HN: Help. Talented engineer lost his way

Stop moping about the three jobs you didn't get, and keep applying to jobs.

A lot of jobs are meaningful, but might not be obvious from a job ad. When you interview, you'll also meet people and learn more about what it's like to work there. So, don't worry if a job seems like it might be boring, just interview there anyway.

At least if you're in the SF area, you should easily be able to line up 2 or 3 interviews a week indefinitely. If you are really out of ideas for companies to apply to, just read through Techcrunch and look for a jobs page for every company mentioned. That should give you at least 10 leads a day.

Good luck!

^^ This.

You just gotta think 3 simple words everyday:

Keep moving forward.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbi__sQ7F5Q&feature=youtu...

Please check out this months job thread on HN and apply to all the options you like : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472746 .

You can also post an email to me if you are feeling low.

Not for the sake of argumentation but I have a slightly different take on what you have written. So some points IMHO :

.."I have two aspiring github projects with growing communities."

Great, you are a better programmer than me. Please mentor me.

You can train fresh young programmers anywhere in the world. Teaching is a great morale booster and you will be changing lives of your students.

.."But I don't know how to capitalize on that."

Gotta learn it the hard way.

Building a business is a different skill set than programming. Try something, fail and try something else. You will learn it and get better at it. The more skilled you get, the better you will be.

.."I don’t want to work for typical internet businesses like a web framework, analytics startup, or a newspaper publisher. I don’t feel enthusiastic about selling advertisements or stuff that’s purely virtual."

I agree with you on finding a more meaningful job. But selling advertisements is great if you are advertising a good cause. Making a web framework like Wordpress powering millions of blogs is just awesome.

Again it is your personal choice but making someones life better is better than doing something. And doing something is better than doing nothing.

You made quite a few statements which made me think quite a bit but my first advice is:

Do what you enjoy doing most...so if consulting does not tickle your fancy then just don't do it. Doing stuff that you really enjoy whilst making cash is definitely the best of both worlds.

Also you mentioned that "I'm not really sure what to do next"...I suggest you travel around the world for a while and experience the world as you could really discover new things about yourself whilst along the way figure out what you really want to do. This has worked for myself and a lot of people I have met. More importantly do not stress or hassle about finding what you want to do as the more you pressure yourself, the more you end up not coming up with a solution.

"I’d like the job to be meaningful. I guess I want to care about it."...that shows passion and having passion in a product is a good start. So why not build your own SAAS (software as a service) product? You are your own boss and you also get to create your own dream job. Sounds surreal or maybe unrealistc at first but with great determination comes great rewards.

Best of luck and enjoy life!

The thing that stuck out the most for me was your state of mind. You mentioned how you have struggled emotionally and felt the hit of three rejections. You then go on to say you like being emotionally attached to things that you do.

It seems to me you are an emotional person. I consider myself the same, when my state of mind is gone, I'm worse than useless.

My advice: Get to the core of what is making you unhappy and fix it.

Please don't think that I am passing you're struggles off as a "shit happens, get on with it", quite the opposite in fact. A healthy body and a healthy mind. Well, I find that I can deal with parts of my body failing (I am getting older after all) but please don't underestimate the power of your mind. If you are unhappy with aspects of your life no "dream job" will fix it. Sure, people do get down when they are looking for work, it's a stress and a hassle but I suspect most people's unhappiness runs deeper than that.

Good luck with the job hunting. It would have been nice to see which GitHub projects you are working on (the feedback from the HN community alone would have been valuable).

It's difficult to provide advice without knowing a little bit more about your motivations. For instance, why did you leave the bigCo? Was the work unfulfilling, or were there other issues?

Without knowing more about your situation, I have two comments to offer:

1. Make sure you're exercising regularly. When you get out of shape, neurotransmitter ratios can make your problems feel a lot worse than they are. I've seen big boosts in mental acuity and feelings of well-being in my own life every time I've gotten back into shape after a hiatus.

2. Make sure to keep things in perspective. You're clearly ambitious, which can be a good thing, but we have to remember that even in our field's less-exciting jobs we get to solve problems and work on puzzles all day and generally receive 99th percentile pay (globally speaking). It sounds trite, but the phrase "first world problems" has helped me see my situation in a more objective light in the past.

Good luck!

In my career I have stacked shelves at a supermarket and worked at the UK equivalent of circuit city. Oh that was recovering from a nasty bankruptcy in the middle of the dot com crash.

So my advice is yes, take a job - but take a part time job - three or four days a week. They exist, honestly. Worst case scenario see if someone on HN will jobsharer with you and if a employer will take on two talented hackers who are going places.

Take the communities growing around your projects (let us know which ones!) and do not be afraid to try and turn it into consultancy - running a business is not the end of the world.

If you prioritize making a difference and choice of work topic over money, then a valid option is to go to academia, pick a compsci topic that you care about, and spend some time working on that - as a postgrad or postdoc you won't be paid nearly as much as in industry but you can usually can pick the direction yourself and make some satisfying and fun progress there.

Money is what they give you for doing what you don't want to do. Most of the really fun jobs pay poorly as a result. Talk to people who work IT for NGOs for examples.

Put an email in your profile or email me.Maybe I can help you with that depending on the situation.Thanks.

Ditto my email is in my profile if you would like to contact me

Are you in the same situation as the OP?

Opposite im looking to pair with someone who has the OP skill set