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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:
- Can you have a fun tech job, without the worry of being suddenly unemployed?
- If you are you forced (as I am) to get your fun on the side what are some good projects to get involved in?
- What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?"
Gee, imagine that.
Glad I'm not old enough to have a job.
Best of all, we could bring our nerf toys in to work (and use them!). Four months later, the company went under.
Ever hear of "cause and effect?"
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Wow, I never hear those two words in the same sentence. Unless someone is saying "My job is not fun. But, I also don't know anyone who works in a tech job. So maybe I am totally wrong. Who knows?
Please Hire me.
What, me worry?
if your job isn't fun for you, get a new job. working the state sounds interesting to me. your job should be rewarding, don't waste your life hating your job, do something you love.
Black and Tans with friends.
Never underestimate the importance of a good social life. Even if it is with the people you work with, leave the work talk at work and have a good time. It doesn't matter what you enjoy, clubs, dancing, bars, drinking, playing sports, or watching sports. The key to steal a slogan is to just do it.
Its easy as a techie to go home from work and 'work' on your own projects. This is the time that most open source work gets done. But the beast that can do that more than once a week is a rare one. Most humans need something else.
Social interaction is more than irc, aim, etc... There is much to be said for physical interaction. I suppose there was a time when I got some satisfaction out of conversing with people online. Now I use it merely as another means of communication with people I already know, not as a means to communicate with new people.
In short, drink beer.
-e
even though I work with seven techs. I work at the hell desk of a private college in NW Ohio, where I'm the phone and cable tech. I started out doing PC troubleshooting on the 'front line.' (there's only one extension for the help desk, so only one person at a time runs it)
It is a relaxed work enviornment. We brought our water guns in during the summer, have snowball fights in the winter, and change eachother's passwords on a quazi-daily basis. The things like that interject humour into our lives, and during our meetings and when we communicate, we're always told that we look like we have no stress. It boils down to doing what you enjoy and to make it as comfortable as you can doing it. If that means making-busy that cute freshmen girl's phone so you can go flirt (boss read: fix it), so be it.
Have fun, but introduce it slowly if your department has never seen it before...you never know where it will end up.
I disable sigs...do you?
I work for a dot com that actually has a working business model, imagine that? Unfortunate thing is that we started a little late and never did get big investment. Turned out to be the best thing for us.
I think what it really comes down to is that a lot of people out there assigned the wrong reason to dot com failures. Your business has to have a realistic way to make money, it just that simple. So many of these companies started up with a euphoric misconception that the money would just stream in from nowhere somehow. I don't think it had a whole lot to do with it being fun or not.
I had a nerf gun in our office along with a couple of other people, mines broke now, a small bout of hand to hand combat. It would be allowed again if I could afford it.
After nearly 6 months without a paycheque things are looking up again, but the office has been fun the whole time. The trick is just to remember that having fun in the office is intended to raise productivity. As soon as you're going into work to relax and unwind, you're having a little too much.
Aaron
AaronCameron.net
Playing with nerf guns in a converted factory is fun...but is it a job?
My job is as a programmer/admin. I enjoy it and the company receives good value. Pre-1995 this would have been defined as heaven. To you dot-bomb losers it is apparently hell.
324006
is it just me or does this guy seem to want a job where he can run around shooting co-workers with nerf guns? was that even fun when you could do it?? it sounds like it would get old in about 10 minutes. you need to stop obsessing over the fact that no one these days is going to let you play like a child when you're supposed to coding perl or whatever it is you do.
Beware those jobs that offer a fun environment with nerf toys, free soda and all that. More often than not, it is a ploy to make you put in those uncompensated hours of overtime. A lot of companies use these incentives because they are extremely inexpensive compared to paying you for each hour you work.
Maybe it is just the contractor in me speaking, but when it comes down to it - pay me the money and I will take care of having my own fun outside of work. That doesn't I don't love the work I do, it just means that I do a great job at it because I love the work, not the silly cheapo incentives.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Hey, Why don't you quit your job and start your own company? Then you could bring in all the nerf guns you want.
"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."
Clearly the Nerf Toy simulator he was developing went unappreciated by the masses. I'm kind of surprised that State Government hired him though. They usually have pretty low standards. I would think he would be overqualified for a government job given that he has ambition, even if it is to find a job where he can play with Nerf Toys again. 8^}
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I work for the state. We have "stress breaks". An occasional rubber band zinging by, tossing a football for five minutes, a practical joke, a long lunch, a few quake rounds, a round based game such as civ:ctp, or just having everyone tell a joke. It makes the work much more enjoyable and when we're finished, we're refreshed and more productibe anyhow. Yes, we have nerf guns, but we decided they weren't too good for general play, but they worked great when everyone ganged up on a person that made a stupid remark or asked dumb question.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
She's a fresh-out-of-school programmer, and she's been looking for C/C++/Java work here in Chicago. Three months of firing off resumes in every direction, and she hasn't gotten so much as a single interview.
It seems like nobody is hiring programmers fresh out of school - or not in Chicago, at least!
What's the experience been like for others who have just graduated? Is this something of a fluke, or something more to do with her gender than her experience? (I don't know if I want to believe that in this day and age...) Or does the surplus of available tech workers from the dot-com fallout mean trouble for entry-level programmers?
To me, I have fun in teaching students about programming. Teasing them with tricky questions and see their faces as you unravel the answers. It's really funny, you can see jaw drops from some and you can feel superior too. :-)
Or, you can apply for webmasters/admin in campuses. Consulting befuddled students and meanwhile having some nostalgia on how you did the same when you were at their age. :-)
You can expect that working in educational setting is stable, without being worried to get fired. That's only if you have Master's/Ph.D's degree. The salary is a bit lower, but if you want a stable life, this is definitely worth a try.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
well i am having a fun job working. well i don't really call it work since i treat it like playing. i am a systems administrator for a school and although the pay is not high compared to the US tech job pay, i do have a very fun time meeting with other people and doing things and see them accomplished and be appreciated by other people.
:-(
we get to play with expensive equipment (good thing this is a university and we are in spend mode all the time.)
but the main thing is when you do things, you do it great. your output should be dependent on the input (salary). bring out the best and people will see it. you'll not worry about finding other jobs.
for our past times, we play counterstrike with all the other employees in work. we even have regular tournaments. that is fun. we also do have parties, excursions, etc. mingle with other people. humans are social creatures and do not stare all day in front of the monitor.
for projects, well if you see things that can be done better, why not. from web sites, workstation management, hardware management, etc. you do it good.
i hope that everyone will have a happy time in their jobs and they will have stable work.
johnlaw
"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
...and done very well indeed - Google!
:^)
Take a look this - doesn't sound like they've been hit too bad by this downturn...boy I'd love to work there!
I hear they use massive Linux clusters, too, which I'd love to get my mitts on.
"Are there any more Fun jobs?!??!!"
Yes, there are. For years people have been loving their jobs because they enjoy what they are paid for. Not for playing around in a sandbox like you are in Grade 1.
And its not only tech people who enjoy their job. Its doctors (excitement/feel like they are helping people), ministers/counsolers (spiritual fullfillment) and even fishermen (enjoy the surroundings/hard-work enjoyment).
I think this guy needs an attiude change/reality-check.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I'd have to say that I have a pretty fun job. I'm the network administrator at a small but growing publishing company in Akron, OH. Fortunately when I graduated 2 years ago, I didn't succumb to the temptations of a .com. My company isn't quite as relaxed about things as a .com was, but we have gym facilities, a lake with tables and umbrellas, a softball team, our fair share of little toys in our cubes, lots of company outings that are actually fun, flextime, etc.. I mean, a job isn't supposed to be fun 24-7. There's stress and some not-so-fun things, but for the most part I really enjoy my job.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
... on what you mean by "fun".
I'm working at a consulting company and we have to work with a very large codebase with mixed new and old code of varying degrees of quality. And it's often a pain to add new things or optimize old things because a lot of cruft has built up over the years. Nevertheless, it's fun to be, in that it's challenging and gratifying when you know that what you did makes the code cleaner, better, and faster.
There are also times when it's just plain annoying, when you're faced with a virtual tower of cards of badly-written but working code. You wish you could rewrite it to make it better, but you're also afraid everything might just start tumbling down. And it's very frustrating to know that you could fix it, but unable to do it because of time constraints or fear of breaking everything (due to other code relying on buggy behaviour).
Nevertheless, I consider my job quite fun. I think most of it comes from the fact that I work with a very inspiring person who also shares my ideals of what is good code, etc.. And even when we know we don't want to touch that piece of ugly code, although we'd love to "fix" it, we can share the wish that had we the chance, we'd do it better. We can talk about what design methods would've been better, and how perhaps we can work towards that in the future, etc.. And I think it's this personal connection that makes the difference -- the job itself can be quite a bore at times, but when you know someone else is with you on it, it makes a world of difference.
Just my $0.02.
Poll Mastah
I teach computer science at one of the colleges here in Missouri. Playing on servers all day and getting paid for it... talk about fun!
Being a student at this point, I don't have any absolute need for income. I work with my own company out of my friend's basement. We manage enough income to pay for the power bills. Our current goal is to learn as much as possible about both computers and electronics as well as business that we can have a workable product out the door by the time we finish college. The best part is that by the time we actually expect income off of this we will have made many connections inside the business world and gained enough experience that we will have a better chance of success. Hopefull y the economy will be a bit better in 4 years when we get out of school.
I am !amused.
My job's devolved to routine support on the "tough cases" (ie, those which either involve assholes or require my knowledge of the 500+ person tech infrastructure). I resolved to not work for my boss but to simply punch the clock and pursue those elements of the job that give me personal satisfaction. I will work strongly for my department as I have respect for our Director that extends beyond the prerequisite respect that profesionalism dictates.
Still, it sucks sometimes and the "high" is gone.
I'm no longer loving and eager to go to work. For the first time in my life (I'm 37) I look forward to the end of the day most of the time.
i forgot to place not in the 3rd paragraph. it should have read:
your output should not be dependent on the input (salary).
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
I work for state gov. also. If you have any skills, you should be able to sell fun projects there with no problem. Our state is having big budget problems. It's our perfect opportunity to get Linux, PHP, and new ideas to be heard, and seriously considered. Budget problems have given us unbelievable opportunities. Guess what, it makes the job fun.
Don't go through your career thinking that someone is going to make it fun for you. Nerf toy time might be fun, but you will have to make the time up.
Here is a bright idea, try and start your own company. See how much toy time you get. Keep it in perspective.
I ended up working at a bank. Yeah, you'd think it'd be the ultimate suitplace, and I'm not even really sure why I went in for the interview, other than the qualifications were exactly me.
It was one of those fun group interviews, and it started sounding like a fun place to work, but the clincher was when it came time for the other managers to ask me their questions, and the programming manager's question was "Rubber bands: office supply, or weapon?"
I got the job when my answer was "Office supply. I have *Nerf*."
The rest of the bank viewed the MIS department with tolerant amusement, but they weren't quite as stuffy as you'd expect either. (Each department had goofy "Camp" signs. Computer Operations was Camp Kickalottapeopleoff or some such, Foreclosures was Camp Usendadamoneyukeepadahouse, things like that.) They're still in business, though I quit to become a SAHM, after corrupting all their RPG programmers by teaching them Perl.
My husband, on t'other hand, works for A Really Big Airplane Manufacturer Who's Laying A Lot Of People Off Next Year, and it's definitely big-company mentality, even in the various IT departments. You can still be a nonconformist, though; I just bought him some Frigits, which he's using on the metal cube-dividing cabinets, and he came home and reported that he's now "famous."
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
I brought in my mighty Nerf gattling gun one friday and had security on my sorry ass as the mother sounds like a machine gun! Anyone have a silencer for these?
Very tough indeed. I disagree with the implication from other posters that the fact that you could bring nerf toys in (and use them, yes) was the cause of the company's downfall. No job should be "sterile" per se... it's critical that there -always- be room for some small amount of humor or fun.
;-)
Anyway... I'm kind of in the same situation, if a little more stable with my current employer. By hobby, training, and natural interests, I'm a hardware hack. Always have been, always will be. I'm far more comfortable with a soldering iron in one hand and an oscilloscope probe in the other than I'll ever be with a keyboard and display in front of me.
My problem is that all the "interesting" (to me, anyway) jobs in engineering, specifically avionics, require a four-year degree. So, I spend my days as a (somewhat) frustrated engineering tech masquerading as a Unix SysAdmin, and going to school at night towards my degree. Before that, I was a PC support guy. Before that, I was in datacomm and networking. Do we see a pattern here?
The bottom line, I think, is that you need to know for sure what you're interested in, and then work towards it in any way you can. Sometimes, it can take years before you know, beyond any shadow of doubt, what you want to be doing. Heck, I didn't realize I really wanted engineering until I turned 37!
My favorite projects involve avionic systems modification/refit. This is the process of taking older hardware, seeing what it does, and updating it to make it better or more efficient. My biggest fear is that there may not be too many positions left doing this by the time I graduate (about 2005 or so at the current rate, earlier if I can push myself).
But you know what? I'm going to do it anyway, no matter WHAT the industry does! Never, EVER believe you're "over the hill" to do what you really want in life!! That's a great way to lock yourself into a tailspin.
The bottom line? Don't worry so much about whether a job is "fun." Find an occupation YOU think is fun, and push for it with everything you've got.
Oh... almost forgot. Get your ham radio license, too. That's always fun.
Good hunting.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
You have several options.
- Make the job a way for you to get experiences,
ie. don't be afraid to travel abroad etc.
- Make yourself invaluable, it's hard work, but
once there, any company will go great lengths
and listen to you if you're bored.
- Start your own. There's lots of money in making
internet software for small companies. When you
work for yourself, things are much more fun as
YOU make the decisions, ie. technology etc. and
you take on the challenges, and not just hide
out as an anonymous mouse at BigCompany (tm).
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
I program video conferencing set top boxes conforming to ITU H.324, H.323, and H.320 standards. We developed our own OS; the whole binary image fits in under 1 Meg of memory (Flash). Now I know most of the Slashdot readers are IT types and if you go this route, it's highly probable that you'll end up in a government or Fortune 500 job where you maintain "the net". But if you want a fun job, I suggest getting one where you not only develop the software but also the hardware - where everything is done from the ground up. I promise you - you'll never be bored.
If you can't find a job that you find fun in your industry... (technology in this case) perhaps you're in the wrong industry?
Nope, I just don't get it. Lots of light and a technical job are two terms that just don't mix. Lots of light means reflections on your screen, which leads to increased headaches. Any real techie lives in a darkened room/area. I'm having a constant running battle with others in our office to have the lights kept off at my end of the room.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Instead of lining the pockets of greedy company owners/CEOs, I work for a non-profit organization which is there to support you, rather than hinder your progress. Layoffs? College enrollments are on the rise due to the massive numbers of IT layoffs! Have you ever heard of a college instructor getting laid off? It simply doesn't happen, because of the inverse relationship between IT employment levels and the need for college-level IT instruction.
Plus, I find teaching to be immensely satisfying, both on a personal and spiritual level. What more noble endeavor is there than to help others? I can safely say that I've never felt "personally satisfied" at any consultant gig I've done.
If you're happy following all the other unemployed IT sharks that are being chummed by headhunters with no jobs to offer and companies intent on building their resume files for when the "turnaround" comes, more power to you. If you're looking for something that's not only fun, but honorable, check out your local colleges.
Yes, I would say I am doing exactly what I have wanted and still want. Ofcourse there have been days when I have had to do stuff that was not for me (like run the company ;) but you have to do things that you dont like to do things that you like.
;)
However, I don't believe that it could be possible if I would have been working for someone else.
What do I do then? Ummmm... I dunno
I got the last one. Sorry. They are all gone now and will be for many years to come.
...College!
I've always lived by that, and it seems to work (err no pun intended there). I work in a job where the "work" is exactly what I did before somebody paid me to do it. If your job isn't "fun" maybe you need to look at your "work"....
I'd just like to point out two oft-overlooked facts here.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Without income no company can survive. Many of the dot-coms really has to charge more for their service, they can't live on thin air, it just can't happen.
I think that the fact that the public has gotten used to the idea of not paying anything for anything will be one of the most difficult issues for these kind of companies.
When it comes to software development we will have basically the same problem. Tons of people who lives on their parents, venture capital or the goverment (studying for example) are flooding the market with free stuff. This is not a very big problem today but I suspect it will get worse in the comming years.
I worked for 3 dotcom startups before getting to where I am now, and I really miss the work - what I do now is dull, unimaginative, repititious, and frustrating... I went from being a nicely flexible jack of all trades, doing whatever needed to be done to get the day's tasks completed, to being slotted into a rigidly defined (and ridiculously micromanaged) dba for a poorly written foxpro dos tracking system for a gas turbine repair company that fears change like rabbits fear wolves.
The market sucks - especially if you're a generalist who thrives on constant challenge and learning new technology as soon as it's available and applying it as fast as you can to your projects. Work hasn't been fun for me since I joined the brick-and-mortar world of IT. I'm hoping that in a couple of years, we'll see a new boom, but until then, I'm just miserably punching the timeclock and biding my time.
-72
p.s. we had Nerf guns in our offices during the startup days, but rarely had time to use them.
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
Find work doing what you love, and your job will be fun.
Nerf toys and funky offices are temporary diversions that can't possibly make for long-term job satisfaction. I think many Internet startups cultivated this environment in the hopes of keeping employees at work longer and getting more out of them. But if you work somewhere where people do good work because it's meaningful to them, it'll be a fun job and the company might have more of a chance at success.
Well, my job isn't fun (tech support), but everyone in my department is pretty close (it's only 5 guys) and we do have some fun after work. After hours we participate in some networked computer games and some nerf wars. Our manager is fine with it as long as our work does not fall behind and he even participates sometimes.
I think if we didn't have this to blow off some steam after talking to all those customers, we'd all go insane.
There's never enough when you have too little
The questions I asked myself when I looked at a job were as follows. Will I be bored? Will I learn something? Will this job not work as above, but also work to advance my career?
And the all important: will I get bragging rights? ;)
Then again I am also divorced with no kids. Don't get me wrong: the money I make is good, as good as my father the EE makes with over 25 years of experience. It's just not 6 figures like what the dotbombs were throwing around for a while.
My sage advice? (lol) Look for a job while you are snug as a bug in another, even if it's a POS one. Be picky. Look at the employer's record. etc., etc.
I am probably preaching to those that need it least, but...somethings need reiterating.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
I would say the only problem is support the 20+ Mac users, but after you get a friendly demeanor going, they're easy to get along with and actually start to solve their own problems.
Now I'm working on projects that are fun for me, that eventually Stone & Ward will see benifits from. Like playing with different Linux distros for an in-house webserver (that doubles as an Infiltration server :) Or building a RAS to take advantage of our 24 phone lines and 6mbit connection that don't get used after hours. I also have a planned network backup solution that uses an ATA RAID controller and a bunch of big hard drives. It would give them four months of hourly incremental backups.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
So I sent my resume out to some local game companies, and the rest is history.
I get to:
A lot of people seem to have the impression that getting a job in the Game industry is really really tough. For Engineers/Programmers, this is definitely not the case. Sure, at entry level the pay is typically not on par with "business coding", but for me at least, a smaller salary is a tiny price to pay for the blessing of a job that I love.
If you're a coder, and you like games, and you'd like to work on games, send that resume out. You might surprise yourself.
--Joe
I have a bit to comment on this. I've heard way too many people equate jobs where you get to do whatever you want, with jobs that are fun. Job enjoyability very little to do with a lot of the things tech guys harp about.
;)) makes me feel good.
For me anyway, an funfactor of a job has very little to do with foosbal tables, or nerf guns, or anything like that. A job is enjoyable if I get to do work that's enjoyable. For the past few months, I've been working at an embedded tech company that's somewhat prosperous.
At the beginning of the term, the boss just came over, dropped a couple specification manuals on us (me, co-worker), and told us to implement it. That was cool. No micro-management - we went to him when we had questions or doubts. For starting from scratch, and not knowing the hardware or the codebase, we got a decent amount of work accomplished.
The answer to your question is YES. There are really nice, enjoyable jobs out there. Find a company that's doing interesting work - no, not the next e-business we're going to revolutionize the world with our web-frontend loss-leader 'solution' funded on venture capital and no chance of profit.
It's about the work man. I became a programmer because I love programming, because solving hard problems using logic (I love math too
So what sets you off? compilers? virtual machines? optimization? datbase? graphics? ai? infrastructure? app-coding? embedded systems? low-level?
There's tons of companies out there doing interesing stuff, that need good people to work on interesting problems. So find one and get in.
If you're not into your work, no amount of nerf playing will take away the fact that you don't enjoy your work - it just means you'll get less done, and be dead weight for your company and get fired, or not be fired (which indicates bad management and that the company is headed nowhere fast).
-Laxitive
You wouldn't think that there are any positions like this left.
I'm a webmaster/artist for a medium-sized company in Texas that handles financial data. My duties range from in-company photographer to web design to server administration. I don't make *quite* as much as the developers we employ, but I do make quite a bit more than 'industry standard'. Also, I get to delve into all aspects of my job, unlike the developers who are stuck coding Java 40 hours a week. I've become siginificantly more experienced at photography, and I've increased my art skills. I was strictly an Apache admin before I started, but now, because this is a '31 Flavors' shop, I know as much about IIS as I do about Apache. (And yes, I keep the MS servers patched against things like Code Red and Nimda.)
If you can find a position like this, I highly recommend it.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Working in tech should be fun without screwing around. I work as a *NIX admin because I love working with Solaris and Linux. I like hacking at shell scripts, trying to make windows work with Samba, and finding clever ways to lock my servers down.
If you don't consider the work itself to be fun, you really need to find another line of work.
That said, I just found a job with a small government contractor. We get free food and drinks, shoot huge rubber bands at each other, chill on the patio, etc.. So yes, those jobs still exist.
, I never hear those two words in the same sentence. Unless someone is saying "My job is not fun.
I hear these whiners all the time. I wish they'd shut up and stop whining or get a job the do like. This is America. People are free to find a job that they're happy in (assuming it's legal). If they can't find one, maybe it's not the job that's that problem.
I'm a student and part time web designer. The advantage to this is that I work for myself and can play all the Counterstrike I like when I get bored. The downside is that I haven't been paid any actual currency yet, and my school won't let me have a kool designer goatee beard.
er0ck asked:
"If you are you forced (as I am) to get your fun on the side what are some good projects to get involved in?"
I think the best thing to do is to get a job doing something you like doing, or get paid lots of money for. When you can get both, it's an added bonus. The best kind of project to get involved with is something you find interesting, and something you're good at. It really depends what kind of job you've got and what projects are available.
Failing that, get a job that pays more money. Eventually you'll be promoted to a millionare cushy desk job, Bill Gates-like, and will be able to play Counterstrike and Team Fortress all day. See you there.
er0ck also asked, "What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?"
That's easy. Pretend you're working and play Team Fortress a lot. :)
It was actually really nice -- two or three times a day you could play a quick game or two, each time taking maybe five minutes. It was a great way to get away from your desk and get the blood pumping a little bit (nothing like some activity to get the brain working again).
Then our managers decided that we shouldn't play during the work day anymore. It was like night and day for me -- I couldn't get past the after-lunch sleepy feeling on most days, I didn't want to stay at work late anymore. Ironically, the amount of time I spent at my desk actually producing dropped dramatically.
It was just ping-pong, but I think it marked kind of a turning point in terms of morale at work. I know I wasn't the only one who felt that way.
A lot of the reactions I've been reading are reacting to the excesses of the dot-coms, like that "Generation Now" commercial where nobody in the office is actually working. That's fair, but it's important to remember that there's a lot of room between that extreme and a boring, soulless workplace.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Well no, not really. It is increadably rewarding for those that are good at it though, and they wouldn't do anything else.
They work their tight little asses off though.
This is going to sound trite, especially considering all the other posts saying essentially the same thing, BUT. . .
You are basically still a child. You have now had your first *jobs,* but have yet to have any actually experience of working.
Give up the idea of "fun" at work. Find a job where you enjoy doing the WORK and bust your ass at it, eight hour a day. Then go HOME to play, with your paycheck.
How about starting your own company? Work 16 hour days, seven days a week, only to have nothing because your employees take it all while bitching about you. I used to tell people, " I don't work for myself. I work for my lawyer, insurance company, phone company, landlord, power company, etc. They don't let me keep anything for myself."
You'll probably go under just like everyone else, but just might have the time of your life anyway. Funny how "fun" works sometimes.
By the way, if you manage that you're doing better than the 99.9% of the population who end up performing work functions because they like to eat better than the alternative. You just might have to grow up and get used to that idea.
KFG
I suppose my company counts as a "fun" company. We have nerf toys. We have a beer fridge. We have a funky office in a refurbished warehouse. We have a 12-foot-high pile of hop-balls in an unused office. We have a monthly toy budget of $400. I work with a wide variety of interesting and creative people. However, I think that companies like this have existed since the beginning of the technology industry. Here's what makes them different:
1) Focus
We're a technology design company, with heavy emphasis on human factors. Part of our core competency is creativity. That's what clients pay for. Having a "fun" work environment impresses our clients (because they come to us looking for creativity) and improves our product (because it stimulates our employees). If we were, say, a web applications consulting shop, having a fun work environment would be more of a luxury and less of a necessity.
2) Values
My company is very fiscally conservative. In three years, we've grown from three people to twenty-seven. That's a snail's pace by dot-com standards. However, from day one, we valued having a fun, interesting work environment over aggressive growth. We carefully selected our clients and projects based on our capabilities and the scope of the project. We refused VC, instead funding our internal development via government contracts (which let you retain the rights to stuff you make). You simply can't have your cake and eat it too; a company has to decide early on whether they want to make jillions of dollars (and have a stressful, boring work environment) or enjoy themselves and do cool stuff (but make less money doing it).
3) People
A lot of the people at the crazy, funky dot-coms had no skills whatsoever. They were fresh out of college, and it was their youth alone that made them a hot commodity. A fun technology company CAN exist; however, like any company, if it's to survive it has to hire people based on their skills and experience rather than the number of their piercings. A successful fun technology company is very choosy about hiring people; it needs people who have both the necessary skills and the creative, funky, or bizzaro flair that fits with the company's culture. People like this are hard to come by, so naturally these companies tend to grow slowly. Even during the height of the dot-com fury, when kids fresh out of liberal arts college were getting $80K to write HTML, we were very selective about who we hired. If anything, our rate of rejection was higher than it is now. We moderated the growth of our business to match the growth of our employee base, because we wanted to hire only top-quality people.
For a little while, it was possible to have the best of both worlds: a company with a loose, wild culture that grew explosively and made its founders rich. However, now that the VC purses have snapped shut once more, we're back to reality: for a company to be "fun", its managers need to value the quality of life of their employees and the nature of the work that they do over pure profit. And, sadly, such executives are few and far between.
For the most part, all employers... corporations in particular, have declared war on their labor.
I'd list the reasons but the apologists would just deny them. :-)
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
I spent some time in industry, but for me nothing beats acadamia. No, you won't be a millionare but it is way more fun. With the IT glut there has been a shortage of hackers staying at universities. Almost every department is in bad need of someone to code for them. And not just database front ends, fun stuff.
Financial agents for the Economics department. Star models for the Physics department. Biologists have so much data on their hands right now you could data mine untill the cows come home. Chemists are figuring out computer models are much easier to work with for many problems. No matter what kind of hacks you like to do a university would be more than willing to pay you for it. And the best part is you can get your masters/PhD degree in Uber Geek studies on the side.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
I left my tech job to return to grad school. I've completed 2 Master's and am nearing a PhD. That's not the fun part. That's the sucky part.
My fun job is running a sports web site with two other like-minded people from my alma mater. We've started our own company, provided free and subscription-based news, recruiting and other info. We bring in enough to keep it afloat and to advertise with. We run contests, we buy crap to give away (hats, shirts, etc), and have tons of fun meeting others who read our site, are passionate fans like us. Occasionally, it pays for travel to games (we went last year from the east coast to a game at UCLA). It's a ton of fun for me to have a hobby which pays a little something back.
This may not have entirely answered your questions, but for me, it's a marriage of two things I love: my school's teams and tech. You might wish to consider finding something similar that suits you....
I guess they didn't know that PERL works under Windows to.
There are plenty of fun tech jobs. Most Defense work can be fun if you get on a good project.
If you want _real_ fun then go and work for a toy designer. Failing that, go and sell the toys instead..
I too, as a web app developer, used to have "fun" at work. I was not part of any Internet startup or VC funded venture. I was a web guy at a Rhode Island based travel company. I left the company in August to start up my own consulting company. Although my company still is not formed, and I'm stuck working in Barnes and Nobles, I'm glad I left because the travel industry is in shambles. We used to have a pool table, Nerf Guns, refridgerator, flexible working hours, and a Dreamcast hooked up to our 25" monitor. When I left in August, we lost the pool table and our workspace to make way for more salespeople. Now I just learned that the company let go 50 people yesterday, including alot of the IT staff. Say goodbye to "fun" at work...
> 3. What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?
Mostly I chat with my fellow workers, but what I really do to have fun and unwind is *LEAVE WORK*
My job is not my life, no matter how much I enjoy it. If I really enjoy the company of my coworkers that much I invite them out with me.
I'm working at a company that's still growing.
It's great. I love my job. I also managed to get in right before the floor went out from under everybody.
My company is still fun. We had a doughnut-eating competition to raise money for the WTC bombing. Pranks are still played.
The problem is, there's a dotcom backlash. The real reason why dotcoms failed is because they weren't making any money. But people see the fancy chairs, the quirky offices, the couches, etc. as a symptom of the problem that there was. So the remaining tech companies are trying to show that they aren't like that.
I have to dress professionally to work, which means that the FCUK t-shirt, the OpenBSD t-shirt, the tie-dye t-shirt, and so on all have to stay home. Everybody wanted those funky mesh chairs, but we got Leap chairs instead. We have nice offices, not warehouse/factory space. Each office ends up with one hard leather couch set, not a fluffy funky couch set.
I guess the main thing is that the fun is between you and your cow-orkers, not a corporate mandate.
Gentoo Sucks
Government contracting does not have to be boring. I work for a small company in Dulles, VA. We do work for Department of Defense, the Department of State, and commercial work as well. (about 40%, 40%, 30%)
I manage a project for the Department of State. My office does not have a desk in it. I have a leather couch, a 30 gallon fish tank with a breeding pair of angelfish, and a tech library of hundreds of books. I use a laptop exclusively, and manage a team of 20 people that includes 3 telecommuters.
We hold our team meetings in a lounge that includes bean bag chairs, a TV with a dish, a drum set, an amplifier where people can plug in their guitars, and some keyboards. Every friday at 4:00 work stops for happy hour, and the company supplies the beer. Everybody works flex time, and as long as you meet your deadlines and meetings, there are no problems.
Everyone gets a 401k, 7+ weeks of vacation time, and a ton of other great benefits, including the work place. We do not have any cubicles... Our The real-estate agent told us we were crazy when we built our building... they were suggesting that we use 'open office furniture' (a euphamism for cubicle hell). We designed the space with 10'x10' and 10'x15' offices, with real closing doors (most have windows - some are interior)... 15 amp circuits for people's computers, large monitors, halogen lamps, and small refrigerators. Tons of lab space, tons of conference room space, 4 kitchens, and a lounge.
Our company is stronger than ever, despite the tough econimic times. How do we do it? Well, the company is now 14 years old, and has less than 200 employees. We have grown SLOW... selectively hiring the best, and only the best (or the young, and mentoring them). People stay a LONG time (I've worked there 6 years, and of the first 50 people hired, about 45 are still here), so we develop skills and team cohesion that other tech companies can't match. We have a low overhead... about 90% of the staff are actually engineers, so we don't have a lot of people in 'upper management' or 'human resources' that increase the rates we have to charge our customers. The current economic downturn has only helped us... we have a larger selection of potential candidates to hire, and people looking to hire a tech company like our track record and reputation. The company has been managed like a real COMPANY, and we have been profitable nearly every quarter, every year. The sum of (happy employees, talent, profitability) is a strong company that will probably be here 100 years from now. We are privately owned by the employees. We have no reliance on 'venture capital'.
We have had clients that have hired 200+ people in less than a year, and act like throwing money around can solve any problem. This is why tech companies fail: money is NOT a substitute for time, talent, or experience. If you have to hire 200 people in a year, you are going to have a lot of dead weight, and you are going to have a small percentage of talented, overworked people who don't know how to work well together. They burn out, leave the company, and the company collapses from all the dead weight that are hiding in offices, hoping their stock options are worth something when they cash out.
As long as I'm bragging about the great place I work, I might as well tell you where I work. Check out www.fgm.com. If you are a talented engineer and looking for work, drop me your resume: dbock@fgm.com. I'll review it, and if I like what I see, I'll strike up a conversation with you. If you impress me, I'll give your resume to the appropriate people. If you are not talented, don't bother. We are looking for talented Engineers and Architects who know Java and/or C++. I'd expect you to know all the things a good programmer should know, such as maintaining make files (or Ant), using CVS, know a text editor well, etc. If you've read the Pragmatic Programmer, you know what I'm talking about. We are also looking for System Adminitrators with Solaris and Linux skills, who are willing to travel to Europe several times a year for a week at a time. If you know other stuff like PHP, Python, Ruby, Apache/Tomcat/JBoss administration, all the better. I you have skills working with an Object Database like Versant, talk to me RIGHT NOW.
If you are a windows-only guy, don't bother me... you are a dime a dozen. Do yourself a favor and go invest in your knowledge portfolio.
So therefore, I am indeed enjoying my job. I specifically went out of my way to get a job in the videogame industry specifically because I wanted a job that I would enjoy. I could make more money doing other kinds of work, but then life would suck.
At this time, I program videogame and get paid for it. My life most emphatically does not suck. When people do ask me what I do for a reason, I cannot answer the question without gloating. To me, this is the definition of success.
END COMMUNICATION
I work for a bank. I come to work in shorts and sweatshirts. I have stress balls that I use as projectiles - with the company logo no less! I have a bust of Elvis with a baseball cap sitting on top of my shelving unit - when people are looking for me I just say 'go to 15, go to the west side and look for Elvis.' But this is all extraneous.
But when push comes to shove I'm there to do a job. Because it's a techie job it has incredible heights. At its best it's like they're paying me to do crosswords all day. And even at its worst I'm in a supportive atmosphere where getting things done is a team effort. This all happens in an established, conservative organization with 50,000+ people.
The moral: It's not the size or nature of the tech company, it's the work and the people around you. You can find good and bad working situations in any milieu.
And through my job I can now say - with a little exageration - that I could land the space shuttle only using stored procedures.:)
IMHO, as per
J:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
You may find that nobody hires "C++ developer"'s but they do hire "MFC" developers or "CGI" programmers or some such specialty. Having the magic acronym on that resume can get you into an interview.
Once you can get an interview, you can sell yourself. You *have* to seem enthusiastic and optimistic. Ive also found that swagger helps. You should be self confident to just shy of arrogant. And never bullshit- speak your mind.
After that, well you've overcome the old "22" barrier and now find that there are more jobs than ever. (Especially if you can get the job done)
And as for the corny nerf-toy stuff, that was always just superficial.
amen to that...
Maybe you still don't understand this, but playing with Nerf toys isn't *work*. Work is providing a valuable service for an employer, which they then pay you for. Unless you're testing usability of Nerf products, what you're lamenting just doesn't count as work.
Enjoying what you do for work, and being able to have fun while doing it, is something different altogether. It's something that most people never have the good fortune to experience. For most of us, having a job and making enough money to pay the bills is the most important part of a job. There are some of us (myself included) who do actually get enjoyment out of it, like what we're doing and the people we do it with. But we're few and far between. You're point of view about work is incredibly skewed, which isn't surprising since the jobs you've had before this were all for dotbombs whose only reason for existence was to burn through as much venture capital as possible before anyone ever found out they didn't have a product and never would. Exactly the kind of company I've actively avoided, while still working in the tech industry.
Welcome to the real world. I hope you're doing a good job, because otherwise someone better will be sitting in your chair soon.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
there are only opportunities to crawl on your lips over the blasted, ruined landscape of human misery that the greases the wheels of mindless commerce in an economic system designed by a dark conspiracy of secret overlords to ensure their perpetual control over the very fabric of society.
your happiness is a commodity that enjoyed a brief spike in market value during a period of economic instability caused by the introduction of new information technology. now that the Internet is well integrated into the system, stability has returned to the market and we can all return to our regularly scheduled slavery, ennui and occasional soma holiday.
thank you for your time. no go the fsck away.
jhw
Dude, since you are not doing well then it is obvious your previous management was not "actually smart" and despite the fact that it was "fun" to work there you were NOT following valid business plan.
Lets really take a look at this. You joined a company that hired a bunch of college students and expected them to learn a brand new language while allowing them to spend their days playing with nerf toys??? And you honestly believed this company would last for more than a few months?
I am all in favor of having a good work environment. A good environment will brew creativity and make employees much more productive. The days of the dot com companies where people where paid outrageous amounts for doing nothing are over, as they should be.
Comments like this bother me greatly because I love to program and have a great deal of fun at work. When two really productive people get into a nerf fight at 3 AM after working 20 hours, that's a great thing, but when people work 6 hours days and expect to goof off for 5 hours of that day, well, what do you expect?
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
I work for myself...
nurf sed.
flinging poop since 1969
I'm not worried about suddenly losing my job, but then I concentrate on doing what I'm paid to do, rather than playing with toys at work.
I moderate at +3, Highest Scores, and I always mod down.
If you don't like it, vote me off the island.
I hate "fun" work environments, because they're usually not very fun and are focused on pretty lame people pursuing lame activities.
Nerf toys, "group happy hour", "group lunches", yuck. I have plenty of friends that match my interests and values outside of work. The LAST thing I want at work is having to try to fit in with the "fun group". Sounds like high school to me.
I get my "fun" at work by being challenged by the work, not enthralled with the people.
That being said, I have had fun with the people I worked with at every job, but it happened in an organic way, not because work was a "fun place".
I wouldn't worry about your stale boring steady paying government job. It won't be around for much longer. With personal tax rates for many citizens exceeding 60% it is obvious the government is about to go out of business.
With $40-$100 billion terrorist bailouts even sucking the social security fund dry won't keep them in business. The industrial era is at an end. Welcome, to the information/technology age.
In this age it no longer pays to be of gargantuan preportions. There was a time that a giant scale earned some sense of safety to pay off the inefficiency of the size of the organization. Those times are done.
So, enjoy your boring steady government job while it lasts. I would suggest you go back and read "Snow Crash" again and think about employment in that kind of world.
best of luck
yes, I use ASP to and their's a lot of stuff you can do in PERL that you can't do in ASP. If they find PERL a little too complicated they should try Python, it's really easy and fun.
1. Can you have a fun tech job, without the worry of suddenly being unemployed?
Absolutely! Find a company that has a stable, well-thought out business plan and a real, well-founded, plan for making money. There are thousands of them out there. They may not be small in terms of the number of people they have, but perhaps the team you sign up to work on *is* small and feels like a startup.
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?
Just read Slashdot, I'm sure you'll find something :P
What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?
Much to the dismay of the leasing company that manages our building, we do office pranks. They generally involve paint and some sort of theme that has nothing to do with the interests of the person in the office. We've done themes from Hello Kitty to igloos to pink butterflies. All very pretty, of course, much to the dismay of the occupant of the office :)
I love my tech job. I work pretty normal hours, and only occasionally have to work late. I work weekends every once and a while too, but those are pretty rare. The people I work with are extremely smart, passionate about their work, love what they do, and really want to make the project succeed. I have the freedom to pick up interesting side projects, and can learn about whatever technolgoies that interest me. If I want to bring a nerf gun into work, I doubt anyone would stop me. I've worked with the same company through two school internship, then full time for the last three years. I have zero worries about job security. Where do I work? Microsoft of course :P
Another unit is the 5th Signal Command in Germany. They do network monitoring for the US Army Europe Wide Area Network. They also have deployable units that can go anywhere in the world and set up LAN's. In 1997 I was deployed to Africa and they set up non-classified and classified info LAN's with a satellite link back to Germany and Internet access. I was surfing the Internet form Central Africa. It was great.
Or you can go to 18th Airborne Corps . You can be in one of the higher level signal units or 82nd Airborne where you'll jump from planes with you servers and set up LAN's when you land.
I work in IBM's Linux Technology Center. I get paid to work on the Linux kernel. Our mission is simply: "make Linux better."
I spent the first few weeks just familiarizing myself with the kernel's internals. Now, I spend my time communicating with maintainers and producing patches to fix SMP locking issues.
I'm 22 and just out of college, so these dream jobs are waiting somewhere for some of you.
I work for avendor and go do onsite trials of our software all the time at every shape and size of shop you can think of. Fun crops up all over - in all shapes. I think it's the people not the place or type of business that make the difference. The one observation I have made, though; is that the places that have seemed to be having the most fun to me are the ones who have their s**t together the best. These shops have the luxury of knowing all is well and management who is happy and therefore tolerant of geeky indulgences...
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
Part of my interview is just that- questions about how the languages on their resume work.
Ive generally found that a poor programmer is also a poor software engineer, so i really want to ask these question to weed out chobo PHd's who couldnt hack their way out of a bubble sort.
So I have an alternate gambit: I say that there is a technical part of the interview- but since the candidate obviously has so much experience it is unnecessary- unless of course they want to try it.
Invariably they say they'd like to try it anyway, and then the atomsphere is right. I tend to find that 66% of candidates really shouldn't have C++ on their resume, because they dont know the most basic things.
Sadly, a good indicator of this is extensive education, and a job history riddled with positions like "software analyst", and "systems architect".
Well you switch form a Dot COM job to a governemt Job. Those are in two complete end of the spectrum. I work for a small consulting ferm. Flat out, We do a lot of work, We rairly have time to have Nurf[tm] Wars. But Still I work with a good bunch of people and the enviroment is relaxed. This firm has been in operation for over 8 years and is not a Dot Com but a solid buisness. It takes a more consertive aproach of buisness compared to a Dot Com who is tring to make a billion dollars overnight. So there is R&D and I have some time to learn new languages but only when there is time. Work can be fun but at the end of the day I can usually say to myself I did someting usefull that helped society.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My current job in Internet Streaming Infrastructure can be very fun most of the time. We have the nerf guns, play Counterstrike and Unreal, and have challenging yet exciting projects. The trick to keeping this great job is that I do have to meet some serious deadlines. There's a joke in the office that the real work doesn't start until 6PM. This may be true. When you're having too much fun during the day, you've got to make up for it sometime. I can still bring my dog to the office, but with the state of the current economy, I'd better be able to deliver, or the whole company can go bust, and then I'll be back doing government work.
"Is it good for the company?"
When I graduated back in December of 1999, it took me a long time to find a job. I had made the mistake of thinking that taking summer classes were better than interning with a company in the summer. Whoops!
:)
The funniest thing was, I interviewed with a company for an ENTRY LEVEL JAVA position - I had helped TEACH a class on Java at my Uni, I had been programming with it on my own for three or four years (I coded instead of going out to bars at night)...
...And I was told that I was "too entry level" for the entry level position. The fact that I didn't make a dime from my Java coding meant that I had no experience - even though I'd probably been programming in it longer than he had.
It took me seven months and nine days (yes, I counted) from graduation day to getting an offer letter from a company who was willing to "take a chance" on a recent graduate. The best thing I did was I had some cheezy little programs on my website (one of them was a Java Yahtzee applet I made in a class) and that proved to the interviewer that I COULD code...My boss still plays that game today sometimes, and he's given me a bug list of things to fix.
So, don't give up hope. If you need to, get a job at a retail store while you look to help with some of the costs. And, be yourself in the interview. The irony of the job I was actually given an offer for was the one job I _KNEW_ I wasn't gonna get (it was my 30th interview, I was set up for disappointment) so I wasn't all uptight - and they wound up giving me an offer the next day.
And then, once you get a few years experience, you'll be fine for the rest of your life. Hopefully.
My job is kinda cool. You just have to realize that your job should not be your life. Rather your job should be your fund for your life. I only work enough to make rent, and pay for my toys. I try to not get stressed out, but I do work for a 75,000 customer ISP/Telco/Cable/Cell Phone Company, so that doesn't always work. I also try to only work 8-5, as I'm salary exempt. Just let your job fuel your life, not be it.
user corith signing off...
When I got my first job as an engineer working on the Eastern Test Range - I took lower than average pay so I wouldn't have to leave Central Florida. The job was fairly cool, I worked on Rockets, Radar's, Telemtry Systems, Timing Systems etc.. I traveled to and worked on Islands in the Caribean and South Atlantic, I did this for almost 10 years. By the time I had been there about 5 years I was so bored out of my mind I started doing consulting on the side (Software and hardware designs for instrumentation systems). Finally about 4 years ago I was washing my car on a Saturday and heard an add on the radio for a job fair put on by a major defense contractor. I popped a couple of resumes out of the printer, put on a tie, and drove about 45 minute's to Melbourne. It turned out to be the best employment decision I ever made - I now work in a R & D environment, am given the latest software and hardware tools and computers, travel to cool places (even better than my old job) and the icing on the cake is that I get paid well for it, heck this job is so cool, I'd pay my employer to do the work...
I may be echoing lots of other comments, but let me put my $0.02 by saying that being lucky enough to a) have a job, and b) be working with technology, you should have all the ingredients you need to *make* your job fun. It's all what you make it, after all.
I feel exceedingly lucky to be a technology consultant. I get to play with lots of different kinds of technology at my various clients, I learn something new virtually every day, and I work for a company that is growing and very stable. Now, true, I don't get to wear jeans (and climbing over server racks in skirts and hose is kind of a challenge), and there isn't a pool table in our office. Instead, we have great job security, a stable company who we know isn't wasting money on things that don't directly benefit the company (and therefore, us), a fridge that's always stocked with beer (for meetings and when we're working late), and a working atmosphere that's fun because of the work we're doing, not despite it. For those of us who work in tech because we love it (and not because the dot com boom filled our starry eyes with dollar signs), being able to work with technology and have a community of peers to learn from and bounce ideas off of... well, that's my idea of fun at work.
LauraCleo
I work part-time on campus for slightly more than minimum wage with the people who make sure the dorms are up and running. I'm around to make sure their network and computers are up and running and everything gets along. I didn't have to implement anything, I just maintain. It's simple, the people are nice, and I pretty much make my own hours.
(http://netomat.net) and it's more fun than a barrel of monkeys -- art programming, a new XML graphics and animation language, and a clear and aesthetically pleasing code base (because I wrote nearly every line of it so far, see my sample code here.
If you are a disciplined, brilliant and artistic Java programmer with a deep and broad knowledge of programming then send me email here.
Sorry for the plug but I've been thinking recently how lucky I was to be having fun at my job while everyone else works on financial programming and ecommerce...
So yeah, there cool jobs out there but they are usually higer up in the ladder.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
i also joined a startup right after my graduation. For the last one year it has been fun. I forsee fun is soon going to be a lot lesser if not nothing at all...and then it will be the right time to work for myself. The funds are scarce and innovation is kept at bay. To keep oneself alive policy is preventing the "fun loving" gung-ho characters to take a back seat.
"... or have they all suffered from the Economic Darwinism of the early 21st century?"
It wasn't "Economic Darwinism" that killed the dot-coms. It was utter foolishness.
Violence is not Religion. Religion is not violence: What Should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Why are you burnt out? Why do you dislike your work? Is it because of the current job, or because you feel that your career is at a dead end?
An IT union... absolutely not. Are you mistreated in some way? Is the company screwing you over? why do you need a union?
Insane hours? Who is setting your hours? You know, most state laws have rules regarding working hours....
I work for a small Web Development firm... My side of company is to do all of the ASP programming. I develop web-page backends, write web applications, do a bit of design work here and there. All and all, it's a fun, challanging job in and of itself.
/. it too much. :-P
:-)
:-)
The atmosphere is very "fun" as well. We have a large, open, artsy office...we hang out in the mornings before work...and a lot of times, we use the office after hours on on the weekend just to hang out.
If you'd like to see a picture of the office, the lead design has a personal homepage prototype setup that uses the office as a backdrop picture:
Click Here... Don't
Why didn't we go out of business? Because "fun" doesn't mean bad business practices. We kept our work solid, we never strayed from normal customer relations, and kept our prices low even during the hayday. Sure, I got paid probably only 1/4th as much as other ASP programmers last summer--but I'm the one with the job right now.
Determination and solid business practice is the way for medium-sized tech jobs to survive right now... And, to be honest, our business is doing quite well. Just because the day of businesses which charged $20,000 to set up a domain, and spent the rest of the day riding a razol-scooter around the office is gone, doesn't mean that one can't have a "fun" work enviroment.
-Jayde
What's a sig?
I used to agree with you. Then I stopped working for business people and worked for a technically minded person instead. It was great for about a year, but then he ran out of gas. He simply had no long-term planning skills, and he couldn't run a business worth crap. He had a family who was more important (I agree, but I don't claim to be a CEO/CIO), and slacked off at his job by going and playing golf under the guise of "interviewing potential clients".
In retrospect, I understand why business people run businesses. They don't have the skills that you have, and they don't understand the technology that the business runs on, but they know more about the core business models and money and economic limitations than you or I will probably ever know.
So you hate Windows? Big deal, you probably don't know crap about Windows, either. You don't want to learn anything about Windows? Ok, you don't have to learn anything about Windows. In fact, stop bitching about your job and go get another one. Take a good look at all the *nix jobs that are available for admins and devs. There's a TON of them, and they're all desparate for people who know their stuff... like you, supposedly.
Stop expending all your effort on whining, and either learn Windows or go get a *nix job. Personally, if I were you, I would do both.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
There's quite a lot of jobs that are fun that don't need to have toys and foosball tables prominently displayed to achieve official FUN status. I used to work for someone who thought that way, and would get boxes of cheap toys and bottles of bubble soap (might as well just pour that straight into the keyboards), and it wasn't fun, it was a gimmick to distract people from her shit management skills and the fact that she ran the department ragged and understaffed for stupid political reasons. It's easier to buy your employees a happy meal than actually create a decent work environment for a hard-working staff.
Now I work for a "straight" company (or three, if you count how many times it'd been bought out). CEO's a jerk, there's plenty of horrid little petty policies bouncing around other departments, but I'm having fun because I'm doing the work i want, have the opportunity to work on interesting projects, and work with a kickass team of ass-kickers and has a boss who knows how to play politics effectively to get us what we need. Decent management and decent coworkers make for a considerably more fun job than just having toys littered about.
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
I work for a wireless internet consulting division for a large cellphone company. While the economy has cut our division here in Canada from 70 to a mere 27, we still have a very good work environment. I pick my own hours, work from home when I want and wear just about anything to work. When projects get rough and there is lots of work to be done, project managers are out buying us goodies and junk food to keep the code flowing. Sure, it's not nerf-balls and super-soakers, but we do have pool and foossball tables right by our cafeteria :-)
What bothers me the most is the incredible amount of new people joining (or trying to join) the ranks of the technical people...and they don't know a damn thing!! I mean, shit, a least learn to write a simple batch file or figure out that you can usually use a boot disc to get to a hard drive that is recognized by the bios but won't boot. I think what really pissed me off is that I interviewed a guy 2 days ago (late 20's) and it was to hire him for an entry-level position in technical support. This guy was A+/MCSE/CCNA and answered half the questions wrong in the interview. He even tried to pull off that he actually had done what he was saying.
I'm really getting tired of people trying to join the tech industry and they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. That's my rant, take it how you like it.
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
There are lots of fun tech jobs out there. I have one, at least most days. However, only last week I was talking to my dad about troubleshooting hardware, and we got off on a tangent. It seems that in his department at the University, the electronics shop guys have been feeling the changing times. Ten (20, 30, 40) years ago they were given hand-made, one-off controller cards to design, prototype, and build for all sorts of bizarre instruments. Then of course, they had to repair them when they broke, as well as maintaining the instruments themselves.
Now they're a crack team of highly experienced, low-level electronics guys who are reduced to swapping power supplies in PCs, and _maybe_ replacing filter capacitors in them. They're all looking forward to retirement because the fun has gone out of their jobs. About the only place advanced electronics will get you an interesting job now is in chip design.
The point? Fun moves around. (Note here that I'm talking about the fun that's inherent in the work itself) In 20 years, my SA job may be utterly dull, and reduced to clicking buttons. My hard-fought skills will be almost useless, except perhaps in OS/device development environments. That's the sad way it often goes.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Real Geeks have Koosh guns. ;)
What !? Someone has to entertain you? I've been around a while, and have had many tech jobs. I like what I do and find enjoyment coding. The art of coding and the constant striving to make the code better keeps me entertained. Later Eric
Recently I spoke to one of the high ups at where I work (A former Army base)Seems they wanted to spend thousand of dollars for a E-mail server ,Dns .I then passsed around my laptop told them what Open Source could do for them .
.Who at the time was brand new and has decided that this is the way to go.
I was greated with the M$ party line except for the head of Telecommunications
There are still a sea of NT boxes in my work place,but I dont think there are going that many upgrade to Windoze 2000 server !!!
My 2 cents worth
Just work for a "non-tech" company. I myself work for a law firm where technology itself is used quite healvily, but it's not the main focus... so you can work with tools and toys where actual applicable needs of skills is very ranged. Plus you deal with people with an alternative viewpoint.
Not a boring day of work, and I plan on working it for life. I have no threat of losing my job, since I am a Net admin, DB admin, Tech support, basically CIO all rolled up into one, and the staff loves me.
Highly recommend small to mid-sized businesses that are ramping up on their tech needs. No corporate feel, great people to work with, and you learn so much!
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
If your idea of fun is goof off all day and fight each other with nerf guns or foosball then I doubt you will find it.
If instead your idea of fun is the job that forces you to think out of the box and push you to think of new ways of solving old problems with new technology, then these are all over the place. You just have to keep looking.
Also keep in mind many screwed up places use the foosball tables,nerf guns and free soft drinks as a way to attract younger/single/unattached employees that are easier to exploit than married/with-children employees (no wife or girlfriend to bitch if you work 60-hr weeks or longer).
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
lunchtime is spent on cs/wolf/q3/4p game boy linkups/gamecubes. then i go home at 6, happy, get home, and spend more time being a geek (gba dev)
i was lucky in finding my job, in the sense that the director found me (my cv through google) and hired me on a fantastic salary (twice that which an 18 year old should be on for his first job :) and i naturarlly accepted it. game dev is the most challenging and motivated work ever.
course, i didnt have to read a book on how to code right after i was hired...
You may be thinking that these are boring places to work. And you're right, the culture isn't Nerf toys and Quake deathmatches. It's corporate. So how can I be having fun?
Fun isn't all silliness. Fun for me is learning. I work very hard to keep my skills current, simply because I enjoy the challenge. Everyone I know from college who got on the entry-level corporate track is stapling TPS reports for a living, or going to 40 hours of meetings. I have plenty of that work too, but I also have the opportunity to do new things and actually affect the business. This month, I decided to learn Windows Scripting Host by writing a script that automatically installs NT Worksations and Servers. That's what's fun in IT...watching people use something you did.
Work is work. You just have to adjust your definition of fun. I like learning, and going home to my wife and cats after it's over. I'm just down the road from the HQ of Computer Associates...those guys know how to keep employees chained to their desk. Everything's provided for them...meals, a gym, a concierge service, you name it. This makes them not feel like they're giving their life to the company. But at a startup, you're most likely getting paid less, working a ton of hours, and never know whether you'll be employed or not next week.
Take my advice; rethink work. Be happy you're not a PHB. :)
[1] Ever notice how Starbucks employees are interchangeable? You can go into a Starbucks in NYC, or LA, or London, and the same request/response sequence is used. Your drink order is hashed into the same shortened form for delivery to the server. I call this the SCOTP (Starbucks Coffee Order Transport Protocol.) My RFC will be out soon.
I've found that when we spend 16 or more hours a day, 7 days a week working with the same people, trying to stay ahead of marketing and being sucessfull, the "core group" (the guys with the sleeping bags at work) tend to go a little crazy after a few weeks. The Beer, Nerf, and Estes rocket moters taped to a stick release the tension and allow a few more days of coding before the cycle repeats. Yes its fun, but there is quite a bit of pain before the crazyness starts.
I see and have gone through a bunch of people that expect work to be a toy filled experience from the morning to 5:00pm and then they expect to leave and repeat the process the next day -
It don't work like that It's just what you happen to see because it's the cutest "sound bite" when someone talks about the company. I'm guilty of this myself, I tell my friends all about the nights the police come, but omit the gory details of:
- Trying to get an I2C serial chip to emulate a RS-232 port over a weekend because the customer told us on friday that they needed it on monday.
- Creating our own distribution of linux that boots from eeprom on a PC-104 card in 2 days
- EPLD designs in 12 hours
P.S. Looking for a few good Tcl/Tk and Hitachi 2200 series programmers in a new startup. If you want the gain, you will have to live through the pain. mdrop23@yahoo.comright now I am watching 14 episodes of Family Guy while getting payed.
-- ghx
I work for a Government job as well. 9,600 emloyees, a million residents (county job) as the senior webmaster. Hmmm...seems like we have a good rubber band fight about twice a week, there are constantly toy airplanes flying about (two of the guys are R/C pilots, so they bring in the paper version), and I tend to have quite a bit of fun.
But, as someone already mentioned, there has to be a balance between that. These periods of activity usually last no longer than 5 minutes, and happen once, maybe twice, in a day. It may help that because we have control over our projects, we can push them along and keep them as best we can from stagnating. Oh well.
Random Musings
If it was supposed to be fun, you would be paying them.
"reread your post, you basically stated "I knew more than the guy giving the interview, and as he tried to grill me my right answers appear wrong" yet you bitched for a full page about it"
A) That is not at all true. I offered anecdotal evidence to my claim that college produces inferior product which must then be entirely revamped once a company hires that newbie.
B) I now understand what happened. Somebody with as much going on upstairs as you rated it.
C) At least I didn't post it as an Anonymous Coward like some generally nadless people who shall (obviously) remain nameless.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
AMEN! I think if you don't like the work you're in and need to entertain yourself w/ nerf guns and the like, you need to move to a field of work you love. Maybe become a stock-clerk at toyz 'r' us or something... :)
-Dan
I work to live, not live to work. My family and my personal interests are much more important to me than my career.
Now, having said that I have to make the point that I do not feel that a job where you do not enjoy yourself is worth wasting your time with. HOWEVER, I also learned early on that with every job, no matter what it is or how much you love to do it, there will always be times where you are not having "fun". If you weather those times, very often you will be given projects to do that are more challenging and fun. That of course depends on your management.
How do you find such a job? That can be as easy as looking. Despite the "downturn" that the pundits and "experts" seem to feel that we are in there are so many jobs available for qualified technical individuals that every year the recruiters are begging universities to graduate more CS/CE/EE majors.
Notice that I said that there are positions for qualified individuals. I really think what is happening in America right now is that companies are getting rid of the flack. Suddenly managers seemed to figure out that a self-taught individual is generally not able to do large-scale programming tasks due to lack of training. Notice, I said generally! There are always exceptions.
Having said all that here are the answers to your questions:
1. Can you have a fun tech job, without the worry of being suddenly unemployed?
Absolutely, especially if you have some experience and possibly a degree. There are many companies that are doing very interesting and cool stuff. Most are not dot com companies. Look for a medical company that needs a sys admin, a small company that needs sales tools written in something other than Fortran, etc. It has been stated in other comments that whatever you want to do you can find a job doing it. If you can't find a company that you want to work for, start a company/product on your own that you could market. Remember, Open Source does not mean that you cannot sell support. You may fall on your face, but you will have learned something and very possilby had fun on the way.
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?
There are so many as to be impossible to give you a specific example. The trick is just to find something that you love. Go to Freshmeat, SourceForge, or any of the other repositories and see if the killer app you want to work on is there. If it is not, start one yourself.
3. What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?"
I code. I interact with my co-workers. The building I work in has a pool table. I listen to music. I read slashdot (blatant plug). I play Mahjongg (that game is evil!). adcritic is your friend. If you think that coding is not relaxing enough then perhaps you are in the wrong field. Debugging is what is stressful. Sometimes I have to code to get over the stress of debugging. :)
I'm speaking to myself. For the past few years I have given up all but the most important aspects of my life (my wife and two kids) in order to devote more time to work. For the next two weeks I'm in lock-down to finish a project.
Leave on time. Spend time doing something else with people you love.-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
In retrospect, it really was my fault. Some of the Notes developers were really into sneaking up on me with Nerf guns, and after a few weeks it really got old. So I decided on revenge.
One Friday I came in late with a borrowed automatic paintball gun capable of shooting almost 200 rounds and full camoflage. I opened up on the whole office, learned that paintball paint doesn't wash off as easily as advertised, and that the "fun office environment" wasn't nearly as fun as I thought it was.
Once HR caught wind of it, I was told not to return on Monday. Although I was pretty regretful at the time, I look back on it (now that I'm employed again) as well worth it.
Me thinks that you've got Java on the brain.
_sig_ is away
Appreciate the job you have. Some people don't have one at all and are in serious trouble.
I still have my Dot-Fun job.
All in all I think it is still more then possible to have a fun work environment while still understanding how to make money. I don't really want to explain how we do it (online store and online production agency), however there has to be a balance within your work force. You need geeks and you also need a few buisiness majors. Furthermore, those two groups need to be capable to face to face communication, which can be hard at times, so you have to be picky when you hire folks.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Working at a job that is interesting is FUN! But if you aren't making a marketable product, that job will soon disappear. That was the main reason most of the dotcoms went under. They weren't making anything that people would buy. Who buys a web page?
There are fun jobs out there. But before you take one, make sure that it has a positive revenue stream. Stock prices are meaningless, so go for the wage and benefits. And get the experience, which is the most important. When you're fifty in the tech field, the only advantage you will have is experience.
p.s. It sounds like you're still young, so let me clue you in on an important universal law of reality: nothing is perfect. You can find a good job, but that job will have crap mixed in with the ice cream. My current job is interesting, challenging, and productive, but it comes with a lot of crap known as PHBs, lawyers and long distance micro-management.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I do support for an ISP, which one I won't say, but lets just say that well I have helped a guy named "Bubba" get on the internet.
The only thing that is left is that I would love to do is take pictures for a "normal" internet porn site.
Well right now I am a collage student in the field of computer networking and electronics system. I am hoping and thinking that in 2 years when i get out there might be some good jobs left. My current job is not that bad. (besides the ISP work that I do on the side for beer and DSL money) But I hope that some of you guys leave some of the fun ones open for us college kids.
Geeks running the place is the way it SHOULD be!
I've been a professional UNIX admin for 10 years
now, and actually have a clue as to how frustrating
it is to hear some asshole manager type tell me my
budget for (insert business-crucial hardware here)
has been turned down because he's too much of a
pansy-ass to tell the board that whoever did their
pre-startup consulting work never bothered to suggest
that the place might want data backed up to tape,
or want a redundant router here and there, etc.
too many places pay too much for worthless manager
types, the place gets so top-heavy that no work
ever actually gets through all the fucking red
tape that each manager has "invented", and the whole
company goes under. common story...
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Of course, we have fun doing technical things, not learning Perl or playing with Nerf toys.
have they all suffered from the Economic Darwinism of the early 21st century?
Suffered? I think it's good that dot-coms with almost no technology and almost no business plan have disappeared. Real technology often takes many years to develop; how are sound technology companies supposed to compete for funding with fast talking CEOs for startups?
I have had a risky tech job since 1996, we were a start up before startups were cool, we were doing layoffs, before layoffs were rampant. I've been through round after round of financing, rounds of layoffs, the selling of the company, and a complete shutdown.
I think the risk is a big part of what makes it cool and fun. I love the risk, I love the change.
We went through three very bad management teams. Bad tech decisions forced down from the top, over hiring, hiring friends, buying 1 mil worth of furniture we didn't need, you name it.
Last December, they laid off everybody except the 12 people that were doing all the work. Then they put us in charge of our departments. It was like a fantasy come true, somebody got rid of the idiots. We have an ass-kicking mean old man running the company now. We do far more with far less. We have actual customer income, and get this, we know what it costs to run our business.
I work with 21 other people, not one of them is a slacker. I respect every single one of them. A very rare situation indeed.
It amazes me what people in the new economy have come to expect from their jobs. Some perks are a benefit to the company and the employee and that's great. Happy employees are more productive, but that's a business descision. A lot of new economy employees got spoiled by lots of perks and high salaries, and in the end, the new economy business couldn't afford to stay in business.
It is good to have a job you enjoy. That means you enjoy doing the work that the employer is paying you to do. It is good when you have bright and interesting coworkers to work with and learn from. You're lucky if that happens.
Enjoy your job, but remember it is a business. The company is paying you to do work that they sell to pay your salary and make a profit. They are not paying for you to play. If you're not working a full day; you're not doing your job. It isn't your employers job to entertain you.
Also keep in mind that there are many many people who aren't as fortunate as those of us in the technology industry. They go to their job for 8 hours and do work they don't like, because they have to make a living.
Enjoy what you do. If you want to have fun, have a life outside of work.
On the flip side of the coin are the people who think that you are unqualified for a particular project because you haven't learned a particular language or flavor-of-the-day API. As you did an excellent job of pointing out, software engineering skills are by far the most important factor that determine the quality of a developer's work and these skills are largely language and API independent. This (among other reasons) is why MIT teaches (or used to teach anyway) their computer science courses with obscure languages like CLU and SCHEME - because it is the engineering principals that matter and not the language.
So to the original poster who chided the company for hiring somebody who didn't know Perl to write Perl, that may have actually been a very good decision if the guy had substantial software engineering skills. It takes a few days to pick up a new programming language, but years to develop good software engineering skills.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
>> Man, I hate those kinds of interviews. Those guys weren't really asking you for answers... they were asking you to read their minds. <<
They are looking for people who think like them. Prehaps teams work together better if they think alike.
Until good objective metrics come along, the "think like me" is the way it is, for good or bad.
Table-ized A.I.
I was sick of you people before the DotCom run up and I am still sick of you people. Get a clue: 1. Hired to do a job that they had to teach you is bad news. 2. Playing games instead of doing work, bad news. 3. Did you LEARN?? No you went to bad company after bad company.
And I wish people would stop calling them dot bombs, you were the idiots that thought working for a company with no real product was wise.
Get a clue, jobs suck, people suck, the world sucks.
...even though we don't do the nerf thing much any more.
I work for MontaVista as a Geek Of All Trades (yup, the documentation for the last product I worked on lists that as my title) and love it. Nowhere else have I had as much flexability to see a problem that needs to be addressed or something that could be automated or a new feature that would be helpful to the customer and go out, design it and write it. There are lots of one-man projects up for the taking, I'm allowed to use whatever scripting language I want except where it matters (kernel code, customer requirements, teammates who need to maintain it, whatever), and yes, we have some fun (a company band, free sodas, and pretty damn clued management).
Even better, I have the most brilliant coworkers I've ever worked with. Anywhere. Ever. Talking with these folks is enlightening, and there's always new stuff to learn. I've gone from porting and packaging to kernel debugging and writing internal testing software. If I get bored of one job, as soon as I finish the project I'm on I can always get assigned to something else.
We don't spend unnecessary money on toys (no company-issued PDAs, except of course for those working on a PDA-related project) but nonetheless, working there kicks ass.
Plus they let me telecommute while I'm attending school. WooHOO!
Thus, let me assure you -- Nerf guns aren't necessary to having a cool job. I'd take the brilliant coworkers, clued management, interesting projects and job flexability that MontaVista offers me any day.
my job still has nerf toys and teenage programmers, but we also have a viable product, and experience where experience is needed. Not all start-ups fail, just stupid ones.
FUn.... I feel lucky to have a job ( it's a real pain in the ass job too) I'm doing threeor four peoples jobs, am understaffed and trying to keep an antique undocumented and rediculously complex (mostly do to piecemeal design) piece of software going while it is be "redeveloped" in Calcutta....
fun and there aren't that many decent jobs to be had at the moment in case you haven't looked recently...
morturii
First my complaint, "How fun is too fun?", in the subject line gets kicked by the lameness filter. I consider my tech-job fun, well.. it is ok. I have to deal with clients on the phone a lot, which sucks.. However, I have been learning a lot of system administration skills which I didn't have before, which I find fun.
:)
;)
I can dress however I want, my hours are set but flexible.. and I make a 1/2 decent salary. Yesterday I was sort of forced by a client to learn quite a bit more about SSL then most knew existed.. being an administrator isn't always just knowing how to do stuff, but learning how to do it within an hour
Many people, especially administrators and programmers are not hired because of their skills.. but how easily they adapt to new environments, software, and technologies. So someone being hired who is a pro at 10 languages, may be hired for an 11th which he barely knows.. as they will be more suitable for the position who ONLY knows that single language.
Btw, I'm at work and listening to Bob Dylan.. quite loud, nobody seems to mind
I'll give the original poster the benefit of the doubt by assuming he just neglected to mention some of the more important aspects of his "fun job" rather than assuming he's just shallow and naive.
After 13 years of pushing pixels, I've finally found my dream job. Yes, there is some Nerf involved, but very little. I work for a company that produces highly interactive CBT (Computer Based Training). Our niche of the market is fairly small, but we're far and away the top dogs in that niche.
I get to do 2D and 3D design and animation, a moderate amount of programming and scripting, and am also getting my feet wet in VR walkthroughs and simulations. Probably the single best part of it all is we're given enough time (typically a few months for a 1-hour lesson) to make our projects as perfect as we can. And although we work our asses off, we (management included, not just us geeks) make sure it's always a "fun" environment. We're given a suit-free environment of our own, where as long as we can meet our deadlines and continue to improve our courseware, we have free reign to work as we see fit. That's manifested in many subtle (yet important) ways, but the two easiest to convey are spending each day grooving to our mp3 collections on good heaphones (which is where the Nerf balls come in... intercom system) and HalfLife over the LAN at lunchtime.
The most important aspects of the job are that we all work as hard as we can to produce the best product we can conceive of, and that we are constantly learning new skills and methods, with complete support from management for any effort to improve on what we do. I'm sure it's not a universal sentiment, but most of us would happily work there for free if we were able to. Can you say zero turnover? I knew ya could.
--Bryan
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I recently moved from a "boring" job (working for a defense contractor) to an "exciting" job at a telecommunications company. The group I work with used to be an ISP before they were bought buy the telcom company.
I must admit that the people I work with now are some of the sharpest I've come across in a long time. I'm learning things from them instead of begging management for training. The pay is great (with performance bonuses!) and the stock options aren't bad. Hell, I even have a window to look out of now instead of being trapped in a fluorescent-lit room with steel walls and no windows. And, yes, we even have Nerf toys even though no one has used them yet.
However, I find that I'm stuck on a relatively meaningless project, begging vendors for hardware and software that we need to complete said project. We're doing this because our budget was SLASHED (reduced 90%) and we barely have money to meet operational costs until the end of the year. So, while we wait for the vendors, err Business Partners, to ante up not much is happening. Aside from some computer-based training, I spend most of my time surfing the web.
When I left my previous job, it was because of management issues. Now I realize that, regardless of management issues, I really did like what I was doing because it was in support of our armed forces and I WAS making a difference. At my current job, I feel like a cog, easily replacable, even though it is a "fun" work environment. This has forced me to ask myself some important questions about what exactly I want out of a job and what I'm willing to put up with to do something I feel is meaningful.
You might want to spend sometime thinking about what YOU want out of a job before deciding on your next move. You may find that what you want to do is not conducive to a "fun" environment but is something you'll feel good about doing. Or, you may be just the person that group/company needs to show them how to have fun doing their work.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
OSS Nuke Lauchers too?
Table-ized A.I.
Google is fun. They're making profit. They'll probably IPO in a couple months DESPITE the economy turning to shit, and they'll make big huge bank.
-- Spankmeister General
I found out from an anonymous source that management was emailing back and forth about the people they were spotting playing ping pong.
Just my .02 cents....
I have had some really lousy jobs, working for and with scum-sucking pigs. That helps me keep things in perspective, when I start to get into that "poor poor pitiful me" mode that always initiates the "job satisfaction" debate.
People who say, "oh, just go get another job" are likely either ignorant or fools. Most jobs are going to have some unpleasantness. Some things are intolerable: bigotry, dishonesty, sexism. Yes, you have to realize that most places of employment are going to include those items. You may have to shop for a long time before you find one that doesn't -- if ever.
In the end, you have to determine what combination of pleasantness and unpleasantness suits you best. A good deal of the atmosphere of a job depends on how you approach it. I have a coworker who grumbles a lot, who is rabidly anti-MS (we are pretty much a MS shop), and who can be a real "nattering nabob of negativity" sometimes. He's not doing himself or us a favor by staying in a position he obviously doesn't like. It's important to look at the impact your own behavior has on the atmosphere at work. If you find yourself being nominated "Mr. Negativity," it's probably time to get out -- or do a 180 in attitude.
On being told by a manager that I had a bad attitude, I once said, "I don't change attitude, I change jobs." That's not necessarily the way to get yourself into a job you really want to keep.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
I work for my state government in one of the largest state agencies they have. Aside from spending all day Friday cleaning out the Nimda worm (will users never learn?), we normally have a wonderful time at the Helldesk.
/. post, please go easy on me)
A Godzilla toy is dangling from the dropped ceiling in a mouse cord noose, old 386 and 387 chips (nicknamed "giblets") are embedded in the carpeting which covers our walls, a sound-proof room (used to be a recording studio), and we have free reign from the bosses to do "Network Performance Testing" during lunch using Q3 and Unreal Tourney.
I'll admit, I got lucky in where I work. I know not all gov't IT jobs are like this, but it shows that it IS possible to work for anyone, even the gov't, and have fun doing it!
(first
My take on this question is that I'm sure that there is loads of fun work out there - although in the environment of limited funding changing jobs should not be taken lightly. However, for myself, a fun job is one where I'm given sufficient freedom and resources to make me productive. If you can solve problems you will be a valued employee and even when jobs are scarce - you will find work with any organisation that feels they can trust you.
That said, I enjoy solving non-obvious problems, love technology and have been obsessed by software for over a decade. I hate computer games, love good food and think that a friendly, light and well-equipped workplace can't be over valued. I'm very aware that jobs I find interesting are "dangerous" but this is because I like adventurous ventures. This is why I do work for others. I've been asked to recommend others for jobs I'd find interesting, but I've had to explain that everyone I know who is up to the job is in well-paid stable employment - good people are still hard to find.
Find a position in a traditionally "stable" industry that has a need for your technical skills rather than the tech industry itself...in my case, eyeglasses. How often have you seen an organization that is doing well in its industry but is anywhere from technically wanting to technically crippled? Most importantly, don't pout about the illusive big bucks and prestige you thought you were promised by the tech industry. When it comes to my job, I am the proverbial "...pig in shit"; not because it's "fun", but because my skills are appreciated when it comes to solving problems. I don't have a degree in computer science, but after learning HTML 5 years ago, I am now "the coder" of a small and capable IT department because of applicants who expected a HUGE salary for what was often a rigid skill set and a poor attitude. Even in the current climate, we're doing well enough to outsource our IT division for networking, consulting, programming, hosting, e-commerce, etc.
Whilst demand exceeded supply for programmers things were pretty cushy for those with tech skills. Those that took the risk and participated in the revolution reaped the rewards. Those who stayed in 'safe' jobs they hated busting their butt in 9-5 for little reward looked on in jealousy. At the company I worked for we had nerf wars, played footie in the office, had a company Nintendo/Playstation room, free beer and pizza from Fri 4pm onwards, bar tabs at the best bars in the city... and you know what? The work was challenging and fun. And we got responsibility we wouldn't have got working as a 'cog' in a large corporation. Personally I had an amazing time and still got to write some kick-ass content management systems. Then work slowed down so I moved to an established media company where they promised me more interesting work. But the office was still relaxed and we had fun. I now run my own company which is far tougher but the only way to make significant money. Should I have to go back to working for someone else then being good at my job I won't have any problems finding employment... despite having had all the 'superficial perks' and being 'bought off by the management'. And you can't take those days away from me :-P
To sum up, don't live in the past: just look back in wonder at the amazing time you had, it'll be something to tell your kids as they struggle to find work in a world recession. It'll never be as good again until the economy is.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
No Nerf Guns! The Horror!
I got a boring tech job and I love it (well it wasn't boring the last two weeks because my office was almost destroyed by terrorists).
Why do I love it? Because I graduated school in the early 1990's and had to be a dishwasher becaus the economy sucked so bad. After that I became a social worker at a group home. I had to work with retarded adults, I gave bathes, I wiped asses and I changed diapers of quadroplegics, I got feces hurled at me, I had to say words out loud like "Stop Masturbating" in the middle of McDonalds. All this for $6 an hour.
I then moved to New York in 1995 and became a truck driver. I got my fingers broken movig furniture, I got threatened by the police, I saw people get killed in really stupid car accidents, and I am presently getting sued by a moron who hit me head on in Pennsylvania after he swerved into my lane. He's trying to get me to settle out of court for something that was his fault due to a goofy Pennsylvania law.
My knees are still screwed up from that one.
So you wanna know if 'fun' jobs are out there?
If they are, you don't deserve them, I do. And people like me who have had real crappy jobs before.
Too me, getting paid well, not getting hasseled by corupt cops and not dealing in human excrement is a 'fun job', but you can play with Nerf stuff if you work at a group home.
Here's a recipe for a job lifestyle that doesn't suck. Comments are welcome to improve and sharpen this idea..
1.) Live a simpler life; do with less. There's no happiness in posessions. You don't need to buy a shiny new house in the suburbs--find a nice plot of land in a more rural area and build your own small, efficient, eco-engineered dwelling. You don't need a brand new car. You don't need to buy every latest piece of super-fast hardware the day it comes out. You don't need to buy goofy little geek trinket items from online vendors. You don't need Cable TV or satellite. You don't need to order out--learn to cook instead.. You don't need a huge stash of caffeinated beverages--water is much more healthful. You don't need to go to Starbucks, Panera, or other trendy shop every other day. You don't need to buy your clothes at fancy shopping malls. I could go on and on but you get the picture.
2.) Now that you don't need $60k/year to support your lifestyle, do whatever the heck you please. You can easily make enough to support yourself by doing contract work, consulting, etc. and have plenty left over to put into savings. You don't have to figure out the latest and greatest radically new business idea to be self-employed. Go with something that works and have 6 months of living expenses in a seperate bank account in case of rough times. Focus on zero-debt. Get rid of any car loans or mortgages ASAP. (you didn't waste that much on a house/car did you?)
3.) Now, all of a sudden, you also have lots of free time because you're not stuck in a 9-5. What better way to use that time than to contribute to lots of Open Source projects. Work with the idea that better OSS will expand your opportunities in a consulting job.
4.) Save Save Save. Make $20k/year your goal. Invest it wisely. Retire early. Kick back and relax. Enjoy the easy life without being filthy rich.
5.) On the other hand, working for a big established company is a way to build up enough money to launch yourself into the position I've described, especially if you're just getting out of school and need to pay off your loans.
I own an Information Security consulting firm. People pay us (very well) to hack into their networks, do onsite security assessments, do incident response, nail employees gone bad, fix their firewalls, roll out VPNs, and other such things.
A bad day at my company is better than a good day just about anywhere else.
Our line of work is the most fun... We get PAID to do what we love.
http://www.networkarmor.com
Life Sucks then You Die...
I'm not even going to think about my realistic chances for employment...
I think you can have time out for nerf ball when Panhandling (does that qualify as a tech job?)
Making my software behave the way I want is a great rush. Design, coding, testing is fun. Bug hunting and squashing when successful is satisfying. End-user support is... well, that's why they call it a job.
I consider myself lucky, though. I am part a small team that works on a commercial app with longstanding well-defined requirements. It's similar to tax software: the users need to print a report in such-and-such format and create a data file with such-and-such contents. Beyond that, we (I) get pretty much a free hand to make the software "do the right thing". I keep getting the feeling that this type of job is more and more rare.
The office environment and the people therein are important, and a bad work environment can ruin a great job. But, if you're not deeply into the "work" that you do, all the perks in the world can't make it a fun job.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
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
I work for a big company, in a cube farm, it can take months to get purchases approved, we are chronically understaffed and overloaded. PHBs are everywhere as are people who are worthless for real work but have figured out how to work the company.
HOWEVER, I have one of the most complex and interesting environments I've ever seen to work in. The network spans the globe, we have almost every operating system under the sun. I play.. er, I mean work with servers that have uptimes of multiple years and hold terabytes worth of data. Our network pushes gigs and gigs of traffic every minute.
I love what I do (infosec) and I have a never-ending playground of challenges and projects. I work from home when I want to, I have good benefits and a fair amount of vacation....
Who cares about nerf toys (I'd rather have free Dr. Pepper) or lots of light (can you say screen glare and too much heat)?
Why should I care about the cube farm I work in? I spend my time in the wires and the ether, I may have a 9X9 cell that I spend 9+ hours/day sitting in, but my mind is wandering around the world over and over.
I have about 200 contractors and 60 Federal employees working for me. We have everything from legacy Cobol programs, to COTS e-commerce packages, to custom Java Web apps (hum - the one I'm thinking about is open source since anyone can request our code), to a 4,000 seat LAN/WAN (yeah, sorry we are largely MS at the desktop, but we have lots of Unix application servers and some Linux in the infrastructure). We are hiring a few employees so we can try to keep up with the technology our contractors bring to us. Interestingly, quite a few of our skilled contractors are interested in coming to work for us because they love what they do for us, are having a lot of fun, and like the stability they perceive on the government side. Others find the concept of the long term commitment they believe goes with a decision to move in-house to be a negative. Different strokes for different folks. No nerf guns but the former CIO used to toss footballs at everyone who came in his door -- I'm more sedate, but I don't mind people tossing them at me.
I work locally here in Victoria, BC in a permanent "consulting" job for an American company in Alameda, CA. And I've got to tell you, I'm still having a great time. We have a foosball table, a ping pong table, a relaxed environment, and I get to deal with really smart people all day long. (Programmers, developers, and engineers from Microsoft's WebTV, U.S. Navy Weapons Division, NASA's JPL, etc.)
The job isn't in danger of going anywhere, I get to stay in Canada, we have a stocked refrigerator, and there's skylights throughout the building. (Big difference between natural light and artificial.)
I have fun at my job. I think there's a terrible fallacy going on right now though: There are a tonne of jobs available--lots of them. All over. But the qualified individuals are lost in the sea of layoffs from the other idiot companies.
If you know what you're doing, you won't have trouble finding a job. Really! If you're not an arrogant ass, you won't have trouble finding a job. Honestly!
The problem is convincing your potential employer that you aren't lying like a sack of sh*t and that you really do know those things on your resume. With all those layoffs, the market is inundated with unskilled wannabe professionals who were spoiled by the dot-bombs. They're making it hard for those of us (or more appropriately, you kind folk) who've been here from the start, and so really good people get passed by because they don't know how to attract positive attention to themselves.
There's lots of jobs--just a bad signal:noise ratio.
My web development company, SpinWeb, is small (8 people) and privately held. We've been in business for over five years and we use PHP, Perl, MySQL, Unix/Linux, and other open-source technologies. We are thriving and having a great time. My opinion is that it's a result of our structure and approach to how we do business. Many huge web shops (i.e. Agency.com, Razorfish, Marchfirst) grew so large and in such a short time that they basically collapsed under their own bulk. The primary goal of these companies was to make money and watch their stock go up. In the meantime, the smaller, private companies continue to focus on producing quality work and having fun. This is not to say that the larger companies don't produce quality work, but they definitely operate by a different set of goals. I'm convinced that only the smaller, more agile web shops will survive and will continue to provide a fun work environment. Web development is a service that sometimes requires lots of interaction with the client and larger companies have trouble dealing with this. When clients want to make a change on their web sites, they don't want to wade through endless layers of project managers and team leaders, they want to talk to a developer and cut straight to the chase. This is what makes small companies like mine attractive to most clients.
I love my job and most days it doesn't seem like work.
Confucious say: "Is stuffy inside fortune cookie."
Oh there's still some places that haven't sucked the blood out of the genius of generousity, like towerofbabel.com
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
Do what I did at a previous job - take out the lights from their sockets in your part of the office. Others get their lights, you get your darkness, and all is right with the world. I had to argue a bit with the maintenance people who kept replacing the bulbs, until I left a note there saying NOT to replace it. Then much eye relief ensued.
Having read most of the higher-rated comments on here, it seems to be as though most folks seem to frown on your desire for a nerf gun at work. I think the people who are saying that you need to find a job you like based on discipline (ie, you like programming, so a programming job is fun) are wrong. Let's pretend that there are two jobs, A and B, that are identical except that job B allows you nerf guns (and any other toys you like), you can wear anything you like, and work the hours you want. Which job do you think is better? Of course you'll go with B. Yet a lot of folks here want to argue that even with all those toys, you won't be happy if you don't like the job itself since the toys cannot distract you. That's true, but you're reading slashdot (read: you like computers) and I'd wager that you like programming too. Toys simply allow you to take a break from whatever you're doing, which is especially useful for morale and for when you're stuck on something and need to take your mind off it for a few. I'm a college student, but I've had two summer internships that involved programming (both were salaried, not hourly). One was for a large food company where the environment was just slightly less formal than the standard corporate attire, but toys would have probably been unacceptable. You had to work from 8am to 4:45pm. Then my next internship was for a large software company where toys were accepted. You could work whatever hours you wanted. You had the freedom to come and go as you wanted. I chose to come in much later in the morning than 8am. The company had arcade games, ping pong, foosball, not to mention the toys you brought in yourself (like razor scooters for commuting down the hallway). The job with toys was much more fun, and I got about the same amount of work done at each job. The toys simply meant I spent more time at work.
The small companies doing the interesting stuff don't advertise job openings on the big job boards (mostly, there are occaisional exceptions). Basically the job finding (and from the point of view of employer, the people finding) process is what is flawed. The big job boards are 95% jobs that are handled by recruiters, who spend about 1/4 of the space promoting how great their job placement company is. Most of those jobs are stuff big corporate jobs for small peons, and lately at pay levels unrelated to the skills and experience people really bring to the job (because they decide in advance what the pay is, and try to find someone that will take it ... which works in this market right now).
I'd like to see a job board set up that's restricted to just really cool jobs. It would have fewer recruiters because they have few cool jobs, but it shouldn't restrict them. And it would be important for the search on it to be smart. On the major boards, if I search on a keyword like "unix" it matches up ever jobs for Windows NT programmers that say "some exposure to unix would be helpful", but that's not what I put the search term in to find. And there needs to be as much focus on what kind of job is involved (the role, what the work is) as the skills. Just because I listed skills in programming a few languages doesn't mean I actually want a job doing programming all day long (hey, many admins can code, too, but maybe they don't want to do it all day long).
Such a job board MUST be free for not only job seekers, but also employers. Companies are faced with many boards to post on, and when there are costs involved (usually a few hundred dollars), they simply cannot post on them all (and many small companies can't even post on any). Revenue to support it should come from impression advertising and highlighting extras (for those companies that do want to pay something to make their posting stand out).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
the place i work at has ALOT fun, Nerf guns ect.. and that includes teepeeing my bosses office, after we picked the lock : )
all this and we still get work done. As long as the goofing off is not excessive, our boss turns a blind eye knowing that a happy employee is one who will work longer, harder for for less (not a whole lot less but i wouldn't leave this place for anything short of a 40% raise)
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
I am a college student. One of my jobs outside of my classes is some undergraduate ecology research. Fun stuff. Basically, I write code to analyze various ecological datasets. Interesting stuff. While I don't shoot nerf arrows at the scientists who work around me, I get to go camping occasionally as a part of my job, in addition to doing something that fascinates me. For me, this is a lot cooler than being just another capitalist whore with a bonus of nerf weapons... But that's just me.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
First of all, if working was fun, YOU would be paying to work, not being paid. :)
But, seriously, I've had fun jobs in the past. Sometimes, it's the work that's appetizing. Sometimes, it's the environment, with fun and interesting people.
Most of my good friends today come from those jobs. And I think they'll be my friends for life.
Unfortunately, nothing good seems to last... Today I have a job that's both uninteresting and a career dead-end. To make matters worse, the co-workers are absolutely weird. I'm yet to see such a bad mix. The cherry on the top of the ice-cream is my situation as a foreign worker in the US, that prevents me from changing jobs too easily.
Face it... It could be worse. You may not have a fun job, but at least (these days) you have a job.
i just started a new job, for a non-profit. it doesn't pay a lot, but being on a ranch, isolated in western montana is nice compensation. here we have a lake within 100 feet of my front door, nice people, horses, lots of fun.
.orgs as long as i can.
my position here is basically maintaining the network, as well as the database and web servers, as well as writing new software which keeps our organization together. i'm rather enjoying it after 3 weeks.
don't fret folks, there still are enjoyable, fun tech jobs out there - i plan on staying with
I work for a startup which is now a bit less than 2 years old. We have about 70 people. I am the CTO which for me is my dream job - it involves a wonderful variety of things from the deeply technical to the purely business oriented. The best days are when I cover the full spectrum of the role; dealing with vendors, whiteboarding with senior engineers, some people stuff, and a bit of pre-sales chalk talk.
Building a startup company from scratch is a tremedous personal growth experience, and I've gotten a lot out of it. It's extremely hard work, but extremely rewarding too.
In contrast to the dot-coms, we have been very conservative with spending our modest venture capital investment, and have concentrated on steady success - we have put out three software releases, we have successful paying customers to whom we deliver real value, and a 99.93% (and growing) uptime.
It's the company culture which is most important to me - we value people most highly. We have an open information culture (and after all, everyone is a shareholder). Mutual respect, integrity and a work hard play hard attitude are all important to us. We have a highly capable technical team, and many of them could easily find a higher paying job with a larger company even in this market; the reason they are with us is because they believe in what they do, and they enjopy the contribution they can make and impact they can have at a small company.
A lot of people posting in this forum will spout a lot of wibble about how everything should be run by techies and how marketing and sales people aren't as important, yada yada. Get this - a company needs to be strong in all areas to be successful, and the folks who produce the glossy collateral slicks are just as important as the Java coders. We succeed because we are one team.
We also have the usual little things that help alleviate stress: the junk food stocked kitchen; ping-pong, pool and foosball tables. When people are as driven as our team are, they need to unwind too.
We're not hiring techies right now, we're in a phase of focusing on growing revenue, but there are still good startup opportunities out there, and I'd advise anyone to give it a try. Even if the company isn't successful, you'll learn a lot and have a good time doing so.
Having gone myself from a 50,000 person company to a 1,000 person to 2 person startup (myself and our other founder) I can say it's truly unique and worthwhile career move.
my first 'real' programming job was at a dot-com; we had the old factory warehouse, the vents, the wide open spaces. typical dot-com stuff. fun was not at all a part of the culture though; the idea that someone wanted to write code and design because that's what they liked to do was considered unprofessional. having fun at work meant you didn't have enough work to do. quake? heavens no. nerf guns? absolutely not. worst part wasn't that the managers frowned on those things, the workers frowned on those things.
if I'd leave a sarcastic or funny comment in a section of code, someone would invariably email me informing me that such things had no place.
some people will say that people like me shouldn't bitch, that we weren't 'real' IT people, that we've failed somehow because we're not senior software engineers by now, or religiously attached to 'doing the job'. but ya know what? when programming stopped being fun, and I *realized* that, I left. changed careers. walked away.
my current career is pretty much fun, and I don't have to put up with all the bs that went along with being a programmer. and I still can write code to do stuff if I want, without some dumbass telling me I'm unprofessional because I like to include a # WTF? in my code when appropriate.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
that's pretty cool...i don't particularly like MS business policies, however i never doubted that they treat their employees quite well
i have a coworker. yes, this is to say that i have a job (contrary to popular belief), but infact this coworker aimed to achieve cisco and solaris certification a while back. he could not accept the rationale in which he failed.
:D
:D)
his complaints were centered around "SH*T, all the test was on the gui. i don't have to know that SH*t in order to administer slowaris" (yes reader, you have either thought this, or heard this before; and i'll pity the former)...
he's the kind of *nix user that thinks anything with a gui is a waste of his time; he abhores "redhat" (because of it's users) and yet refuses to learn any kind of a logical-thought process that would allow him to automate his workspace. yes, this poor sap actually prefers to TYPE tedious and repetitious configuration entries in an apache httpd.conf -- and even more sad, he can only type at a measly two-fingered rate of ~ 10-15 wpm.
this attitude helps for an explain: his "goal", or what would make him happiest in a "tech job" was being started out at 40k$USD per/year salaried, where he could come to work around 1030-1100, work till 1600 and do nothing but fu*k around with his enlightenment theme all day. of course, it DOES take him all day EVERY day to do it as even my employer can type faster. (who, by the way, is up to 4-5 fingers at a time. i'm very proud.)
what's even more pitiful is that he honestly believes that there are people at his skill-level (which you will have to take my word as to be rather deficient in good unix guru points) making significantly more than he presently does (a meager helpdesk pay; and again you will take my word that he's STILL being paid too much).
and i tell him, "surely a few years ago, you could go with that excuse for experience that you have and find a nice 3-4 month job in a cubicle before the company going under, but that was the boom of the fad!"
his response has always been "but anyplace would pay more that this SH*Thole!"
and so he quit. it took him 3 months before he crawled back (and took a pay-cut)- but yet he still didn't learn. his convictions lead him to the belief that he was just lazy.
yes folks, this miserable cretian would rather consider himself a lazy fool, than a stupid one. not that i wouldn't per-say, but that i would prefer not to have any allusions about either
which brings me to the point. work is that thing you do that pays the bills. i happen to enjoy my work; i get to write software that does things that nobody else is doing- and that facinates me enough to keep my job. in my job: i am an important person, with an important task.
this is my mission. a rather good mission. companies do rather well when they simply decide to make an excellent product. yet with this boom for the internet "fad", that just wasn't in ANYONE's mission. it was to "get online" and "get E" and ERP and lots more ands than i feel like typing.
this intangable mission escaped these startups; all they saw was a bunch of long-haired hippies in cubicles with club-lighting and music.
but anyone with some decent thought can tell you that's not how a business is run; and to the intellectually challenged: i'm not saying successful businesses cannot have club-music and nerf cannons, but that this cannot be the pinnicle of their mission.
i happen to work for an internet-based company. it would certainly fit anyone's description of a tech-job. and yet, i never sought a tech-job in my life. i'm a programmer, and by some respects a rather good one. (by others, a lousy one, but that's only incidental
if you're serious about finding "fun work", then trust that it does exist. i won't work anyplace i enjoy, and i DO enjoy where i work. but if you're looking for a company who's business model is "fun", then you're looking for a temp job- just please stop kidding yourself about it.
H1B amounts to "slave labor". The workers can't risk losing their jobs for fear of being deported, so they will take whatever crap the employer forces on them, and the employers know it, so this dish it out thick.
H1B workers can't very easily change jobs, because the new employer has to already be willing to do the government paperwork to hire an H1B. The market for job hopping (which would help prevent abuses by employers) is pretty much closed to H1B workers.
H1B workers are underpaid for their jobs because the H1B job only requires they be paid at least the average pay for the job classification, and the government classifies all software engineering into one single job with one average. Since that average takes into account all the really lame programming work, too, it's a lot lower than what a really good programmer would and should make.
H1B workers hurt the US economy because they buy less here with what little money they do make (on average). Many send all their excess back home (because they aren't planning to stay), or save it up and take it back when they finally leave (even if they'd have preferred to stay and become citizens).
I say the H1B program should be dumped. Those who want to leave, go back home. Those who want to stay should be given permanent resident status (and they are welcome in our country) and be free go find a better job than the one they are stuck in. That is what a free market really is.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I work at a factory maintaining all the C++ code for the applications which run the facility, including new program development, and feature addition. There is nothing more satifying than taming a horribly written MFC prog, and making it sing. I also do some Vb script for the admins, and some Perl scripts for the Unix and Linux servers.
The only downside is that the voluntary turnover rate is so high (due to a number of factors), that I also have the responsibility of answering the help phone 1/2 the day, which sometimes makes it impossible to handle anything important. That part really, really sucks.
It does not matter what you do, it's wrong.
However, most of the delivered systems are on WinNT and Visual Studio is where much of the programming takes place. The Unix boxes and Linux clusters are used for proof-of-concepts, prototypes, and sys-admin. However, there are a lot of Linux supporters high up in Management and they could switch over anytime soon.
Keeping
The ohert 1% is don't work for process bound systems liek millitarycontarcting or our governemnt :)
I work at Sun. I love wokring at Sun. Right now I'm choosing between enxt assignments and any one of them looks fun, though theyta re very different.
Having fun at work isn't about Nerf guns and free Jolt, its about loving what it is you do.
Fun tech jobs?! No, the only tech Jobs that I know, Steve, isn't that fun of a guy. He rules his company with an iron-fist, and I would NOT want to be on his bad side. (groan)
-bugg
I completely agree. Since when was a job supposed to be about clowning around with nerf guns and street hockey? I love technology and am very thankful to have a job where I can get paid for doing what I love.
Thanks for the common sense and reminding us what it's all about.
One thing about Microsoft that you have to understand is that each dept. can be like working at a different company. This being said, multiple dev's that I've talked to have nerf football indoors, sometimes nerf wars, and many times supersoaker fights in the summer. I know someone else who is a Sysadmin for MSN, and although he says the working conditions aren't as good as other departments there, he says that network games (read:CS!) are acceptable to the management.
Personally, when I am grinding over some piece of code, I NEED to have a ping-pong or CS break every once in a while. I think it improves my productivity, and my moral. I figure that as a developer I'm responsible enough to get the job done, and since I spend most of my life at work, I should be allowed to have a life at work.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Best of all... We're looking for more programmers.
So, the end result: The jobs exist, you're just not looking in the right places.
Ya know, I get kind of upset when people bash .coms across the board. Sure, many of them had some VERY poor spending habits and had little to no chance of ever recouping significant revenues. And yes, I'm sure that many were populated by lazy, wanna-be geek employees who simply wanted to ride the gravy-train to .com Valhalla. But this did not represent the .com masses in totality.
.coms out of college (NYC & Boston). To be perfectly blunt, I worked my butt off in a little over two years and gained a lot of valuable experience that school simply wouldn't have taught me. So did most of my coworkers. I had no pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming a millionaire while masterbating Nerf-guns all day. I did not have a golf course in my office space, nor a Steinway, nor daily catered meals. We worked hard, we had our fun, and we had rather decent incomes for a while. It was a good experience for the most part and I am glad to say I at least TRIED it. But the day a potential employers disqualifies me because of my .com experiences, well, I'll be forced ram my fist through their nostrils and pull out their shriveled little MBA-powered brain from the skull.
I worked at two
End Rant.
PierogyBoy
Can you have a fun tech job, without the worry of being suddenly unemployed?
I have a better question. Can you have any job without the virtual certainty of being suddenly unemployed?
Business has traded in stability for incompetence, and is claiming better results.
There are no entry-level jobs, no training, and no accomplishment to be found in the workplace, and therefore it is a poor place to invest any significant effort, and employees know it. "You get your paycheck," the employer says. "Isn't that enough?" No. It isn't.
Outside the workplace, everything depends on commitment and responsibility. The bills are due every single month with 100% certainty. A paycheck is always iffy.
When other commitments are made: family, mortgage, children, college funds, etc., they all depend on decades of responsible, predictable commitment.
Employers, on the other hand, refuse categorically to make any commitment to their employees, despite their ability. Companies with eight-figure a month incomes lay people off BY THE THOUSANDS because of "strategic reasons" while those people are left to spend months and sometimes years rebuilding their careers while they expend massive effort to keep their families housed and fed.
Meanwhile the incompetent, their presence due to their above average aptitude in office politics, and awash in benefits and salary, convene another meeting around a catered lunch to discuss their "strategic paradigm directions." The people who know how to build the products are busy changing careers, if there is any such thing as a career anymore.
If you are you forced (as I am) to get your fun on the side what are some good projects to get involved in?
Start a company where competent engineers can build something without having to explain it to incompetent people every 10 minutes.
What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?"
I'd like to complete a project. That would be fun for a change.
I work for the CS dept at a university. I work with cool stuff and cool people in a casual environment. And my job is secure.
Indeed they do still exist. Consider my place of employment, where I have worked now for just over three years. At this outfit every employee has his or her own private window office with walls to the ceilings and no cubes. Employees are treated to significant free food and drink and one probably could live for a while just migrating around the buildings snarfing up the freebie lunches and dinners for those who work hard. We play with nerf guns, water guns, yo yos, and even have little nerf turf wars going on between groups. There is a foosball table on floor #1, a pool table on floor #3, and a ping pong table in the next building. Elsewhere you can find free arcade games. And it is not uncommon to see long haired geeks clad in t-shirts and hawaiian straw hats walking barefoot through the halls. In addition, this place where I work provides me with extreme technical challenges and difficult problems that require me to grow. We work on projects that affect thousands, tens or thousands, or even millions of people depending upon our area of focus. Because of this we have issues related to security, deployment, and scale that dwarf those faced by most tech workers. In my position I have had to go from zero to expert not only in areas such as security, XML, and networking, but also in the area of managing conflict and engaging others to work towards goals. Finally this business provides its employees with astonishing resources and is unlikely to vanish for quite some time. In case you haven't glanced at my email by now, this business is Microsoft. :-)
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Lots of people have an attitude that they go to college and "deserve" something.
Yeah. Like being called "Doctor" after earning an M.D. or a PhD. Like being instantly qualified to be an attorney, or a mechanical engineer.
..and yes, being qualified to work in a field closely related to the major.
I would venture that the average college student does 10x the work of the average employee.
I've been doing this stuff for 20 years. I've worked for many different employers, some good some bad. I've learned they all have one thing in mind, to be financially successful. We, as engineers, have different motivations. We want to do purposeful work and express our creativity. You refer to this as "having fun".
The sooner one learns these simple distinctions, life becomes simpler. Self determination is the the key. If you want to have fun, then continuously prepare your self for the next job. This will make you a valuable asset to any employer, and they will try to keep you happy.
I am writing this from my beautiful home office, in which I work every day for a company over 350 miles away. I crank out gobs of code and other stuff that senior staff does. I could not be happier. I have followed my own advice so I know it works.
Good Luck!
Some of us are yearning for the days, back when we had a tough, bloody job. Remember how tough it was when the customer would complain for 10 minutes about they're crap computer system? And how you had to nicely, in a roundabout way, choking down the bile, explain that they're nuts, and that if they click on that menu option, the one that they swear isn't there, doesn't exist, the computer will work fine? And remember when it worked they would still scold you before hanging up? And then call 10 minutes later and start the process over again? I wish I was doing that... It beats pounding the pavement hoping something will work out before the severance runs out and you have to cash out the 401k... Yes, the point is, stop whining and stay put...
you said your job with the dot-com was FUN. Great. You got to play nerf games in a refurbished factory. Yeah. Unfortunately, the "company" went under. Darn. It's too bad the magical economic fairies didn't keep you afloat. Maybe the company went under because it spent all its money on nerf guns and you spent all your time shooting your coworkers instead of trying to stay ahead of the market trends. The failure of your company came about because you spent too much time having fun and not enough time having a job. That might be one of the many reasons for the dot-bomb fiasco. Too bad, folks.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I agree, there is nothing quite as satisfying as the sound of my Porsche 911's rev-limiter cutting in and out in 5th gear. Thank You almighty dollar :-)
Nitrozac and I have a lot of fun doing our job, which is doing The Joy of Tech. Sure, the pay sucks, it's endless work, and sometimes a comic will bomb, but at what other job could you turn David Pogue into an icon? ;)
I don't like to cook, I don't have any interest in eco-anything, and I like buying the latest/fastest/strongest hardware.
Remember, there's no shame in being filthy rich.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
You're right in that the fancy chairs, quirky offices, and freebies were simply symptoms of the disease that killed dotcoms, but America is all about treating the symptoms.
But there's no way I am giving up my funky mesh chair.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Holy cow! You guys are actually working on a "distributed fork" Mosix cluster? I had known that it was available but had mostly assumed that it was pretty much R&D at this point.
I would love to hear more.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
I write. Machines (sometimes after a great deal of effort) respond. What can be more fun that that?
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Not to pick on the questioner (too much ;-), but if you want to play with Nerf toys at work, see if Nerf has any openings. Me, I'd head for LEGO if I wanted to work in the toy industry.
-Paul Komarek
For spelling every single word of that sentence correctly.
Hands in my pocket
See -- the problem was that you went to a well funded company. If you work for a company that didn't take in a dime of VC, started from and continues to work from sweat equity and sweat revenue, you'd still be having fun. True, I'm not driving a Lexus LS-430, but fun, there's plenty of it.
We've graduated from the less harmful nerf games, to the more dangerous, higher velocity hackey-sacks. Crap, if we only had the height, we'd be throwing Jarts (lawn darts) in there. You see -- that is second stage of fun that your dot-bomb company wasn't around to experience. It's slightly more dangerous (doing my Ice Man teeth-bite), but the things you'll put up with for fun and a paycheck...
Our main application was Matlab and Matlab processes didn't migrate properly. We kept those on the Origin server. For image processing and rendering, we used the mosix cluster and it worked very well. Just remember to code your program into a bunch of threads or if you are processing data, split data up and run one process on each dataset.
The program that monitors load is cool too. It monitors the loads on each node and you can watch the threads jump from one node to another.
Keeping
...just take a look at sourceforge.net. Oh, were you asking about paying jobs? Sorry...
They pay you for it because you wouldn't do it otherwise. If it was fun, you would pay them to do it.
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
Being self-employed, I have been able to change from making money on Windows programming to make money on Linux programming. I have never enjoyed my work so much!
Lars.
In my recent experience, the IT industry crunch has brought more workload and demands more flexibility from me. So I find that I am able to do things that were more fun than the things I did before the crunch. I also find that I do things that are not as fun.
As an IT grunt, I never expected to represent my customers(major telcos) in person(I mistakenly thought it would happen when _I_ was ready..cough). I also didn't think I would be writing design documentation in quantity that I do now. And although I can't say that I like some of these things, or the pressure, I know it makes me stronger. I do like that.
I would prefer to spend time working on our decaying infrastructure, coming up with ways to make things more efficient and cheaper with technology. This I can do, but not with the focus I once had, or the authority I now have.
For the time being, my goals have remained the same. Get better at anything I can to be ready for anything that gets thrown at me. And enjoy the ride.
Okay... Somebody brief me here... WTF is "Black and Tans" or "Blank and Tans" or whatever? A swill beer? A cheap rot-gut brand of whisky? Mixing whisky and beer (a.k.a. a boilermaker)?
What's this Nerf shit? At my office we a Fight Club in the basement during lunch. Even the women come to duke it out!
You missed thepoint of your own question, I think. You see, when you said "fun tech job" you mentioned the horseplay. While there's nothing wrong with a light-hearted workplace, you never really said you enjoyed your JOB. Did you like what you did? Was teh actual work fun? Did you work at all?
I think the real question here is: D you enjoy the work get paid to perform?
"Find a job that lets you do something you like, and you'll never work a day in your life."
So if working the tech industry isn't something you enjoy, you might consider the academic community or something.
OR, alternatively, you might consider working for Mattel or whoever, testing Nerf rockets. I mean, if that's what you enjoy.
/*
Sure. I've written about this on /. before, but here are a few of the major points -- things that many (most?) people get wrong.
- CVs that are needlessly long. If you're looking for something like summer work while studying at university, a page will probably be good enough. For a first or second job after that, two pages is probably appropriate, as you'll need a little space to list the work experience you've got now. If you genuinely need to write more than two pages, you don't need me to tell you how to write your CV.
:-)
- CVs full of unsupported buzzwords. Agencies are great for sending these, usually on an ugly and hard-to-scan cover page that adds no value to the CV. Employers will not be impressed by your claiming to know 17 different langauges when you've only just graduated, or your gratuitous use of terms like "expert", "advanced" or (God forbid) "mission critical". By all means list your skills, but be honest, and provide objective information, such as the number of years you've been using a skill. You might include a fair assessment of your ability ("basics", "competent", "good"), which helps an employer to understand your focus if you're listing, say, three or four languages. Make sure the experience sections of your CV (work and education) show where these bits of experience happened.
- CVs with poor use of English. If you can't even write English, do you expect us to let you write C++ or Perl? Sloppy language is a sure sign of someone who doesn't pay attention to detail, and that is not the kind of person we want to employ. And of course, a professional programming job needs far more than coding skills; it also requires interpersonal and communications skills, for a start. The quality of your CV is the one way a company has to assess these skills until they meet you in person.
- CVs that use poor layout. Companies will not be impressed by pointless flash on a CV. Don't overuse things like fonts. Avoid snazzy graphics, strange formats such as 3-fold brochures, or other "distinctive" features. Stick to a clear layout that's easy on the eyes. Use bullet lists where appropriate, but don't overdo it so that your pages look "dotty". Leave plenty of whitespace; a cramped CV is hard to scan, and you've only got 30 seconds -- max -- to convince someone to keep reading.
Some things, everyone should have. For example...- Provide a summary of your skills. This comes at the top of your CV, right under the personal information. Think about what your potential employer is looking for. For example, if you're going for a programming job, you might list the languages most relevant to the job (maybe with an indication of your proficiency with them -- "Java, 3 years, competent"). You might also choose to list the major tools you've used (e.g., JDK v1.3, CVS).
- Provide your academic background in an easily-scannable chronological form. People will check this briefly, often as the first thing they read on your CV, to guage your general level of experience. Include dates and places, grades, and brief notes if, say, your degree course covered something particularly relevant to the job. If your academic career has been quite long (e.g., you've got your degree by now), consider condensing the earlier qualifications into a one liner (e.g., in the UK, 8 GCSEs: 3 As, 3 Bs, 2Cs).
- List your relevant work experience in an easily-scannable, chronological form. Give dates and places, job titles, and a brief summary of what you did, including anything that's relevant to the job for which you're applying.
Finally, certain things will catch the eye of someone reading your CV, and if they're appropriate, you can use them to good effect. For example, consider providing your home page address. If you've got some personal programming projects under your belt, you might consider making the source/docs available on-line. If your CV is read by someone technical, they probably will visit your site and have a quick look, at least long enough to say "Hey, she can really code!" or "Nope, he can't code for toffee." If your home site is full of cutesy photos of your friends, I don't recommend providing a link...Apologies for the lack of links in this post; the /. search engine doesn't seem to be working properly right now. However, one link that's definitely worth following is the one to Carnegie-Mellon's Susie the Screener page. This page may come as a rude awakening to many /.ers who think they're clever, but they'll have much, much better job prospects after reading it.
If you just follow the simple and common-sense advice above, I reckon you're already in the top 5-10% of CVs a company will receive. That alone will put your chances of getting an interview way up. Good luck.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
- salary
- vacation
- health benefits
not fun thingsI'm sure as long as you work 80 hours a week and take your payment in worthless stock options, some companies will let you shoot off your nerf gun and have as much "fun" as you want.
Your idea of a fun job is playing with Nerf?
Have you thought about....
Selling toys?
I work in the new media dept. of a daily newspaper. My job still has its fun moments and perks. Typically, once a month or so, my boss joins me and another coworker at our adopted bar, "the new media lounge," to throw darts and share a pitcher. That's cool for two aspects. One, we can release stress outside the office w/ the boss buying. Two, it shows the boss has an interest in us as people, not merely as peons.
Quite often, I find the best work environment isn't always fun and games. It's the one that leaves you alone to focus on a large project and draw on the resources you need to make things happen. To a fair degree (but by no means universally) the managers know that frequent distractions keep me from getting my current work done and that ultimately delays the work *they* are asking me to do.
Ultimately, I find a great deal of satisfaction in my job, not because it's "fun". Quite often it isn't. But, at the end of the day, the work has kept me challenged, the boss wants me to be challenged and keep bringing new ideas to the table. The other benefit I've made for myself is not living and dying by my work. I give it due care and consideration. It is important. But it's not all I do and I won't spend more than 45 hours a week in the office unless there is a damn good reason for me to do so.
I also make a habit of not living for work out of the office. If something important happens that needs my attention, I can be contacted, but I don't go out of my way to seek contact after hours and over the weekend with work. By and large, unless I see it by 4 p.m. Friday, I'm not going to deal with it until 9 or 10 a.m. Monday.
I find all of the above are critical for contining to enjoy my work. I get close to burnout only infrequently. I tend to stay optimistic about longterm prospects. Being given an effective work environment, the flexibility to come early, leave early (or vice-versa) and not be tied down to a leash is far more powerful than being given PlayStations or having scooter races through the halls.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
Perhaps I should do some more reading. I thought Mosix was supposed to distribute a forked process across distinct machines on a network. Thanks for the information!
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
I have to say that I'm having a blast with my current job. I'm a "senior bioinformatics specialist" at a major pharm company. What I really do is write code for the biologists.
I'm constantly learning (they're paying for my classes), and I'm working with some extremely bright people. To me... that's fun.
If you're not enjoying your current job, I recommend switching. Don't quit; just start looking. If you don't know exactly what you want, I highly recommend the exercises in What Color Is Your Parachute?
Good luck.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
I love my job, but then I guess I was lucky. A fellow student in my CS course happened to mention the gov't contract he was working on needed 4 entry level computer operators. I sent my resume that night via email and was hired the next day for a different company (TRW vice Veridian), same contract.
In less than a year I have been promoted to a working supervisor and lead tech of a system. As long as it is up when someone needs it, my time is pretty much free to do whatever I went, and I can qualify most of my time at work as "professional development." On any given day, I could be found playing with shell scripts, helping the sysads install new systems, learning a Perl book, setting up a network, ssh to my home system, or any number of things. I can even do my programming homework as long as we are not too busy with a project. They also pay 100% of my tuition and books. In short, right now there is no other place I would rather work. They pay slightly below the area average, but being a former Marine with no degree, I am not complaining.
There are a number of "fun" palces to work out there, you just have to figure out your definition of fun and go find it.
lInUx Is CasE SenSiTiVe
I like 'em in cookies, myself.
// Alan Porter
I just finished writing a book explaining how it's nearly impossible to do anything useful with EJB 1.1 CMP.. EJB 2 CMP is much better but since implementations are still so new, I'd really look at Webgain Toplink. not a perfect product or support organization, but probably the most mature out there.
-Stu
"If you are you forced (as I am) to get your fun on the side what are some good projects to get involved in?" Many, many tech folks volunteer their skills on the side to nonprofit organizations. They like the feeling that their experience and knowledge can be applied to helping their communities, the environment, etc. Think about what causes you care about, contact organizations in your area that address those causes, and offer your services as a volunteer. It's worth noting that a poster to the Her Domain discussion group said that her sister got hired because the interviewer was impressed that, while she was unemployed, she volunteered -- and had noted it on her resume.
You can even look into volunteering online. NetAid Online Volunteering is focused on organizations that work in developing countries. Also see the Virtual Volunteering Project.
J Cravens http://www.coyotecommunications.com
Most people at my company bring in things like Nerf guns and wiffle balls and play around the office at times. It can get really loud once in a while. Many of them even go so far as to participate in extracurricular sports together.
Of course, these are by and large the same people who are willing to work 26 hours straight if an emergency arises, and are very good at staying billable and making a crapload of money.
The problem with the dot bombs wasn't the Nerf guns. The problem with the dot bombs was VC's smoking way too much crack and management buying into their resulting high.
A fun job is one that gives you the time you need to do fun things.
Most people work on the 40-40 plan: Forty hours a week for forty years. That will never give you the freedom you need to do fund things.
In addition, most people work for money. I must admit that I do as well... But I also work for time:
I am currently running a business that, by my own forcasts, will supercede my $100+/year developer's job within the next year.
Is it a get rich quick scheme? No. Only rock stars get "Money for nothing and your chicks for free."
I work hard now, so that I can cut down that 40-40 plan... If you want to plan for your retirement, contact me.
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...
Every day is pretty fun for me - and most of my colleagues. We don't have nerf guns or toys, just an enthusiastic team, a good social life and enough intelligence to make any challenging task fun.
Enjoy becoming good at your job - enjoy being good at your job - andjoy getting better at your job>
Don't get too sucked into all work and no play - get your balance right. Remember the most important thing is your family, work is a way to support them so just find one which challenges you enough but isn't crappy and make it all fun.
I don't sound like I'm on Prozac do I?
Granted, in our offices, we don't use Nerf armament - we get great deals on old Russian munitions from a wee little man near the metro. Take that society!
--carbon dioxide