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Ask HN: What is your job? Do you like it? What was your favorite job?

106 点作者 zipfle超过 9 年前

38 条评论

davisr超过 9 年前
I currently work at an ad agency (we call ourselves a &quot;boutique data-driven marketing company&quot;) in Milwaukee. My official title is Developer, but I do a lot of things: I manage servers, code applications (HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;Javascript, but also C, R, and loads of shell scripting), research new concepts, automate existing workflows, and so much more.<p>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&#x27;m much happier doing what I do now, but in a while I want to start a non-profit with some co-worker friends.<p>I&#x27;d want that non-profit to be education-related. Education is a really important space to improve, but adding &quot;technology&quot; to an already-bloated space is useless. I feel too many organizations try to add tech for tech&#x27;s sake, when it&#x27;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.
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fruzz超过 9 年前
I work as a software developer on a product that provides a remote desktop environment whose activity is recorded. This isn&#x27;t the main business of the company I work for; they do contracting work and use this environment for auditing purposes. I mainly do JavaScript&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;CSS and some C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Python work.<p>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&#x27;m not in love with my work. I accept that, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d find any other work environment in this field to be that different.<p>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&#x2F;oil industry crashed though, and that&#x27;s over for me unless I amp up my education. It wasn&#x27;t the job itself I liked; it was being sent in these wonderful locations that I&#x27;d never get to travel to otherwise, free of charge.
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jo909超过 9 年前
I sit in a chair, in front of a panel with many lights, and another panel with many buttons. And I press the buttons rapidly in some specific order to make certain lights go on or off.
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bane超过 9 年前
I help run an general purpose applied computation R&amp;D lab for a medium sized non-profit. In the last year we&#x27;ve worked in fields as far reaching as bioinformatics to cyber defense to finance.<p>In the meanwhile, we&#x27;ve helped develop faster disease detection assays to improving safety in transportation.<p>We get to play with lots of big computers, pitch new ideas, and can have immediate impact on people&#x27;s lives.<p>I love this job, it&#x27;s probably the best job I&#x27;ve ever had. I&#x27;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&#x27;t offering that. I&#x27;ve never been so engaged, on a daily basis. I&#x27;m long past my honeymoon with this job and can&#x27;t see an end to it. Knowing that I&#x27;m helping people with my work makes it extra rewarding.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>Will I help change the world? Probably not, but I&#x27;m pretty sure I&#x27;m helping make it a better place.
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dweekly超过 9 年前
I run a small R&amp;D lab for an unnamed subsidiary of the company that owns Google. Our mandate is to come up with new technologies that change the economics of telecoms, which, if we are successful, may help get hundreds of millions of people online. My coworkers operate a carrier neutral metro fiber network in Kampala and other coworkers are busy building crazy fast internet for America.<p>I like this job.
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anoaznr超过 9 年前
I make coffee, drink it... I also eat biscuits. Sometimes they make me write some code, so we can buy more and better cakes. This is only the morning, afternoon it&#x27;s wine. My official title is Developer, but I call myself &quot;Responsable cuisine &#x2F; employé du mois&quot;<p>This is my first legal job, so I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s my favorite.
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begriffs超过 9 年前
My favorite work is writing open source software. The variety of people interacting helps make the project more general purpose. Creating software for strangers enforces better docs. You get to work with people around the world whose programming ability and knowledge is humbling. Everyone is intrinsically motivated by the project and puts their best effort into what will be publicly visible code.<p>I&#x27;m currently working on PostgREST, an open source server that turns any PostgreSQL database into a RESTful API. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;begriffs.com&#x2F;about.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;begriffs.com&#x2F;about.html</a>
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lior9999超过 9 年前
I&#x27;m a hardware engineer at Apple on the Accessories team. This is my first job out of college (dropped out of my PhD program to join Apple) and I absolutely love what I do.<p>My team is great, everyone here is insanely knowledgeable, and the work is very meaningful. I honestly feel like I&#x27;ve learned so much more in the last year working for Apple than I have in my entire life.
toumhi超过 9 年前
I currently work in a French administration predicting which companies are likely to hire in the next 6 months (in France).<p>It&#x27;s a long-term freelance gig in a joint venture between the french secretary of economy and the national unemployment agency.<p>My job title is officially Lead Developer for the project but since we&#x27;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&#x2F;recruitment data to predict which companies will hire. We have pretty good results!<p>It&#x27;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).
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ggambetta超过 9 年前
I&#x27;m a Software Engineer at Improbable (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.improbable.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.improbable.io</a>).<p>Before this I worked at Google for four years, and before that I ran a small game development studio (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mysterystudio.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mysterystudio.com</a>) 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.<p>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&#x27;s, but perhaps even more motivated because we&#x27;re more invested in the success of the company. I&#x27;m enjoying every minute of it!
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cruhl超过 9 年前
I left college at the end of freshman year to work as a product&#x2F;software developer at a vehicle data company. It&#x27;s an absolute blast; my team is great and the environment couldn&#x27;t be better. After 4:30, I have total freedom to work on side projects without distraction. I&#x27;m learning more than ever before and I&#x27;m meeting all kinds of interesting people.
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engi_nerd超过 9 年前
I work as a flight test instrumentation engineer. This is an electrical engineering equivalent of a &quot;full stack&quot; position because I do everything from troubleshoot individual strain gages to analyze test data to look for trends and causes of problems. I like this job and it&#x27;s definitely my favorite job...but then, I&#x27;ve only had three different jobs.
eldavido超过 9 年前
Current job: leading four-person, client-focused software development&#x2F;design company. I&#x27;m the &quot;managing partner&quot; and spend ~80% of my time writing code&#x2F;technical architecture and 20% on personnel&#x2F;payroll&#x2F;admin&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;etc.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;re going to build a product in 2016.<p>I have about 8 yrs experience as a working dev. Last job was at a startup that grew explosively but had massive tech&#x2F;architecture problems of its own making. I wore a lot of hats at this place over 3 yrs including dev, ops eng&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x27;t have &quot;crunch time&quot;. OTOH there&#x27;s a thrill at &quot;up and to the right&quot; you get in venture tech that&#x27;s hard to replicate. You&#x27;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.
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RobertKerans超过 9 年前
I do design and development at a very large electrical wholesalers. Very small team, and internal politics works in our favour, giving us quite a lot of control over that web part of the business. It gives us time as well; the company is slow moving. The nature of the business means I&#x27;ll hit a wall in terms of where I can go in, I guess, the next year or so, which makes me a little sad; I&#x27;ve learned a great deal, and the team is very close. I can speak several computer languages fairly fluently now, make real things that actually constructively help people, make their jobs easier. Eg, outside of work, I just built a graphic UI interface&#x2F;API backend for a very time consuming data entry task my (very work-stressed) girlfriend has to do every few months, going from photocopied pland and spreadsheets to a webapp, cutting the total time it takes her from days to minutes; she was really happy, I was happy she was happy. It took me an afternoon, and I couldn&#x27;t really have done that a couple of years ago without serious effort. That&#x27;s due to my work environment, mentors etc. Small things.<p>As an aside, programming knowledge has made me a far, far better designer; vice versa maybe as well, maybe
danso超过 9 年前
I currently teach journalism at Stanford, with a focus on computational methods and programming. It&#x27;s a good school and I like working with students, and I can work on research and my own learning. But I&#x27;m not used to the pace and lack of deadlines and I don&#x27;t like the Bay Area compared to New York. My favorite job at this point was working as a developer at ProPublica, for the kind of projects we did and for being in New York.
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manigandham超过 9 年前
I&#x27;m a software developer who&#x27;s built the tech for a few startups, mostly in ad-tech, and now a founder of a new ad network focused on making better ads and changing the ecosystem (especially fun since everyone hates ads).<p>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.
porsupah超过 9 年前
I&#x27;ve been involved in a fair variety of projects, but amongst my favorites would have to be:<p>- an experimental video codec based around contours, with some fairly tremendous potential. It works, but there&#x27;s still a few years more work required to turn it into something commercially useful. (But, with no further funding for now, it&#x27;s on hold)<p>- 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.<p>- 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)
edoceo超过 9 年前
I build a company, love it. This is my favourite job. Before I had one boss, now I have 100s all asking for little things to make their lives easier. Very gratifying.
dijit超过 9 年前
I work in the video games industry;<p>I prefer it to every job I&#x27;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.<p>the company also pays very little but there&#x27;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&#x2F;gym allowance) along with relocation cost and giving me a place to live when I was getting settled in Sweden.<p>There is a twisted downside to this though. My job title does not say &quot;developer&quot;, I&#x27;m the &quot;ops&quot; 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.<p>It&#x27;s actually enough that I&#x27;m probably going to resign very soon. Despite the studio being awesome.
cdcarter超过 9 年前
I work for a B-Corp consultancy that works exclusively with non-profits. We implement databases and the general motto is &quot;help you take control of your data&quot;. My portfolio is currently all supportive housing organizations in San Francisco (though we are a Seattle firm). We work primarily on the Salesforce platform, thanks to their deep deep discounts and grants to non-profits.<p>I love my job, because it&#x27;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.<p>I also get a lot of time to work on open source projects. There&#x27;s a quickly growing open source community for non-profit software on the Salesforce platform.<p>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&#x27;t stable and the hours sucked.
rudenoise超过 9 年前
I&#x27;m a software engineer. I work on a contract basis, contracts last 3 months to a year. I&#x27;ve recently made CI pipelines, Win 8.1 apps, IOS apps but mostly web-apps. The pay is good and the people I work with are cool.<p>I don&#x27;t love it though. It&#x27;s OK. It&#x27;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.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p>[edit] Thinking about it, it was the shear honesty of the place. I don&#x27;t think anyone even tried to dress up what they were doing in jargon or exaggerations. Words like &#x27;passion&#x27; were never applied out of place.
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noisy_boy超过 9 年前
I currently work as a software engineer in a hedge fund on their datawarehouse platform - most of it is written in Perl. I also code in JavaScript&#x2F;JQuery&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;CSS. I code all day long in Vim on a Linux system. I&#x27;ve developed significant sub-components of the system and learned tons doing that. It is pretty great.
Galit超过 9 年前
I&#x27;m an entrepreneur, my current project is TimelyPick. I like my job, because it it challenging, and I do it with passion. My current challenge is to promote <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timelypick.com&#x2F;play-solitaire" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timelypick.com&#x2F;play-solitaire</a> - a new way to play online solitaire card games, and I find it fascinating because it&#x27;s not just doing seo, it is also understand the world of solitaire players, what they like and what they don&#x27;t. When I tried to understand their world, I thought why not share my findings with others, and then started to write about it, and writing is also challenging for me.
aashu_dwivedi超过 9 年前
I work on a product that monitors the client website&#x27;s performance and fires alerts when some problems are found. My official title is software engineer.<p>I am also a student pursuing an MS program part time. Haven&#x27;t had a favorite job yet.
jonathanjaeger超过 9 年前
I work in performance-based marketing, running lead acquisition campaigns on Facebook. I really like it because it feels like you&#x27;re playing a stock market with the fluctuating prices and algorithm changes in the market. Plus there&#x27;s the creative aspect of making the ads while also figuring out the different targeting options that will convert.<p>It&#x27;s my first job out of college and have been doing it for 4.5 years. I also run a creative&#x2F;music community on the side called HypedSound (soon to be hype.co) -- hit me up if you&#x27;re a Django dev ;)
kelt超过 9 年前
I do general tech support for office day to day issues.<p>A little of everything, from printers to network&#x2F;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.<p>Headcount cutting and all means I have a lot less support issues to deal with and more HN time.<p>I have this impression that most developers in any company would be more or less quite &#x27;technical&#x27;. Is there any need for tech support role in bigger corporations?
FigBug超过 9 年前
I currently do contracting, mostly in the Pro Audio industry. I do VST&#x2F;AU plugins, control surface software, digital mixers, speaker processors, effects processors, etc.<p>I do enjoy it, even though it pays less than most other industries.<p>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.<p>I also worked on some pretty fancy digitally controlled line arrays and subwoofers. The aiming they could do was pretty cool.
notnownikki超过 9 年前
I help run a CI system based on the openstack-infra CI components, for a major provider of openstack based services.<p>The great thing about it is meeting with the developers, asking them &quot;What CI problems are holding you up? Anything we can improve?&quot; and making their answers my priorities. We always end up improving things and making people&#x27;s lives easier.<p>It&#x27;s not so much the technology, although I do love that; it&#x27;s being able to make a team&#x27;s working life easier and more enjoyable.
TurboHaskal超过 9 年前
I did CRUD for some local shop as a solo developer.<p>I quickly got bored because of the lack of intellectual stimulation. Fourteen monad tutorials later the whole stack was written in Haskell.<p>I wish I had a job.
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TACIXAT超过 9 年前
Security Analyst. I audit applications and security related designs in order to find flaws in them. I enjoy it a lot. I get to exploit a lot of interesting flaws in a wide variety of applications.<p>I used to reverse malware. That job had a lot of other tedious responsibilities, so I&#x27;m a lot happier where I am.<p>I&#x27;m also building a web application in my spare time. Getting close to launching it. This is probably the most fulfilling work I do.
drakonka超过 9 年前
I work as a build engineer at a game development company. I do like it because I have a great opportunity to learn and grow, which is possibly the most important thing to me in a job. I&#x27;m encouraged to think about what I want to be doing long term and move in that direction. Right now I deal mostly with build tools and automated testing.
Overtonwindow超过 9 年前
I am the Director of Government Relations for a hospital. I enjoy it very much. My favorite job was being a stay-at-home dad.
haseeb1431超过 9 年前
Develop different financial products and provide business intelligence. Software Development manager with 4 direct reports in 3 sparsely geo-located engineering team.<p>It is OK as long as I am earning enough to have good life.<p>I love to develop products that are being utilized by common people and it improves their lifestyle.
Zanta超过 9 年前
I&#x27;m a mechatronics designer at a robotics startup. It&#x27;s a junior &#x27;jack-of-all-trades&#x27; position: mechanical design, testing and automation, and hardware troubleshooting. I&#x27;m still pretty new but I like the project and I like the variety of work.
gmays超过 9 年前
I&#x27;m a product manager at GoDaddy and love be the level of influence I have and role I play in making our customers successful.<p>My favorite job is a tie between what I&#x27;m doing now and my time in the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps was more fun, but it wasn&#x27;t sustainable.
a3n超过 9 年前
SWQA on medical devices. All manual testing. It&#x27;s pleasant enough, but I&#x27;m really gratified by the social contribution.<p>My favorite job was writing test software at Boeing for 747-400, 757, 767 and 777, in the early nineties.
ycosynot超过 9 年前
I make little websites which I don&#x27;t know if people will care about. Enjoyment will depend on the millions I manage to rake in.
awl130超过 9 年前
why do you ask?