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Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

187 点作者 rukshn超过 3 年前

16 条评论

legerdemain超过 3 年前
Want to work on interesting problems? Build software for doctors' offices and medical groups! Help lawyers crawl out of their low-tech hole! Work on software to revolutionize public classrooms! Why work on interesting tech when you could throw yourself at intractable problems that we never get any closer to solving?
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PaulHoule超过 3 年前
I think many people are &quot;interested&quot; in novelty.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lehmiller.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;4&#x2F;28&#x2F;why-we-crave-sexual-novelty" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lehmiller.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;4&#x2F;28&#x2F;why-we-crave-sexual...</a><p>There is &quot;interesting&quot;, &quot;novel&quot; and &quot;not understood&quot; which are related but not the same thing.<p>In projects I think one should budget novelty. If you understand the domain (understand the problem) then it is not so risky to use a framework, languages, etc. that you don&#x27;t understand.<p>If you are unfamiliar with everything, however, you have a tough slope to climb. Sometimes you have to do it. To work with ISO Common Logic you almost certainly have to use Haskell. If you want to code for Arduino you&#x27;re going to have to work with C or a similar low-level language. But if you can have a choice at all you don&#x27;t want to use new tools for a new problem.
vgel超过 3 年前
I&#x27;m getting tired of this take. There&#x27;s such as thing as programming for the joy of programming. You can love a clever algorithm with no &quot;business value&quot;. Code can be beautiful and fun to write without being useful, or optimally-useful-per-unit-of-time-invested.
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mcguire超过 3 年前
There are downsides to this. The early parts of my resume read like a list of major software project disasters of the 1990s. Among other things, I worked on Taligent OS and WorkplaceOS. (Never heard of them? That&#x27;s my point.)<p>As a result of chasing interesting problems (and a stint as a university sysadmin), my salary history led me to be significantly underpaid for most of my career.
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gampleman超过 3 年前
As someone who has spent their entire career working on interesting problems using boring technology, and now work on an interesting problem using interesting technology, I can only recommend the latter.
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caymanjim超过 3 年前
These things are fairly orthogonal. There are interesting problems, there&#x27;s interesting tech. Sometimes interesting problems require interesting tech to solve, but not usually. Often boring problems are best-solved with interesting tech, but they can optionally be solved with boring tech. In my experience, solving interesting problems with boring tech is far more frustrating and unfulfilling than solving boring problems with interesting tech. But again, they&#x27;re pretty orthogonal.<p>There are a tremendous number of jobs using interesting tech to solve boring problems. This is really the bread-and-butter of most tech careers. You might be selling widgets or building another social network or something that is mind-numbingly boring and unfulfilling, but if you&#x27;re into the tech, you might still enjoy your day-to-day. That&#x27;s certainly been the bulk of my career. I&#x27;ve also worked on solving interesting problems using boring tech, and while it was nice to see the results at the end, the path leading there wasn&#x27;t as fun.<p>If you&#x27;re lucky enough to land both, that&#x27;s great. I&#x27;ve worked on interesting problems with both interesting and boring tech (NASA projects), except it didn&#x27;t pay well. I&#x27;ve worked on boring problems with interesting tech (fintech) and that both paid well and was actually more challenging and more fun. And I&#x27;ve worked on a whole lot of boring problems with boring tech (countless ecommerce web projects).<p>At the end of the day, if I can&#x27;t have both, interesting tech is probably more important to me, because that&#x27;s what I spend almost all my time dealing with, and I&#x27;m still a hacker at heart and appreciate the tech in itself. It does leave me feeling, most of the time, like my work has no meaning, but I can find meaning in other endeavors. There aren&#x27;t enough interesting problems that also pay the bills to go &#x27;round, so most of the time I just want my day-to-day to be engaging.
908B64B197超过 3 年前
... but if you can&#x27;t work on an interesting problem (where you get a cut of the revenue to solve it) then please, make sure to work on the best possible tech stack, ie, the one the company you want to jump ship to already uses.
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IfOnlyYouKnew超过 3 年前
That’s my thought every time someone creates yet-another HN reader. Sure, you were interested mostly in the stack you’re learning. But there are endless opportunities with similar scope where you might end up creating something actually useful.<p>For inspiration, Wikipedia is rich reservoir of repetitive tasks to fix minor issues that would be easier with a task-specific GUI for review.
oytis超过 3 年前
As much as I agree that solving (technically) interesting problems is more fulfilling than selling ads using distributed clusters, I think that finding an interesting problem that helps business make money is a non-trivial problem by itself and usually requires a separate person doing it full time. If you have such a person in your team, you are in a great luck
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1vuio0pswjnm7超过 3 年前
&quot;I picked up the project because I was genuinely interested in it, and because it was extremely challenging.&quot;<p>I pickied the OS as a project because Im generally interested in it. Its challenging. I had to learn Bourne shell and C, and a bit of assembly.<p>I am genuinely interested in the OS because I use it everyday to help solve problems.
darthrupert超过 3 年前
Naah. I&#x27;ll work on interesting tech. Mostly because life is too short for things like php or windows, but also because sometimes (admittedly not very often) it gives me a significant advantage.
erokar超过 3 年前
The author doesn&#x27;t say who or how what about the project was interesting, just that it was interesting and that it made him endure Java. My experience is the opposite. I don&#x27;t care so much what I&#x27;m making, as long as it&#x27;s not something making the world a worse place. I care about what technology and methods I can use to do whatever. That is interesting to me from a craft point of view.
one_off_comment超过 3 年前
In my experience, it&#x27;s fun to work on interesting problems and it&#x27;s fun to work with interesting tech. But it quickly becomes overwhelming if you try to do both at the same time.
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aslkdjflkajsdf超过 3 年前
I do both. Shall I be ostracized?
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username91超过 3 年前
Recommend striving for both.
eurasiantiger超过 3 年前
Important note: the writer says they started on Java and had trouble grasping OOP concepts. No wonder, because Java is not an object-oriented language—it is a class-oriented language. This is especially apparent from the inheritance mechanisms.<p>JavaScript, on the other hand, is an object-oriented language down to its prototypal inheritance. There are no classes, only objects and primitives (which can get transparently promoted to objects).