I can attest that I was much happier at $80k than I was at $30k, but not much happier at $110k or $140k, less happy at $155k, miserable at $175k (becoming director of engineering). Now I'm at $200k but it's the remote part that makes me happiest.
The company is Surge, LLC (https://www.surgeforward.com), and they offer developers for hire. It is 1099 contract work with at least 40 hours a week guaranteed.
You get matched to projects based on skill set. I only advertised myself as PHP and Node, so that's what I've been assigned to (75% node/angular/mysql, 25% PHP/angular/mysql).
For reference, I live in the suburbs of Los Angeles so prices are lower than in the Bay area. I make $200k and my wife makes $100k working part time as a registered nurse. Flexible schedules mean we can spend lots of time with our daughter and travel quite a bit.
Software engineer starting salaries in companies like Amazon/Google/FB etc are close to 100k or more. So breaking that mark as an engineer is very much possible.
I was at $155k as a W2 software engineer at my last company...that seemed to be a ceiling for engineers in Los Angeles. I had to become a director of engineering to get to $175k.
I'm happy for you. I tried remote work for 2 years and now I'm happily going back to working in an office next Monday. Can't bear the loneliness anymore. I don't have much of a social life to begin with, so I really need some actual human face-to-face interaction in my job.
I'm at year 2 and I don't see myself going back to an office. It is nice getting out of the house, but I never want to commute again (read: Los Angeles traffic) and I don't like people expecting me to be in a certain place at a certain time.
My current company - Formlabs. I get to build really good hardware (3D printers), working with ~seven different engineering disciplines. Smart people, high levels of autonomy, and very little politics. People are there to build great stuff.
If you don't mind my asking, what field are you in? I've been fascinated with 3d printing for a while(built my own printer etc) but haven't quite found the right place to apply and you are certainly selling the formlabs experience!
We do Software (embedded, desktop, web), mechanical, electrical, process, systems, optics, and manufacturing engineering. It's a pretty fun mix.
Since you asked, I personally work directly with all of the above (as a product lead). My expertise is in software, mechanical, process, and systems engineering.
I was pretty happy in my first job as a system administrator for a small B2B ISP in my hometown. Full autonomy, engaged coworkers and challenges that kept increasing.
Unfortunately, I like getting paid and I've been let down in that regard. I was there for 5 years and left for a job at a big 3-letter corporation and then some other corporations. I've been soul searching for a decade now.
I have never been happier than I was in grad school (the Space Systems Lab at the University of Maryland).
Which might sound surprising, given the pay and work hours... but there's a lot to be said for working with a group of people you love with all your heart, who have your back, in a field you are passionate about and have been since you were a kid.
Grad school was incredibly hard work, and the pay sucked. But I wouldn't give back a single day of it.
Grad school was the most miserable time of my life for exactly the same reasons. Inaccessible professors, introverted, competitive cohorts of PhD students who rarely became good friends with one another, an exclusive focus on your output and performance to the point of becoming dehumanizing.
Probably PhD work for me, too. It's a slightly different experience in the UK, I think, but did afford me quite a bit of autonomy. Has been hard to match since.
(I get the impression that the trend has been gradually towards more structure and less autonomy in "doctoral programs" -- from my point of view, that's sad).
Sorry to digress - What I want from life keeps changing over time. Maybe evolving as I grow/change as a person. While I was happiest at certain roles/companies in the past, I don't think I would be as happy there now.
I think it's really important to analyse the current situation and think about what's good. We (or at least me) only ever seem to know what we have when it's gone.
Justin.TV during the first 3 years or so. Honestly, because we were in "cowboy mode", and that's what I enjoy the most. The site was growing and changing so fast it was often hard to keep up, and we were all just doing whatever it took.
It's not for everybody. It's for certain types of people, and even certain stages in their lives.
I also worked in a hypergrowth unicorn from the early days and I would also call those first couple of years there my happiest job, even though it was tons of work and full cowboy mode.
That was when I was in my mid-20s and single. I am 100% sure that I wouldn't enjoy that right now in my current stage in life. (mid-30s and married now)
I worked for a small digital marketing and PR agency in NYC. We worked with clients mostly in the music industry. The environment was very collaborative and it felt like a family in many ways. The work was creative while also being relationship driven. Overall I'd say it was the environment that made me enjoy the job most.
You'll be happy if you have a boss who trusts you completely and colleagues that aren't a-holes. If you have this you will find the work thats interesting.
The only way that comes to mind is knowing someone well enough in a company that needs your skills when you need a job. Its a very small intersection in time/space/relationships.
I've always lucked into these situations. And honestly I never really realized how lucky I was because I didn't have anything to compare it to.
Not joining teams with bad bosses is one way to go about this. This is also very very difficult because these guys will offer you a ton of money.
Honestly, the best advice I think is to follow your best boss when he moves once you've found one. (Again this advice only "works" in SV where there are a massive number of growing companies where people move very frequently).
Given that you know to look for a good boss and you know to resist offers purely based on financial terms, I think you are helping yourself to make your own "luck" :)
Yeah, I'm at the same company I was at 18 months ago and at that time it was the one I'd been the most happiest at in my career. Autonomy, great leadership, trust, people over process.
Same company today, same work, but the opposite of all those intangibles. New leadership, new values. Significant turnover now, following an era of unusually low turnover. Total commitment to the new direction despite the picture painted by direct feedback and turnover.
I've been in decent companies that I just feel like shit in because of what my skills were contributing to.
The most notable was a couple years I spent working under a pharma giant, I've never felt so disgusted with myself in my life. Coming up with new ways to get money from your customers, I mean patients, for the same or lesser service did not sit right with me.
So for me, it's largely about the work/company. How can you not care about what you contribute to day-to-day, yet feel entitled to be upset at CEO's and politicians who do bad things "for the money"?
I think everyone from migrant workers to a fortune 500 CEO has a moral obligation to not write off injustices they are contributing to because of their mortgage or whatever money-centric excuse they use. At the same time, live your life the way you want. You just aren't any better than the bank lobbyists/Comcast CEO/insert evil company leader here, they all have the same excuse as you...money. You are your actions, not your words or thoughts.
I agree with you. However, I suspect HN has a lot of people who value these things, but I wonder what percentage of people are purely focused on other things (e.g. money, power, etc)and don't care much about these values outside of how it serves their primary motivations. Sometimes these are the people who value autonomy in their own jobs, but want to make sure nobody else has autonomy in theirs. Relationships are also a means to an end.
Mastery sticks out to me in this. In a lot of years of working, I've only met a few people who really pushed themselves towards mastery. Or worse, they mastered focusing on their Job Title/Salary. Many people seem to be fine with being satisfactory. I don't think there's anything wrong with this since satisfactory means you're doing a good job.
I worked as an intern at a factory while at university studying computer science. All the process machines were computer controlled, along with office computers for accounting and material control. Despite having a workforce of 200, there were only 2 IT guys there - 1 sysadmin, 1 developer, and I was slotted between them.
I was given a year-long development project, but during lulls in the activity, I was able to help both guys with their work, and in doing so, found several long-suspended projects the sysadmin had wanted to implement. I was able to kick some of these into gear; for one of them, a virtualisation project, I wrote a design document in my own time, presented it with projected costs to the CEO and was given the okay to start it. We built the platform (ESXi) on time and under budget, and there were a lot of immediate benefits. I was able to retire half the servers in the server room.
It all really boiled down to trust; I was given the keys to the kingdom at that job, with domain admin access to do tech support, and not only did I get to play with some cool technology, I was able to implement stuff that made people's lives easier - I built a Windows Deployment Server (another long mothballed idea) which brought our workstation build time from 6 hours (fresh install of XP plus post-install updates, not even slipstreamed, then install software manually) down to 15 minutes (deploying the pre-built image over PXE). I do believe I left the place in a better state than when I joined, but it was quite bittersweet - I came to realise I'd probably never be trusted with that kind of power over the company infrastructure again.
My first real job, I was a tiny cog in a global machine, and I couldn't deal with that. I lasted 3 months before quitting. My next job was in development, I stuck that for 3 years as it was predictable and fairly calm. I didn't enjoy it as much, but I needed the stability at the time. I moved into DevOps for a year, but my boss was an incredible micromanager who didn't trust people beneath him to do their jobs. After a year of being ignored and getting little work done, I lost interest.
I found another job, which I started last month. In contrast to my previous experience in long-established companies, I'm now working at a start-up as a sysadmin. And whilst the pace and the rapid hiring are really different to what I'm used to, I have some of that intern power again - my suggestions are taken on board, and I am trusted to do my job. I also get on very well with the people here, and they're coming to appreciate having someone to turn to for tech issues - previously, no single person was in charge of inventory or tech support, and now they can just ask me.
I think the intern job was the best of both worlds - the calm, predictable pace of an established firm, but with the startup-ish get-it-done attitude to IT work that stopped bureaucracy getting in the way. But I think I can deal with the fast pace so long as I can stay in control of my responsibilities.
Honestly? This warehouse where I was repacking lumber. The lumber would come from the sawmill on a big flatbed truck. However, the lumber would be stacked in a formation that made it impossible to fill up the shipping containers optimally for shipping the lumber overseas. So my job was to (with a bunch of other guys):
1. Unpack the lumber.
2. Restack the lumber in a formation that would allow for maximum lumber loaded into the shipping containers.
3. Rewrap the lumber in plastic and staple the plastic in place.
It was mindless work where I didn't have to think about anything, had no deadlines, and I got physical exercise to boot. It paid $12 Canadian per hour. Long-term, it would have sucked because the wage was too low. But short-term, it was exactly what I needed at the time to recharge my batteries.
In terms of real career work? Just after I graduated from university, it was a team of young hotshots that made custom .NET apps for improving work processes at a telecom company. Ton of freedom, ton of competence, ton of stuff that got done. Still possibly the best team I've ever worked with.
I really miss my first job after school. I was working in a factory. No responsibility, no thinking, just some mindless labour. I worked physically hard enough to be tired at the end of the day and got to talk to my coworkers while the job was pretty much done on autopilot.
But the pay was not great and the career options were non existent.
But I don't think I'd be able to be very happy outside of work on that sort of money now days.
None. Haven't found a company that would meet my standard. And we're talking about class A companies. I should try to start my own company, I think it's the only way to get what I want.
Less micro micromanagement, room for innovation over productivity, freedom to move from dev to product to design, etc. Ability to work from home whenever, communication skills over whiteboarding skills when hiring new folks.
The question was "at what company we're you the happiest" and you said "none"? You can be unhappy at ever but you would have still been happier at one over the other.
With few exceptions it's always the place I'm currently working, because happiness in work is a big priority for me, so when I move from place to place I always try to make an improvement in how much I enjoy work.
When I'm unhappy, I ask myself why, and how much effort I think it will take to change what I don't like (which often is something I can change in myself, rather than expecting the environment to do it for me), and if I think it's worth the effort to change (myself or my surroundings) I do.
Otherwise I stay where I'm at until I can figure out how to improve things.
I used to get paid surprisingly well to play capture the flag and hit children with dodge balls, then we'd do stuff like make electric pianos out of 555 timers and paper clips, and popsicle stick trebuchets that could throw a rock several hundred feet.
My most recent job at the Canon Innovation Lab in Kitchener made me the happiest because of the people I worked with. Incredibly dedicated team that were great to be around and working with University of Waterloo students kept me young at heart.
My first job where all I was expected to do was empty the bins, sweep, vacuum and mop. Once all of that was done, I was allowed to do whatever I wanted which meant I learnt a heap from the techs and started doing billable work.
I learnt a heap from working there and went back after a particularly bad stint at another workplace as a tech.
All they ended up caring about was if I was billing out enough to cover all the extra time I was staying at work doing tech stuff, and still managing to keep the place clean.
Stratum Security was my best experience to date. They're very welcoming and provided a lot of guidance. I became a better programmer after working with them. And the way I was let go after the project ended, with a glowing LinkedIn recommendation and a bonus MacBook Pro... beats words.
Apple was the most rewarding in many ways, but I was happier working retail at Nestor's sporting goods in Quakertown, PA. I was young and full of vigor, we went camping together many nights after work, rode bicycles together every Sunday, and all was well in the world (year: 2000).
German user here, I loved my Hiptop/Sidekick phones! IPhone functionality way before Apple got it!
Loved also the skiing game easter egg. Had the first and second phone, was crazy in love with them. Still have them in a box somewhere, was thinking about resuscitating them for hipster purposes.
Seriously, I loved these phones, one of my best gadgets I ever had. Unbreakable, full of functionality, clever design... i hated to see them go. Had a Nokia Blackberry clone afterwards that I couldn't stand.
Nice to see someone from Danger. Whatever happened to the company, rumour was it was bought up by Apple? I also heard Steve Wozniak was somehow involved?
Steve Wozniak was on the board of directors, so we met him once at an all-hands meeting. (The other major celebrity appearance was from Thomas Dolby, who was involved with the Beatnik Audio Engine that we used for sound.)
The SnowBored easter egg was the subject of some internal controversy because it wasn't part of the standard QA testing process. There were initially some bugs in invoking it from localized keyboards where the asterisk wasn't on the 8 key.
The company was bought by Microsoft, and the Kin was the ill-fated result. Many of us went to Google and made Android; others went to Apple and made the iPhone; still others went to Palm and made the Pre.
Working at a non profit in SF. I had almost full autonomy doing both tech support and dev, and by the time I left I had the job down pat. People liked me, and I liked working there.
Alas the obvious downside was not making nearly enough to live on remotely comfortably in the Bay Area.
At my current company (Aha!). Fully remote which is great for me because I'm a night owl. Interesting and technically challenging work in my favorite stack (Rails/React). We use our own product so I get to see my new code/features in front of me the next day. Great environment to learn about running a seriously profitable and successful startup from the inside. And the engineering culture is right in the sweet spot -- independent and self-directed but with brilliant colleagues available to bounce ideas when I get stuck; committed to quality but pragmatic about reality for a large codebase; forward-thinking and open to new technologies but cautious about balancing value and benefit vs. the inherent risks introduced by change.
My first industry job back in my home country (I live in America now). The company did outsourcing work for a large multinational technology company, and for me it struck the perfect balance between having to be too emotionally involved with the product and getting step by step specs of what needed to be done.
The work was like this: they gave us access to the product's source code and a set of high level requirements (i.e. support standard X, write a new tool that enables automation of Y, add feature Z, etc.). It was up to me and my team members to figure out how to actually implement those things according to the requirements they gave us.
I absolutely loved that setup and really, really miss it. It was challenging in the sense that I had to learn a code base, learn new stuff, read RFCs, and figure out real solutions to real problems. But the problems were handed to me - I didn't have to come up with them.
Every job I've had since then comes with the IMO unreasonable expectation that I be super involved with the product and come up with new ideas and features for it as if I owned it somehow (which I don't). I absolutely loathe that - if I wanted to have that attitude towards work I'd start my own company (which I haven't since I have no business ideas). I'm much more of a "tell me what's the problem and I'll fix it" kind of person, but I haven't been able to find any jobs like that after my first one.
I've had a few jobs that I was really happy at. In fact, most of my jobs have been on the happy end and the ones that weren't, I've moved on quickly. I generally like smaller companies where there's a "family" atmosphere.
1. My current company has been pretty good to me. During the 2011 Super Outbreak [0], when my city lost power for a week or so, they took all the employees and their families and put us up in hotels in Nashville for a few days until things stabilized and we could return home. We didn't even have to work if we didn't want to. After a stressful day of tornadoes and a few days with no power, a nice hot shower was very welcome. Stuff like that is pretty normal here. They take good care of us.
2. I worked for a company that did e-learning materials while I was in college. Our product was basically a self-contained website with videos, subtitles, tests, etc, distributed on CDs. This was the early 2000s, so pretty bleeding edge then.
The owner was a business professor full time and this was his side project. We were always small, and him and his wife always took an interest in all the students that worked for them. Getting a home-cooked meal and a night of poker once a week was a nice perk for a poor college student.
The cool thing, though, was there was no pressure to stay. They knew we were students, they knew we were going to graduate eventually and take jobs elsewhere. It was a mutually beneficial scenario where they got relatively cheap labor (but compared to my friends I was making bank), and we got good experience before heading out into the world.
3. I was a park ranger for the NPS in Yellowstone for a few seasons as well. And that was a fantastic job. I wrote about that in another HN thread [1].
112 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadhttp://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/Happiness-Is-Lo...
Since you asked, I personally work directly with all of the above (as a product lead). My expertise is in software, mechanical, process, and systems engineering.
Unfortunately, I like getting paid and I've been let down in that regard. I was there for 5 years and left for a job at a big 3-letter corporation and then some other corporations. I've been soul searching for a decade now.
Which might sound surprising, given the pay and work hours... but there's a lot to be said for working with a group of people you love with all your heart, who have your back, in a field you are passionate about and have been since you were a kid.
Grad school was incredibly hard work, and the pay sucked. But I wouldn't give back a single day of it.
(I get the impression that the trend has been gradually towards more structure and less autonomy in "doctoral programs" -- from my point of view, that's sad).
PS. did you follow Akin's Laws?
37. (Henshaw's Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.
I also worked in a hypergrowth unicorn from the early days and I would also call those first couple of years there my happiest job, even though it was tons of work and full cowboy mode.
That was when I was in my mid-20s and single. I am 100% sure that I wouldn't enjoy that right now in my current stage in life. (mid-30s and married now)
Its never about the company or the work.
You'll be happy if you have a boss who trusts you completely and colleagues that aren't a-holes. If you have this you will find the work thats interesting.
The only way that comes to mind is knowing someone well enough in a company that needs your skills when you need a job. Its a very small intersection in time/space/relationships.
I've always lucked into these situations. And honestly I never really realized how lucky I was because I didn't have anything to compare it to.
Not joining teams with bad bosses is one way to go about this. This is also very very difficult because these guys will offer you a ton of money.
Honestly, the best advice I think is to follow your best boss when he moves once you've found one. (Again this advice only "works" in SV where there are a massive number of growing companies where people move very frequently).
Given that you know to look for a good boss and you know to resist offers purely based on financial terms, I think you are helping yourself to make your own "luck" :)
Yeah, I'm at the same company I was at 18 months ago and at that time it was the one I'd been the most happiest at in my career. Autonomy, great leadership, trust, people over process.
Same company today, same work, but the opposite of all those intangibles. New leadership, new values. Significant turnover now, following an era of unusually low turnover. Total commitment to the new direction despite the picture painted by direct feedback and turnover.
The most notable was a couple years I spent working under a pharma giant, I've never felt so disgusted with myself in my life. Coming up with new ways to get money from your customers, I mean patients, for the same or lesser service did not sit right with me.
So for me, it's largely about the work/company. How can you not care about what you contribute to day-to-day, yet feel entitled to be upset at CEO's and politicians who do bad things "for the money"?
I think everyone from migrant workers to a fortune 500 CEO has a moral obligation to not write off injustices they are contributing to because of their mortgage or whatever money-centric excuse they use. At the same time, live your life the way you want. You just aren't any better than the bank lobbyists/Comcast CEO/insert evil company leader here, they all have the same excuse as you...money. You are your actions, not your words or thoughts.
I agree with you. However, I suspect HN has a lot of people who value these things, but I wonder what percentage of people are purely focused on other things (e.g. money, power, etc)and don't care much about these values outside of how it serves their primary motivations. Sometimes these are the people who value autonomy in their own jobs, but want to make sure nobody else has autonomy in theirs. Relationships are also a means to an end.
Mastery sticks out to me in this. In a lot of years of working, I've only met a few people who really pushed themselves towards mastery. Or worse, they mastered focusing on their Job Title/Salary. Many people seem to be fine with being satisfactory. I don't think there's anything wrong with this since satisfactory means you're doing a good job.
I worked as an intern at a factory while at university studying computer science. All the process machines were computer controlled, along with office computers for accounting and material control. Despite having a workforce of 200, there were only 2 IT guys there - 1 sysadmin, 1 developer, and I was slotted between them.
I was given a year-long development project, but during lulls in the activity, I was able to help both guys with their work, and in doing so, found several long-suspended projects the sysadmin had wanted to implement. I was able to kick some of these into gear; for one of them, a virtualisation project, I wrote a design document in my own time, presented it with projected costs to the CEO and was given the okay to start it. We built the platform (ESXi) on time and under budget, and there were a lot of immediate benefits. I was able to retire half the servers in the server room.
It all really boiled down to trust; I was given the keys to the kingdom at that job, with domain admin access to do tech support, and not only did I get to play with some cool technology, I was able to implement stuff that made people's lives easier - I built a Windows Deployment Server (another long mothballed idea) which brought our workstation build time from 6 hours (fresh install of XP plus post-install updates, not even slipstreamed, then install software manually) down to 15 minutes (deploying the pre-built image over PXE). I do believe I left the place in a better state than when I joined, but it was quite bittersweet - I came to realise I'd probably never be trusted with that kind of power over the company infrastructure again.
My first real job, I was a tiny cog in a global machine, and I couldn't deal with that. I lasted 3 months before quitting. My next job was in development, I stuck that for 3 years as it was predictable and fairly calm. I didn't enjoy it as much, but I needed the stability at the time. I moved into DevOps for a year, but my boss was an incredible micromanager who didn't trust people beneath him to do their jobs. After a year of being ignored and getting little work done, I lost interest.
I found another job, which I started last month. In contrast to my previous experience in long-established companies, I'm now working at a start-up as a sysadmin. And whilst the pace and the rapid hiring are really different to what I'm used to, I have some of that intern power again - my suggestions are taken on board, and I am trusted to do my job. I also get on very well with the people here, and they're coming to appreciate having someone to turn to for tech issues - previously, no single person was in charge of inventory or tech support, and now they can just ask me.
I think the intern job was the best of both worlds - the calm, predictable pace of an established firm, but with the startup-ish get-it-done attitude to IT work that stopped bureaucracy getting in the way. But I think I can deal with the fast pace so long as I can stay in control of my responsibilities.
1. Unpack the lumber. 2. Restack the lumber in a formation that would allow for maximum lumber loaded into the shipping containers. 3. Rewrap the lumber in plastic and staple the plastic in place.
It was mindless work where I didn't have to think about anything, had no deadlines, and I got physical exercise to boot. It paid $12 Canadian per hour. Long-term, it would have sucked because the wage was too low. But short-term, it was exactly what I needed at the time to recharge my batteries.
In terms of real career work? Just after I graduated from university, it was a team of young hotshots that made custom .NET apps for improving work processes at a telecom company. Ton of freedom, ton of competence, ton of stuff that got done. Still possibly the best team I've ever worked with.
But the pay was not great and the career options were non existent.
But I don't think I'd be able to be very happy outside of work on that sort of money now days.
When I'm unhappy, I ask myself why, and how much effort I think it will take to change what I don't like (which often is something I can change in myself, rather than expecting the environment to do it for me), and if I think it's worth the effort to change (myself or my surroundings) I do.
Otherwise I stay where I'm at until I can figure out how to improve things.
Easily the best job I've had.
1. Much more interaction with people
2. If I didn't sleep too well on a particular day I can still teach but with programming I'm not productive enough
3. Deadlines and pacing is easier
4. Much more free time when students are doing an exercise or don't need you that much anymore (after 2 months)
[1] The source is in Dutch but Google Translate works good enough to understand the gist, see: https://uurtarief.tips/nl/zzp/ict/uurtarief-ict-zzp-freelanc...
I learnt a heap from working there and went back after a particularly bad stint at another workplace as a tech.
All they ended up caring about was if I was billing out enough to cover all the extra time I was staying at work doing tech stuff, and still managing to keep the place clean.
Loved also the skiing game easter egg. Had the first and second phone, was crazy in love with them. Still have them in a box somewhere, was thinking about resuscitating them for hipster purposes.
Seriously, I loved these phones, one of my best gadgets I ever had. Unbreakable, full of functionality, clever design... i hated to see them go. Had a Nokia Blackberry clone afterwards that I couldn't stand.
Nice to see someone from Danger. Whatever happened to the company, rumour was it was bought up by Apple? I also heard Steve Wozniak was somehow involved?
The SnowBored easter egg was the subject of some internal controversy because it wasn't part of the standard QA testing process. There were initially some bugs in invoking it from localized keyboards where the asterisk wasn't on the 8 key.
The company was bought by Microsoft, and the Kin was the ill-fated result. Many of us went to Google and made Android; others went to Apple and made the iPhone; still others went to Palm and made the Pre.
Alas the obvious downside was not making nearly enough to live on remotely comfortably in the Bay Area.
The work was like this: they gave us access to the product's source code and a set of high level requirements (i.e. support standard X, write a new tool that enables automation of Y, add feature Z, etc.). It was up to me and my team members to figure out how to actually implement those things according to the requirements they gave us.
I absolutely loved that setup and really, really miss it. It was challenging in the sense that I had to learn a code base, learn new stuff, read RFCs, and figure out real solutions to real problems. But the problems were handed to me - I didn't have to come up with them.
Every job I've had since then comes with the IMO unreasonable expectation that I be super involved with the product and come up with new ideas and features for it as if I owned it somehow (which I don't). I absolutely loathe that - if I wanted to have that attitude towards work I'd start my own company (which I haven't since I have no business ideas). I'm much more of a "tell me what's the problem and I'll fix it" kind of person, but I haven't been able to find any jobs like that after my first one.
1. My current company has been pretty good to me. During the 2011 Super Outbreak [0], when my city lost power for a week or so, they took all the employees and their families and put us up in hotels in Nashville for a few days until things stabilized and we could return home. We didn't even have to work if we didn't want to. After a stressful day of tornadoes and a few days with no power, a nice hot shower was very welcome. Stuff like that is pretty normal here. They take good care of us.
2. I worked for a company that did e-learning materials while I was in college. Our product was basically a self-contained website with videos, subtitles, tests, etc, distributed on CDs. This was the early 2000s, so pretty bleeding edge then.
The owner was a business professor full time and this was his side project. We were always small, and him and his wife always took an interest in all the students that worked for them. Getting a home-cooked meal and a night of poker once a week was a nice perk for a poor college student.
The cool thing, though, was there was no pressure to stay. They knew we were students, they knew we were going to graduate eventually and take jobs elsewhere. It was a mutually beneficial scenario where they got relatively cheap labor (but compared to my friends I was making bank), and we got good experience before heading out into the world.
3. I was a park ranger for the NPS in Yellowstone for a few seasons as well. And that was a fantastic job. I wrote about that in another HN thread [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14390927
(that's only happened the once, though)