Hi guys!
I'm currently unemployed, looking for a job and would like to make some survey here, basically the topic would be "the interesting job". To give you a quick introduction: I was working as a .Net developer for around 7 years in different but more or less similar outsourcing companies, I've started participating in competitive programming 1.5 years ago and eventually this ruined my career in regular outsourcing cause the tasks there most of the time are more boring and less brain-teasing than what you have in CP.
To be clear, what I want here is to have as much opinions as possible, I would appreciate any ideas, consider this topic to be a brainstorming platform. I just want to broaden my understanding of what is there outside of the companies where I was working before. I'm interested to hear about your companies (I won't blame you if you decide to advertise your company in this blog post), or maybe you won't give out the company name but will share what do you do there, whether you find it interesting or not, anything.
I'm interested to hear about different areas you are working in, I'm not even restricting it to be a programming job, maybe something CS-related (but still supposed to be interesting for a programmer), maybe you're working in CS-research centres, maybe in some educational centre, maybe you're winning a lot of monthly/yearly contests and selling the T-shirts you get there and that's basically your salary.
Good example of what I'd like to see here is gojira's Rockethon introduction blog post where he was introducing Rocket Fuel, what do they do there, why is it interesting to work there, what might be the challenging task there and what does it have to do with competitive programming.
Red coder is unemployed, oh my dreams are ruined.
Well I can see that you are from Russia, so there must be IT companies. I don't know how good you are in Java, C# but you can give a try, I think that there is a lot of different jobs. Software engineer, data science association, databases?
Not sure whether the reply fits your topic, but I found this puzzle solver job position appears interesting to me.
If you are currently in Saint-Pete's there are few positions about big-data opened — in Dino Systems and Grid Dynamics almost always.
However I'm not sure whether you regard this field as "interesting" and probably people here would like to see experience in Java instead of C#, but I'm not sure. There are not that many specialists so they are not quite capricious :)
UPD Another interesting place here is GGA Software in EPAM. As far as I know they are working on problems related to chemistry and bioinformatics and people who work here are quite happy.
It's my second year with Grid Dynamics, and I've been to two projects: search engine for a E-commerce and Big Data one (ads-related). Both are quite interesting and challenging but I ain't no red to judge :) And yes, Java is a must
Clarification: I'm not restricted to Russia, even more generally I would look for something outside of Russia, preferably in Europe. But for now I would just like to check what are the options in general, what do people do, not restricted to any particular location.
A special offer for you!
Can I find this contest in a gym?
It seems that he has not taken you? My condolences.
Sam durak
Try to define "interesting" first. It's just a combination of good/bad impressions, sphere of knowledge, random thoughts, state of personal life, elusive (usually distracting) expectations about tasks, perspectives, social/personal/politic importance of this job, and many other things that you see from uncertain points of view dynamicly changing their position! Even you lovely color may have some influence) So don't try to define your "interest", it's just part of primitive biological mechanism which will try to don't let you spend your energy for something else than searching food/pretty girl. For example, when we need to wait for smth — it say "sit down somewhere", and we're listenig. Don't use it for seeking job, it's not just a place where you can get some sandwiches.
As I said, I've never worked as professional coder, but I've tried several quite different university/tech/IT projects with 2-3 persons (the most interesting is WiFi traffic analysis[libpcap], currently GIS [Qt], the next will be web), and I can say:
Now, my rules:
I am doing clustering of local businesses for Google and quite happy about that. Local businesses — are restaurants, hotels, laundries, statues of liberty, etc. Basically every non geographic feature you can search for on the map. Significant and most important part of my job — I just looking on data and think what can be done with that data. Do experiments. There are weeks when I don't submit even single line of code :). From time to time I have chances to implement trie, DP, DP on bit masks, or come up with encoding with some fancy properties. But not frequently.
Of course there are not interesting parts. Maintains of internal tools. Hopeless attempts to figure out how to schedule you job in data center with priority, which would allow it to succeed. Other infrastructure problems. Maintenance of public API, and helping clients to figure out how to use it.
Overall I am rather happy with my current job. Actually the biggest disadvantage is that my teammates at Google are not red coders, unlike my teammates at ACM :)