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

Your job shouldn't be your life.

[garcia]

I don't want a dream job...

Dream jobs eliminate the one good thing about life. Vacation. Whether that be on the weekends, your random days off in the middle of the week, or the two weeks you spend lounging in Jamaica.

They don't call work "work" for nothing. If it was fun they would call it Vacation. Work gives me something to look forward to when I don't have to do it. It shouldn't be an escape from your family, it shouldn't be fun, and it certainly be something you overly enjoy...

My enjoyment everyday comes in the form of looking forward to the weekend when I spend my free time geocaching with my friends or myself. If I enjoyed work I would probably be sitting in my office working. What good does that do me?

We are a sad society when we put work in front of our "real lives".

Remember that before you go off in search of the job that you just can't wait to get to everyday. Family, fun, and vacation > work.

BTW - I don't mind my job in the least. I don't complain about it and I don't hate coming to work everyday. I just think it's better to enjoy yourself outside of your job.

Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.

[kruczkowski]

Work in Germany, under German law every worker must get 6 weeks paid vacation, from a janitor to a CEO.

Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not enjoy both? Sounds like you're trying to rationalize the career you chose.

Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.

[mbge7psh]

A truely dream job shouldn't seem like a job at all. If you get payed to do what you truely enjoy, where is the harm in putting it before other hobbies?

Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, it's a sad society that SEPARATES "lives" from "work".

Why should you only enjoy yourself when you're not working?

Imagine a job in a small company where you know everybody, you and your wife both work and can freely visit, and you bring your kids to work with you every day and watch them learn and play.

Imagine you can wear whatever religious symbol you want, and say whatever you like without fear of lawsuits. Imagine that once you finish your day's work, you're free to leave, but you don't because you love doing your work.

Imagine that your life and your work where completely intertwined and you loved every minute of it.

Isn't it funny that people say "where do you live" when they ask what you do OUTSIDE of work? If "living" happens outside of work, then when you're working, you must be DEAD right? The opposite of live.

You should look forward to EVERY DAY, not just the weekends. That's sad.

I don't have the solution.. I'm self-employed and really enjoy it but I still have to deal with the "walking dead" on a regular basis.

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:Your job shouldn't be your life.

[Jorrit]

Work shouldn't be fun??? That must be one of the saddest remarks I have heard in some time. I would quiet my job the moment it stops getting fun.

Of course I agree with you that work isn't the only thing in life. Family comes first.

But if your work isn't fun then I pity you.

Greetings,

Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.

[Cyclone66]

Wouldn't the more enlightened country be the one that realizes working like a dog, 50+ hours a week with only a week vacation is not a way to live?

Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderate parent 5, Insightful. Working 50 and 60 hour weeks with no vacation is very 1890s. Slaving away like a serf for a king is very 1300s.

Germany and the rest of the European countries have the right idea. A person needs more time to enjoy friends, family, and most importantly for the economy, spend money.

Yes, I am an American and yes, I might be a little upset since I can't afford to take any time off after my first child is born in August.

Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.

[HungWeiLo]

You talk about overhead, but you're making the assumption that overworked, 60+ hrs/wk individuals will produce output at a constant rate of high productivity. Also, a very high concern for employers these days is medical. Simply, overworked/tired workers are more likely to get more medical problems and drive up medical costs collectively.

Re:Dream Job #1

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Anonymous Coward,

After further revision your skillset and experience does not appear to match our First Poster job position requirements. In fact, you miserably failed.

We at Slashdot value professionals like you and would like to keep your resume in our database for future positions open.

Best regards,
HR

IEEE Magazine?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I wanted a list of what's hip & cool, I wouldn't look in IEEE magazine to find it.

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.

There's always worse.

[Geoffd1]

Let me tell you something: if you think you have the worst job, there's always a more dire one.

I had a job where I was supposed to engineer "smart" plumbing fixtures - keeping water temperature right, measuring turd/bowl ratio, etc. It paid the bills, but it was boring as hell - and always got blank looks at the local SCA meets.

When the tech boom subsided, I lost the job. I wasn't too worked up about it. I found another job quickly, but little did I know it would turn out to be even worse. It was similar to the above position (experience always helps when applying), but, as I found out upon showing up on day one, I was to be engineering urinals. I fear parties, for people inevitably ask me what I do. Ten years of higher education for this, and people piss on my designs!

So, don't complain about your job. At least your products aren't full of piss.

Does this count?

[JZ_Tonka]

Sitting on a couch in my parents basement, posting to Slashdot from my Linux-running laptop, surrounded by empty McDonalds wrappers and cans of Jolt provided through a generous grant from the U.S. taxpayer.

No, I'm not bitter...

Slashdot?

[FreemanPatrickHenry]

I don't know, I would guess CowboyNeal has pretty close to the ubergeek paradise job. I mean, come on, he's got unlimited mod points for God's sake!

dream jobs and being subjective ..

[psycho_tinman]

Naysayer that I am, I think a "dream job" is impossibly subjective.

Some people may be thought to have dream jobs because it pays well in general(professional sports stars). Some people because it is something you wish you were paid for (professional gamers or err.. movie critics, if you like). Some may have dream jobs because you wish you were doing that job (it's description, at any rate.. some people entertain fantasies about being a photographer for a magazine like Playboy :p). Some people may wish for cutting edge technology jobs.. Hey, when Marcelo Toscatti was interviewed, I remember a comment saying "he's 20 years old, kernel maintainer and married".. :)

So what is it that we like about these jobs ? The fact that the grass always looks greener on someone else's pasture ? or the fact that we wish we were doing something else ? :)

For me, the job I landed immediately after I graduated was my "dream job". Hey, I was paid to code. I loved writing code, I liked finding tricky solutions to problems, I just liked my job. The fact that they paid me (obscenely well by the standards of an undergraduate who had been paid nothing before for doing mostly the same thing) didn't even enter the equation. For about 6 months or so, I was one happy puppy. Churning out code, design specs..researching things I wanted to do, learning new stuff.

Then the rest of my life kicked in. You figure out the 12 hour days are ok, but you didn't want to stay in office and miss the rest of your life pass you by. A progamer interview I saw recently (ShowTime, a War3 player) said he plays almost continuously for 15 hours a day. I may like gaming, but I couldn't take that continously for too long. Even people with dream jobs need to find a balance somewhere. If a dream job demands all your energy, your time.. leaves you with no energy for anything else.. then it won't be your dream job forever.

A true dream job (definitely not something you can be paid for, so I wonder if you can call it a "job" anymore) would allow you balance. If you're earning a wage for it, then sooner or later, you will find yourself wishing for something else.

My $0.02

Dream Job for Linux Sysadmin

[Stinky Cheese Man]

PNL is hiring a Senior System Administrator for the world's largest Linux cluster and 5th fastest supercomputer.

I have _THE_ best job in the world!

[GoMMiX]

$345 a week and all I have to do is send out three resumes during that week.

That Master's degree sure is serving me well now!

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... :-)

uh...ok

[DirtyJ]

Q: Why do you keep hitting your head with that hammer?

A: Because it feels so good when I stop!

Ultimate job: House husband...

[HarveyBirdman]

...to a rich and sexy and loving wife.

Rich, loving, sexy wife: Honey, I'm home. I made another million dollars today. And I stopped at Fredrick's Of Hollywood today, but that's a suprise.

Lucky husband: Great. Oh, the 25" mirror for my new telescope arrived today along with the racks of G5 XServes. I'll mount the mirror out in the Large Array tomorrow morning.