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Ask HN: What's an insanely competitive job for a software engineer?

4 points by s1k3s ↗ HN
I'm in my 30's now and while I'm enjoying the low stress / high paycheck type of jobs that I get based on my experience, sometimes I miss the days when I was a junior and I had to compete against others to show off my skills or to meet (fake-ish) deadlines my boss would put on us.

Are there any jobs / fields where I can experience that again? I do have deadlines where I work now, but I can basically jump out of them by just saying "no, we can't do this in 3 days" or something around that.

14 comments

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glawre
Front Office financial technology roles spring to mind.
fuzzfactor
Go head-to-head against other candidates at a startup committed to outgrowing Amazon in e-commerce, until you get hired then outperform everyone else until you are CEO then never quit competing with Amazon.

Or are you interested in something more immediate and further removed from software?

Maybe step into the ring as a prizefighter, put on a few pounds so you can go above your weight class for good measure.

Or perhaps roller derby?

I apologize if my level of insanity is not adequate for what you have in mind, but this might get you started.

hzlatar
Start your own business. That's the most competitive and intimidating job for a software engineer.
f0e4c2f7
Video game development. The pay used to be worse but it has actually been getting somewhat better lately.
LarryMade2
Ive heard stock market, cryptocurrency is very competitive, both a challenge in hardware and software.
muzani
Startups are a good bet. Look for the more ambitious large ones that are worth over a billion, and still trying to grow 10% every week. You can say "we can't do it" as much as you like, but you have to give a counter proposal to still hit the targets. Often these companies have deep pockets too, so that's fun.

Something like Rocket Internet and their portfolio is a good place to start, or someone in the Alibaba ecosystem if you're not opposed to working with China.

Also the larger ones often pass an intelligence filter, so they're unlikely to push you to unreasonable deadlines and stress levels. But it's still competitive enough and you'll likely find yourself in a team with 10x-ers.

s1k3s
I did work in a startup worth $100M, and it was becoming more and more corporate every day. Might be wrong, but I think a startup worth that much (1B) is way past the point of challenging innovation.
muzani
I'm in a $1b one now and there's plenty of challenge, lol. It could be the SE Asian ones are a little different. Because you can't just focus on one country, there's a lot of smaller ones with very different cultures and legal frameworks. So a big company ends up spawning off a new company every 6 months or so and have to figure it out again. It's why companies like Stripe, Uber, Amazon have so much trouble with local competitors wherever they go. And it's why companies need to expand quickly, before a local competitor grows enough to challenge a regional one. We've had situations where a payroll or messaging app might have 90% adoption in one country, but near 5% or so in a neighboring country that speaks the same language and eats the same food.

LATAM and Africa seem to be similar too. Former colonies, so there's a mix of similar ethnic background and yet different work/life/economic/legal cultures. And places where corruption is heavy, where private organizations may pick up the slack from government.

Again Rocket Internet is pretty good at this kind of thing. If the Americans are like colonial Great Britain and the Chinese are like colonial Spain, Rocket Internet is like the Dutch East India Company.

eastbayjake
Interested in consulting? It gets knocked a lot on here as a profession, but you're constantly building on your technical core strengths to learn something new (business domains like agriculture or manufacturing, functions like digital marketing, etc) and because you're building within your clients' ecosystem you're also typically always learning something new technically. Constant S-shaped growth curve with lots of timeboxes as a forcing function. If you also enjoy helping people solve hard problems, it's quite rewarding beyond pure intellectual challenge.
s1k3s
I’m not sure what you mean by consulting, but I can’t see any job ad for something like that. All of them are basically “we need an engineer to build this”, and in the end you show up on the job and it’s not different than the previous one.

Can you share more details?

eastbayjake
Contracting != Consulting. There are roles at both big firms (McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, Accenture) that deal with a broad set of technology issues across strategy and implementation, as well as smaller boutique shops focused on specific technology problems. Here's a representative job posting for a big firm: https://www.mckinsey.com/careers/search-jobs/jobs/softwarear...
gaws
> I'm enjoying the low stress / high paycheck type of jobs that I get based on my experience, sometimes I miss the days when I was a junior and I had to compete against others to show off my skills or to meet (fake-ish) deadlines my boss would put on us.

I'd gladly take that low-stress, high-pay job off your hands if you don't want it.