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Are There Any Fun Tech Jobs Left?

er0ck asks: "My first job out of college was working for an Internet Startup. They gave me some books and told me to learn Perl. Our office was a refurbished factory, with lots of light and open space. Best of all, we could bring our nerf toys in to work (and use them!). Four months later, the company went under. Several dot bomb jobs later, I work for my state government. Is anyone still having fun at their tech job?" I think that with the economic downturn, more companies are concentrating on survival more than being "fun". Are there any "fun" tech jobs left, or have they all suffered from the Economic Darwinism of the early 21st century?

"[Government work is] steady work, but boring at times. (I don't think they'd approve of the Nerf guns). Without the pressure of staying in business, projects sometimes stagnate, leaving us with little to do. During these slow times, I help behind the scenes at NerfCenter.com; It's a fun site, and they are switching to Perl for their admin backend. It keeps my skills sharp, and wards off the boredom.

My questions to the Slashdot community are:

  1. Can you have a fun tech job, without the worry of being suddenly unemployed?
  2. If you are you forced (as I am) to get your fun on the side what are some good projects to get involved in?
  3. What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?"

18 of 584 comments (clear)

  1. Can you imagine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    A huge throbbing cock in your mouth?

    Thank you.

    Cocks Ucker, Fag.

    1. Re:Can you imagine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
      Yes I can.

      I can even imagine it being a Chicagoan cop cock.

  2. Stephen King, author, dead at 54 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic


    I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

    1. Re:Stephen King, author, dead at 54 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      For once, the Stephen King troll is correct about his age.
      With Mr. King having been born on September 21st, 1947, the stupid troll was incorrect about his age until yesterday.

      And he's still incorrect about his death.

  3. MMMM PENIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I love sucking cocks, they're so yummy. Everybody should suck at least 1 cock every day. Unless you're a woman - they're terrible at sucking cock.

    -- jraxis

    1. Re:MMMM PENIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      dammit dammit dammit that is not jraxis!!! everyone already KNOWS i only fuck five yearold GIRLS!!! mm wait... i do like cock!! gimme gimme!!

      -- jraxis [jraxis.com]

    2. Re:MMMM PENIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      yeah right everyone knows i fuck five year old boys constantly, i shove my cock up their ass and also suck their cocks

      -- jraxis

    3. Re:MMMM PENIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      lol who r u guys n y do u all hate raxis? i kno him from dalnet hes pretty cool

    4. Re:MMMM PENIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Hehe looks like somebody's doing some meta-impersonation :)

    5. Re:MMMM PENIS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      would the real jraxis please stand up?

  4. mmm kiddie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    i like to fuck my own sister's feet!!! --jraxis

    1. Re:mmm kiddie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Dammit that's not me! I don't fuck any females, only males!

      -- jraxis

  5. Re:Right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Is this where the sweet meet to beat their meat?

  6. Re:It's up to you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Yes, travel rules. Used to work for a place with lots of nerf toys, gradually the free soda etc dissapeared [thanks to BigCompany]. Never had the desire to go to a dot bomb- did not work out for most people who took those routes. Now, I do open source and get paid for it. I always have fun!

    Work is what you make of it. If you make it fun.. it's fun.

  7. Re:Have you thought about the military? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    That's pretty badass.

  8. Re:Learn to read by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    holy christ you are one fucken loser asshole! go shove a nerf football up your ass, faggot!

  9. Not trying to one-ups by MeowMeow+Jones · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    But if you're on a computer, you can actually crawl through a new statement with a debugger. Here on MSVC, new calls malloc, delete calls free. Alot of programmers will write debug versions of all dynamically allocated objects, so that they can do primitive reference counting to see if there are any memory leaks. They're usually implemented with malloc and free as well.

    Regarding sbrk() most manpages recommend that you dont use it (From FreeBSD:The brk and sbrk functions are historical curiosities left over from earlier days before the advent of virtual memory management.)

    The original question is a bit of a double-edged sword (and might have even been intended as so) Although the only rational way to impement a default new() is {return malloc(sizeof(object));} it's irrelevant, because new is an interface. It's implementation should be considered a black box by the programmer. Even though new and delete almost definately use malloc and free, you can't make that assumption as a programmer.

    That's the reason they go out of the way to state that calling free on a new'ed object leads to undefined behaviour. It'll work 99.999% of the time, but when it does bite you in the ass it'll take you weeks to find the bug.

    --

    Trolls throughout history:
    Jonathan Swift

  10. Re:What do I do to unwind? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    > It also happens to be a Saturday night and I'm
    > sitting here, but that's another issue.

    Actually, it's the same issue. "Hot sex" doesn't count when it's masturbating to the latest photo of Britney's feet.