Ask HN: Which Job After Burnout?

2 points

3 years ago

After a burnout I did a 12 months sabbatical, which is scheduled to end about now. Took almost 9 months to even start coding a few hours per week on some side projects, but now it feels like its time to start working again. However, after the last 2 jobs (large codebases, some parts 15-20 years old) I feel that I need the next job to be something I can be passionate about, its been quite some time.

My experience so far is 15 years as java developer (/architect/solution engineer/etc), mostly not the average web app backend, but rather things like metaprogramming (also meta-metaprogramming), complex distributed systems, and my favorite: high performance software. Things like realtime big data analysis (think of 50 billion sensor values per day, 100 day working set, analyzed with 50k rules on a single workstation), mass data batch processing, a bit of number crunching, etc. Making things very fast and efficient (and in Java) has been my passion basically since I started. (as hobby I write solvers for logic games like pathery.com and similar things) Of course sharing my experience and mentoring junior devs I do as well, whenever it is adequate. But I am pretty picky about my choice of language.

Unfortunately it seems like there are not many jobs left that need real performance, compared to e.g. around 5 years ago. Being in Germany, most of our IT is basically large industrial companies (which are ridiculously behind on digitalization and very hierarchical) and most smaller companies are working directly or indirectly for the larger ones software departments. When they say they have high performance requirements, it typically means "our whole dataset is 20GB and every request takes at least 3sec. We'd be really happy with 1sec request time, but you're not allowed to change anything"... (The reason the landscape changed in the last 5 years is basically that now their horribly slow software runs in the cloud instead of on premise, so at least its SSD storage on the DB servers now) I've looked around a bit recently and not yet found anything promising. Though things like high frequency trading has caught my eye, writing systems with < 10µs response time is certainly something that seems interesting. (assuming in that domain things like 100k values/s is not an exception either)

Has anyone a recommendation on a specific field or domain that might fit that niche, or was in a similar situation and has general advice?