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>I need to find something with purpose,big money, and satisfaction. Consider giving up the big money requirement and your options will open up significantly. A

by hueving 10y ago

>I need to find something with purpose,big money, and satisfaction. Consider giving up the big money requirement and your options will open up significantly. At companies like Google and Facebook where you get the good pay, there are very few roles that get to work on the super interesting problems so they are hard to get. Most likely you will end up working on data migration tools, front end interfaces for existing systems, account life cycle tooling, etc that may be interesting at first, but they aren't that satisfactory in the long run because you'll realize you're a very small cog that can be easily replaced. If you give up big money and join a startup (even mid sized), your impact can be a lot more tangible and satisfying. Programming for government/industry research can also be pretty satisfying but the pay is much lower (e.g. I worked for an academic consortium on HPC networks and really felt like I was improving tooling for cutting edge science).

thr0waway1239 10y ago
>> because you'll realize you're a very small cog that can be easily replaced This very thing struck me when I was watching a video recently about Ph.D.s at Google [1]. You would think, well, a Ph.D. working at Google - what could possibly be a more fun job? Apparently, to conduct even smallish experiments, they need to make sure that the code runs on infrastructure which is basically created to handle huge scale. I couldn't locate the exact place in the video again, but couldn't help but feel that this takes away so much of the fun of working on research problems in the first place. Obviously, if you disagree with my view, then you would thrive in that environment! Given how many times the research problems I tackle (as side projects, for fun) end up going absolutely nowhere, I would absolutely not want to invest any effort in things like readable and scalable code and such. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ-IwnnjBy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ-IwnnjBy0
praxulus 10y ago
If you're willing to give up slightly more money, you could join an organization like Code.org or another well-run organization pursuing some kind of social good. These places are absolutely brimming with purpose and satisfaction.

by hueving 10y ago

thr0waway1239 10y ago

>> because you'll realize you're a very small cog that can be easily replaced This very thing struck me when I was watching a video recently about Ph.D.s at Google [1]. You would think, well, a Ph.D. working at Google - what could possibly be a more fun job? Apparently, to conduct even smallish experiments, they need to make sure that the code runs on infrastructure which is basically created to handle huge scale. I couldn't locate the exact place in the video again, but couldn't help but feel that this takes away so much of the fun of working on research problems in the first place. Obviously, if you disagree with my view, then you would thrive in that environment! Given how many times the research problems I tackle (as side projects, for fun) end up going absolutely nowhere, I would absolutely not want to invest any effort in things like readable and scalable code and such. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ-IwnnjBy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ-IwnnjBy0

praxulus 10y ago

If you're willing to give up slightly more money, you could join an organization like Code.org or another well-run organization pursuing some kind of social good. These places are absolutely brimming with purpose and satisfaction.