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Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?

• riebnik 4y ago
  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/ https://tulip.co/, we are still hiring.
• Scimmia 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dcminter 4y ago
  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.
• z3 4y ago
  You can find interesting jobs in this Telegram group https://t.me/dailyapehr https://t.me/dailyapehr
  • iso8859-1 4y ago
    OP said they don't like crypto.
• ta238911 4y ago
  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.
• shultays 4y ago
  Check career pages of companies that work on things that you find interesting
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    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.
  • frobozz 4y ago
    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.
• jelicicm 4y ago
  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.
• rethab 4y ago
  > 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.
  • fendy3002 4y ago
    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.
  • OrangeMonkey 4y ago
    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.
    • chasd00 4y ago
      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.
  • Hoasi 4y ago
    > 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…
• mcv 4y ago
  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.
  • ragebol 4y ago
    Agreed. Why is that though?
    • bratbag 4y ago
      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.
      • ragebol 4y ago
        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.
      • mind-blight 4y ago
        Yeah, a lot of that motivation lends itself to rent seeking rather than adding value
    • pjc50 4y ago
      "Feeling like your job is rewarding to you" is part of the compensation, and to a certain extent trades off against actual money.
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Intersection of supply curve of people able and willing to do the work and demand curve of people able and willing to pay.
    • 4y ago
• pdinny 4y ago
• nurettin 4y ago
  > 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?
  • mstipetic 4y ago
    Tree hugger babble? Aren’t you just confirming the fintech stereotype
    • s5300 4y ago
      Malignant narcissism is a hell of a drug, if that wasn’t already obvious…
      • mstipetic 4y ago
        Maybe buy now pay later is the big financial innovation of our generation
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
    • nurettin 4y ago
      It was tongue-in-cheek, but you've got a good eye.
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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
• jason-phillips 4y ago
  > 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.
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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.
    • jason-phillips 4y ago
      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.
• throwaway6734 4y ago
  Check out Government Research Labs (like SLAC and other university affiliated labs)
• asp_hornet 4y ago
  Good recruiters. They are out there.
• pointlessone 4y ago
  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.
• durnygbur 4y ago
  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.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    > 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.
• estsauver 4y ago
  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/ https://www.apolloagriculture.com/ which may or may not be interesting to you.)
• gampleman 4y ago
  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!
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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.
    • celdon25 4y ago
      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.
• samsquire 4y ago
  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.
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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
• inglor 4y ago
  > 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.
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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)
    • mxuribe 4y ago
      > ...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. ;-)
• rswerve 4y ago
  Check out the Digital Services Coalition. https://digitalservicescoalition.org/#/story 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)
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    Thanks! That seems pretty good
  • macinjosh 4y ago
    If someone is bored at work going to work for the federal government will _not_ improve that situation. Talk about boring and useless work!
• ehnto 4y ago
  > 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.
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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
    • the_only_law 4y ago
      > 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.
      • navbaker 4y ago
        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.
• sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  > 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.
  • r0b05 4y ago
    What are some examples of this?
    • sam_lowry_ 4y ago
      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.
    • sam_lowry_ 4y ago
      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.
• primeblue 4y ago
• rglullis 4y ago
  Why don't make your own job? If you are so smart, surely you can go ahead and find something interesting to build...
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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.
    • robofanatic 4y ago
      > open source devs generally don't get paid for their work lol. have you seen this https://github.com/sponsors https://github.com/sponsors ?
      • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
        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)
        • sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
          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.
• tmaly 4y ago
  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.
• gniv 4y ago
  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.
  • dan-g 4y ago
    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.
    • DoughnutHole 4y ago
      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.
      • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
• psim1 4y ago
  > 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.
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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).
    • lentil_soup 4y ago
      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
  • Loughla 4y ago
    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.
• krisoft 4y ago
  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.
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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.
    • 082349872349872 4y ago
      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.
  • cevica 4y ago
    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/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-you-can-do/
• atemerev 4y ago
  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?
• Unbeliever69 4y ago
  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.
  • alkonaut 4y ago
    Sounds interesting. Is there a website?
• walleeee 4y ago
  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.
  • Test0129 4y ago
    > 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.
    • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
      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)
• snarf21 4y ago
  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.
• eatonphil 4y ago
  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.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    These guys already rejected me next my resume wasn’t exciting enough.
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    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.
    • the_only_law 4y ago
      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.
• jvolkman 4y ago
  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.
• hermitcrab 4y ago
  I created my own job: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/11/06/lifestyle-programming/ 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.
• dgs_sgd 4y ago
  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.
• tluyben2 4y ago
  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.
• scarface74 4y ago
  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.
• paxys 4y ago
  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.
• CabSauce 4y ago
  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.
• jollyllama 4y ago
  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.
• yboris 4y ago
  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/ https://80000hours.org/job-board/
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    Yep, that's exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for. Definitely going to look at this board, thanks :D
• andsoitis 4y ago
  Find a company that makes a product that appeals to you.
• NGRhodes 4y ago
  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.
• caeril 4y ago
  > 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.
• Balgair 4y ago
  Shameless plug for my industry: Come to Biotech!
  • uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
    I wouldn't mind but I have no background in it at all
    • Balgair 4y ago
      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.
• cevica 4y ago
  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/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-you-can-do/
• MarcoSanto 4y ago
  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
• dboreham 4y ago
  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.
• Temasik 4y ago
• mightypirate 4y ago
• fruzz 4y ago
  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.
• dont__panic 4y ago
  - 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.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  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).
• randcraw 4y ago
  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.
• Kranar 4y ago
  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.
  • strikelaserclaw 4y ago
    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.
• karmakaze 4y ago
  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.
• jhoogland 4y ago
  Check out 80000 hours! It’s a non-profit (I’m not affiliated) that helps people find impactful careers. https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/
• janee 4y ago
  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
• zulban 4y ago
  You might enjoy reading the book "Bullshit Jobs".
• irongeek 4y ago
  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.
• ApacheDoris 4y ago
  Open Source Community maybe a good choice.
• zhangjiafeng 4y ago
• ldbooth 4y ago
  (Asked about an interesting job.) Comments proceeded to be focus on high paying, large market cap tech companies.
• Serenityflat 4y ago
  [flagged]
• As_You_Wish 4y ago
  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.
• Serenityflat 4y ago
  [flagged]
• iExploder 4y ago
  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
• ankura22 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fisikali 4y ago
  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.
• austinxopherrey 4y ago
  How can a startup be useless if it's reached unicorn status?
• pipecork 4y ago
  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.
• natethenate 4y ago
  Just slightly biased here, but workwithindies.com curates interesting roles working for smaller teams in independent games.
• aleixsuau 4y ago
  I believe https://80000hours.org 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 https://80000hours.org/job-board/?role-type=engineering Good luck!