[NathanKP]

If you like writing software, if you look forward to getting your next assignment, then you should probably go ahead and pursue it as a career. If you trudge through it and show some aptitude for it, but you don't enjoy it, please choose another career.

Exactly. It seems that recently there have been a lot of young people who are treating the Software Engineer position kind of like the RN position. They think "There is high demand for this profession so I'm going to study for it in school and make big money, and this will be awesome."

But money !== happiness. RN is considered to be a good profession to study for in college. But not everyone who studies to be an RN can be happy taking care of sick and dying people all day, even if they are getting paid well. Likewise not everyone who studies to be a software engineer can be happy sitting at a computer writing code all day, even if they are getting paid well.

Some of us are happy to write code all day, and to "waste work" by rewriting systems frequently whenever the business changes directions because we love the challenge and the sense of progress as we get to see our coding skills improving month after month as we learn new technologies and techniques. I'd probably still be coding even if it was a low paying job, but I'm fortunate that because I enjoy coding so much and do so much of it I've become quite good at it and am able to make good money as a side benefit.

[UK-AL]

"If you like writing software, if you look forward to getting your next assignment, then you should probably go ahead and pursue it as a career" -

The thing is academic/personal assignments are probably novel and interesting, while 99% of business programming isn't. The jobs that have problems that are novel or interesting, are damn hard to get.

So if you enjoy it at school/hobby, that has no relation to if your going to enjoy it as a job. So you can easily end up hating your job.

[NathanKP]

The jobs that have problems that are novel or interesting, are damn hard to get.

I disagree. The monthly Who's Hiring thread here on HN is full of great jobs solving interesting problems. If you find those jobs "damn hard" to get maybe you need to learn some of the in demand skills or build a better portfolio of projects that you've worked on. A github full of open source activity can get you an interesting job quite easily.

A while back I put a very simple entry on an HN contractor thread and started getting two to three job offers a month in my inbox, many from very interesting companies doing interesting things. This was while I was still in college, not actively looking for a job yet. I accepted interview offers from a few of those companies and basically picked and choose who I wanted to work for, which eventually lead to me getting a job at the startup I work for now (storydesk.com) without ever needing to send out a single resume.

Maybe my experience is unusual, but I don't see it as being that difficult to get an interesting job as a software engineer if you leverage a community like HN.

[UK-AL]

some of the in demand skills? Such as?

Mobile Development Skills? I know that. The majority apps are boring though, interfacing with a web service, saving and displaying data etc.

Web Devs Skills? I know Django the best, but again 99% of people using web frameworks are just doing the normal inputting and outputting data out of a database routine.

ML? I know that, but most companies only hire serious academic researchers, or people with previous experience of it. I have MSc in CS with quite a lot ML in it, but most are looking Ph.Ds;

Compilers? I've built a few prototypes. But very few companies actually need this.

[NathanKP]

It sounds like you have enough skills. Maybe the only skill you need to develop is how to sell yourself to the type of companies you want to work for.

If you don't mind some completely unsolicited advice:

I just checked out your HN profile and found a link to your blog. I checked the blog and it is fairly empty with only two posts, and I see no Github link. That's the first thing a good startup company is going to look at if they think you might be a candidate for a position: your blog and your github.

I managed to track you down on Github via a Google Search and while two repos seemed empty for some reason, Harlan looks pretty cool and non trivial, showing a good level of technical skill.

The primary things I'd do if I were you is simplify and expand the message on your blog to explain who you are and what skills you have and link to Github prominently. Maybe on Github put up some more projects from a variety of different domains, and write a few more blog posts about those projects.

Additionally blog theme says a lot about you. Right now the ideal blog design if you want to come across as a "startup engineer" is something that looks like Medium or Svtble. Your blog theme looks like a Tumblr.

(No offense intended but another slight thing to adjust might be the photo on your blog. Obviously appearance isn't everything but in that photo it looks to me like you have a smirk instead of a smile for some reason. If you choose to include a photo it has to be one that makes you look like someone goodnatured and a great employee, because people hiring in behalf of a company are going to get one of their first impressions of you based on the photo, before they even look at the Github.)

Anyway, once again I hope you aren't offended by my well intentioned by completely unsolicited advice. For what it is worth I'm sure that you can get an interesting coding job at an interesting company.

[UK-AL]

ok, what interesting problems are you working on? And I'll tell you if they're interesting or not?

Because 95% of startups I've come across are solving trivial problems.

[NathanKP]

These are the things I've been able to do in the past year or so that I thought were pretty interesting and enjoyable:

* Code to render PDF's into images using asynchronous streams to make it extremely fast.

* The same thing for videos, to recompress them for delivery to iPads.

* Code to use AWS to create a service that can be fairly easily scaled up and down dynamically in response to demand.

* Creating a highly tuned Node.js server capable of serving thousands of requests per second. Even basic CRUD operations can be pretty interesting to code when you are fine tuning server system level settings, optimizing database queries, using caching, etc to make sure that response times are all around 10-15ms even at hundreds to thousands of requests per second.

[molex333]

But just because you hate your job is no reason to damn an entire profession.