Ask HN: Where are the interesting jobs?

[Jormundir]

Lately while conducting a job search, I've been running in to company after company that just seem to want another cog in their feature grinding machine. I've been having a hard time finding software engineering jobs that are more than just "crank out web application features" smoothly put as "solving hard problems".

Does your company have a job that is more than just code monkeying? Please post it in this thread with explanation of why it's more.

[dljsjr]

We're gonna have some job listings up come February.

Might be a tough sell for a lot of the folks here. We're not in the valley; we're in a small Florida city called Pensacola. And we're not slinging web apps. And we don't use super-sexy languages, we use Java. We're working on software for humanoid robots.

I work at the IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition). We just came in 2nd place in the DARPA Robotics Challenge after SCHAFT, so we're moving forward with decent funding and we have a Boston Dynamics/Google Atlas robot that we used in the competition.

We don't suffer from a lot of the poor project management that is endemic to pure academics; we have a pretty healthy "Agile" culture, so much so that Atlassian is actually an official engineering partner on our team and occasionally sends engineers on-site to work with us both with their products and contributing code to the 'bot itself. Our team is very international (French, Dutch, Taiwanese, Spanish, American, Canadian, and if you count the Atlassian folks then we have an Aussie) and Pensacola is actually a pretty cool town. Plus it's on the beach. If you're interested, take a look at http://robots.ihmc.us/jobs come February.

EDIT

I foolishly posted this right as I'm about to go to bed, so I won't be checking in on comment replies. If anybody has questions, contact info is in my profile.

[geuis]

It's really, really interesting to hear someone doing from Pensacola working on robotics. I spent several years there in my youth. Wish you all the luck.

For anyone looking to move there though, there isn't much to offer. The schools aren't very good. The local university is UWF, University of West Florida. It's a very conservative Christian area. Just want to emphasize VERY. Not a place to raise kids if you want them to have any early advantages in life.

That being said, the city is very family oriented. I was in Boy Scouts for many years there (Troop 610 ftw). Despite the overbearing religious pressure everywhere, I found a livable situation.

The beaches are gorgeous. There's nothing bad to be said about that. Go, visit, just for that experience.

Maybe things have changed since I lived there. Investigate. But my experiences say no, look elsewhere.

[ijs]

Congratulations on the 2nd place finish! Robotics is an area that's growing quickly with a lot of hard software engineering problems to tackle. It's also home to some great open source projects (OpenCV, PCL, ROS, to name a few). I think we're going to see more robotics firms looking to industry rather than academia for hiring, technology, and process (as you mention) as the field matures. I know that's the case at Bot & Dolly, where I work; at the moment we're looking for engineers with significant C++ and 3D/UI experience more than robotics expertise (www.botndolly.com/jobs). I can't emphasize enough how far these jobs are from cranking out web application features -- we're really at the cusp of something big at the physical/digital divide, and there's a ton of room for talented developers to contribute. Please get in touch with any questions.

[RyanZAG]

Not sure a lot of the comments here are getting it: nobody (I hope) is really interested if you're using Haskell or Angular to "crank out web application features". That's specifically what he's not asking for. Just because you're cranking out boring stuff in some strange language doesn't make it "solving hard problems". Besides for the problems you're making for yourself on purpose, I guess...

[bliti]

I'm an average programmer on my best days. Writing the same things over and over used to seem tedious, and boring. Day-in, day-out writing authentication backends, some boring object relationship mapped to an use object, Javascript to disable a button, a test to asset that a page is rendering correctly, etc. But then one thing happened. It took me less time to do each of those many "boring" things. Repetition was forcing me to think about the problem behind user authentication backends. About the most web-compliant way to disable a button. How to automate the work of writing the tests. Little by little. One by one. Line by line I started to become a better. Repetition is not bad. It is good. It forces you to think about the same problem from many different angles. That is why I'm more than happy writing yet another API in Django. And I will be happy in any field with any language. Its the process of growing and developing my skills that keeps me hooked.

[tkl]

The Kaiser Permanente Medical Informatics team is looking for more software engineers. You will get to do more than code monkeying, though admittedly, there is always some time spent code monkeying. You will get to help improve our natural language processing pipeline to wrangle large clinical datasets (How can we do phrase chunking in a parallel manner? Can we get down to real time, sub-second, speeds?). Help improve our internal tools to assist our physicians and linguistic annotators. Can you use statistical analysis or machine learning to "recommend" other diagnoses? Or, my own personal curiosity, sparked recently in office: can we reprogram an FPGA to be optimized for pattern recognition computations?

If these kinds of things excite you, please send me an email at [email protected]. We're based in beautiful Del Mar, CA, btw.

Cheers

[bhousel]

Hey that is kind of cool. I imagine you could take the UMLS Metathesaurus and load the parts you are interested in to a in-memory store for fast lookups.

[psgibbs]

I posted this on the "Who's hiring" thread a few days ago, but didn't get much traction. Basically, if you are interested in science and/or energy, we're going to be doing a lot of really interesting things spanning physics simulations, system optimizations, and, yes, 'cranking out web application features'.

We're literally two people right now, but have a great product, and great traction. It's not a traditional VC style market or exit opportunity, but our opportunity/headcount ratio is absolutely massive, and we desperately need to hire.

=======

Folsom Labs, San Francisco CA, Full-time Software Engineer http://www.folsomlabs.com

We're building the next generation in solar (PV) system design tools; basically we make it very easy to analyze the potential value of a new PV systems by leveraging an advanced physics simulation engine. We've been in beta for about a year, and are formally calling it 1.0 in a few weeks. We've got a lot of great traction, and almost universally stellar feedback from our users. We've also recently received a federal grant[1] to help fund our next generation of products (and a round of hires).

Everyday we get to deal with a range of problems that few startups get to offer – we have a pretty modern web-stack [2] (that we actually need, not just to be trendy), but also get to solve interesting physics/optimization problems on a regular basis, while also acting as industry thought-leaders. It's a really unique place in both the solar industry, and as a software company.

We've made it this far as a two-man team, and we're poised for a lot of growth in the next year, so it's about time we brought on some help. If you're a full-stack engineer looking to do some really interesting work (and occasionally put your undergrad physics courses to real use), we'd love to hear from you.

– Paul

[email protected]

[1] http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/sunshot/incubator_projects....

[2] AngularJS (frontend), Python/Flask (API/Backend), Cython/C (Physics Simulation Engine)

*edit:reformatted the original "Who's Hiring" post

[lesgrossman]

Porn. No joke. Been working as a developer for tube and premium porn sites the past two years -- by far the best work experience I've ever had. Easy work environment, make my own schedule, low stress and high profitability. Worldwide travel with a bunch of partyers. Comfort may depend on your opinion of the industry, but the benefits are real.

[BeoShaffer]

How do you get a job in porn if you don't already know someone in the field? I never see job ads for it, and when I tried searching on Dice my query was "corrected" to "port".

[j45]

I think somethings being missed here. Interesting problems come out of the problems no one else is willing to solve or tackle because they're looking for something sexier.

The most interesting and random work of my life so far has come from never saying no, and instead a "let me think about it" and finding a way to get it done. This, in turn gets you a track record, and reputation for interesting conversations and problems.

Be a student of problems as a whole and the small boring problems you solve all become part of interesting solutions later.

[jtreminio]

Maybe start hunting in different industries? I did a bunch of the regular ol' ecommerce shops, selling stupid shit to people with too much money, before landing jobs in the education and healthcare fields and I have to say I am much happier now.

[derekchiang]

What I used to do was to browse the companies funded by leading venture capital firms like KPCB[1]. These companies tend to do non-trivial stuff.

[1] http://www.kpcb.com/companies

[lsiebert]

I see more boring jobs as an opportunity to polish your craft. Especially if you are more junior, like me, you can learn from coworkers, as well as on your own. Now if I can just get one :-).

[ibstudios]

Sounds like you are sick of other people's ideas.

[DustinCalim]

This.

[yesimahuman]

Not sure if you're more interested in spending time working on an open source project and getting paid to do it? We are looking to hire in 2014: http://ionicframework.com/

[noname123]

How are you planning to monetize on it?

And how does it fit in with your commercial products that's like VB for Bootstrap, jQuery Mobile? Is the open source project going to be the cannibalized as the backend/engine for those products?

[krrishd]

Do you think part-time positions/internship type things would work out?

[latch]

You realize that it's 2014 now, right? :)

[hunvreus]

If you feel like traveling, our Shanghai office is currently recruiting both FT and interns; http://wiredcraft.com/careers.html. We have an SF office with 2 FT staff and me traveling back and forth and are planning to open in Berlin this summer, but aren't yet recruiting tech profiles in the Bay.

Lots of Javascript (AngularJS, node.js), Go and Python. Lots of work on infrastructure, developer tools and data visualization. Projects are either our own products or for our clients (World Bank, UN...).

We have a flat structure and expect our team members to take direction and give a sh*t about what they do.

[sanxiyn]

Mozilla is looking for a compiler engineer who will work on LLVM, Emscripten, and Rust.

http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/o3VZWfwD

[thearn4]

What is your background? Do you have a particular development area or industry that you are interested in (web development, scientific computing, etc)?

Government agencies (NASA, DOE, etc) and related industries (aerospace, defense, healthcare, etc) work on some very interesting and unique problems. But these jobs are generally more limiting (think legacy languages), often come with their own sets of cultural overhead (sometimes the antithesis of agile), and will likely pay less than what you are used to (if coming from SV). The trade-offs are tricky.

[pwim]

Big companies have big budgets for recruiting, which is why you'll see their ads everywhere.

Interesting jobs often rely on referrals. You might try attending some of your local developer events to see what is happening around you.

If there is any technology you are passionate about, you could try checking out conferences about it. You don't necessarily have to attend - just try checking out the list of sponsors / speakers. Companies that are involved with conferences tend to have more interesting jobs.

[zbruhnke]

We're logging into 700+ banks and bill providers already (right now its just two of us and I am the only engineer) and we've only been working at it for four months.

We're building the most advance financial data API on the market and we've got ideas that go well beyond traditional scraping.

Though we're starting with a kind of "Twilio for finance" our long term goal is actually much different and I'm happy to share that with you if you want to drop me an email(its in my profile).

But lets suffice it to say you won't be building basic CRUD apps. We believe in automating tasks to our core and if our plans go as expected we'll be competing against companies that have hundreds or even thousands of engineers but building a company that I think can scale to the same revenue levels with less than 100.

We're a startup and we're very early stage (Pre-seed) but we've already turned down a $4MM acquisition offer and we're in this for the long haul.

To be clear the question we set out to answer when we started this was "If Google built intuit today, where would they start?"

I think we're off to a pretty good start and would love to chat further if that interests you at all

[WadeWilliams]

We're hiring across the board at Local Motors.

We run ideation, design and engineering challenges on our responsive Django/AngularJS based platform, and we are white labeling this platform at armycocreate.com (to develop soldier solutions) and at a location to be announced this spring (for a fortune 10 company).

Our core site at localmotors.com is based around automotive innovation -- we currently are manufacturing the Rally Fighter (rallyfighter.com), Verrado Drift Trike (verradodrifttrike.com) and the LM Racer (localmotors.com/racer) in our Microfactory network. We currently are headquartered in Phoenix, have a Microfactory in Las Vegas, and are expanding to the East Coast in the spring.

In the past we entered and won the Experimental Crowd Sourced Vehicle challenge hosted by DARPA in 2010 when we produced the XC2V in under 6 months time from design to delivering the vehicle to President Obama.

Our tech team is currently about 10 people deep ranging from server admin, db, UI/UX design and Python/JS Engineering roles. We currently only list a Front End position on our Jobs page but we're definitely interested in expanding our Tech Team, building some native iOS/Android apps.

This is much much more than a code factory... we're actually developing real products whose inception happens on the web platform. Our in-house knowledge is deep in design, engineering and manufacturing of physical products rooted in automotive -- but we certainly could use more help on the web side of things. We've got a great core on our tech team right now but we've had the hardest time finding talent in the Phoenix area.

If you've got the skillset and experience we're looking for, you'll have a huge amount of influence on the platform's direction, in addition to the opportunity to crank out some super cool features that solve real problems -- but you'll be able to choose your own destiny, which for me is almost more interesting than just one or the other option.

We're not totally against remote work but we'd prefer you to have a presence in one of our Microfactory locations, or at least have the ability to spend a significant amount of time (>30%) in Phoenix at our headquarters, at least for your onboarding period.

Please contact me directly @ [email protected] if you are interested.

[RollAHardSix]

"Expanding to the East Coast in the spring" - Interesting! Where too?

[kilroy123]

Saw a show about you guys, awesome stuff!

[ganjianwei]

I work at a 50 person (20+ engineers) startup (http://www.tellapart.com/) that works on real time personalization for retailers. Here are some specific things we're working on that folks might find interesting:

- Rearchitecting our data system to use the lambda architecture (http://www.manning.com/marz/) so we can build better personalization products on top of retailers' customer data.

- Building and improving machine learning models to predict user's behavior and what users want based on a ton of datapoints we collect for hundreds of millions of users.

{my_username[-3:]}@tellapart.com if you'd like to find out more

[MyNameIsMK]

Try working for a small business NOT IN TECH. Things get interesting fast. You will like it.