I have to pay the bills to be able to pursue what I like, so I work. Preferably I like to work at a place where I actually like working. This is taken from my LinkedIn profile, it’s there too. But it can’ t hurt to post it here as well.
Imagine, for a moment, that you could create your own job with ideal conditions for you to work in. What would it be? This question I get asked sometimes during job interviews. My answer is usually the same, but I thought it would be worthwhile to share this and expound on it a bit. This way I could also elaborate on why this would be ideal for me, and hopefully, some enterprising person has this exact job for me (unlikely, but I like to be surprised).
I will start with soundbite-like sentences and I will elaborate on these. First, a little background on myself and how I like to work. First of all, I am a creative and curious person, and this has been the greatest contributing factor in myself being quite a generalist when it comes to skills. When someone asks me if I know anything about a certain thing (be it operating systems, technology, products, protocol, APIs, frameworks or what have you) I haven’t encountered before, I usually respond with “not yet”. If it tickles a certain fancy, I will dive into it in my free time. This also makes my work seem chaotic, but there is a certain method to my madness. When I have to come from an unknown angle, the work takes longer, but I will learn a lot in the process. This enriches my tool chest of tricks I can later employ. Needless to say, I have built up quite a war chest of knowledge that way in my career.
So, what would my ideal work environment look like? Well, the job itself would be a combination of system administration, engineering, slacking and playing with new technology (preferably open source). Inspiration was gleaned from the things I liked when I worked at several companies. More after the jump.
