Ask HN: Do you work on interesting problems?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632519

by Austin_Conlon • 7 years ago

8 9 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

billconan• 7 years ago

At work, no. But I have side projects.

slipwalker• 7 years ago

sure, to keep my bills payed on time is the most interesting problem ever... :)

gshdg• 7 years ago

They may not be technically difficult, but they sure are challenging in other ways, and that makes them interesting to me!

ltmi6002• 7 years ago

You shouldn't have to work on interesting problems at work because Life is the most interesting problem. You should have as much time and mental resources as possible to handle that problem/puzzle.

stagas• 7 years ago

Everytime I discover the meaning of Life, they change it. My point is, Life isn't a well-defined problem, and it shouldn't be, so it is more like a never-ending puzzle that you are free to go as deep as you want.

But there are parallels, and for example, multiple solutions can apply for the same issues, with plenty of different outcomes, positive or not.

Work, usually, comes with well-defined requirements which require specific solutions. Working on well-defined problems, and solving them, gives you knowledge and experience, which you can often apply to solving Life problems as well, but in a more systematic way than you did before.

It's an exercise for the mind which generalizes, the mind can then reuse those new skills out in the real world. Even more, solving difficult problems in a team environment, requires certain levels of communication, coordination and accommodation, which are also very important, if not the most important skills you can reuse to understanding and solving the puzzle of Life.

ltmi6002• 7 years ago

That is a very inspiring perspective on how work aids in dealing with life. I hope you do find work that provides challenging and meaningful problems for you to solve. You deserve it.

buboard• 7 years ago

Life is the most interesting problem

Most of life is mundane. That's why there are entire entertainment / leisure / travel businesses to fix that issue.

AwesomeFaic• 7 years ago

At work I work on problems that are interesting to other people, but not to me. At home I work on problems that are interesting to me, but not other people (or so I assume).

Feels like a healthy enough balance.

sethammons• 7 years ago

For work, my team has been moving legacy architecture to a new stateless model while continuing to support billions of events going through our system. Our software runs on thousands of machines. It is very much switching out parts on a moving vehicle. High scale, high availability, updating arch, etc. I think it is interesting. You can't just start a green field thing and move over wholesale. You have to move over parts and for subsets of users. You have to incorporate years of bug fixes and learnings in the legacy stack to the new stack, and the new stack has new and different scaling challenges.

Ask HN: Do you work on interesting problems?

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