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Comment by bullgod66 | Hacker News Reader

It's so sad that most jobs are not interesting. The only thing that is actually interesting is theoretical math, and there are no jobs in industry that require that - all of the interesting jobs are in academia, and the competition is too intense except for the very top. What a cruel world we live in.

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It really matters a lot more if an employee finds his or her own job interesting than if you find it interesting. I can personally attest that at least one employee finds his job in software development interesting, even though it involves little to no theoretical math. In fact, I find it a little disparaging that you call my career uninteresting so unequivocally.

However, if you yourself are so dedicated to pursuing mathematics (which does sound like an interesting topic) know that there are mathematicians in industry. Tech companies and government agencies hire huge numbers of math majors, and although the work can stray into the realms of applied mathematics, your interest in pure math could serve you well.

Software development is not interesting - you don't have to come up with any novel ideas, or be creative in your problem solving, especially with the existence of large libraries that already exist that can perform any algorithm for you. For example, if you are doing machine learning in Python, you can just use a library like scikit or numpy, and you don't even have to code the algorithm. In fact, you don't even have to understand the algorithm or why it works - your boss just tells you to use k-nearest-neighbors and you select that from the library - no independent thought required. It's basically mindless - I don't understand what is intellectually interesting about it.

And in order to do interesting mathematical work in industry, you have to have a PhD and therefore you must again be placed in the extremely competitive and toxic environment of academia. And regardless, any theoretical knowledge of pure math would be unnecessary due to the existence of these libraries that basically do all the thinking for you. Even if you are smart and able to do pure math (which should give you a competitive advantage), it doesn't.

> Software development is not interesting

Interesting premise, lets see where he goes!

> I don't understand what is intellectually interesting about it.

Oh.

What is intellectually interesting about just copying and pasting code from a library? I think we can all agree that it is significantly (orders of magnitude) less interesting than solving abstract math problems.

obligatory: https://xkcd.com/793/

You laugh, but (and I don't remember who's the original author of this quote) "I'd die for the simplicity that is on the other side of complexity"

What has led you to the conclusion that everyone would agree with that ? I certainly do not agree.

Ha, good thing what's "interesting" is entirely subjective

Speak for yourself. My day job involves taking apart and diagnosing small electronics, and repairing them if necessary. I find that fulfilling and nearly every day I come across something I haven't seen before, or I come up with a new fix for a new problem. If that was all I did at work all day, I'd be content to stay here indefinitely. The only reason I'm looking elsewhere is because I only get to spend about 15% of my work day doing that. The rest is sitting at a desk answering phone calls, which might be the best job in the world to someone out there but it isn't to me.

In other words, what's good for you isn't good for everyone. If you drop the selfish attitude you'll realize that your happiness matters to one person: You.

Uh so why don't you write some of those libraries? Do you think the ivory tower is the only place people conceptualize unmet needs (Hint: it isn't)

If you wrote a new library, what would you put in it? What is the point of writing a new library that contains functions that already exist in other libraries?

I'm not saying industry doesn't conceptualize unmet needs. I'm only saying that it's intellectually uninteresting.

So what useful things/libraries/whatever have you created? I'm rather curious what you find interesting enough to work on.

one point could be to generalize what an existing libraries do... perhaps... but I don't code much so I don't know

Is this satire?

It's what we used to call "trolls". HN is blessedly free of them. This user will be hell-banned, but there's nothing to keep them from creating another account and doing it again.

Just change "interesting" and "we" in his post to "interesting to me" and "I". Then it's reasonable.

nah! The troll is getting hungry.

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