Hacker News Reader

Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups that are just making useless services that clearly won't go anywhere.

Find a business that makes money from software, small product-owner companies are often really good to work for, preferably one that supplies/supports your local community. You can actually find that in agencies pretty often. When you've got a business providing a core value to the community and no investors, you can feel a stronger connection to where you work and the community it's in. Usually smaller bootstrapped companies have to be providing a tangible service to the community in order to survive, whereas VC can be lofty and full of non-things and hype.

View on HN

Definitely agree, though I wonder where you find those types of jobs? I recently tried looking at government jobs but didn't find anything that was either remote or near me. Not sure where to find the rest.

Because indeed, almost everything I find on tech recruitment platforms is either big corps (often doing nebulous B2B things) or VC backed startups that clearly don't really provide real value besides making VCs hope they can get their 10x returns

> I recently tried looking at government jobs but didn't find anything that was either remote or near me.

Hell, I’d be willing to go back in office for an “interesting” job. The problem with the government is what they pay for probably having to live in DC. As well as the horrible sounding bureaucratic requirements and leveling.

You need to look at either the private companies or university-affiliated research centers doing the actual research and implementation of technologies for the government rather than the government itself. There are loads of these places that don't require living in DC or have a ludicrous application process. Just to throw an example out, US government spacecraft operations have a large presence in Colorado, so there are a ton of government-adjacent opportunities for tech work in that sector there.

> You need to look at either the private companies or university-affiliated research centers doing the actual research and implementation of technologies for the government rather than the government itself.

Oh these guys won’t touch me. I don’t have any formal education. I do agree that many have some pretty interesting jobs.

Uni's have a hard time hiring, so you'd be surprised. If you can show equivalent industry experience then they'd probably love to have you as most universities are full of ex-grads. They really appreciate industry experience. But just my personal experience here, because I didn't go to university I was not ready for the bureaucracy and inefficiency, I had to leave. In industry it's usually high pressure, get things done fast. At the university it was high pressure but slow as molasses, working through processes and finding the humans you need to do their parts of the process, then convincing them to actually do it.

I cannot at all speak for all government/big organizations, but there is a certain level of bureaucracy, inefficiency and tedium that I don't personally find enjoyable so I steer clear of those now. There's probably some really great teams within big orgs out there who have managed to carve themselves a comfortable niche but I bet those are even harder to find.

I personally look for companies with less than 100 people, usually much less, in smaller cities. At least in Australia you can find lots of great bootstrapped small businesses doing project work for clients or product-owners of their own software products. But you have to go find the businesses rather than find the job offerings, then just check out their careers page.

There's probably not many in SV, since VC sucks all the air out of the room in the tech industry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com