Where do you find the interesting jobs?

Sometimes you can get lucky and land an interesting job, but I think getting to do interesting work takes time (and luck). An anecdote from my past as an illustration: When I started my job at [FAANG] I was assigned a project. It was not mind-numbing, but not sexy either -- modernize the infrastructure while not messing up the site. Being new, I gave it my all and was rewarded a couple of years later by having the option to work on a very interesting project, used by tens of millions, with a clear user-visible outcome. Afterwards I usually had my choice of projects and teams inside that org.

Edit: I guess the actionable advice is to get into a company that is big enough to have _some_ interesting projects.

First, you need to actually value interesting work in relation to other job values (like compensation, good working hours, low stress, making a difference, family friendliness, good management and many others). Generally these will be a tradeoff, but you might find one where the tradeoff suits you. For instance I had a job I really enjoyed at an Earth Observation startup geeking out about maps and space, but the comp was pretty mediocre and the management abysmal. But it was enough for my needs at the time and I'm reasonably good at managing up so it didn't bother me too much. Many of my former colleagues left that job dissatisfied, since the tradeoff wasn't to their liking.

Second, always be looking. You are right in observing that 99% of job ads seem totally boring. Partially this can be helped with some filters on job boards, I tend to just filter out "Finance" and "Advertising" since I know that I have basically zero interest in those domains. But the chance that you'll find a great interesting job where you skillset is even vaguely compatible at the time you need it is pretty low. It's better to keep looking well before you need to.

Third, if you meet someone in your field who's working at a place that seems interesting, ask if they're hiring. Even if not, there's a chance that next time they are, the person will remember you. Or perhaps in their next company...

Finally, cultivating a broader skillset rather than a highly specialised one can make this easier, since many interesting companies are probably not doing the exact same everyone else is, so they might need someone who seems more adaptable.

Good luck!

> I've also found that interviews don't tell you much about reality.

Always ask to see code and talk to engineers about what their days look like. I believe there are very few legitimate reasons they won't show you their code, but more likely if they're refusing, it's because they're hiding something. When talking to an engineer, ask them how their code goes from idea to production and have it explained in detail. This will tell you what type of management they have, what testing/review/deployment practices, etc.. As a bonus, I also like to ask my future peers what they don't like about their job or what they'd like to change.

I agree most jobs are some form of shite, but there are good ones. Being more picky during the interview phase should hopefully allow you to find some of those while weeding out the bad quicker.

The weird irony of our society seems to be that the most useless jobs pay the most, while the most essential jobs pay the least. A lot of important work is being done by volunteers and charity organisations. The best paying jobs are often parasitic. Like stock manipulation.

> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups

Everything? No, you're looking in the shiny techy places. Counterintuitively, interesting tech jobs are found in boring, established sectors. Get on the boring, common sites like LinkedIn and Indeed. Consider healthcare, automotive (not Tesla, but Ford), or even higher ed. If you want interesting, and not just a big fat paycheck, these are the kinds of places you will find interesting work, make a difference, and see an impact.

It sounds like you've discovered what you aren't aligned with, but you don't yet know what you do think is interesting or valuable. The first step is answering this question for yourself. What do you care about?

Science perhaps? Pick a field and you can probably find a lab or project in need of research software engineers.

Healthcare? Plenty of work in digital health records, computational drug discovery, or so I've heard.

There is a world of mundane but important work humming along below the turbulence, but it doesn't have the hype or marketing bullshit and isn't as visible. Somebody is writing software to transfer your driver's license when you move to a different state. Someone programs microwaves, somebody else rail scheduling systems, someone else water treatment plants.

If you know what you care about, look for jobs involving it, and pay no mind to web3, fintech, adtech or whatever.

> How do you find interesting gigs?

Get really good in a specific field you care about - for me that was platforms and programming languages but you might really enjoy other stuff.

When I say really good let me emphasize that's not exceptional, I am in no means a great programming language designer or web platform person or developer in general.

Once you get beyond a threshold - you'll find a lot of people who deeply care about the technology and the conversations become a lot more "here's this cool thing". That often unlocks connections and opens the door to work on platforms and interesting startups.

My work history before going to Microsoft was 3 technical startups - before that I worked on automagically generating and auto-healing E2E tests which was a bunch of algorithms and chromium internals on a technical product, before that I worked on a distributed p2p CDN over WebRTC which was also a bunch of algorithms and code, yada yada.

I believe my open source work unlocked these opportunities and not my fancy CS degree.

Check career pages of companies that work on things that you find interesting

I think the most interesting jobs technically are in developer tools or developer infrastructure companies. This includes companies building databases (e.g. Cockroach, Neon.tech), compilers (e.g. JetBrains), CDNs (e.g. Fastly, Cloudflare), hosting (e.g. Digital Ocean).

These companies hire frontend developer, backend developers, core systems developers. You don't have to be a genius or a CS grad. You can always get in doing what you already know and do more of the core stuff over time if you like.

Check out the Digital Services Coalition.

https://digitalservicescoalition.org/#/story

Like others have said, it depends a lot on what you find interesting, but these companies are doing good work trying to improve digital services for people who are in or interact with the government.

Sometimes the projects are greenfield and you can choose your stack; sometimes you'll be dealing with legacy code, skeptical stakeholders, and government bureaucracy. Culture tends to be supportive and inclusive, most of the companies work remote, pay is good--but not top of the market--and consulting isn't for everyone, but most days you feel like you're doing something worthwhile with your skills.

(I work for one of these companies)

> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups that are just making useless services that clearly won't go anywhere.

Find a business that makes money from software, small product-owner companies are often really good to work for, preferably one that supplies/supports your local community. You can actually find that in agencies pretty often. When you've got a business providing a core value to the community and no investors, you can feel a stronger connection to where you work and the community it's in. Usually smaller bootstrapped companies have to be providing a tangible service to the community in order to survive, whereas VC can be lofty and full of non-things and hype.

Don’t look at job adverts. Figure out what interests you. Find people who do that. Figure out how they got there and how you yourself can get in the same position.

> It honestly makes me feel like my skills and time are being wasted.

Stop wasting them then. Hint: work is not necessarily the thing which will scratch that itch. If after plenty of introspection, and trial and error you find that the kind of things which make you happy don’t pay enough, then you can try thinking about your work as the thing which you do to support what interests you.

It depends on what you consider interesting. I look for:

+work in person

+biz is generating revenue

+there is a physical system that the software interacts with that I have some degree of physical access to

+Follow other interesting and likeminded colleagues you've met to places that they go.

Other things:

+Look for places that greybeards tend to stay around.

+not in the trendy part of your city. It's gonna be in an older, more run down area. Or outside of the city in a burb or more rural area.

+Usually, the tech isn't going to be sexy. You probably won't be working with cloud tech, at least not exclusively.

I don't. Even in average non-that-evil workplaces the main motivator of those holding the hierarchies is paying off their mortgage. Your creativity, ethics, motivation, experience, skill set are irrelevant - if you're on their way for pay off their mortgage, you're out of the carousel. Occasionally I drop CV to some matching openings and make a video call from pure inertia. Shutdown of Stack Exchange careers noticeably lowered the quality of openings in my pipeline.

> Everything is crypto "web 3" bubble, fintech, or recruiters being very vague about "unicorn" startups

I work in fintech and it is very interesting to me. I've turned down recruiters from 50 countries since getting this job and I obviously don't care if you think money is the root of all evil or some other weird tree hugger babble.

So what is interesting for you?

I think there's one real thing that's important to decide first which is "What would make this interesting for you and what defines useful for you?" The most useful things in the world are often absurdly boring. Vanta is a great example of tremendously useful company that strikes me as being nearly paint dryingly boring. I'd focus on that first, and once you move from a generic mindset to some specific subset of things, I bet you'll find something.

For what it's worth, I really struggled so I ended up deciding to start something with some friends, and that has really succeeded for finding something interesting. There's no better way to have an interesting job than to make one doing something you find interesting, and hopefully useful.

(https://www.apolloagriculture.com/ which may or may not be interesting to you.)

The most interesting jobs are ones that make the world a better place.

See 80,000 Hours - a non-profit organization focusing on career advice and helping people find opportunities to solve the world's most pressing problems.

https://80000hours.org/job-board/

In my case, I ran into an old coworker on the street that was working in a space that sounded interesting, and now I've been working with freight railroads for 3 years after spending ~15 at giant, well-known tech companies.

But it depends on what you mean by interesting? We build SaaS products for railroads. Day-to-day, that often means writing software that looks similar to other industries. APIs, web interfaces, relational databases, cloud hosting, etc. I wouldn't say every line of code I type is particularly interesting.

But when I'm feeling annoyed at working on some mundane feature, it's easier for me (relative to previous positions) to step back and remember that the overall space is full of interesting people, history, and different methods and processes that I would've otherwise never known about. And I still have that some of that childhood fascination with trains.

> mind-numbing useless stuff

I'm curious, what is your definition for this, in more detail?

In the past, I've very much enjoyed some places I've worked (like semiconductors) while others found the place intolerable, chasing the latest wiz-bang frameworks used by fleeting, "disruptive" startups.

I've been consulting for the past few years. I love the variability and also the reward from helping others accomplish their goals. I absolutely love the people for whom I work currently. We are hiring, simply because we do good work and have more opportunities than bandwidth. We work at a high level and solve very interesting problems for clients.

So to answer your question,

> Where do you find the interesting jobs?

They found me. I'm not sure how they do it, but they have a knack for finding very talented people.

You don't find interesting jobs you have to earn them. When a company is hiring, generally they are not hiring someone to do the interesting stuff, they are hiring people to fill an immediate need which is usually the more generic line of work.

The interesting stuff is reserved for more senior people with domain expertise and who can be trusted to handle a great deal of responsibility. New hires are risky, take a great deal of investment, and often leave within a matter of a couple of years. If you want to find interesting work, stick it out with a company and work your way towards a position where you are entrusted with a great deal of autonomy, and that only happens with time.

Interesting means different things for different people. For me, crypto is still interesting (maybe because I didn’t earn any significant money from it yet, though there sere some lucky moments).

Rule of thumb: interesting pays a lot less, because there are much more skilled people willing to work on “interesting”. This is why there is no shortage of people willing to enter the academia, despite abysmal working conditions there. But hey, at least you get “interesting”. I also entered the academia after 15 years of working in the industry, for the same reason.

So, what’s interesting for you? Health tech? Climate tech? The military? Intelligence analysis? Pure mathematics and type theory? What moves you?

> I would kill for a job that feels even remotely useful or interesting.

Public service as a freelance contractor. No, really. Depending on where you leave, this may pay good money (Netherlands) or next to nothing (Poland).

But there will be many useful projects to work on.

I'm working in my IT job in Italy after a Bachelor's in Physics and a Master's in Astrophysics.

My priorities where: - don't go with the baddies (amazon, google, facebook, nestlé, military...) - remote work (work for a living, not living for work. I don't want to be a commuter 2 hours every day to work in an office while I could do the same from home) - coding/data analytics/software analytics in general. I just wante to be open minded and learn what I don't know and use what I already know

With this priorities in mind I found a good job with an average pay as a data manager for the Health minister, while working from home or traveling with my 9-18.

I believe that if you put your lifestile first and then the capabilities ego last, you can be happy after just a few of linkedin searches.

I've had different kinds of interesting gigs. The first kind is what most would consider interesting, working at a small fast-paced startup with much freedom in many of the choices of language, platform, frameworks/libraries. That's the case if you're early. Some of those same roles will end up becoming supporting a mishmash of varying one-off tech for different programs/services which can be challenging but far from interesting.

Another kind of interesting that I'm starting to appreciate is using boring tech to solve or evolve standard platforms to grow with the sophistication of the customer base at a large company. Things move much slower, the tech, languages, tools can feel stagnant. At the same time, you're still solving the problems that need to be solved with good engineering producing pretty clean/clear implementations. Most wouldn't consider this very interesting. It only feels worthwhile when you take into account that you've now shipped improvements to 100,000s or millions of customers. It also helps greatly if you actually believe that what the company does is a largely net positive for society.

As for my personal history of finding interesting jobs, I've found many of them randomly by being open to new experiences. Some were better than others but I don't regret taking any of them. Even the good small/fast ones were only good for about 1.5 - 2.5 years after which my learning opportunities slowed and I moved on.

I usually get asked, but I more and more desire just projects that are from scratch for 3-6 months alone or with 2-3 mates of mine. Those I find harder to find; the sites that say they offer projects like that really don’t; they mostly end up being huge tech debt pools built by different bad teams from the same site and too far in to offer a rewrite (well offer is ok, but they will say something like ‘maybe later, please finish this list first with the current code’).

A good site offering only that would be excellent but I guess hard to do.

Surprisingly, Linkedin.

While around 95% of stuff in my inbox is rubbish and generic postings, there are those 5% worth my time. Interesting companies, challenging and relevant problems.

But admittedly, having only 5% non rubbish already requires you to have a proper profile, with nice information about previous work and experience.

I do make it a habit of responding politely and negatively to most, with a quick one liner, but talking to a few even if I am happy with my job, just to find out what else is there and what is happening around me.

That is how my current employer, Tulip Interfaces has found me, and I have never before worked on more relevant and challenging topics.

Have a look yourself, https://tulip.co/, we are still hiring.

Unusual gigs are just outliers. I think odd jobs don't necessarily have much in common that would bring them together under one umbrella listing agency.

But interesting jobs depend on the eye of the beholder. What's interesting to one person may not be to another and reflect what you think is cool right now.

Personally, I find jobs interesting if they take me somewhere new, where I haven't been before. Learning about biology and medicine sufficiently to convince pharma researchers that you have found a meaningful signal in their data -- that's what led me to analyze biomedical images and develop computational models of disease.

Before that I got into HPC and supercomputing because I like speed and wanted to learn about weird forms of computing (like the original Connection Machine).

These days, to me, 'interesting' might be applying machine learning to new spaces, like exploring a cutting edge niche at a biomedical startup, or the automation of government, or adding smart instrumentation to city services.

Interesting jobs as diverse as these are unlikely to appear at any one listing agency. I suspect you'll have to actively search for whatever tech tickles you.

I’d say it very much depends on how you define “interesting”.

For some “interesting” means working with specific technologies. For others — working in different capacities (e.g. project managememnt when before you was IC, or dab into product design when before you was an engineer, etc.) or environments (e.g. corporate, startup, gov, etc.). For yet others it’s about working on technical solutions to social/polititcal issues. And there are many more definitions you can think of. Also, different defintions can be adopted by the same person at different times. There’s also a question of deep passion vs novelty seeking.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you probably won’t find anything until you understand what you’re looking for. Once yo know it probably won’t be too difficult to find it if it actually exists.

The usual places to look for work will be a good source of your top of the funnel so to say. It won’t be difficult to filter it out when you know the thing you’re looking for.

Why don't make your own job? If you are so smart, surely you can go ahead and find something interesting to build...

I specifically looked for areas where I knew the end result would actually help people. In this case, I have a lot of mobile experience and interviewed with a medical company that helps diabetics manage their insulins and communicate with their health care providers. I also took a pay cut specifically because I want to help people. There are more important things than money. If you are willing to take a pay cut, there are tons of opportunities. You could even start a consulting company where you help non-profits with their tech/socials/website. They don't have much money but you would be making a real difference and you get to pick who.

Also, I don't know if they are hiring but look to something like costplusdrugs run by Mark Cuban where he is now selling more and more drugs at the lowest price possible.

Startups perhaps? I look at my startup. Complete greenfield project. Never been done before. Industry disruptor. No ceiling for the growth potential of our product. Developers engage the full stack. Never boring. Fully remote.

What do we make? CADless vertical CAD software (web app) for the construction industry.

I believe https://80000hours.org could help you. "You have 80,000 hours in your career.This makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.

If you’re fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren’t sure how, our in-depth guide can help you...". They have an amazing support and list job offers related to the key world problems: https://80000hours.org/job-board/?role-type=engineering

Good luck!

Have you looked for jobs at companies where you are already working with their product? e.g. Gitlab, VSCode, Ubuntu, Firefox, Grafana, Kafka etc.

I recently got a job at a company where I was already using their product, and I now feel that I'm actually working on a product that I think is worth working on. It's worth remembering though that at the end of the day work is work, and maybe you ended up doing what you do because you loved doing it when you were younger (e.g. programming). As a professional your day to day work isn't going to be 100% doing something that you love, but there's all sorts of other things going on that need your attention.

As cliché as it sounds... networking. My best careers have always come from being open to meeting people outside of a career-seeking context.

Last August, a startup moved in next door to my place in SF. I was friendly to the owners and we'd occasionally share a beer in my front yard. They mentioned they were hiring engineers and I always laughed it off.

One night they were working late in lawn chairs out front, and I idly asked them to finally show me the app. Turned out to be one of the most innovative web products I've seen in a long while. I've been with them now 8 months and couldn't be happier.

Not the reply you're looking for, but it's a topic I'm interested in. My current situation is that I'm employed in a startup that might be killed by the end of the year, if the next round of investing is found. If there is money - I'd like to stay and work here and at that point won't be interested in changing positions, but I need to think about options too at this point.

My line of thinking is as follows:

1) Follow "who is hiring" monthly posts on HN

2) Look on LinkedIn ads; do research on company which is hiring (if possible because sometimes agencies won't tell - in which case I'm probably not considering)

All ads are to be filtered by $TECH_STACK + Full-Remote.

Happy to follow this thread to find more interesting places.

Ask friends who know what you're interested in if they've heard of anything.

Search the web for startups and small companies in areas you find interesting and approach them directly.

Sign up for newsletters on topics that interest you and then read up on any companies mentioned.

You might also want to try to steer your skillset in the direction of things that interest you while doing time at a "boring" company.

I'm assuming you're not looking for "conventionally fun" business areas (showbiz, gaming etc) where the competition for applicants is extra fierce. But be prepared to take a lower pay to get into a field that attracts you.

If you can live with decent but (definitely) not outrageous pay, I find that Research Software Engineering (the art of enabling better (often academic) research through better software) can be very interesting and very rewarding. RSE is becoming a thing in almost all domains, and RSEs often work with different domains from within a central team.

Check job sites for academic institutions and national labs. There are also professional RSE societies in some regions of the world, often called [country code]-RSE.

By becoming a specialist in something.

In my case:

- a run of the mill enterprise CRUD developer? Boring run of the mill of jobs

- a run of the mill enterprise CRUD developer who can talk to customers, write documents, present to investors, train developers on best practices etc? - slightly more interesting jobs at companies where companies were looking to move to a different level of maturity.

- all of the above and experience with “cloud”? - a remote job at a FAANG specializing in “cloud application modernization” that I got without having to do the leetCode/DS&A monkey dance.

I'd say start with industry sector or company size. Go directly to the company rather than a recruiter, a good ol email showing genuine interest goes a long way.

E.g. be the first dev hire, or look for IT related work in Antarctica...heck go all in and become a co-founder with someone.

I think there's lots of interesting work out there, it's just often reverse correlated to your long term wellbeing haha

I created my own job: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/11/06/lifestyle-programm...

But even that has some boring bits and compromises. If you find something that is 100% interesting/fun then probably no-one is going to pay you to do it.

Ask yourself to define "interesting" using concrete terms.

Are there specific fields you want the company to be in? List them.

Are there specific roles you want to be in within the company? List them.

How much of your time do you want to spend doing feature development vs maintenance? List that.

Are there specific stacks you want to be using? List them.

What size/phase of company maturity do you want? List it.

Go from there.

Only accept jobs from people you already know well and trust. Obviously this introduces a recursive problem, so you might need to take one or two not so great jobs first in order to catch your hare. For those, select jobs where the people you meet are impressive. Don't care so much about the product, market. Focus on the people.

(Asked about an interesting job.) Comments proceeded to be focus on high paying, large market cap tech companies.

I find interesting initiatives to work on the side at Mozilla- Foundation (&Mozilla Corporation could be good for paid work) : https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-you-can-do/

It sounds like you're looking for a job where you'll be constantly challenged? A small startup (small enough that you can know every employee well) is good for that.

Another suggestion is to befriend people you find interesting and smart, and see what their jobs are.

> How do you find interesting gigs?

Honestly, you need to accept the reality that useful companies pay less.

It's a sad commentary on the world, but if you want to do useful work and actually contribute to humanity, you're not going to be buying $12 beers in downtown SF or NYC.

So go work for a hospital and clean up their IT. I see shit like this and wonder what you consider USEFUL. Because working for healthcare would be useful, but it is not the same as saying that you work for some hot startup.

Job boards can be pretty terrible. I try to find companies doing something interesting and apply directly through their site. You can also find yourself among less competition if their jobs aren't being picked up by big boards.

This is a very hard question to answer.

If I would to say, find a product, service, or idea you believe in and see if the company behind it is hiring.

Your resume would likely get lost in the regular pipeline, so look for networking opportunities with existing employees.

- Sift through the buzzword crap. Be prepared to spend days looking at company web pages and job listings without applying to any jobs at all. I'm not interested in web3, AI, fintech, or adtech. So 90% of jobs go straight to the trash. But it's worth digging into some opportunities in case they're just effective marketers using buzzwords to bring in more applicants, with a genuinely interesting actual job.

- Set up recurring searches with diffs of new jobs that match your language/framework/environment preferences. Much better than continually sifting through the same listings. Better yet, find something that'll allow you to blacklist crappy companies you'd never work for -- Facebook, Google, IBM, Oracle are on my blacklist.

- Find niche communities with hiring listings that better align with your interests. I work in documentation, so I'm a member of Write the Docs, which has its own job board. Hacker News Who is Hiring has a lot of companies that are too small for my liking, but medium size places do occasionally advertise -- it's your job to find them.

- Don't go to overboard on filters. I learned this from apartment searching: listers frequently make mistakes. Filtering too hard on "2+ bathrooms" would have omitted my current rental, which was erroneously listed as 1 bathroom. If you filter too hard for "MUST HAVE >150k COMPENSATION" or any other criteria, recruiters will post incorrect listings that you'll end up missing. Human intuition on an unfiltered query can often find diamonds in the rough that no amount of filtering would ever identify. So occasionally just... look at the HN Who is Hiring page, with no filters, and click on things that look interesting. You might be surprised at what you find.

- ABI (Always Be Interviewing) -- the more you interview, the better you get at it. Interview candidates at your company to better understand the interviewer side of things -- it'll make you perform better in interviews, too. There are all kinds of recruiter tricks used to manipulate you. There are all kinds of tricks YOU can learn to better learn about a company before you sign an offer. You should try to learn as many of these tricks as possible so you won't be bamboozled by them in the future.

But it mostly comes down to time and patience. Great jobs are few and far between, and often have Achilles' heels of their own as well -- a crappy vacation policy, no 401k match, etc. Figure out what you're willing to compromise on, and wait for the opportunity to arise. And when it comes, don't be afraid to pounce.

Define interesting. Once you have that, look for companies that do that. Apply, rinse repeat. In a short while you will be in a network of like minded peers. After that you should be good. Mind you, the secret it’s people

Check out 80000 hours! It’s a non-profit (I’m not affiliated) that helps people find impactful careers. https://80000hours.org/

There is no universal definition of "interesting". You have to figure out what that word means to you, and find companies which offer such opportunities. Or just go do those interesting things on your own.

Have connection with great people. Great people are usually working on great projects. Then you just ask 5-10 great people about their current company, product and if they have open positions (they always have).

I was lucky that my open source contributions led to some interesting short and long term engagements. If I'm already into something, it may be that I find it interesting - no need to search.

My most interesting jobs have been found via word of mouth where I have ended up speaking to one of the team before I even get to see a job advert or job spec.

That's about as vague as one can get. What exactly does "interesting" mean to you?

You could work for a police department doing tech work for them. You could work at a sewer district helping them out with calculating flows on computers or whatever. You could work at a hospital doing some kind of tech thing. You could move to Alaska and work for their State Parks calculating the movement of tagged bears. You could go to a university health school and see if develop measuring programs, like maybe some professor wants to measure and weigh poop for some reason, you could create a poop measuring app.

I don't know, man. What is interesting to you? How would any one know?

The utter reality is there is no such thing as a interesting job. That's the long and short of it. Almost any job, generally speaking, is interesting for the first year or two. Then it is just a drudge job, with the same people, having the same conversations day after day, doing the same thing. No matter what it is, not just technology. Accounting, janitorial work, truck driver, lumberjack....it all gets boring, if you're that type of person.

Me...I usually like every job. I worked at a factory job that consisted of taking a stack of 100 cups and putting them into a box - about 12 stacks in a box. I did that every day, I was a machine, doing the same exact movements all day. I really dug it, it was so zen. Hypnotized me for 12 hours (I worked 12 hour days - 3 days on, 2 off, 4 on...that kind of deal). I love working retail, which I know people hate, but I love it. I loved working at McDonalds for my first job ever. That was the best job I ever had. I liked working as a programmer. I liked pretty much everything.

It kind of reminds me of a story. A man was driving down the road from one town to another, was moving to the second town. He was driving and saw a farmer working in the field on his fence, so he stopped and asked the farmer what were the next town's people like as he was moving there. The farmer asked him what the last town's people were like, and the man said that they were horrible. The farmer said that the next town's people were horrible, too.

Later that day, it so happened that another* man was driving down that same road and stopped to talk to the same exact farmer. The man asked the farmer what were the next town's people like as he was moving there. The farmer asked him what the last town's people were like, and the man said that they were great people. The farmer said that the next town's people were great people, too.

So...the moral of the story is that all jobs are great, or all jobs are boring. Just depends on you.

Just slightly biased here, but workwithindies.com curates interesting roles working for smaller teams in independent games.

If you don't journal your ideas and thoughts then I suggest you create a GitHub repository and begin journalling in markdown for minimal friction.

Then do it everyday. You'll think of something interesting, or a problem that needs solving, or pain you see in the world around you.

You have criteria for what you find interesting, you need to dig deep inside yourself to unearth what you're keeping bottled up inspiration.

Then revisit your journal frequently, add to it, remix it and begin sideprojects.

See my profile for my journal, I have 450+ software idea and startup idea entries.

try embedded development, preferably a company in consumer market that makes a product every two or so years

i worked in audio, hifi streamers, synth keyboards, etc, you get HW to play with and these companies can be so small you get to do different things once in a while

Check out Government Research Labs (like SLAC and other university affiliated labs)

How can a startup be useless if it's reached unicorn status?

You might enjoy reading the book "Bullshit Jobs".

Find a company that makes a product that appeals to you.

Shameless plug for my industry: Come to Biotech!

Open Source Community maybe a good choice.

Good recruiters. They are out there.

You can find interesting jobs in this Telegram group https://t.me/dailyapehr