So, what do you do for a living? Is it the culmination of a series of interesting jobs all over the map, or have you had a Steady Eddie job for a decade or two?
And, more abstractly, what do you want to do? Are you living the dream, are you chasing a dream, or have you given up on chasing that dream?
I'm on HN because it seems to be the only place with cool nerdy people who aren't afraid to be honest and critical while being generous in sharing their good-will :)
Re dream job: I'm been talking about this endlessly on HN already, but I'm currently working on a very ambitious writing project [1] which will hopefully pave way to some interesting possibilities! Though to be frank, I'll probably stay working at the bookstore for a very very long time.
Btw thank you Phileosopher for asking this question! I've been super curious as well. :)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30928105 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30976497
I initially wanted to be an academic librarian and got an MLIS, but I was diagnosed with MS my last semester of school so that altered my plans, to say the least.
I don't really have a dream job, but what I do have is a growing list of pre-reqs a job and organization has to have before I'll work for them. I won't work a job where my work makes the world a worse place or where I'm disrespected. I won't work for hypocrites. At this point, it's looking more and more like I'll end up going back to freelance work just for the ability to refuse clients I don't want to work for. Right now, my anxiety and risk-tolerance are preventing that; I need to work on my mental health first.
What kinds of things do you do in your political communications job? Sounds very interesting!
On my team in particular, I'm the team member with the strongest tech and quantitative skills, so I also am the one who collects and presents metrics + owns relationships with a lot of the service providers we have relationships with.
It's not my favorite job I've done (too much 'asap' work and not enough thinking work), but I took the job because I knew marketing and branding was what I was weakest in when I was working for myself, and I wanted to learn about marketing while still having a roof over my head, so I took a comms job.
I spent 10 years at Apple and then six years at a startup that was acquired by Cisco.
Then I developed a chronic illness that took me out of the workforce and bankrupted me.
After getting a diagnosis (after two years of trying) and adjusting to my new reality, I got my health under control, starting working again--mostly as a consultant--and gradually reconstructed my life to fit the new circumstances.
I've been working as a consultant for about sixteen years now, and life is good. I like my work. I live alone except for my elderly mother. My children are grown and our relationship is good. In my spare time I write stories and songs and software and draw pictures. Despite my health-related bankruptcy lo, these many years ago, I am now rich, not in the sense of owning a lot of capital, but in the sense of having a good and satisfying life and expenses that are less than my income.
I've done a bunch of work that I find interesting. Over the past couple of years, it's been helping an engineering company with software development, AI, and product development. The work is interesting and my colleagues are congenial.
Am I living the dream? Yes, I think so. At least I'm living a modest, reality-adjusted old man's version of the dream, and I'm pretty happy with it. I expect to keep doing it as long as possible, until nobody wants my help anymore or I fall over.
Glad that you're well!
Vote for representatives who want free healthcare.
So I had IBS aka colon spasms to a debilitating degree and went to a couple highly-regarded doctors via my insurance including Kaiser and Blue cross in Seattle, but they said I was ok, and didn’t even do a referral to a gastroenterologist and just did blood panels. This destroyed my life and my relationship with my gf for a couple years and who I thought I was going to propose to, then it just mostly stopped.
I’ll have the odd spasm now and again but nothing like it was from 2017-2021. Now I’m in the other side of the country and it doesn’t bother me like wtf it just went away.
I’ve been screened for crohn's disease and ulcritive colitis and nothing came up. Sometimes our bodies are..strange.
I want to continue trying to make the world better, including sustaining myself through Open Source. Pretty much the dream.
The remaining piece of the dream is to challenge/indulge myself and build a bike computer (jazda.org).
If the world hadn't been on the brink of multiple crises I'd be doing basic science though.
And yes, it's the culmination of a series of interesting jobs all over the map. As a teen, I started doing what I like and then later I started helping people that asked me for help. I became a startup CEO more or less by accident.
Debating between going back to my bio school background via probably bioinformatics but for now really like working outside with my hands. Starting to build custom furniture and repair equipment on the side.
Cant imagine doing one type of job for more than handful of years, at least for now.
I am pretty happy with my life balance. I have 3 kids, who are all wonderful. I love going to my 20 hour barista job socializing and talking to young people and encouraging them to follow their passions. The business is great too, growing like crazy and its fun to use my economics and tech background to actually drive business results for myself.
I’m quietly connecting with friends and acquaintances that work in tech to explore what new door to open (UX/UXR, B2B Sales, Account Management, Project Management), but I won’t actively begin pursuing a new position until July 1.
That said, if anyone is willing to discuss pathways - email is in my profile.
I kind of ended up in my career at random. When I first decided to go into law I never thought I would end up working in finance. I like my job (most of the time) but I have often wondered why I didn't go into software development instead. One reason, I think, is that it's easier to do programming as a hobby than law, so this way I get to explore two very distinct disciplines.
Even if you don't like or have an interest in cryptocurrency (I think there are legitimate and compelling arguments to dislike it), the questions it raises about decentralized ownership and decision-making, and cybersecurity ethics/law in open systems where participants have agreed to the code as contract are just so cutting-edge. To my knowledge there hasn't been a successful prosecution of someone who's exploited a bug in an open-source smart contract yet, though it looks like this will be tested soon with the Indexed Finance hacker.
Clients include the full run of international organizations, e.g. UNICEF, UNDP, and so on, and international foundations.
We're not in the business of predictions or focus on techno-solutionisms, rather we help policymakers and organizations understand different ways social change can unfold and impact them and help them build strategies that navigate around these changes.
I like what I do and feels it has high social impact. I just wish it paid better and wouldn't mind working with a long-term fund or VC as an additional side gig to make that happen.
Can you recommend any starting points if I would like to learn more?
Now I pay my bills through holdings that were initially built 9 years ago off a single $5000 investment. It is not an eye-popping multi-millions portfolio, but my lifestyle is cheap and I can generally afford anything I want. My college study was in economics, and while finance isn't my most favorite topic in the world, my hand has been forced to use what I know to grasp in that direction and predict what the next steps are in the space so that I can make successful speculations. Finance is conceptually important to societal coordination, and the tech simply adds more ways of achieving it. But in the near term it has to endure wave after wave of rent seeking activity, which is also what makes it good for speculation.
More recently, to pass the time(because I play a long game here, and do not try to trade more than a few times a year) I started paying attention to the NFT markets and have been using that as an excuse to practice illustration skills, which has been fun and builds on what I already knew from games. A few works have sold. As a side gig it's fine, it lets me work on ideas I want to express, and if I continue to invest in those skills I'll have another set of options for income.
My wants are mostly centered around relationships, community and society - things that can't be answered just with work or money.
Those are extremely important wants! Most folks have very low-bar perspectives about those things. Or, they see it with a simplistic lens that doesn't actually go deep.
You should definitely channel some more energy, time and attention to those things. It'll change everything, it certainly did for me :)
I love the latter especially for its sense of physical "place" - you can't beat something that you can touch and feel. It's been a very fruitful path for me, and the fact it subsidizes my NSFW illustrations doesn't hurt. ;)
I was always interested in computers but when it was time to strike out on a path after high school I thought the idea of being behind a computer screen all the time wasn’t that appealing so I focused on my other interest, ships.
I got to learn about engines, pumps, hydraulics, electricity, etc. (On a ship the engineers fix EVERYTHING) but after a few, ended up on a ship that allows me to focus on the electronics/ computer side and spend most my day looking at a computer.
I program as a hobby (easy to take traveling) still and read and take as many online classes as I can. I helped a coworker develop a system for his side-gig to control some LEDs with some raspberry-pi’s and a web app using Flask.
I still really don’t know what I want to be I guess, but I enjoy the level discourse here and the community’s ability to find interesting stories.
It is my 'dream job' insofar as I love teaching philosophy. It isn't, however, an ideal situation. This is because at any point in time registrations for my synchronous courses might dry up.
So I have been trying to diversify my income streams too. But it's quite difficult to do so when I was a rusty academic for 7 years. The past two years were a learning experience on all fronts.
I was not sure I could actually contribute to hacker news, newbie here. So still learning the ropes, and it seems that it is not limited to tech jobs, posts, or news.
Where do I head from here? I wish I knew. The ride has been interesting though. The only reason I'm responding is because of your nickname. So, curious to hear back! Thanks!
Write software to model and evaluate hardware performance and power. Write software that generates software to test hardware, think hard about how to test hardware and explore if implementations violate architecture spec.
Now at work I mostly write docs about how to model/test hardware. I am too senior to write software and have to do something strategic (that is what I am told and rewarded for).
A series (very short - i did not switch companies too many times) of hey this is interesting and a few years became - "I know how to do this. It is not fun any more but I have bills to pay."
Outside of work I try to dabble in modifying/writing system code (*BSD or Linux) and teaching computer systems. Unfortunately I have very little time to put into these hobbies. I am not done chasing the dream, just a little winded from work so cant run as fast as needed to catch the dream.
Source: Am German, have worked with an org that wrote a grant proposal for an ML R&D product for funding from a federal state programme.
You'll find no lack of these services if you look around. They do check what you're bringing to them as they obv. also only invest if they see a chance of a project being funded and take a small percentage or fixed fee for managing the process.
What do I want to do? My child has some disabilities, so I'll likely be in the Parent role full-time for awhile. It continues to be a second childhood, and I'm parenting myself along the way with the help of a professional counselor, The Blindboy Podcast, and authors through their books. After shedding several hobbies these past few years I'm slowly spinning up practice in software development, specifically to help people learn (the software I'm familiar with in public schools had a lot of problems). I'm also interested in making games, again to help people learn (while also escaping into game-land). Ideas are cheap, so if you'd like to make a game to help us better understand the hyperobject of Earth's ecosystem (see also: ecology and complexity science), please do! Number Munchers was fine and all, but we can do better. That said, I'm also ready to go without using this technology and focus on rewilding whatever land I'm on, along with changing my diet to eat mostly whatever is grown here and by nearby farmers. Computers are fun and useful tools, but we're still animals in meatspace.
I haven't included any contact information in my profile yet because I'm not ready to collaborate or be otherwise employed. That will likely change. The HN community has many people who know far more than I do, and some seem to share the general values of helping the land, water, air, and life on Earth be healthier and more resilient as the average of annual weather changes.
Edit: formatting
But that's a dream for other people who know how to make it happen. I take work where I can get it.
Also, what drives your interest in being a developer?
Regarding my deams, I don't know whether I should be 95% happy with all that I've got already or try to chase something else. A significant portion of my colleagues have stayed for more than a decade, some had changed jobs but came back after a few weeks or years.
I like puzzles, so will most likely end up interviewing at FAANG at some point. I think leetcode/hackerrank is a bit annoying but if I can double my compensation, it isn't a big deal.
My main focus is my toddler though and just enjoying life so I am maximizing for free time.
- Architecture
- Compliance
- Operations
- SRE
More or less herd a bunch of cats. One day it might be reworking the design of a given service, another it might be helping our more proper Operations team close a ton of vulnerabilities.
In general... I try to make things better/help others do that too
Now I am just a team lead and just trying to climb the ladder.
I would like to be more specialised in BW photography, just like my father was.
Same workplace for 25 years, but different engineering roles.
My plan is to bring to market therapies for age-related disease, probably a crosslink breaker for skin. We’ll see if it happens...