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Ask HN: Non-web developers, what do you do?
People who are developers/software engineers but don't work in web development, if you don't mind me asking, what do you do?
I'm tired of developing web applications and of browsing through a whole bunch of job postings which all boil down to some combination of required language(s), some web framework, REST API, and one of the clouds.
Is that where most of writing code is now? Is there any hope for something else?
- dyingkneepad 6y agoI do low-level operating-system C programming. There is some C++, and lots of scripting in Bash, some in Python. Also lots of Math is involved in what I specifically do. I kinda daydream in laterally switching to working on Security and cryptography, maybe one day I'll pull some strings and try that. Or do some programming that helps Physics people better understand the universe. But I don't want a salary downgrade.
- lumberjack 6y agoAre you in the simulations/HPC field by any chance? If so do you mind telling me what it looks like in terms of career prospects from your vantage point? Also if not in that field can you elaborate a bit more on what industry you are applying your skills to? You don't have to be very specific. I ask because I have the exact same skill set and am in search of what to do next.
- dyingkneepad 6y agoIt's either companies that produce hardware or that offer some sort of support for hardware. Or that use specialized hardware in a certain way. There are not many companies and they are all big (lol good luck entering this market without 100 billion to invest). Positions are restricted to either the USA or whatever low-cost geos they hire from.
- mcrwfrd 6y ago> Also lots of Math is involved in what I specifically do. I’ve always dreamed of using my math skills in my day job. What kind of math do you work with? Any tips on finding positions like this?
- recov 6y agoData engineering. I do backend/web things in my free time which I find more more but I would hate to do it for a job full time. DE lets me play around with large datasets with massive machines I normally wouldn't be able to.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y agoI work on enterprise application development. I feel the same way, web development seems tiresome and filled with hype.
- danbolt 6y agoI work in the video games industry. In a big-budget context, I have an interest in intersecting designer-focused scripting languages with C++ codebases.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI work in embedded systems. It's a smaller area, I'd guess maybe 5-10% of software engineering, but it's not going to go away any time soon. It also is much less focused on "frameworks" and APIs. It's a lot of C++ on Linux these days. Harder-real-time stuff is more likely C or C++ on vxWorks or some similar RTOS.
- kalyantm 6y agocan i ask how you got into the field? Not op, but I too am stuck in this web (pun intended lol) about frameworks, and REST and only have a high level understanding of software I really want to dig deeper, do DS/Algo and get better at the basics (usually C/C++)
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI can give you very little advice. My first job out of college was in embedded systems, and I've spent most of my career there. I never had to figure out how to switch into it. I'm sure there must be some leet-code-ish thing that gives embedded puzzles, about writing to hardware registers, and bit flipping, and race conditions between threads. But I don't know where it is, so I can't point you to anything. If you want to get better at C++, you might start with Stroustrup's Tour. For C, I don't know what to say. You might also consider Rust, though I don't know if it has much traction in embedded yet.
- the_only_law 6y ago> I can give you very little advice. My first job out of college was in embedded systems, and I've spent most of my career there. I never had to figure out how to switch into it. Maybe I'm wrong but I have a feeling most for fields outside of web dev type stuff (note when I say web dev I dodon't mean exclusively frontend, but general application programming which mostly tanes place kn thr web now) this is how it works. I casually browse jobs from time to time and out of curiosity I notice that a lot of domains and companies seem to have to categories of jobs: "student / recent grad" which generally seems to be supported by university recruiting and "experienced".
- khadgar25 6y agoI do scientific computing i.e. solve partial differential equations that arise in engineering using C/C++/CUDA/OpenCL with some Python/Matlab interfaces for non-specialist scientists to use.
- lumberjack 6y agoI do that too. May I ask if you work for a university or national lab or industry and how competitive the pay is? I work for a university and the career prospects don't seem so good for me at this point.
- khadgar25 6y agoI have a PhD but I work in industry. We have people from national labs usually because of compensation. It's not high six figures but it is pretty competitive especially for the area I live in. I worked in finance for a few years in New York and although the pay was better, living in Manhattan has a way to humble you :) To be honest, I feel like I really lucked into this job and don't really know many places that employ people like me for solving PDEs in industry but you could definitely try something like quant researcher/developer which will alleviate some of the compensation woes from university and still have aspects of mathematical code to some extent.
- lumberjack 6y agoThanks. It does feel the same here. The jobs are quite niche and the pay not so great (comparatively to the demands of the job), and often a Ph.d is required.
- mcrwfrd 6y agoI’ve always wondered if jobs like this exist, but I’ve never actually seen a job posting for one. As a developer with a math degree, these kinds of jobs have always been something of a dream for me. Any tips on where to look?
- nocubicles 6y agoDeveloping ERP (Enterprise resource planning) systems. They mostly run with web user interfaces but you actually never work with Javascript/Html. Instead you write code in domain specific language.
- birdiesanders 6y agoDevOps I would say, mostly lots of kubernetes work, and building various services to help us maintain them.
- codingslave 6y agoReal time event orchestration, eventual consistency in complex systems
- heapslip 6y agoReal programming I guess. Wouldn't know.
- a_lifters_life 6y agoI've moved successfully to application security from software dev - primarily breaking apps now and helping devs more securely (re)write apps
- igotsideas 6y agoI’ve been thinking about going this route but wouldn’t want to give up writing software. How did you make the transition?
- jugjug 6y agoI develop a system to monitor energy production of solar panels. Before I helped build a system to manage large number of EV charge points. There is some web frontend, but most of the work is in the IoT communication, scaling, and insights into many kinds of malfunctions.
- pknerd 6y agoI was/am a web dev but mostly use python for ETL and web scraping.
- 2rsf 6y agoTest automation can contain as much code as the product itself, and many times is as complicated or even more. Think about distributed testing of multi user applications, ML analysis of test results, producing the big data for big data systems etc. Test automation also interfaces with many related fields like DevOps and security. The bonus in being a test automator is that usually you get complete freedom to implement things the way you want and usually your budget and resources are huge.
- juangburgos 6y agoIndustrial software, at the SCADA level. Basically "industrial IOT" (aka indistry 4.0). Moving data from one place to another. Historial data, events, alarms, reports, human-machine interfaces (aka GUIs). Mostly C and C++. C++ really puts all together, just use C because most industrial network protocol libraries are implemeted in C.