Ask HN: Where do you find the interesting jobs?
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.
I've also found that interviews don't tell you much about reality. I've changed jobs a few times in recent years, every time I had interviews being told about interesting projects, great practices and so on, but once actually there was made to work on mind-numbing useless stuff.
It honestly makes me feel like my skills and time are being wasted. I'll be honest and say I consider myself to be pretty good at what I do (and it's been confirmed at my past jobs where I quickly get that reputation), but I just don't know where to find interesting opportunities that don't feel like either a grift or being a parasite making money out of arguably evil things.
How do you find interesting gigs?
263 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadSearch 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.
This approach has worked for me several times over the years.
It takes time and patience. The companies you target aren't always hiring the roles you want. I've been lucky a few times, with opportunities arising just as I've been laid off, but part of that is the groundwork. I keep looking at them even when happy and secure, and tweak my skills in the right directions.
This can also work for other factors, like nice offices or short commutes. I also keep my eye on the jobs board at a company with a landmark HQ nearby.
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.
That doesn't automatically correlate with parasitical roles, but there is an overlap.
Also people working for non profit or other socially beneficial companies probably know the company budget goes to help more people not to pad CEO pockets...
The lowest rung of essential jobs are the easiest ones to get so those most desperate for income basically are forced into legal slavery.
And it is slavery. In Texas to rent a 1 bedroom apartment you need to work over 90 hours per week, assuming you earn twice minimum wage, maybe even more...
Those who take the soulless jobs are taking jobs reserved for people just like them who value money above everything else and who will walk over anybody to get it. They're not as likely to have imposter syndrome because they lack humility and are narcissistic. So they're not as likely to be a pushover and accept standard pay...
I wish we all could just earn the same amount but society has decided in a weird way who gets to thrive and we gets to barely survive.. It's not fair but it is what it is.
In your society, what is the incentive for someone to clean up diarrhea in a gas station restroom?
It’s really not that hard, or expensive.
I would be interested in looking at a link for these bathrooms that do not require human labor for upkeep.
Either way, the point is different types of work exist with different difficulties/desirabilities, and people need incentives to do the less desirable and/or more difficult work.
If you expect people to slog through medical textbooks and training for 12 years to earn the same as someone checking out groceries, you might be living on a different planet.
That said, don’t think further debate with you will be anything close to fruitful.
edit:
In the year 2022, anything on the internet containing close to
> I have never heard or seen one
Very much leads me to believe the poster has an incurable case of brain worms
I work in real estate development, and we have built gas stations and hotels, and very recently. Either we are wasting a ton of money by employing janitors and housekeepers by not knowing a viable self cleaning bathroom exists, or there is some other problem with self cleaning bathrooms.
>I have never heard or seen one
>Very much leads me to believe the poster has an incurable case of brain worms
Or it means that self cleaning bathrooms would be such an amazing innovation that every single new retail/hotel/gas station/convention center/Starbucks/airport and ANY place with a public restroom would rush to install.
And yet it is, objectively, not seen anywhere by me in SF/SEA/NYC/PDX/LA.
What is more likely? That the product, if it exists, has severe limitations which make it uneconomical. Or a post on HN is correct that all these airports/hotels/malls I go to, with recent renovations or new builds, simply did not know about them.
They appear to be very hard and very expensive in practice.
You may be thinking of self cleaning toilets which are not relevant to this discussion.
I do however think that is not the case, & that it is a comparatively simple issue nobody has given too much of a fuck about yet, as highly capitalistic societies give zero fucks about improving anything the general public may have access to.
I think you are overly pessimistic. There has never more a better time in history for a person with an idea to get funding for crazy ideas like this because of capitalism. They just have to make money.
For an idea like this to be worth it and succeed, it has to be cheaper than that person willing to do it manually. High minimum wages and benefits like single payer health insurance will definitely speed this up.
In our current society, cleaning diarrhea in bathrooms is low pay is a consequence of lack of UBI (i.e. incentive to feed and house yourself) and high supply of people willing and able to do the job of cleaning bathrooms. Although, with a combination of lower fertility rates and lower immigration rates, I expect that to change.
This behavior has become very trendy over the last decade or so and it's frankly quite literally genocide.
- save the whales, feed the homeless, maintain Linux distributions: 0 money
- clean floors in some company: $
- software development for the average company: $$$
- software development in "fintech", real estate, make weapons, or other somewhat questionable thing: $$$$$
- write algorithms in some FAANG to manipulate people using ads: $$$$$$
Or you could look at it as part of the process of allocating society’s resources towards more productive ventures from less productive ventures.
It is not the perfect mechanism, but if anyone has a better idea, they are welcome to share.
I would credit at least some people working in finance for opening up the ability for any financially illiterate person to participate in a country’s economic growth by easily being able to buy broad equity index ETFs at near zero cost.
A lot of people do not want to spend their time reading 10-K reports to figure out which businesses to invest in.
Are you claiming there is widespread fraud in SEC filings?
If you are referring to many industries becoming controlled by a handful of large organizations, then people working in trading and finance have nothing to do with that. That is in the political arena.
But the same is true for many other professions. I also remember reading that the highest paid engineers are working for Google and Facebook to optimise ad placement. CEOs get paid a lot even if their company does things that harm society. There's an entire industry just to help large companies avoid paying tax.
A lot of things that would be good for people/society have no good way of really being profitable (unless lawmakers do something to rebalance the game to somehow help them).
And a lot of things that are profitable are objectively bad for society.
- Career politicians who are more interested in maintaining office than working for the public good.
- Corporate executives who prioritize profit/stock price over the common good. The Sackler family comes to mind.
- Financiers (of various types) who accumulate personal wealth to the detriment of the common good.
It's possible to be a good politician or a good executive and not be "evil", but there are enough notable examples of the worst of both that both careers are somewhat sullied in the public eye. And of course, it's all shades of gray.
That's clearly not what the OP was referencing.
A better way is always welcome, but I have yet to read about it or see it.
The key insight that explains the situation is that we pay based on how easy it is to replace someone. If you are doing a critical job that everyone can do (like cooking) then it is unlikely to pay well. There has been little success by systems that pay people based on how important their job is.
Speaking from Australia, I'd probably command enormous respect if I taught some kid programming. Compared to the median wage I'd be roughly doubling their earning power & I could get them a good desk job if they are smart-ish and try hard.
However, I'm legally barred from becoming a "teacher" because I don't have a masters degree in education.
This is probably the heart of why they don't command respect like they used to - it used to be that people worthy of respect became teachers. Now people worthy of respect become some other profession and aren't allowed to teach their high-value skills without jumping through hoops.
But also: people don't get paid based on the value they create for society, but on the value they create for shareholders. So running a company into the ground may actually be short-term profitable for the shareholders if you manage to keep dividend payouts high. Parasitic companies extract value from society and give it to their shareholders. Lots of companies do enormous damage to various aspects of society, but as long as they don't have to pay for that damage, they can still be profitable for their shareholders.
Shareholder value is the biggest curse ever unleashed on/by capitalism.
I disagree that shareholder value is a curse. I recommend The Visible Hand by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. who noted that over the last century there has been a shift from family-managed businesses to managerial-management which has more loyalty to themselves and abstract owners of the company, creating these kind of effects wherein a subsection of the managerial class can hop and skip through executive management irrespective of the tire fire they leave behind. Or, similarly, the churn and burn of certain speculators seeking immediate gain through capturing the business’s organizational structure to serve its own, as mentioned, selfish ends. Contrast this to the historical need for going to public markets, which is to quickly raise funding to continue to scale the scope of a business firm’s productive assets :)
Salaries don't correlate with value at all. It's a highly political thing.
There are teachers shortages throughout the country. States are rushing to reduce certification standards. “A high number of applicants” isn’t the cause of low teacher wages.
I don’t disagree with your point necessarily, but I also don’t believe it is a significant concern in most places.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
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.
A programmer who decided on their own to show our code to someone without nda and a confidentiality agreement would be at best severely chastised and no longer trusted with anything important or dismissed.
But, your mileage may vary - every place is different.
In an ideal world it makes sense to have a look at the code and understand how the company works from a holistic standpoint. However in reality I doubt that many companies would allow that to happen at interview stage…
I usually just throw out the idea to let my interviewer share their screen and navigate the codebase while I ask questions. This way, we don't have to fiddle with repository access and I can get a glimpse of their organizational culture.
Here in France, if I ask for something during the interview process with the recruiter, I will get a response like this: "Sorry we don't do that in our process, so goodbye" and they move to the next candidate while I'm out for this job.
Eastern Europe, the same. I asked a couple of years ago what are the credentials of the business unit manager, of the line manager and the technical team lead. They almost laughed me away from the building.
To see some code is definitely out of the question, though. But asking about the development process et all I find to be the type of mandatory questions I would ask as a candidate (and expect to be asked as an interviewer) even if I already knew the answer, just because not doing it would be strange.
I'm sure plenty would explain their processes and how they code, but they're not showing you their code unless it's already public which would be a moot point then.
In a startup, I think I'd have to get an NDA from everyone, even if the code was mindless bulk glue code -- if only to avoid having to later mention that practice to investors who are checking our IP diligence.
Would the following alternative work for you?
In a great engineering environment, people will give sincere answers to questions, or tell you when they can't tell you (because they don't know, or because of business-related conflicts). What about just asking them what their code is like, and see whether their answer sounds like they know what they're talking about, such that that they could give you an accurate answer.
Variation: if they know what they're talking about, but they misrepresented it intentionally, that's a really bad sign from an engineer. And hiring engineers under false pretenses would be a bad idea, as would setting precedent for engineers in that organization intentionally misrepresenting technical information to each other. (That doesn't mean that a dumb organization wouldn't establish an internal culture of dishonesty anyway, but you'll have to filter out the self-destructive and the scammers some other way.)
I've certainly never had to sign one.
The first NDA for an interview that I recall was from a big tech company, and most of it could be paraphrased as something like "Everything we tell you is under strict NDA; anything you tell us, we will treat as public domain" (or maybe it was more like nonexclusive license to use; I forget for certain which that particular company said, since I've also seen the latter since).
Later, I think that company reworked it to be more like "Don't tell us anything that could be proprietary to someone else!"
Agree that their later wording is better, but I suspect good intentions from the start
One company asked me to sign an NDA, they're a well known public but non-FAANG Boston based company. I didn't have a problem signing it but I also don't really see the point.
But, if you have any real experience in the industry (rather than making up fake advice which sounds good on the surface) you'll know that few companies will show their code, because there is little to no benefit to them doing so.
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?
So ideally I want something that satisfies as much of those things as possible.
I'm not necessarily blanketly against fintech or any other thing, but for example a lot of fintech will just be used to further the interest of people who are leeching the world's money and resources and increasing inequality. So I would feel bad about it.
Some fintech is genuinely innovative useful stuff though
Example? What is worth making?
“technically interersting to make (which to me generally means challenging to keep me interested)”
What do you find challenging? Sounds like writing a programming language and using Rust are interesting to you, given your projects?
“with good quality tech practices where you can feel satisfied you've done good work.”
If you don’t mind me saying, it sounds that you know what you don’t want, but do not have a good handle on exactly what you want (or haven’t expressed it) or how to get where you do.
As an exercise, follow up on some of these threads. Multiple people have made suggestions and you have been a bit dismissive. Go a bit deeper. If you want a job programming Rust and building programming languages but find you are not getting the interviews for programming language companies like JetBrains, its possible you could also just take on open source tasks in Rust’s existing community. It doesn’t have to be the core team, maybe one of the game dev rust environment frameworks. What are the pros of doing this? Ignore the cons for a moment since you are feeling stuck. Is it worth being made? Is it technically interesting? Is it good quality tech practices?
I have noticed for me that my interest in programming languages peaks when I want to sharpen the saw. When I want to learn and get ahead of the next wave (our industry is so faddy, I find it silly to ignore it. It’s an amazing way for new people to become the experts quickly in a new area and ride the demand). When I dive into it, I realise that its not so much the language, it’s just a new work environment and opportunity I want, then I dive into a new industry. For me, my passion was really being in something used by millions/billions of people. I went to big tech and loved it. I came to recognize that I wanted a team that knew what it was doing in a big org with possibilities and lots of learning material. When I get the programming language itch now I recognize it as being bored. Thats me, not you though. I am just illustrating. What appeals to you specifically as making a difference? Who do you want to learn from or work with?
To help you out, it can seem that you are going in circles and the doors you want are closed. But those doors are not the only way into the building. What building do you want to be in?
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.
I do have a whole lot of valuable experience, as well as failure-is-not-an-option and customer-focused mindsets. That seems to work well in this environment.
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.
This really sucks because it was the one place I swear that wasn’t ruined by spam everywhere.
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.)
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 was originally in the game industry and left it because I was stuck in a hyper specialised niche (web-based game development). I went back to more general full stack, but even here a lot of companies will specifically look for people based on them having multiple years of commercial experience with their specific stack, rather than just holistic experience in the broader area.
Keep in mind though that startups generally frown upon candidates coming across as picky in what they want to work on. You can’t have it both ways. Think it from their perspective. Of course, they don’t need to know about it. And you won’t be working on it if you are at least appearing less productive in that area if they try to get you to work on it ;)
Startups aren’t for everyone though.
Of course, in the back of my mind I wonder, isn't it possible to have interesting work AND good management? I don't know why, but it doesn't seem to work out that way.
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.
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.
In my case, I'm generally a mix of full stack dev and game dev (specialised in HTML5 game dev). I want to do more systems stuff (particularly Rust), and I've recently created a scripting language with a VM from scratch for a game engine as part of a side project.
But I don't have any commercial experience or keywords for recruiters to find in my CV outside of what I'm already "expert" in, and it's hard to find companies that will understand that a good programmer can transfer skills from one language to another.
To give an example, I recently got rejected at one job at the CV stage for "not having enough React experience" because my last job was in Vue so I wasn't technically using React in recent years (even though it's an extremely similar area of expertise)
Ah, yes, the same old story that HR (or hiring manager) took the job description waaaay too literal, and missing the idea that a halfway decent technologist or developer can/should be able to reasonably pick up any other similar tech/stack...and as such, misseed out on a potentially good candidate. I swear that HR more than any other time in my life behaves more like robots looking to check boxes (or not checking boxes such as in your example). Or, maybe i'm just bitter because i got passed up for nice, interesting jobs in the past, where the candidates they ended up with were less qualified or left the org too soon (re-triggering the same job search again too soon)...plus, i would have stayed a lot longer, and given said orgs lots more of my passion, etc. But, no, i'm not bitter. Not bitter at all. ;-)
Actual technical recruiters will contact me and be interested despite me barely matching their stack, and I once god hired on a job doing a technical test on a language I had (almost) never used before.
But if I try actually applying to a job with my CV? Often rejected because I don't have keyword X. The same company would probably hire me if I came from a recruiter lol
And I think it’s in an interesting space, but that’s also why I started this company :)
Role details here: https://allspice.notion.site/Backend-Engineer-Data-Structure...
Feel free to send me an email if you want: kyle@allspice dot io
Other than that, most of my open source work was just created by myself. If there's something you think could be useful or interesting, just make it and open source it.
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)
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.
Because indeed, almost everything I find on tech recruitment platforms is either big corps (often doing nebulous B2B things) or VC backed startups that clearly don't really provide real value besides making VCs hope they can get their 10x returns
Hell, I’d be willing to go back in office for an “interesting” job. The problem with the government is what they pay for probably having to live in DC. As well as the horrible sounding bureaucratic requirements and leveling.
Oh these guys won’t touch me. I don’t have any formal education. I do agree that many have some pretty interesting jobs.
I personally look for companies with less than 100 people, usually much less, in smaller cities. At least in Australia you can find lots of great bootstrapped small businesses doing project work for clients or product-owners of their own software products. But you have to go find the businesses rather than find the job offerings, then just check out their careers page.
There's probably not many in SV, since VC sucks all the air out of the room in the tech industry.
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.
A couple of other projects I touched are rather meaningless, but this 50/50 ratio of meaningless to meaningful projects is a refresher from years spent in banking or Silicon Valley focused data-shmining unicorn.
A couple of other projects I touched are rather meaningless, but this 50/50 ratio of meaningless to meaningful projects is a refresher from years spent in banking or Silicon Valley focused data-shmining corp.
Outside of that, and outside of the obvious snarkiness, the whole "why don't you make your own job" thing isn't a real solution. Not everyone can be creating companies, otherwise who would be working at those companies?
I don't have much security net in my life so I can't really take the risk of creating a startup on the hope it might turn out well. There's also nothing specific I'm interested in making that would have revenue at the moment.
have you seen this https://github.com/sponsors ?
Maybe eventually it could get to the point where I could do part time freelancing supplemented with github sponsor income, but even that would take a long time.
I suspect outside of a few super-popular repo managers, github sponsorship doesn't bring much income (don't know if there's any public data on that)
If you're serious about games you should make a game. Build an engine too, but only build what you need for the game. This will guide you in making the countless tradeoffs necessary to build an actually shipping piece of software. Otherwise, it's just a tech demo with no constraints or commercial value.
The general game engines (Unity, Unreal, etc) that are commercially valuable spent a lot of time and effort on excruciatingly boring things: supporting a lot of file formats, having very stable tools, being very accessible for beginners, etc.
The engine I'm making is for a very specific need (initially made to help someone else make a specific game), a few people have been using it to make their games, but it's a pretty niche thing for narrative games - https://get-narrat.com/
I'm making it for fun, but I don't expect something like that to ever make money, for that I'd need some big companies to decide to sponsor it and pay me, which is super unlikely.
> Not everyone can be creating companies, otherwise who would be working at those companies?
Those who are not arrogant enough to think they are above the position. Those who tried running their own companies, got humbled by their failure and learned the hard way that perhaps any "uninterested" job is enough. Those who are find meaning in their lives from something else than their daily job.
But the worst group, and the majority of them: those who keep complaining about their jobs but are too afraid to take control of their own lives. These are the ones who keep making excuses like "I don't have much security net (sic) in my life" and "there is nothing interesting that would have revenue at the moment"
Not everyone has to be an "entrepreneur". I like making things, not running companies and managing people/talking to investors and all the other things that come with trying to create a startup.
And yes, sorry but if you're not aware, some people have life situations that don't allow them to simply quit their job and start a company without a safety net. There's a reason the vast majority of "entrepreneurs" are of a very specific demographic
You started the post making sweeping generalizations about things that you don't like but pay well, then you go to complain about companies that may as well be profitable and a good place to work on the grounds of "not having best practices".
So, what is going to satisfy you... Oh, yes, let's see what you want to do: it's not even a game, but actually you want to bring to the world another game engine... Hippity dickity yawn, that is only interesting for the overgrown children whose only issue in their lives is their total lack of social skills.
You were asking for advice, so here is mine: if every job is so boring to you and yet you don't feel like you have what it takes to be in charge of your own professional life, accept that this is a "you" problem, not a "them" problem. If every job you had is "uninteresting", perhaps your focus should be in developing other skills that can let you see the interesting challenges that exist in every industry.
Hopefully rglullis here is helping nudge (if uncomfortably) into actually articulating a positive desire instead of asking fairly generic questions and dismissing everyone’s suggestions and feeling attacked when challenged to show a direction.
There are literally thousands of hiring managers reading these threads. Any one of us could help if the poster opens up with real specifics and what their strengths and desires are. It can be frustrating being one of those managers when the poster doesn’t appear to know what they want other than more money and a challenge. And also doesn’t provide any list of skills and experience.
For anyone reading: original poster is too timid to put their real self out there, making it hard to even help them. When you shoot your shot, step forward unapologetically and say what you have to offer and the challenge you are looking for. The Only piece of info I have is liking narrative text games with relatively simple decision trees, some interest in rust and some reflexive hate for fintech. Also some desire to not move from some unspecified location.
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.