Ask HN: Who here loves their job?

Some parts of internet culture (including HN) would make you believe that barely anybody is actually fulfilled by their job.

I know that there'll be people who say that they prefer to keep their job as just a job and find fulfilment elsewhere, but I'd like to hear from those who've managed to crack the "secret" in making a living from doing what they love.

If you are one of those people, what do you do and how did you come to working a fulfilling job?

I’m a software engineer in a non profit research organisation. I can play with the latest and greatest technology all the time. I assist researchers, I break their dreams, I make experiments happen.

I also worked on the industry a few times but it was quickly boring and I couldn’t care less about the profits for the wealth of the shareholders.

I'm lucky enough to program at a place with technologies I love (e.g., Linux) and with really awesome and smart people. It's still work, so it's still more stressful and less fun than programming could theoretically be, but I feel super grateful to be here.

Not currently.

However, I've had jobs that were really great and were very fulfilling for stretches of a few years at a time. Mostly because they were a stretch / challenging for me at the time, and allowed me to move to new cities and better my lifestyle, meet new people, etc - so it's not completely stupid to expect fulfillment from a job.

The problem is that whether a job is fulfilling or not isn't under your control, it only takes one bad reorg or boss or layoff to mess it up for the next few years.

I don't think I've ever had a job I completely loved, and I've worked in video games as an engineer, designer, and producer. But that probably came closest.

I'm not currently doing anything close to that in my current job, and it's very mentally draining. But there's a lot of toxic and abusive behavior in the video game industry too, and it pays a hell of a lot lower (especially if I were to try to switch back into it now).

If I didn't have to worry about my paycheck today, I'd probably work in board game industry (or just write novels and be a freelance game designer).

The board game industry has its own problems, but I think that would be the most fulfilling. But that would be an even greater paycut. I might have to take a job making 25% or less of what I'm currently making to go into that industry full-time, and that's not really doable for me right now.