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Comment by TradingPlaces | Hacker News Reader

Nobody gets a CS degree dreaming of working for Walmart, but they have 1315 openings with the word “software” in the title. Many jobs are in CA, TX or WA

https://careers.walmart.com/results?q=software&page=1&sort=r...

CVS has 492

https://jobs.cvshealth.com/job-search-results/?keyword=softw...

The non-tech Fortune 500 companies are still hiring. Go down the list

https://fortune.com/ranking/fortune500/

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My brother has been a software engineer since 1996. After working exclusively at mid-to-large tech companies, he started working at a very large national retailer in 2019, mostly because he wanted to move closer to family and that was one of the few good employers around.

He now says that this has been the most fulfilling job he's had. This retailer was working on ancient systems that, while old, were exceptionally well-designed. Moving these systems over to a modern tech stack was challenging but also incredibly rewarding.

I work in finance and a lot of my job is getting the right numbers to come out of the system in the desired timeframe. To my son that sounds boring, and he asked me if I'd switch to work on VR or something flashier. I told him that there's a lot of challenge in solving the problems that I do, and I wasn't sure that optimizing rendering or something in VR would be more rewarding or not (not to mention I'd have probably been laid off by now anyway). I suspect the challenge and reward is the same but using different tech stacks.

Conversely, after having worked for WMT as a software eng myself, that was the least fulfilling dev job I've ever had.

Working for a non-tech company can feel different though, because they are less developer-centric. Especially in the early days I remember many weird conversions I never had before: why do you need this weird software on your computer, or even admin rights? Do you really need that expensive computer/phone/monitor for your development, it's not the company standard? Why do you need to access non-standard ports via VPN?

On the other hand, I really enjoy working on things that benefit non-tech users and solve "real-world" problems.

Walmart, CVS, and Target are not sexy at all (on the tech side). But they're stable, pay well, and you get to work on interesting technical problems that actually matter. You are more likely to deal with an interesting issue at WCT then at a FAANG, there's less red tape to deal with, and everything is just better designed in general since it needs to be reliable.

If you're still there after a year you'll probably spend your career there.

Not too long ago I was approached by a recruiter from Walmart for a role that was deeply technical in areas that I never would have imagined Walmart to be hiring for. So they seem to have some great teams doing interesting tech work.

Unfortunately they wanted on-site presence in a different state than where I live so couldn't go forward with it. Otherwise might well have taken it, to my surprise.

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