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Comment by walleeee | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you've discovered what you aren't aligned with, but you don't yet know what you do think is interesting or valuable. The first step is answering this question for yourself. What do you care about?

Science perhaps? Pick a field and you can probably find a lab or project in need of research software engineers.

Healthcare? Plenty of work in digital health records, computational drug discovery, or so I've heard.

There is a world of mundane but important work humming along below the turbulence, but it doesn't have the hype or marketing bullshit and isn't as visible. Somebody is writing software to transfer your driver's license when you move to a different state. Someone programs microwaves, somebody else rail scheduling systems, someone else water treatment plants.

If you know what you care about, look for jobs involving it, and pay no mind to web3, fintech, adtech or whatever.

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> Science perhaps? Pick a field and you can probably find a lab or project in need of research software engineers.

I've been in the industry a long time and OP's realization that most jobs in tech are useless or so-called "evil" typically occurs pretty early on. This would indicate to me that OP is probably still fairly young and has a lot of discovering to do about themselves and the industry itself. Interesting work for some definition of interesting is everywhere. One should consider themselves lucky to work on very interesting (read: cutting edge) work at any point in their life.

OP is probably a talented developer but not yet at the level any company will accept them as a research engineer, which tends to be a terminal position on the level of the C-suite. If OP is looking for this type of position it explains why every job they've ran into is web 3/crypto/evil startup stuff. Those are really the only people young, relatively inexperienced but highly ambitious, engineers can get a taste of that environment without going through the corporate crucible for a decade and a half or more.

Not really, I've been thinking that for years, it's just been hitting me more recently.

But it seems unlikely for me that anyone in general tech would know much about the science industry or positions of "research engineer" without having prior exposure to that industry somehow.

Like, I could spend 2 more decades doing full stack dev, it would change nothing to the kind of jobs available to me. I'm already as high as I can go in this area without going into management (which I have no interest in)

But I think the question still stands: I would kill for a science related tech job. But these are not found on indeed, HN or even LinkedIn.

The post-doc job I got after my PhD was through one of my Viva examiners, who forwarded me an email from some science email list. Theres no way I could have found it without him.

There are EU Framework Programme projects that have good funding for research, but you need to know where to look to find them.

Where???

yeah I have absolutely no idea. When I look on linkedin, google, typical job boards and others, I mostly find startups.

I've had some success cold emailing researchers and asking about openings in scientific computing. Worst case they just say no. Also look at university corporations, e.g. AUI, UCAR/NCAR, etc. They sometimes hire staff programmers and/or contractors to farm out to federal agencies. Universities themselves may also post staff developer positions; these can be an entry point into a scientific discipline if the role allows you to make connections with people in the field. Another option is government agencies themselves, e.g. in NIH and CDC I think there is some recent demand for bioinformatics developers.

It's probably better to identify an organization you're interested in first, then look at their job boards. Aggregators likely won't list as many of these roles.

https://biopharmguy.com/career-by-location.php has links to a ton of career pages for individual biotech companies. To find the union of Interesting and Hiring-Software-Devs you'll need to warm up your browser's tab bar and do some manual digging though.

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