Work

[cjsmith]

How many people here look forward to going to work in the morning? How many people say to themselves "That was a wonderful weekend, and I'm glad I get to go to work on Monday" or "Wow, I can't believe they pay me to [fitb]; I'd do it just for the fun of it" or "The people at my company are great and I'm glad I get to see them every day"?

I know there are people who are glad to have their jobs, or who feel grateful that their skillset happens to be lucrative, or who enjoy some aspects of their jobs but not others. I also know that there are people who basically hate their job, their coworkers, the activity, the salary, the hours, every bit of it. What I haven't seen is anyone who loves every bit of it.

I know my friends list. Y'all can be a contrary bunch. If I say I haven't seen FOO, several people will respond that they personify FOO. I wanna know who you are. Then I'll ask you how you got that happy.

Comments

[eichin.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe not every bit - there are certainly frustrations - but I picked this job over random hacking and gardening (and I dumped adero in favor of random hacking and gardening :-) There are some good threshhold questions - if they weren't paying me, temporarily, would I still do it? Answer: only if [certain coworkers] were still there - ie. the people are more important than the money. (The money still has value: reminds them that my time has value, also shows that what we're doing has value, if we can successfully get paid for it - but I'm here for the interesting work and the interesting people. The money is mainly so that I can buy a t-zero (http://acpropulsion.com/)...)

Not that I actually just leave jobs for being "less than ideal" - I find a have a pattern of becoming extremely bored (with evidence like showing up to work at random/intermittent hours, and spending the time learning new and only vaguely justifiable technologies - at Cygnus, it was DocBook and SGML) and then being very susceptible to new opportunities (thus the leap to Arepa, where I already knew yonah and warlord and jeff and nancy - and I could come in as the 6th employee...) rather than actually seeking anyone out. Adero was unusual in that it was the first time I could, financially, just go, and there had been enough what-are-we-doing introspection already (I joined them via acquisition, not interest, fastengines had been a lot more fun.) Even before that, though, my tolerance for unpleasant jobs was always low simply because I was (fortunate enough to be) in such demand that alternatives presented themselves rapidly...