31–40 of 47 posts
Environment/Atmosphere and Team go hand in hand.
For example, Fog Creek's offices look awesome. But if you don't care much about Joel, the atmosphere might not work for you.
Looking at the rest of the options, that's what I think at least. If that's not the intent for "Environment/Atmosphere", something like that should be added then, because that can play a big role. A spacious office with views and Aeron chairs is always better than a small windowless room sitting on a pizza box, everything else being equal.
All those are important, and any honest person will say that most of those things matter to a large extent. Who wants to work with great technology, compensation and responsibility, but with a lousy team and environment? What you really want to do is to get people to order them, rather than just vote on them.
Right - hopefully the total vote volumes here end up as a decent proxy. We'll get more sophisticated with this later.
Pay matters only as a signal.
Oh, and lots of money. That'll take the edge off of horrible work any day of the week.
I think the environment/atmosphere is key. If you're getting hassled all day, horrible coworkers, management issues, etc, it takes a really resilient personality to deal with that just for the money. As such, it surprises me that compensation and challenging work go above it. Even if I were being paid $200,000 a year to do cool work, if I had to deal with mega social and management issues, if I had to stay there I'd…
I think you need to look at it relatively. Given an average job, would you rather get an extra $10,000 a year or have a corner office? Would you rather have two of your friends in the team or work on Ruby-on-Rails rather than Java? (in your case, I believe it would be odd for you to accept a Java job in the first place...) Then again, you can argue that it depends on how much more money we're talking about.
But I don't think it makes the poll pointless. It still gives you an idea (vague, granted) of the community. (even though I'm surprised that compensation comes first so far)
Money, but until a certain treshold. After X per month other factors kick in, specially whom am I working with and what. Boring work can be made awesome with the right people, the opposite ain't true. People will crush you even if you're doing what you love.
I'm sorry I don't know exactly what studies he was referring too, but I'm highly inclined to believe what he was saying and it would agree with what you are saying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He means even fascinating work can't make working with the wrong people awesome.
He probably should have said "inverse".
I guess that's why I put the phrase after "the opposite ain't true"... anyway thanks everyone.
Being in Canada, everything but health care/benefits.