Environmental Extremes

I don't like having to work so many different places in IT: retention rates these days seem to be awful.



But the interesting thing has been the experiences I've had with so many different places.

At this point, I've been in massive corporate halls of beautiful marble, where everyone is beautiful and they wear the latest fashions...and I've been in 8-room offices with ripped furniture, beer in the break room, and X-Box on Fridays.

What I learned from this is that for me, it really doesn't matter where I work. It's what I'm doing, and who I'm with. Do I like what I'm doing? If not, can I at least keep doing it without coming home miserable and/or annoyed? Are the people nice? That plays an important part--if you like being around the people you work with, you can overlook a lot of sins.

I had one job that was very personally rewarding: I felt like I was part of something great, and I was doing a lot of good for a lot of people--except the ones I was working for. For them I could do no right. They made me miserable, did horrible things with no regard for the danger they placed the general public in, and they ruined my health physically with the most horrible work environment an office could ever manage.

What matters to you?