Please name a company or at least specific market niche + geo or product, to understand what exactly the company (or your team is producing).
It required research into the industry and real consideration of how my skills transfer so I could convey that during interviews, and I started in a quite junior role. But once I proved myself I have risen fairly quickly. It doesn’t pay anything like the monster salaries I see here, but it’s more than enough for me to live on.
Learned that this is easier when: - company is small enough for me to be in direct contact with customers vs. seeing quotes from user research - time is spent mostly to help customers vs. show how smart we are to leadership - everyone can challenge each other to improve vs. stay stagnant - we have enough funding / cashflow to be able to look forward vs. worry about surviving today
Also a growing number of companies focused on sustainability, which is easier to project meaning onto: https://topstartups.io/?industries=Sustainability
[1] https://Akvo.org
There is a serious lack of people with computational background in the field, very hard to compete with the market in terms of compensation. So we are left with the rare cases where the motivation of the type of work beats that, or the few places (e.g. Broad in the US) that actually have special consideration in terms of salary for computational biologists.
Going through a PhD is probably the one thing that would scare people away as compensation is usually dowright ridiculous, but as someone else mentioned you can find plenty of positions that will but require it. Pretty much all of the students from our Master's degree who don't even have a PhD find jobs in the sector.
I have a master's in Computer Science from USA, and is currently working as a backend web developer in my home country in Asia.
Some MOOCs I took for fun around biology seemed interesting.
I'm thinking maybe I might enjoy bioinformatics.
How does one get into bioinformatics?
> There is a serious lack of people with computational background in the field, very hard to compete with the market in terms of compensation. So we are left with the rare cases where the motivation of the type of work beats that, or the few places (e.g. Broad in the US) that actually have special consideration in terms of salary for computational biologists.
Does that mean they're paid well? Or they aren't? Sorry English isn't my first language.
If you're still interested feel free to email me and I'll be happy give you some pointers. Email in my profile.
I'm working at a fintech company. The tagline here is building digital infrastructure. Generally, digital transactions are a lot harder in countries with higher corruption, because they have to go through a lot more red tape. It's not a low hanging fruit; Silicon Valley will make the tech but they won't deal with the cultural issues. There's also a higher level of fraud. Many payment gateways will freeze your account if you sell tickets or perfumes, because they don't want to deal with that.
So digital infrastructure is a fitting term. Taking the analogy, we do have dirt roads and small roads, but it's a bottleneck for economic growth. We're building the digital highways and bridges and rails for the big and small companies so they can focus on what they do best.
Now I am working on another workflow engine, CWL, used in life sciences and getting more popular. I find it a lot more enjoyable these types of projects used in research, where anyone can contribute via an open source community. My current work is sponsored by Curii in the USA.
The salary is definitely a lot less than FAANG's, but I stopped worrying about that a long time ago, and decided to focus on what I had fun and felt realized. There are lots of groups and companies looking for RSE's, you can find some in the Who's Hiring thread, some times, but ResearchGate and Google will probably give you a lot more options.
p.s.: if you get a job in a research institute, chances are that it is also related to government, so they might be able to sponsor your visa if you'd like to move somewhere else as well.
Really interesting since there is a lot of math involved and you’re pushing the hardware to its absolute limits
Also really satisfying to see people playing the game and see your own changes visually in it
The learning curve is very steep though
Spent a couple years as a C++ dev and did some side projects (stuff like a toy engine) before finding a graphics role
- University labs, where they hire full time staff (not just students) to support ongoing projects.
- Non-profits, who usually handle lots of data, or political parties (usually crazy and fast-paced, but can be fun)
I work in a small company (co-op) co-founded with colleagues of previous gigs. Our clients are mostly nonprofits and political parties. Our clients do really nice things and most are fun to work with (as long as one can stomach that most orgs have their baggage). It wasn't easy to start, but now we have way too much work and it pays well.
For me, I'm driven by rage :P.
But it depends on what exactly and who you teach.
What have you teaches that you find meaningful?
Some people get satisfaction from writing some low-level code that isn't really visible for the end-user in the form of any feature, but e.g. makes the system 10% more efficient - think about kernel optimization work for example. Others again mostly get satisfaction from delivering user-facing features.
Then there's people who will get satisfaction from just being able to work with a certain set of technologies, who might not be happy about being asked to work with other pieces of technology.
My own contribution is small but there is flexibility to shape outcomes and push for improvements to the user experience. The big picture contribution to society is large and it is rewarding seeing the software used to make governments and organizations more efficient. The opportunities for open data and citizen engagement are huge, and the public is getting more exposure as climate change, natural disasters, and epidemics drive a need for informational maps.
It is gratifying seeing the growth of awareness of GIS and geospatial tech, but I continue to believe it is wildly underutilized, and I try to contribute to changing that.
It helps that I can use the software in my free time and do really cool stuff with it. That and meeting customers at our annual events is deeply rewarding - we have really cool, awesome users.
That’s one of the better parts of working at Esri - it is a diverse company with lots of cool people, often with very different backgrounds from the typical software engineer.
You’re wasting time doing meaningless stuff to earn money youll spend consuming. Contributing to Promoting this vicious circle.
What do you consider to be interesting or meaningful work? (Not limiting it strictly to a "job").
Where or how do such organisations recruit or find talent or professionals?
I'm also increasingly of the view that the hiring problem has a MASSIVE "Market for Lemons" aspect to it, in which both candidates and opportunities have a tremendous problem in both accurately representing themselves and in being heard above the noise floor.
This exists for any sufficiently complex informational good (and both skilled labour and skilled labour gigs are informationally complex).
Re-reading the paper just now, I note that Akerlof makes several comments and observations, several of which which I'd not recalled though they've been central to much of my own thinking:
- That a direct consequence is that both high-quality buyers and sellers tend to exit the market. The buyers can't find what they're looking for, the sellers can't find a suitable buyer (or price).
- That hiring is a specific case Akerlof discusses, though he discusses the case of minority hiring. Ethical and senior-level hiring would have similar dynamics.
- That trust (or its absence) is a key factor.
There aren't any clear solutions, though generally greater transparency is a suggested approach. Services such as CarFaX, for example, have greatly improved efficiency and reduced deadweight losses in the used-car market.
https://viterbi-web.usc.edu/~shaddin/cs590fa13/papers/Akerlo...
Advice to my younger self would be: get rich (financially independent) first, then follow your passion.
And my advice to my younger self would be to find a middle ground: do meaningful work but don't neglect the necessities.
The trouble with getting rich first is that you can't know beforehand how much time and effort it'll take to get there.
And focusing only on money may change you.
If meaning in your career is an issue you're wrestling with, I empathize. I know how difficult it can be to do work that you no longer find meaningful. Many of my friends and family are able to treat their work as just a job, but for whatever reason, I haven't been able to do so.
So I quit my job in January to take a step back and think about what I wanted to do with my career. And I decided that as long as the comp was reasonable, I'd be willing to work on any technical problem connected with climate change.
I was surprised at how many interesting tech opportunities were available -- no end of ML and computer vision companies, for example, on everything from recycling robots to weather modeling. And that's leaving aside more traditional full-stack SWE work for collecting and presenting data. If you're interested in climate work specifically, I strongly recommend reaching out to Work on Climate [2] or ClimatePeople [3].
Ultimately, I joined Evergrow because I thought that understanding the capital dynamics in these markets would be most critical. I also thought the team was outstanding -- pragmatic, driven, and very high-integrity.
And if you want to consider different sectors more broadly, I've heard good things about 80000 Hours [4].
[1]: evergrow.com [2]: workonclimate.org [3]: climatepeople.com [4]: 80000hours.org
personally, I think the meaning is in the relationships you form, not in the work itself (unless it's charity? haven't done that, wouldn't know), or maybe on what the compensation allows you to do (in your personal life)
as an example, I met a guy who was one of the top software engineers in a startup (he might have been one of the first members), he was in it purely for the money, so he could afford to pay for aviation classes/certifications, from the beginning he wasn't interested in the work, but it allowed him a [financially] comfortable life, and the aviation stuff
the job itself is fun but the most consistent ingredients for satisfaction (other than compensation) have been: flexibility in projects to choose from, autonomy/lack of micromanagement(!), time flexibility, having a boss I respect or at least tolerate positively, and emotionally mature team members. It's been a pretty obvious 1:1 in change of happiness when one or more of those elements change, and I tend to correct it in a hurry.