Ask HN: Best and worst jobs of your career and why?

Best: The A/B test engineer for Travelocity. My velocity was only limited by the quantity of traffic to the site and there was always so much to learn from financials, human behavior, code performance, code quality, and more.

Worst: A small company with a niche SAAS product that sucked. It was drowning in tech debt with no internal automation. Insecurity was high, Regression was high. Velocity was low. Everybody had an opinion and opinions always won the day resulting in an experience that continued to suck and cannibalize itself.

It’s easy to answer the question of worst job… I worked at a small private hospital that did mostly orthopaedic, and cosmetic procedures, and lots of little day case procedures as well. It was hands down the most toxic work environment I’d ever experienced ever by a solid long shot. People were insanely nasty to each other and would do quite frankly nasty and sometimes highly unethical and dangerous stuff to each other to try set each other up for failure. I literally changed my practice in the circumstances because I felt uncomfortable leaving my fluids unsupervised in a warming cupboard because I was genuinely concerned someone might maliciously spike my bags with something that could harm a patient. Even years after leaving I never open or run through fluids until the moment I’m about to connect them to a patient, when I can make sure there’s been no tampering. I did not work at that hospital for long. Even though the pay was great, I had more suicidal thoughts whilst working in that hospital than I’d ever had before.

The best place is harder to define. I work in hospitals and there’s always a lot of really annoying workplace politics that detract from the actual cool fun aspects of my job in every hospital. They’re all basically a little bit shit. However, I’d say one hospital in particular just had really excellently planned shifts and respected people’s right to go home at the end of the day. Even though it was less exciting than some other places, I just never felt under appreciated, and because my shifts gave me enough time to complete all my tasks I always felt like I had enough time to do stuff without rushing around like a headless chicken.

All my jobs has been pretty average, but I know which one is the best: the one I'm currently on.

Small sized company, with a very horizontal hierarchy, effectively acting as a worker cooperative. We have really good WLB, the payment is not bad, the job is interesting and the colleges are smart.

Everyone here feels a sense of purpose in the company and push to be better, because it directly affects our payment. For that reason our priorities are mostly align with the company's which makes everything run smoothly.

I had a very varied career - great jobs in many fields, lots of overall success from the group efforts across four distinct companies and govt institutions. Honestly, while I was successful, I always felt I was punching upward in every role except my last. I was respected but always exhausted. I was doing things just outside my wheelhouse. So I grew a lot but dumped much time into my career. My last job was a 18 month contract data science / data engineer position. Part of the previous punching up did prepare me for the final job, as well as a late career MS Operation Research degree. So the final job was the best. The youngsters I worked with were impressive, respectful to me, the contract role had little baggage, the technology fairly state of the art (not FANG), overhead was light. I was able to own an effort from start to finish. I do think I may have worked a little too hard on my career, but it was one with reward.

Best: my current job[0]. The second best are those other jobs where I had a lot of agency and worked on something that felt concrete and useful.

Worst: SAP. Great salary, great conditions, no complaints about the team. It just felt so pointless. I might as well clock in, push a red button for 8 hours then clock out. Our project was cancelled after a year or so, but we still had to pretend it wasn't for another month or two. I remember how numb I was on my 20 minute walk home.

[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/all-about-berlin