Ask HN: Is it just me or do 99% of SWE jobs offers seem completely pointless?
I understand where you&#x27;re at, and I honestly have no idea what I could recommend you to do to find, BUT I can answer your question:<p>&gt; People who have really great jobs(not talking about money ofc), how did you find them?<p>It&#x27;s been a whole construction of myself really, and I feel like it&#x27;s still going on.<p>- When I was younger, I used to see only the flaws in things, and I was never happy with anything. Later on, I managed to discover that nothing&#x27;s perfect, but most things have good aspects, and it&#x27;s all about a balance. And even that sometimes, good things <i>need</i> bad things to be good.<p>- My first job was at a smartphone OEM, where we released new models at stupidly fast pace, with very little quality. I felt I was very helpful, because the devices would ship anyway, whether I was there or not, and I helped improved the quality of the device. I had direct contact with users and RMA, and I felt useful for each individual I managed to help. However, as I said, the devices we released were pretty bad (but dirt cheap, pretty much stealing money from shareholders to give it to customers), and I witnessed how those decisions were made, and why. Really, that was putting in real-world my economy lessons. If there is some way to make more money, this path will be taken, no matter how benevolent the involved people are. Business incentives are everything. For that company, the aim was to sell to supermarkets, which only care about specs over price ratio, and nothing else. So it optimized specs over price, and made device that were unusable in 3 months.<p>Once, I understood that business incentive are everything, I went to a sector without the business incentive to output models as fast as possible, but the exact opposite. In France, ISPs provide the home gateway and the tvbox, as part of the subscription. So ISP wants to provide the best service, without replacing the user&#x27;s hardware every year, because it costs the ISP money, so they keep software upgraded and optimized as long as possible.<p>- So I went to a new job (not gonna lie, I didn&#x27;t exactly choose that one), for the biggest french ISP. I initially was afraid of the very big corp (Bigger than Google), but I still did go. I still learnt many things technically, and felt that what I was doing could be useful. Well I was right being afraid of big corp, because well, what I did never became actually used. But still, I learnt a lot again on how companies work, and while I initially have a bad opinion of big corps, I didn&#x27;t have actual reasons to have those bad opinions, now I do! I even realized how and why big corps are not necessarily a bad thing for the world. But definitely not a good match for me at my age. I can&#x27;t really sum up those things I learned, but there has been one metaphor that convey parts of it. A big corp is a galley. It&#x27;s pretty slow by modern standards, but it can pretty reliably go anywhere. There is a captain, but if everyone paddle backwards, the ship doesn&#x27;t go where the captain wants it to go. Really, the ship, simply goes to the mean of where the people paddling want the ship to go. This means that there is no real decision ever made by one person, but that decisions emerge from flock behavior. (Not sure that metaphor works really well, but anyway)<p>So I left that job. I still wanted that business incentive to do &quot;good&quot; things. I turned to a company that I liked when I was younger, even though back then I didn&#x27;t even envision going there, which is a much smaller ISP. So I erased the ecological cost, and the horrible UX of my first job, and went to a company-style that suits me more.<p>I&#x27;m definitely happier with my job than before. I still see dark dots here and there, and I still dream of what I could do next (An Android-based OS for any smartphones, with real competitive market for all apps and services, with business incentives to keep upgrading Android on smartphones for as long as possible), so it&#x27;s not all white, and I think it&#x27;s still likely I&#x27;ll move to another job later, but I&#x27;ll know what I&#x27;m trading.<p>So, I initially said I don&#x27;t know what to recommend you, I&#x27;ll try anyway:
- Never regret taking any job, but instead, focus on what you learned from that experience. I tried that job, because of XXX, turns out XXX was actually a bad idea for me, but that job had YYY that I didn&#x27;t expect, and YYY was good, so maybe I should focus on looking for YYY.
- Focus on things you want from a company, rather on things you won&#x27;t to evade
- You could try looking for companies based on things you think should be done. Like for instance &quot;it would be nice to help musicians sell their music without fighting labels&quot;. Well, based on that you should go work for bandcamp!
- Don&#x27;t hesitate to go &quot;off-road&quot;: If based on previous item you think things unrelated to SWE, like if you think saving whales is important, well it&#x27;s likely there is a whales-saving organization who would welcome a web maintainer, even if they are not actively looking for it, so go ask them.<p>Anyway, I wish you a good luck finding your path