Ask HN: Are there software jobs that involve zero web/networking? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there software jobs that involve zero web/networking?

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I've had a weird realization in the last few years that I love programming/algorithms/optimization but I just hate dealing with the web/networking code.

There is so much stuff involved unrelated to the actual main code like random failures, retries, logging, monitoring, boilerplate, infrastructure, outages, cloud platforms etc...

I would love to work on something completely offline that is just contained within one computer or process for the most part. For example an offline tool or library that does something.

Does anyone have a job like this? If so, what kind of stuff do you work one?

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Firmware perhaps? Or medical devices. Everything will add networking eventually though.

I've written a lot of cloud automation over the past couple of years. I'm utilizing different APIs which of course involve networks but the code itself mainly deals with the management of resources, like deleting / archiving old backups, changing instance attributes etc.

In general if you join a large company there are endless different types of projects. I would look for a project/team within your org that does what you are looking for.

I agree but will add that it can be hard to get into those positions. At least it seems like there aren't that many, they tend to go away as modernization takes place, and the people in those jobs tend to stick around.

Right now everything that works, sooner or later goes over or connects to internet. I don't think there is anything new coming up without internet connectivity

Device R&D jobs seem like the way to go. Will likely be a lot of matlab, labview, c, c++ etc. I know a couple people who have had careers in robotics and I myself have done some work in embodied CV. Pretty much c++ without a ton of care around connectivity. Although as a project progresses you’ll basically be stuck doing networking and boy let me tell you networking with edge devices is a lot more annoying and low level than the beautiful rest or gql endpoints most engineers work with.

TLDR: big companies make networking easy because of crud. Pretty much all software companies are just crud apps (maybe with some sockets stuff if they’re cool)

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