Dream Jobs of 2004

prostoalex writes "We've read about the worst jobs out there, the most overpaid ones, the worst job postings and the outsourcing tendencies. Can an article on employment in scientific and engineering fields can have a positive outlook? February issue of IEEE Spectrum talks about the dream ('coolest, baddest, hippest, grooviest') jobs, where people have fun and enjoy what they're doing. IEEE publication covered the dream jobs for Electrical Engineering majors only. The linked article is actually a story about 9 different people with 9 different jobs, each leading to a separate article."

Comments

History Channel's dream job

[SoCalChris]

There was a show on the History Channel this week about the autobahn. They did a short piece on some lucky bastard who works for a Porche tuner. His job? Take each new, handbuilt car onto the autobahn late at night, and certify just how fast it can go.

Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.

[wrp103]

I once read that you should make a career out of your second favorite thing to do. That way, when work got to you, you could relax with your hobby rather than your career.

That said, I think far too many people keep thinking of better things rather than enjoying what they are doing at the moment. If somebody gives me something to do that I don't like, I try to figure out how to make it more enjoyable.

For example, I once had a boss that insisted that I send him a status report each week. (I hate paper work). So, I did what I often do in situations like that ... I automated it. I segmented the status report into different sections, created text files for each section, and then wrote some code, along with a Makefile, so that each Friday, I ran a single command, and out came my status report e-mailed to my boss along with other interested parties.

Now, I could have spent time bellyaching about what a lousy job I had been given, but instead decided to make it more tolerable. After it was done, I actually enjoyed submitting status reports.

Now, certainly there are jobs with little or no redeeming value, but most of the people I hear complaining actually have it pretty good. Most have food to eat, a place to stay, and make enough money to make ends meet with a little left over.

Blaise Pascal, in his book Pensees, states that people spend too much of their time regretting the past and dreaming about the future, that they don't have time to enjoy the present. As a result, they are often unhappy when they don't need to be.

Re:Dream Job

[Dr. Zowie]

I worked doing mission ops for the SOHO spacecraft for four years. It's a cool place to be -- cutting edge stuff, you're beaming commands daily to a spacecraft a million miles away, yadda yadda. But you rapidly learn that "glamour" is something you can only see from far away. When you're actually doing the stuff, it's just another high stress job in a room with no windows, and debugging and fixing the spacecraft is just what you do every day. I used to have to force myself to look at the big picture and realize what an amazing place I was in.

Now I'm doing pure research and some teaching, in Boulder, CO. This turns out to be closer to my dream job -- more flexible hours and lots of self-directed variety to the tasks. It's certainly not for everyone -- I basically sit around staring at equations, or images, or image-processing software, most of the time -- but every once in a while I get to figure out something nobody's ever known before, and that keeps me going the rest of the year.

Of course, the problem with a self-directed job is that you're always with your boss... :-)