from Hacker News

What am I qualified to do?

by singlepaynews on 3/30/25, 5:23 PM with 4 comments

I could use some help establishing a career direction. My most recent job was as a patent examiner at the USPTO examining in AI. Before that I launched a PERN stack webapp singlepaynews.com, before that I fixed the Seattle DOT’s permit tracking system (Python scripts that read from sql and wrote to docstore were broken by a vendor’s api update), and before that I taught for 3 years at Central Washington University.

M.S. CS; B.Eng. EE; my most significant internship was doing DO-160 electronics test—you write a script to run a function generator and oscilloscope that verifies your power conversion circuit performs and faults as advertised.

I know that the whole world is struggling with getting jobs right now, but I could use an outside perspective on my resume—I’m not sure what I could reasonably do

  • by rywalker on 3/30/25, 5:27 PM

    * Find a startup in your local ecosystem, help them build their product (for free if you must).

    * Use AI (Claude Code, Cursor). Get great at this.

    * With a little experience (and talent) you can be a next-gen startup CTO/senior dev.

    * I'm absolutely not kidding.

  • by gus_massa on 3/31/25, 1:58 AM

    In case it's useful, there are three official monthly threads HN about jobs. They will be posted again tomorrow Tuesday. Perhaps you can post in one of the threads and take a look of at the others.

    If can peek last month edition (read onlu now) or wait and see the new ones in https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring

    PS: Do yo have a blog with some of your projects? A followup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42426726 would be nice to read.