Thursday, May 27, 2004

Ideal Day Job

With [reasons deleted] I thought I'd put together my day job priorities. These include both aspects of a workplace environment and personal career goals. The vast majority of these conditions exist in my job at the moment.

At my ideal job I would...

  • work with a talented team in an open office (not cube farm) environment that encourages cross-pollination of ideas between a variety of roles.
  • be constantly learning, thinking and challenged.
  • work on projects that are important, projects that accomplish goals and serve needs.
  • have a to-do list that is long enough that I'm always busy (with a reasonable ebb and flow to the stress level).
  • conduct user testing, or at least work on interfaces where user feedback is received and valued.
  • spend more time working with people on problems than dealing with problem people. On the same note, I would spend more time being productive than in meetings.
  • have influence on internal workflows, be able to change a process if it is clearly causing problems and be able to experiment with alternative ways of doing the job.
  • solve problems creatively, not just fulfill requirements.
  • be involved with requirements on at least a consulting level.
  • invent new products.
  • work on interfaces in variety of media.
  • both design (wireframes, photoshop mockups, etc.) and code (front end: html, css, dom scripting).

What other things make a job or workplace environment really great?

2 comments:

Nils Devine said...

As usual, linking to an article that I haven't read yet, but think might be relevant. This article is about what I was thinking when I made my second to last post above, about wanting to create interfaces in different media: Digital Convergence: Insight into the future of Web design

Cybil Solyn said...

Also keep in mind that you want a position that you can grow in. You may not "gripe" about it yet, but it would suck to be stuck in Doug's position where you can't be challenged and grow...