Ask HN: Programmers who aren't front/back end/web developers, what is your job? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Programmers who aren't front/back end/web developers, what is your job?

I feel like reading HN sometimes you'd get the impression that all software development now days is just building web apps or working on web services.

I'm curious for people who are programmers but don't work on the usual web stuff, what is your job/domain?

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There's a small but growing amount of "research software engineers", people who attempt to bring professional-level software development to scientific research, and help scientists achieve their goals (example org: https://us-rse.org/ ). That's what I do as of recently (see https://hnn.brown.edu/ ): left my last post-doc, and switched to full-time development on a scientific computing package in my old domain (computational neuroscience).

My previous 7 positions:

Firmware (bare-metal)

Firmware (Linux-embedded)

Blockchain (mixture of cryptography and network programming)

Platform (DevOps / Kubernetes)

DeFi R&D (Smart contract compiler / smart contracts)

Full-stack web (Perl, Vue)

Fintech backend (algos, full-stack web)

Essentially an embedded SW Dev, working on either bare-metal or something using Linux as an OS. I tell non-SW people (and a few who are) that I "do the stuff that happens from the time you press the power button to the time your 'thing' is ready to use", then they get it.

I find it oddly hard to switch fields. I guess I did web stuff for too long and filled my CV with it. Although i regularily do other stuff (embedded eng, systems eng) and find my existing skills applicable to a large extend employers seem to be put off by my history in web.

There's a fair bit of developers out there who are dedicated to native mobile app development.

Also:

- video games and related computer graphics development

- data scientist/data engineer

- desktop enterprise apps (granted, these are increasing going web-based)

Desktop applications, and sometimes servers unrelated to the web. Actually all the technologies that existed for 40 years before the web.

The fact that I hate JS and think it’s the worst language ever created explains why I’m not doing web stuff on purpose unless I’m ordered to.

I am a GPU compiler engineer working on the OpenXLA compiler.

I am currently working for RISC Zero on a ZK circuit compiler. Prior to that:

- tensor compiler for inference acceleration (plaidml)

- static analysis tools (coverity)

- photo manager app, specifically an ML-based self-organization system which never shipped (mylio)

- scripting language for internal streaming computation pipeline (google)

- various embedded firmware projects at a product development contractor

Before that, I spent many years working on compilers and related tools.

I work on tools for other developers!

There is a big cohort of people working in ERP-like software (that granted, covers what you say), and is a big niche with A LOT of things that you need to do.

I work on this, for small companies.

Also, working as database engineer, that is certainly a unexpected turn of events for me :)

At the moment I'm working for an observability company building an observability agent. That includes aspects of backend but it's a bit like writing a computer virus. It's a bit like hacking.

I have worked on bond pricing and inventory systems, systems for options and credit default swaps, security agents for runtimes like java, python, industrial control software (SCADA).

C++/Qt GUI applications (embedded, desktop), mostly for a large customer in the medical sector, i.e. microscopy/imaging/cancer research.

The jobs/roles I search for (finance guy), seems like everyone's working on quant development

system operations/admin.

moved over from dev about 10 years ago, but for various reasons still do a bit of programming, mostly for one-off adhoc analysis or config tasks.

Gotta say not having to worry about end users, future proofing or historic technical debt is wonderful.

Making tools for data engineering. Most of my previous career was text processing.

Working on software for zeiss semiconductor. Scientific stuff, all inhouse

Games? Embedded? FPGA? UI frameworks? DSP or Signal processing?

C Compiler (GCC) - Bug fixes, performance improvements, etc.

Hardware-in-the-loop realtime dev for missile systems.

Working on ML Compilers for different accelerators.

Infrastructure engineer (write TypeScript code)

Computer vision. C++ and Python.

C# Desktop apps.

Data Engineers

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