How’s this for click bait? But there was some study that said that people (yes, this includes women) don’t prefer to have a woman as a boss. Of course, the femibots start frothing at the mouth, but all the frothing on the planet won’t change the facts. First, for the impatient folks, the TL;DR: I enjoy having women as coworkers, but I prefer not to work under them (modulo exceptions, but see below).

I’ve just ended a project where I was working in an Agile/Scrum based environment, with sprints, stories, and deadlines. I kinda liked it, because you collaborate closely with your colleagues, and you pick your own tasks. Things can move potentially very fast, but there are some very glaring downsides. I’ll list them below: The burndown. The holy and sacred burndown. People care way too much about getting a Sprint completely burned down.

I also posted this on my LinkedIn, but just to have some coverage I have posted it here as well.

Yes, I do put myself out there. I have profiles on networking sites like branded.me, LinkedIn and probably some others. Usually, the recruiters and headhunters there behave themselves and don’t pester me that much. They send me messages through LinkedIn or whatever, but lately some of them have become REALLY pushy. Pushy insofar that they somehow found my personal mail address and are now reminding me through my personal mailbox to respond to some job I don’t want.

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.