Ask HN: Do you have a dream job?

I work as a System admin and a client support tech for a small-ish MSP.

I really thought that this is what I wanted to do. I could solve interesting and new problems every and be given a chance to explore what is effectively the infinite depths of computing at a very technical level.

I was really happy initially but as time has went on, I've become more and more aware that customer-facing IT has a lot less to do with solving technical problems, and a lot more to do with solving social problems - Talking to people and setting expectations and bridging a gap between what should actually be done and what the customer thinks should be done....and I'm not good at that. I want to solve difficult, technical problems. I don't want my job description to be 'I primarily deal with people and technical competence is secondary'.

So I'm not there yet, but I feel this experience has helped really carve out what I do want for a career, so I'm glad I've had the experience. If there is one thing it helped define, is the quality of people I work with. I get to work with awesome people, and if I could find these kinds of people doing a more technically-focused job, that might be the dream.

I've been coding commercially for 12 years now, and in 2008 I landed what I would class as a dream job. It was a contractor position up near Reading in the UK, but became permanent. I spent 4 years having a great time, interesting work, great people to work with, and an awesome culture. Then we got bought out by Oracle. I lasted 8 months and moved back to Kent.

Now I work for an ISP (I worked with one of the directors about 10 years ago) 10mins from home, working on everything that needs doing, and I would say that this is a dream job.

I guess it depends on your circumstances, and what you need at the time. Dream job is such a loose phrase. They have both had their downsides, but in happiness levels they have both excelled!

Edit. I should say that I worked at various places before, and none really compare, but they did give a good grounding and helped me figure out what it was i wanted from a job. (Hint:the money is nice, but after a while job satisfaction and quality of life take precedent)

> If some people can identify with your goals and interests, this may help them find a job they love.

There's a solid, recent book on this very subject by Robert Kaplan. Here's his presentation from Talks @ Google, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sY-qwEYjs0

It might not be anyone else's dream job, but I find myself working on things I would anyway be doing for fun (like a specialized bytecode interpreter, audio effect algorithms, various little research projects which happen to improve my Python and Javascript skills...). The only problem is it makes my non-work time feel a bit less interesting by comparison!

No, I have a shit job. Started great went downhill after a year.

I loved it the first year, getting requirements, designing and building the database, and web front end for a sequencing centre. Learning a new language, web framework, some JavaScript, using my existing database and coding skills and pushing them further.

Three and a half years on all I seem to do is fix the same excel upload errors (it was a temporary quick fix solution that has always been bottom priority for replacement), go to dumb meetings where they spend half an hour discuss the acronyms used in the menus, and change colour of items. I never get a chance to focus on anything that takes more than half a days coding, so basically all the interesting work is now replaced by trivial fixes usually where the users seem incapable of reading the error message (though with Excel it impossible to guess what the problem will be).

I was promised a promotion last year, but that hasn't happened yet (I work in Spain, and government cuts mean it not allowed until we merge with another institute). I have realised recently, that it is making me frustrated and deeply unhappy, so I am willing to take a pay hit (on my future wage) to do something that I actually enjoy again.

Ideally I want to go freelance, but there isn't such a big market here in Spain, and the common advice is to build up your portfolio (tricky when your work is in house).

Anyway, as I realised recently, do something you enjoy, and don't get sucked into the management style thing if you that isn't what you want to do. If management are not listening to your suggestions, it is time to get out. The promise of more money has kept me hanging on far too long.

Program Manager overseeing data collection

Washington, DC

Applied

My job isn't awesome but I certainly don't hate it. I would much rather be working for a law enforcement agency. But I'm at a solid point in my current career, and I was going to work for the FBI but I would have to take a pay cut and it would take 2 years to get back to the pay I currently make. So add that in with a house and family and I just don't think I'm going to make a career move. So I just try and volunteer places to do criminal analysis and may pursue my PhD.

I'm a technology lawyer in Toronto, Canada.

I got my job by starting my own law practice after working at a large tech company + a large law firm. Most lawyers work at firms for several years (or forever) instead of doing their own thing. I did contract programming work for many years before starting my practice so I knew what I was getting into by starting my own business. Without my background in programming I wouldn't have most of my clients. I also get a lot of inbound leads because my website does well on Google (re: former web developer).

My job is awesome because I get to help entrepreneurs start their businesses/keep them running smoothly. I'm independent so I can offer reasonably-priced, fast and flexible service. Another benefit of being independent is that I get to work for businesses that other people might not touch such as Bitcoin-related companies. It's more interesting than being a programmer because I get a higher-level view and work with a wide variety of people. I still keep one foot in the world of programming by building my own services on the side.

I'm a web architect / software engineer at a language learning company.

I got the job by a referral of an acquaintance from a local software Meetup.com group that I attend regularly. When I got frustrated with my last job, I approached the leaders of the Meetup group (who I sort of knew as acquaintances by that point) and said "Hey guys, I'm sort of looking around now. Let me know if you hear anything." A few weeks later, one of those guys made an email introduction to me of another guy who works at the company I'm currently at. He brought me in for an interview... at first, I was just kind of going to the interview as a courtesy - I was pretty sure I didn't want to work here - but when I met the guys and the boss I would be working with, I was sold pretty quickly. They seemed like really fun, intelligent guys when we met and they are. If there was a point in the interview that sold it to me, it was probably the point where I asked them if we should start the whiteboard coding portion of the interview and they waived it off, saying "That's just for people who we think are bullshitting us. We can tell you know what you're talking about and what you're doing."

I just got back from the beach for a week, and while it was nice to be away for a little bit, I was genuinely excited to get back in the office on Monday. I don't remember ever feeling that way at any other job I've had, so I guess I have to say this is my "Dream Job". That doesn't mean I want to do it forever - I'm a firm believer that even the "Dreamiest" job doesn't beat working for yourself, but I have to say I really enjoy it. Unless someone offered me something on the order of 2-3x what I make here, I wouldn't consider leaving (and I make a pretty decent amount for my region/experience).

What makes it that way?

1. Boss. Best/most competent guy I've ever worked for. He somehow has the "magic touch" of keeping the team focused on things we can deliver, calling bullshit on all the paper-pushers and meeting-mongrels that try to sap our time ("No one on my team has a company phone. No one in this company has the right to innterupt my devs while they're working."), and rolling up his sleeves and coding when we have to stay super-late to get something done (only happened once). He also judges on "body of work" more than individual incidents ("You went out at 2PM and get drunk with your co-workers yesterday? No problem, you usually get your shit done in good order and on time. You showboated about staying until 1AM last night? Bullshit - on a regular basis, you don't get shit done. Try harder.")

2. Open-ness of the team. "You have been messing around with a new library/framework at home for the last couple of weeks and you really like it? Come in and show it to the rest of the team for a couple hours tomorrow. Team discusses it, weighs benefits/drawback/long-term-maintainability...it's in production a week later." "You met an awesome guy at a meetup last week? Bring him in here and interview him. Two weeks later, he's hired."

3. "Goldilocks" company atmosphere. Not "douchy-SV-startup concrete walls and beanbag-chairs", but not "corporate cubicle farm" either. It's a great mix of people from different parts of the world, different age ranges / genders / etc. We have free sodas/coffee, but not free beer. People leave at 6. There is usually a happy hour every couple of weeks where we get together at a crappy bar and have a great time, but no one's social circle consists entirely of coworkers. If you're married/kids people tell you what happened at the happy hour the next day so no one feels like they're "left out".

I had my dream job awhile back, where I was paid to work full time on my own open source project. Essentially my employer was offering the software to customers, and they wanted to make sure it was maintained. It was easygoing, I set my own roadmaps, and I had the freedom to contribute to struggling third-party dependencies as needed (I felt like an open source superman, swooping in). This job lasted for several years until I quit to pursue startup life.

I'm currently the founder of my own funded company, which in a way sounds like a dream job too, but because there are a lot of non-coding distractions and also huge stress levels, I don't think it's really the same. The cushy open source gig was the dream job. :) Maybe after I'm "successful" I'll go back to that.

- I work for a mental health nonprofit, largest one in the country at the moment.

- I got into IT after being a warehouse worker and "being good with computers" there. I did air guitar to land my first IT job.

- My current job is awesome because as a nonprofit everyone is very huggy-feely, lots of psychiatrists leading the way and whatnot. It is also awesome because I am given free reign to come up with solutions, design new systems and generally tinker with a home-built lab using old equipment I was loaned by this non-profit.

- We get several different models of charity licensing from various vendors in addition to having some of the best negotiators around. A non-profit running all EMC storage, backup and replication? Pretty awesome.

I love the work in general and would do it for peanuts, almost.

I'm a teaching professor of information systems and I'm in charge of the capstone course for our undergraduate program. That means I get to act as coach/mentor for about 35 web and mobile app projects per year (for real clients ranging from startups to multinationals), am very plugged in to the IT and startup scenes in the area, and I get to learn through students' experience about all the development subjects I'm interested in. I assign students to give "tech talks" on the things they're discovering, and I can invite all kinds of experts to come give guest lectures to my classes, which they are often happy to do. On top of all that, publishers practically throw tech books at me if I even hint that I might use assign of their titles as a textbook. And I get to wear a bow tie to work with no one second-guessing me. At least not out loud...

Getting the job meant hard work, prayer, and mental toughness to get through the hazing process of a 5-year PhD and 1-year postdoc earning next to nothing. There are probably easier ways to get a dream job.

Hey

I am still studying computer engineering. My dream job has two branches: travelling and coding, I want to have a job which let me travel to countries, and I want to have enough time for creating something with my codes which are useful for me or for others. I dont know how to get this job, it is the next episode, I learn now how to program.

I got a master's degree in computer science last february (image recognition, stuff like that), however I tought (and still do) I wouldn't like to work in that field. What I wanted to do is something close to web development and design (I mean visual stuff here).

I had two goals: - Live overseas (I'm french), no real destination, I think I would like to move from time to time - Work at a startup or at least where people care about what they are doing instead of how much money they make and how much time they can skip without bosses noticing.

I got some interview, one who almost went through in London, however my degree wasn't really relevant to what I wanted to do, so I started to try learn stuff as quickly as possible, so I made a portfolio in Node and Angular (in the most basic way you can I think, I litterally used/read about angular for less than 20 hours).

However having this thing done opened me some more interview, and I found one opportunity that I really liked, at a startup as a front-end developer. The lack of experience didn't allow me to get an interview though, however the recruiter took the decision on his own to make me do a test originally for another dude, and apparently I passed because I work here for 2 months now, and things are going really well.

At that time, I was ready to accept pretty much anything that pay, but I got very lucky and got exactly what I wanted and expected. The only downside is that I use 2 hours to commute (1 hour in the morning and 1 hour in the evening), but I can't afford closer and better.

I would qualify that as my dream job, however I know I will want to upgrade, change country in the future, dream job evolves along with you growing up I guess.

I am looking for my dream job