Chapter 2
What Do You Want in a Job?

I was ready to leave my job. I had reached a plateau in my professional development at my company. My boss clearly had no interest in using any more of my skills. I reported to the department head, and it seemed likely that he was going to install a new supervisor over me. The writing was on the wall, so I started looking.

My job was doing web applications in ColdFusion under Windows, and I was itching to work with Perl in Unix or Linux. One Sunday as I scanned the Chicago Tribune’s listings, I saw a job that spoke to me.

Perl programmer wanted with web application experience. We use mod_perl under Solaris.

It sounded perfect! I contacted the recruiter offering the job, and he brought me down to his office to meet with him the next morning. The recruiter thought I was a good candidate and sent me to the far outreaches of Chicago to meet with the hiring manager at 1 p.m. We hit it off, and by 4:30 p.m., before I’d even reached home, I had a job offer for 20 percent more than I was making. I was ecstatic and accepted immediately. A few weeks later, I started at my new position.

Fast-forward two months. I was miserable. One morning I called my wife, and as we talked about my dissatisfaction, I realized that my situation was such that it couldn’t possibly get better. I walked into my boss’s office and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to leave.” He tried to get me to stay, but I knew it couldn’t work. Ten minutes later I’d packed up my stuff and was out the door.

That decision cost me. I had no other job lined up, and I’d overestimated the ease with which I could get hired. Worst of all, it was early December. Businesses all but shut down in December when it comes to hiring as managers and decision makers go on holiday vacations. I was glad to be out of that situation, but it cost me a few months of salary.

What went wrong? I ask audiences for their ideas when telling this story at conferences. I’d had a great programming job doing what I wanted, and I was making great money at it. What could have been so terrible? Why was my situation so grim? What made me up and quit? And how had I not realized that it would be so bad? Audience members offer a wide range of suggestions:

• “Your boss was an idiot.”

• “It was all death march projects.”

• “You weren’t working on any projects at all.”

• “The company was poorly managed.”

• “It was maintenance programming only.”^[4]

• “The hours were awful. You worked lots of overtime.”

• “It was a terrible location, and the commute was brutal.”

• “The company was insolvent and was going to go under soon.”

• “You weren’t allowed to work with open source.”

• “Your co-workers were jerks and idiots.”

• “You weren’t actually qualified for the job.”

• “You didn’t get to use any creativity.”

• “They had unreasonable expectations of you.”

None of these was the problem. Although the commute was rough, I could live with that if I was otherwise happy with the job. No, the problem was that I wasn’t interested in what the company did, and I wasn’t part of a team.

I’d accepted a job working for a financial services firm. There were a dozen investors watching quote boards and CNN all day, figuring out how to play the markets. The aura was one of extreme competitiveness. Aggressive macho posturing permeated everything. Worse, there was no sense of teamwork. I worked on solo projects, and half the team would only talk to people of their own nationality.

More important, I didn’t have any interest in the industry. I’d left a company that wrote software for children’s libraries, which I found very fulfilling, and gone to one that made money for rich people.

I have nothing against making money, and I’m glad that my 401(k) fund is managed by people who love it, but I know (now) that it’s not the industry or environment for me.

The lesson here is “Don’t take a job that doesn’t give you what you want.” The underlying corollary is “You can’t get what you want ’til you know what you want.” But how do you know what you want, what’s important, what matters? That’s the focus of this chapter.

But before we go on, let’s have a little crash course in human motivational theory.