I went to big tech and loved it. I came to recognize that I wanted a team that knew what it was doing in a big org with possibilities and lots of learning material. When I get the programming language itch now I recognize it as being bored. Thats me, not you though. I am just illustrating. What appeals to you specifically as making a difference? Who do you want to learn from or work with?

To help you out, it can seem that you are going in circles and the doors you want are closed. But those doors are not the only way into the building. What building do you want to be in?


Tree hugger babble? Aren’t you just confirming the fintech stereotype


Malignant narcissism is a hell of a drug, if that wasn’t already obvious…


Maybe buy now pay later is the big financial innovation of our generation


It was tongue-in-cheek, but you've got a good eye.


Fintech grifters are a lot less intelligent and interesting than tree huggers


By tree hugger babble do you mean things like crypto accelerating making our planet inhospitable? Ugh, boring!


I think there's one real thing that's important to decide first which is "What would make this interesting for you and what defines useful for you?" The most useful things in the world are often absurdly boring. Vanta is a great example of tremendously useful company that strikes me as being nearly paint dryingly boring. I'd focus on that first, and once you move from a generic mindset to some specific subset of things, I bet you'll find something.

For what it's worth, I really struggled so I ended up deciding to start something with some friends, and that has really succeeded for finding something interesting. There's no better way to have an interesting job than to make one doing something you find interesting, and hopefully useful.

(https://www.apolloagriculture.com/ which may or may not be interesting to you.)


The most interesting jobs are ones that make the world a better place.

See 80,000 Hours - a non-profit organization focusing on career advice and helping people find opportunities to solve the world's most pressing problems.

https://80000hours.org/job-board/


Yep, that's exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for. Definitely going to look at this board, thanks :D


In my case, I ran into an old coworker on the street that was working in a space that sounded interesting, and now I've been working with freight railroads for 3 years after spending ~15 at giant, well-known tech companies.

But it depends on what you mean by interesting? We build SaaS products for railroads. Day-to-day, that often means writing software that looks similar to other industries. APIs, web interfaces, relational databases, cloud hosting, etc. I wouldn't say every line of code I type is particularly interesting.

But when I'm feeling annoyed at working on some mundane feature, it's easier for me (relative to previous positions) to step back and remember that the overall space is full of interesting people, history, and different methods and processes that I would've otherwise never known about. And I still have that some of that childhood fascination with trains.


> 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 goals. I absolutely love the people for whom I work currently. We are hiring, simply because we do good work and have more opportunities than bandwidth. We work at a high level and solve very interesting problems for clients.

So to answer your question,

> Where do you find the interesting jobs?

They found me. I'm not sure how they do it, but they have a knack for finding very talented people.


I've been thinking I should get into consulting for a long time, as I tend to like fixing higher level problems when I arrive at a company. But that seems impossible to break into without already having a network to draw from.


Personally, I don't really have a network. Or I don't use it in that way.

I do have a whole lot of valuable experience, as well as failure-is-not-an-option and customer-focused mindsets. That seems to work well in this environment.


You don't find interesting jobs you have to earn them. When a company is hiring, generally they are not hiring someone to do the interesting stuff, they are hiring people to fill an immediate need which is usually the more generic line of work.

The interesting stuff is reserved for more senior people with domain expertise and who can be trusted to handle a great deal of responsibility. New hires are risky, take a great deal of investment, and often leave within a matter of a couple of years. If you want to find interesting work, stick it out with a company and work your way towards a position where you are entrusted with a great deal of autonomy, and that only happens with time.


This is the correct answer for most people. A lot of people jump from job to job every 1-2 years optimizing for TC, they learn a lot of things but not very deeply.


Interesting means different things for different people. For me, crypto is still interesting (maybe because I didn’t earn any significant money from it yet, though there sere some lucky moments).

Rule of thumb: interesting pays a lot less, because there are much more skilled people willing to work on “interesting”. This is why there is no shortage of people willing to enter the academia, despite abysmal working conditions there. But hey, at least you get “interesting”. I also entered the academia after 15 years of working in the industry, for the same reason.

So, what’s interesting for you? Health tech? Climate tech? The military? Intelligence analysis? Pure mathematics and type theory? What moves you?


> I would kill for a job that feels even remotely useful or interesting.

Public service as a freelance contractor. No, really. Depending on where you leave, this may pay good money (Netherlands) or next to nothing (Poland).

But there will be many useful projects to work on.


What are some examples of this?


I got into public service recently and immediately had to work on a service for "less important than 112 calls" and a service to find a nearby doctor.

A couple of other projects I touched are rather meaningless, but this 50/50 ratio of meaningless to meaningful projects is a refresher from years spent in banking or Silicon Valley focused data-shmining unicorn.


I got into public service recently and immediately had to work on a service for "less important than 112 calls" and a service to find a nearby doctor.

A couple of other projects I touched are rather meaningless, but this 50/50 ratio of meaningless to meaningful projects is a refresher from years spent in banking or Silicon Valley focused data-shmining corp.


I'm working in my IT job in Italy after a Bachelor's in Physics and a Master's in Astrophysics.

My priorities where: - don't go with the baddies (amazon, google, facebook, nestlé, military...) - remote work (work for a living, not living for work. I don't want to be a commuter 2 hours every day to work in an office while I could do the same from home) - coding/data analytics/software analytics in general. I just wante to be open minded and learn what I don't know and use what I already know

With this priorities in mind I found a good job with an average pay as a data manager for the Health minister, while working from home or traveling with my 9-18.

I believe that if you put your lifestile first and then the capabilities ego last, you can be happy after just a few of linkedin searches.


I've had different kinds of interesting gigs. The first kind is what most would consider interesting, working at a small fast-paced startup with much freedom in many of the choices of language, platform, frameworks/libraries. That's the case if you're early. Some of those same roles will end up becoming supporting a mishmash of varying one-off tech for different programs/services which can be challenging but far from interesting.

Another kind of interesting that I'm starting to appreciate is using boring tech to solve or evolve standard platforms to grow with the sophistication of the customer base at a large company. Things move much slower, the tech, languages, tools can feel stagnant. At the same time, you're still solving the problems that need to be solved with good engineering producing pretty clean/clear implementations. Most wouldn't consider this very interesting. It only feels worthwhile when you take into account that you've now shipped improvements to 100,000s or millions of customers. It also helps greatly if you actually believe that what the company does is a largely net positive for society.

As for my personal history of finding interesting jobs, I've found many of them randomly by being open to new experiences. Some were better than others but I don't regret taking any of them. Even the good small/fast ones were only good for about 1.5 - 2.5 years after which my learning opportunities slowed and I moved on.


I usually get asked, but I more and more desire just projects that are from scratch for 3-6 months alone or with 2-3 mates of mine. Those I find harder to find; the sites that say they offer projects like that really don’t; they mostly end up being huge tech debt pools built by different bad teams from the same site and too far in to offer a rewrite (well offer is ok, but they will say something like ‘maybe later, please finish this list first with the current code’).

A good site offering only that would be excellent but I guess hard to do.


Surprisingly, Linkedin.

While around 95% of stuff in my inbox is rubbish and generic postings, there are those 5% worth my time. Interesting companies, challenging and relevant problems.

But admittedly, having only 5% non rubbish already requires you to have a proper profile, with nice information about previous work and experience.

I do make it a habit of responding politely and negatively to most, with a quick one liner, but talking to a few even if I am happy with my job, just to find out what else is there and what is happening around me.

That is how my current employer, Tulip Interfaces has found me, and I have never before worked on more relevant and challenging topics.

Have a look yourself, https://tulip.co/, we are still hiring.


Unusual gigs are just outliers. I think odd jobs don't necessarily have much in common that would bring them together under one umbrella listing agency.

But interesting jobs depend on the eye of the beholder. What's interesting to one person may not be to another and reflect what you think is cool right now.

Personally, I find jobs interesting if they take me somewhere new, where I haven't been before. Learning about biology and medicine sufficiently to convince pharma researchers that you have found a meaningful signal in their data -- that's what led me to analyze biomedical images and develop computational models of disease.

Before that I got into HPC and supercomputing because I like speed and wanted to learn about weird forms of computing (like the original Connection Machine).

These days, to me, 'interesting' might be applying machine learning to new spaces, like exploring a cutting edge niche at a biomedical startup, or the automation of government, or adding smart instrumentation to city services.

Interesting jobs as diverse as these are unlikely to appear at any one listing agency. I suspect you'll have to actively search for whatever tech tickles you.


I’d say it very much depends on how you define “interesting”.

For some “interesting” means working with specific technologies. For others — working in different capacities (e.g. project managememnt when before you was IC, or dab into product design when before you was an engineer, etc.) or environments (e.g. corporate, startup, gov, etc.). For yet others it’s about working on technical solutions to social/polititcal issues. And there are many more definitions you can think of. Also, different defintions can be adopted by the same person at different times. There’s also a question of deep passion vs novelty seeking.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you probably won’t find anything until you understand what you’re looking for. Once yo know it probably won’t be too difficult to find it if it actually exists.

The usual places to look for work will be a good source of your top of the funnel so to say. It won’t be difficult to filter it out when you know the thing you’re looking for.


Why don't make your own job? If you are so smart, surely you can go ahead and find something interesting to build...


I'm building something interesting but it's not something that will make money, because it's an open source tool and open source devs generally don't get paid for their work lol.

Outside of that, and outside of the obvious snarkiness, the whole "why don't you make your own job" thing isn't a real solution. Not everyone can be creating companies, otherwise who would be working at those companies?

I don't have much security net in my life so I can't really take the risk of creating a startup on the hope it might turn out well. There's also nothing specific I'm interested in making that would have revenue at the moment.


> open source devs generally don't get paid for their work lol.

have you seen this https://github.com/sponsors ?


https://github.com/sponsors provide tiny amounts unless you are in the 0.001% lucky+famous projects.


yeah, I'm thinking of enabling it, but what I'm making is a game engine that only has a few users for now and it would be a very very long way to being able to make a living income from game developers sponsoring it.

Maybe eventually it could get to the point where I could do part time freelancing supplemented with github sponsor income, but even that would take a long time.

I suspect outside of a few super-popular repo managers, github sponsorship doesn't bring much income (don't know if there's any public data on that)


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 actually shipping piece of software. Otherwise, it's just a tech demo with no constraints or commercial value.

The general game engines (Unity, Unreal, etc) that are commercially valuable spent a lot of time and effort on excruciatingly boring things: supporting a lot of file formats, having very stable tools, being very accessible for beginners, etc.


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 big companies to decide to sponsor it and pay me, which is super unlikely.


Don't be discouraged. You're more likely to succeed by targeting a niche.


Sounds like fun. Disregard my comment then.


Plenty of successful, profitable businesses are built on open source.

> Not everyone can be creating companies, otherwise who would be working at those companies?

Those who are not arrogant enough to think they are above the position. Those who tried running their own companies, got humbled by their failure and learned the hard way that perhaps any "uninterested" job is enough. Those who are find meaning in their lives from something else than their daily job.

But the worst group, and the majority of them: those who keep complaining about their jobs but are too afraid to take control of their own lives. These are the ones who keep making excuses like "I don't have much security net (sic) in my life" and "there is nothing interesting that would have revenue at the moment"


I don't know why you keep being so aggressive but you don't know me or anything about me and you're making weird wide ranging judgements just based on the fact that I'm asking for advice on how to find more interesting jobs.

Not everyone has to be an "entrepreneur". I like making things, not running companies and managing people/talking to investors and all the other things that come with trying to create a startup.

And yes, sorry but if you're not aware, some people have life situations that don't allow them to simply quit their job and start a company without a safety net. There's a reason the vast majority of "entrepreneurs" are of a very specific demographic


My issue is not with you asking for advice. My issue is with the way you dismiss the other things, and try to rationalize your preference as something ethically/morally superior.

You started the post making sweeping generalizations about things that you don't like but pay well, then you go to complain about companies that may as well be profitable and a good place to work on the grounds of "not having best practices".

So, what is going to satisfy you... Oh, yes, let's see what you want to do: it's not even a game, but actually you want to bring to the world another game engine... Hippity dickity yawn, that is only interesting for the overgrown children whose only issue in their lives is their total lack of social skills.

You were asking for advice, so here is mine: if every job is so boring to you and yet you don't feel like you have what it takes to be in charge of your own professional life, accept that this is a "you" problem, not a "them" problem. If every job you had is "uninteresting", perhaps your focus should be in developing other skills that can let you see the interesting challenges that exist in every industry.


To be more charitable, I think the original poster wants help finding what they want… but isn’t providing useful feedback. Making it hard to help.

Hopefully rglullis here is helping nudge (if uncomfortably) into actually articulating a positive desire instead of asking fairly generic questions and dismissing everyone’s suggestions and feeling attacked when challenged to show a direction.

There are literally thousands of hiring managers reading these threads. Any one of us could help if the poster opens up with real specifics and what their strengths and desires are. It can be frustrating being one of those managers when the poster doesn’t appear to know what they want other than more money and a challenge. And also doesn’t provide any list of skills and experience.

For anyone reading: original poster is too timid to put their real self out there, making it hard to even help them. When you shoot your shot, step forward unapologetically and say what you have to offer and the challenge you are looking for. The Only piece of info I have is liking narrative text games with relatively simple decision trees, some interest in rust and some reflexive hate for fintech. Also some desire to not move from some unspecified location.


I specifically looked for areas where I knew the end result would actually help people. In this case, I have a lot of mobile experience and interviewed with a medical company that helps diabetics manage their insulins and communicate with their health care providers. I also took a pay cut specifically because I want to help people. There are more important things than money. If you are willing to take a pay cut, there are tons of opportunities. You could even start a consulting company where you help non-profits with their tech/socials/website. They don't have much money but you would be making a real difference and you get to pick who.

Also, I don't know if they are hiring but look to something like costplusdrugs run by Mark Cuban where he is now selling more and more drugs at the lowest price possible.


Startups perhaps? I look at my startup. Complete greenfield project. Never been done before. Industry disruptor. No ceiling for the growth potential of our product. Developers engage the full stack. Never boring. Fully remote.

What do we make? CADless vertical CAD software (web app) for the construction industry.


Sounds interesting. Is there a website?


I believe https://80000hours.org could help you. "You have 80,000 hours in your career.This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.

If you’re fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren’t sure how, our in-depth guide can help you...". They have an amazing support and list job offers related to the key world problems: https://80000hours.org/job-board/?role-type=engineering

Good luck!


Have you looked for jobs at companies where you are already working with their product? e.g. Gitlab, VSCode, Ubuntu, Firefox, Grafana, Kafka etc.

I recently got a job at a company where I was already using their product, and I now feel that I'm actually working on a product that I think is worth working on. It's worth remembering though that at the end of the day work is work, and maybe you ended up doing what you do because you loved doing it when you were younger (e.g. programming). As a professional your day to day work isn't going to be 100% doing something that you love, but there's all sorts of other things going on that need your attention.


As cliché as it sounds... networking. My best careers have always come from being open to meeting people outside of a career-seeking context.

Last August, a startup moved in next door to my place in SF. I was friendly to the owners and we'd occasionally share a beer in my front yard. They mentioned they were hiring engineers and I always laughed it off.

One night they were working late in lawn chairs out front, and I idly asked them to finally show me the app. Turned out to be one of the most innovative web products I've seen in a long while. I've been with them now 8 months and couldn't be happier.


Not the reply you're looking for, but it's a topic I'm interested in. My current situation is that I'm employed in a startup that might be killed by the end of the year, if the next round of investing is found. If there is money - I'd like to stay and work here and at that point won't be interested in changing positions, but I need to think about options too at this point.

My line of thinking is as follows:

1) Follow "who is hiring" monthly posts on HN

2) Look on LinkedIn ads; do research on company which is hiring (if possible because sometimes agencies won't tell - in which case I'm probably not considering)

All ads are to be filtered by $TECH_STACK + Full-Remote.

Happy to follow this thread to find more interesting places.


Ask friends who know what you're interested in if they've heard of anything.

Search the web for startups and small companies in areas you find interesting and approach them directly.

Sign up for newsletters on topics that interest you and then read up on any companies mentioned.

You might also want to try to steer your skillset in the direction of things that interest you while doing time at a "boring" company.

I'm assuming you're not looking for "conventionally fun" business areas (showbiz, gaming etc) where the competition for applicants is extra fierce. But be prepared to take a lower pay to get into a field that attracts you.


If you can live with decent but (definitely) not outrageous pay, I find that Research Software Engineering (the art of enabling better (often academic) research through better software) can be very interesting and very rewarding. RSE is becoming a thing in almost all domains, and RSEs often work with different domains from within a central team.

Check job sites for academic institutions and national labs. There are also professional RSE societies in some regions of the world, often called [country code]-RSE.


By becoming a specialist in something.

In my case:

- a run of the mill enterprise CRUD developer? Boring run of the mill of jobs

- a run of the mill enterprise CRUD developer who can talk to customers, write documents, present to investors, train developers on best practices etc? - slightly more interesting jobs at companies where companies were looking to move to a different level of maturity.

- all of the above and experience with “cloud”? - a remote job at a FAANG specializing in “cloud application modernization” that I got without having to do the leetCode/DS&A monkey dance.


I'd say start with industry sector or company size. Go directly to the company rather than a recruiter, a good ol email showing genuine interest goes a long way.

E.g. be the first dev hire, or look for IT related work in Antarctica...heck go all in and become a co-founder with someone.

I think there's lots of interesting work out there, it's just often reverse correlated to your long term wellbeing haha


I created my own job: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/11/06/lifestyle-programm...

But even that has some boring bits and compromises. If you find something that is 100% interesting/fun then probably no-one is going to pay you to do it.


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.


Only accept jobs from people you already know well and trust. Obviously this introduces a recursive problem, so you might need to take one or two not so great jobs first in order to catch your hare. For those, select jobs where the people you meet are impressive. Don't care so much about the product, market. Focus on the people.


(Asked about an interesting job.) Comments proceeded to be focus on high paying, large market cap tech companies.


I find interesting initiatives to work on the side at Mozilla- Foundation (&Mozilla Corporation could be good for paid work) : https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-you-can-do/


It sounds like you're looking for a job where you'll be constantly challenged? A small startup (small enough that you can know every employee well) is good for that.

Another suggestion is to befriend people you find interesting and smart, and see what their jobs are.


> How do you find interesting gigs?

Honestly, you need to accept the reality that useful companies pay less.

It's a sad commentary on the world, but if you want to do useful work and actually contribute to humanity, you're not going to be buying $12 beers in downtown SF or NYC.


So go work for a hospital and clean up their IT. I see shit like this and wonder what you consider USEFUL. Because working for healthcare would be useful, but it is not the same as saying that you work for some hot startup.


Job boards can be pretty terrible. I try to find companies doing something interesting and apply directly through their site. You can also find yourself among less competition if their jobs aren't being picked up by big boards.


This is a very hard question to answer.

If I would to say, find a product, service, or idea you believe in and see if the company behind it is hiring.

Your resume would likely get lost in the regular pipeline, so look for networking opportunities with existing employees.


- 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.


Define interesting. Once you have that, look for companies that do that. Apply, rinse repeat. In a short while you will be in a network of like minded peers. After that you should be good. Mind you, the secret it’s people


Check out 80000 hours! It’s a non-profit (I’m not affiliated) that helps people find impactful careers. https://80000hours.org/


There is no universal definition of "interesting". You have to figure out what that word means to you, and find companies which offer such opportunities. Or just go do those interesting things on your own.


Have connection with great people. Great people are usually working on great projects. Then you just ask 5-10 great people about their current company, product and if they have open positions (they always have).


I was lucky that my open source contributions led to some interesting short and long term engagements. If I'm already into something, it may be that I find it interesting - no need to search.


My most interesting jobs have been found via word of mouth where I have ended up speaking to one of the team before I even get to see a job advert or job spec.


That's about as vague as one can get. What exactly does "interesting" mean to you?

You could work for a police department doing tech work for them. You could work at a sewer district helping them out with calculating flows on computers or whatever. You could work at a hospital doing some kind of tech thing. You could move to Alaska and work for their State Parks calculating the movement of tagged bears. You could go to a university health school and see if develop measuring programs, like maybe some professor wants to measure and weigh poop for some reason, you could create a poop measuring app.

I don't know, man. What is interesting to you? How would any one know?

The utter reality is there is no such thing as a interesting job. That's the long and short of it. Almost any job, generally speaking, is interesting for the first year or two. Then it is just a drudge job, with the same people, having the same conversations day after day, doing the same thing. No matter what it is, not just technology. Accounting, janitorial work, truck driver, lumberjack....it all gets boring, if you're that type of person.

Me...I usually like every job. I worked at a factory job that consisted of taking a stack of 100 cups and putting them into a box - about 12 stacks in a box. I did that every day, I was a machine, doing the same exact movements all day. I really dug it, it was so zen. Hypnotized me for 12 hours (I worked 12 hour days - 3 days on, 2 off, 4 on...that kind of deal). I love working retail, which I know people hate, but I love it. I loved working at McDonalds for my first job ever. That was the best job I ever had. I liked working as a programmer. I liked pretty much everything.

It kind of reminds me of a story. A man was driving down the road from one town to another, was moving to the second town. He was driving and saw a farmer working in the field on his fence, so he stopped and asked the farmer what were the next town's people like as he was moving there. The farmer asked him what the last town's people were like, and the man said that they were horrible. The farmer said that the next town's people were horrible, too.

Later that day, it so happened that another* man was driving down that same road and stopped to talk to the same exact farmer. The man asked the farmer what were the next town's people like as he was moving there. The farmer asked him what the last town's people were like, and the man said that they were great people. The farmer said that the next town's people were great people, too.

So...the moral of the story is that all jobs are great, or all jobs are boring. Just depends on you.


Just slightly biased here, but workwithindies.com curates interesting roles working for smaller teams in independent games.


If you don't journal your ideas and thoughts then I suggest you create a GitHub repository and begin journalling in markdown for minimal friction.

Then do it everyday. You'll think of something interesting, or a problem that needs solving, or pain you see in the world around you.

You have criteria for what you find interesting, you need to dig deep inside yourself to unearth what you're keeping bottled up inspiration.

Then revisit your journal frequently, add to it, remix it and begin sideprojects.

See my profile for my journal, I have 450+ software idea and startup idea entries.


tbh I have a great side project that people like and that I'm working on in my spare time, but it's a game engine and not really something that can be turned into a living


try embedded development, preferably a company in consumer market that makes a product every two or so years

i worked in audio, hifi streamers, synth keyboards, etc, you get HW to play with and these companies can be so small you get to do different things once in a while


Check out Government Research Labs (like SLAC and other university affiliated labs)


How can a startup be useless if it's reached unicorn status?


You might enjoy reading the book "Bullshit Jobs".


Find a company that makes a product that appeals to you.


Shameless plug for my industry: Come to Biotech!


I wouldn't mind but I have no background in it at all


It depends on the role if that's super necessary. You can totally find more CS heavy positions at biotech companies though. They may even find the time to tutor you in bio on the side. Most are very open to experimentation with roles.


Open Source Community maybe a good choice.


Good recruiters. They are out there.


You can find interesting jobs in this Telegram group https://t.me/dailyapehr


OP said they don't like crypto.




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