by zipfle on 11/26/15, 1:14 PM with 80 comments
by davisr on 11/26/15, 4:22 PM
Before I did this, I worked as a freelancer doing one-off website jobs for small businesses. Finding clients was easy, but I started dreading the same work everyday. I'm much happier doing what I do now, but in a while I want to start a non-profit with some co-worker friends.
I'd want that non-profit to be education-related. Education is a really important space to improve, but adding "technology" to an already-bloated space is useless. I feel too many organizations try to add tech for tech's sake, when it's already impossible to get a class into a computer lab and make effective use of that time. Educational software needs to be thought of differently. Another crap webapp that tests students is a detriment to every student that has to suffer through it. Educational software needs to allow students to explore nature and the world around them.
by fruzz on 11/26/15, 4:40 PM
I neither like nor dislike my job. I like the people I work with, and I get to architect things and play with new technologies, but I'm not in love with my work. I accept that, I don't think I'd find any other work environment in this field to be that different.
Honestly, I was happier when I was serving coffee. My favourite job was when I was in the geophysics field and was sent all over the world on mapping projects. The mining/oil industry crashed though, and that's over for me unless I amp up my education. It wasn't the job itself I liked; it was being sent in these wonderful locations that I'd never get to travel to otherwise, free of charge.
by jo909 on 11/26/15, 4:20 PM
by bane on 11/26/15, 5:28 PM
In the meanwhile, we've helped develop faster disease detection assays to improving safety in transportation.
We get to play with lots of big computers, pitch new ideas, and can have immediate impact on people's lives.
I love this job, it's probably the best job I've ever had. I've even turned down some less appealing jobs at Google because of the range of cutting edge things I get to work on in a normal day and the Google positions weren't offering that. I've never been so engaged, on a daily basis. I'm long past my honeymoon with this job and can't see an end to it. Knowing that I'm helping people with my work makes it extra rewarding.
I've worked in similar applied R or D fields, did a stint at a couple software companies and worked as an analyst from time to time, working on some very hard problems. But nothing with this kind of positive impact potential.
Will I help change the world? Probably not, but I'm pretty sure I'm helping make it a better place.
by dweekly on 11/26/15, 5:14 PM
I like this job.
by anoaznr on 11/26/15, 4:47 PM
This is my first legal job, so I don't know if it's my favorite.
by begriffs on 11/26/15, 5:47 PM
I'm currently working on PostgREST, an open source server that turns any PostgreSQL database into a RESTful API. http://begriffs.com/about.html
by lior9999 on 11/26/15, 4:59 PM
My team is great, everyone here is insanely knowledgeable, and the work is very meaningful. I honestly feel like I've learned so much more in the last year working for Apple than I have in my entire life.
by toumhi on 11/26/15, 8:48 PM
It's a long-term freelance gig in a joint venture between the french secretary of economy and the national unemployment agency.
My job title is officially Lead Developer for the project but since we're such a small team (the idea is to borrow the organisation and process of a startup in a big french administration, bypassing their hellish processes), I also help in copywriting, system administration, monitoring, and the most interesting : machine learning using a huge amount of economic/recruitment data to predict which companies will hire. We have pretty good results!
It's a great gig and hopefully of social value to France which needs it at the moment (unemployment is at an all-time high right now).
by ggambetta on 11/26/15, 5:08 PM
Before this I worked at Google for four years, and before that I ran a small game development studio (http://www.mysterystudio.com) for almost 10 years. Improbable gives me the best of both worlds -- the speed and the impact your day to day work has in a startup, and the world-changing ambitions of Google.
I get to work on very challenging technical problems, building core systems from scratch, within an engineering culture and people of a caliber comparable to Google's, but perhaps even more motivated because we're more invested in the success of the company. I'm enjoying every minute of it!
by cruhl on 11/26/15, 4:52 PM
by engi_nerd on 11/26/15, 5:11 PM
by eldavido on 11/26/15, 4:48 PM
I'm trying to take the best parts of a law firm (explicit focus on mentorship, got-your-back partnership mentality, treating people like skilled, autonomous professionals, good pay) and apply it to software dev. I expect a lot out of people but give them the tools and space necessary to get things done. We're going to build a product in 2016.
I have about 8 yrs experience as a working dev. Last job was at a startup that grew explosively but had massive tech/architecture problems of its own making. I wore a lot of hats at this place over 3 yrs including dev, ops eng/head of ops, and some product management on our API (we were a developer tools company) but ultimately got sick of shoveling shit behind repeated poor decisions made over many years. I was a founder before that for a company that had a small acquisition, and before that I worked at Microsoft for a while.
Favorite kinda depends on what you value. I get the most professional satisfaction out of my current job; we do things at a reasonable, sustainable pace, and don't have "crunch time". OTOH there's a thrill at "up and to the right" you get in venture tech that's hard to replicate. You'll probably make the most money in bigco tech, but if you save and invest well in your 20s, you can start to replace a lot of wage income with investment income pretty rapidly in your 30s.
by RobertKerans on 11/26/15, 6:25 PM
As an aside, programming knowledge has made me a far, far better designer; vice versa maybe as well, maybe
by danso on 11/26/15, 5:22 PM
by manigandham on 11/26/15, 6:36 PM
In between past startups, I worked for boutique software firms making custom software for x-ray machines, vaults used in banks and jewelry manufacturers, and even machine vision tech used in movie production.
by porsupah on 11/26/15, 5:30 PM
- an experimental video codec based around contours, with some fairly tremendous potential. It works, but there's still a few years more work required to turn it into something commercially useful. (But, with no further funding for now, it's on hold)
- an embedded project, developing some audience response keypads and base stations. Nothing world-changing in the least, but a lot of fun. No OS involved, and everything had to fit into 256K of flash, with 64K RAM available. Designing the bootloader, a robust audio link, a scriptable accelerometer engine, and more, with plenty of hardware involvement - mm, that was good fun.
- the 3DO and Mac versions of The 11th Hour, sequel to The 7th Guest. What an amazing place to work that was.. arriving for my interview, the sense of enthusiasm was nigh palpable. Everyone knew they could be earning way more down in the Bay, but nobody left. Plus, coaxing 40-70fps video playback out of an 8MHz ARM6 core was quite gratifying. ^_^ (The result of some careful alterations to the datastream format, and a lot of assembly)
by edoceo on 11/26/15, 6:36 PM
by dijit on 11/26/15, 6:17 PM
I prefer it to every job I've ever had- but mostly for the talented people I work with and the meritocratic mentality of the senior management at the studio I work in.
the company also pays very little but there's a real sense of being taken care of; things like paying my health insurance (EU; Private healthcare), matched pension contribution, matched sum investment on my behalf, free company cinema events every so-often, health care contribution (massages/gym allowance) along with relocation cost and giving me a place to live when I was getting settled in Sweden.
There is a twisted downside to this though. My job title does not say "developer", I'm the "ops" side of a devops team handling online backend for an upcoming video game. -- And being the bridge between the studio and institutional bureaucracy imposed on us by a very thick layer of incompetent control freak managers which sits above systems administrators who only sit on 2 extremes: great or utterly incompetent- which is imposed on us by the publisher... makes my job an absolute nightmare.
It's actually enough that I'm probably going to resign very soon. Despite the studio being awesome.
by cdcarter on 11/26/15, 6:41 PM
I love my job, because it's a great blend between strategic work and technical work. Since our clients are often running shoe-string operations that have evolved instead of been designed, a lot of my job is convincing the client that they could change their process instead of paying me to build a feature.
I also get a lot of time to work on open source projects. There's a quickly growing open source community for non-profit software on the Salesforce platform.
I used to work as a professional union stagehand, programming and operating projection and media systems for musicals. I loved that job, but the work wasn't stable and the hours sucked.
by rudenoise on 11/26/15, 5:20 PM
I don't love it though. It's OK. It'd be better to code 20% of the time and observe, talk, think the other 80%. I think that this might make me more efficient and more productive.
My best job was my first. A guy had a profitable web-site and no technical knowledge, there was no notion of best-practice, and he hired me to do everything/anything. The environment was smokey, the equipment shoddy and the business practices disordered. I was straight out of uni and free to make any decisions I saw fit, any mistakes were on my head.
[edit] Thinking about it, it was the shear honesty of the place. I don't think anyone even tried to dress up what they were doing in jargon or exaggerations. Words like 'passion' were never applied out of place.
by noisy_boy on 11/26/15, 5:57 PM
by Galit on 11/29/15, 11:14 AM
by aashu_dwivedi on 11/26/15, 4:54 PM
I am also a student pursuing an MS program part time. Haven't had a favorite job yet.
by jonathanjaeger on 11/26/15, 6:07 PM
It's my first job out of college and have been doing it for 4.5 years. I also run a creative/music community on the side called HypedSound (soon to be hype.co) -- hit me up if you're a Django dev ;)
by kelt on 11/27/15, 8:58 AM
A little of everything, from printers to network/servers for the past 14 years(2 job switch so far). I love helping people resolve their issues, I would say I love my job but a recent switch to a oil and gas company seems to have been a bad choice.
Headcount cutting and all means I have a lot less support issues to deal with and more HN time.
I have this impression that most developers in any company would be more or less quite 'technical'. Is there any need for tech support role in bigger corporations?
by FigBug on 11/26/15, 6:25 PM
I do enjoy it, even though it pays less than most other industries.
Favourite thing I worked on was a 48 channel touring console. Unfortunately is was cancelled shortly after launch and all released units (except 1) were purchased back.
I also worked on some pretty fancy digitally controlled line arrays and subwoofers. The aiming they could do was pretty cool.
by notnownikki on 11/26/15, 6:20 PM
The great thing about it is meeting with the developers, asking them "What CI problems are holding you up? Anything we can improve?" and making their answers my priorities. We always end up improving things and making people's lives easier.
It's not so much the technology, although I do love that; it's being able to make a team's working life easier and more enjoyable.
by TurboHaskal on 11/27/15, 11:54 AM
I quickly got bored because of the lack of intellectual stimulation. Fourteen monad tutorials later the whole stack was written in Haskell.
I wish I had a job.
by TACIXAT on 11/26/15, 6:27 PM
I used to reverse malware. That job had a lot of other tedious responsibilities, so I'm a lot happier where I am.
I'm also building a web application in my spare time. Getting close to launching it. This is probably the most fulfilling work I do.
by drakonka on 11/26/15, 7:13 PM
by Overtonwindow on 11/27/15, 1:23 AM
by haseeb1431 on 11/26/15, 5:57 PM
It is OK as long as I am earning enough to have good life.
I love to develop products that are being utilized by common people and it improves their lifestyle.
by Zanta on 11/26/15, 5:34 PM
by gmays on 11/26/15, 6:20 PM
My favorite job is a tie between what I'm doing now and my time in the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps was more fun, but it wasn't sustainable.
by a3n on 11/26/15, 6:50 PM
My favorite job was writing test software at Boeing for 747-400, 757, 767 and 777, in the early nineties.
by ycosynot on 11/26/15, 6:07 PM
by awl130 on 11/26/15, 5:07 PM