In college I took a break to work on a startup for a while... that folded, so finally finishing my degree, I went into the military. They actually paid me to pl

In college I took a break to work on a startup for a while... that folded, so finally finishing my degree, I went into the military. They actually paid me to play OPFOR in war games and jump out of airplanes. When I realized that you get pigeonholed by your initial choices, I decided I wasn't going to make a career of it. The next step was government contracting. That was a pretty cool company where we actually got the title "Computer Scientist," and it was pretty exciting as we worked on some interesting big data analytics problems and actually did some computer sciency stuff with natural language processing and entity extraction. And that was great, except they started to have management issues. So I took a friend's advice and applied to AWS, where I got to work on a fairly new service team. I started to appreciate all the cloud hype, here we had a service that let you request specialized hardware on demand, so you fire a big blob of JSON off and set up a whole network in minutes. After a while, the stress of the pager was getting to me, and I was tired of working deep on the backend and not being able to explain what I did to regular people. So now I work in consumer finance. I work on a financial methodology optimization engine. The problems are surprisingly fun, though it's complex as all hell and I'm procrastinating as usual... (And, granted, most people can't follow me beyond "oh, I have a 401k" but still.) Moral of the story: at no point would I say I had a dream job, every one of them had some downsides and no one job used my CS degree to its full potential. But in all of them, there were definitely projects where I felt I made a notable contribution. Over the years, I've definitely got my money's worth on that degree. All I've ever done is looked for interesting jobs, not so much asking "is this is my life's passion" but "are these people doing interesting things?" (Another thought: some areas like government and finance are shockingly primitive, technologically. If you find a company that has smart people working in an area that's primitive, you can be one of the first movers.)