Ask HN: How do I find a meaningful software engineering job?

Re:Ask HN: How do I find a meaningful software engineering job? by jclay on Sunday June 17, 2018 @01:02PM (#17333178)

Try reaching out to professors or research labs at universities. I work with a professor who would love to hire more Software Engineers with industry experience. It is by far the most meaningful and interesting work I've done in my career.

There are tons of interesting projects going on within academia that unfortunately don't take advantage of any software engineering best practices. Many projects are prototypes hacked together in MATLAB and I know in our lab we are looking to build more robust products that are open source and extensible for other researchers to use.

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Re:Ask HN: How do I find a meaningful software engineering job? by joernl on Monday June 18, 2018 @02:12AM (#17336257)

As someone who works in a central service unit not directly affiliated with academic research, I was given the chance to touch the lives of probably generations of students.

Emphasis on "touch", not necessarily "change". Still, it sometimes gives me goosebumps when walking through the halls and seeing all the people who are "forced" to use my work.

Pay is not great, but conditions are otherwise excellent.

(Founder/ Dev/ Lead of an electronic exam infrastructure at a large German university)

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Re:Ask HN: How do I find a meaningful software engineering job? by dyl4n on Sunday June 17, 2018 @01:28PM (#17333299)

I second this. A cursory glance of the faculty research pages of your local university's biology / physics / chemistry / etc departments will show you just how many half-engineered research software tools are in need of a dedicated engineer.

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