In less than three months I will be leaving my current position, and I started thinking about the kind of place I want to work at. Here are the points I thought of, with the most important ones appearing first:
- Awesome developers to work with. In my current workplace I’ve been one of the most veteran developers for a while, and it naturally put me in a teaching position. While I like teaching, I feel that the best way to learn is from others, and lately I’ve been learning less. In my ideal workplace I would be the junior developer, where people point at my code and say “yeah, but you could have made it a lot simpler by…”. So, smart, talented developers to learn from is definitely the most important thing to me in the new place.
- An interesting product. I want to work on something I believe in. I prefer working for a start-up company doing something very cool, over a safer enterprise environment doing in-house development. Also, I’m young and don’t mind working hard if I’m having fun and there’s a chance to hit the jackpot :)
- An agile environment. I was one of the people who implemented agile methodologies at my current place, and I would really want it to already exist in the new place. It’s not an absolute must for me, I guess, but if I have to convince everyone, yet again, that unit-tests are very very important, I might get very tired indeed.
- A comfortable working environment: a strong computer with a two monitor setup, a good chair (not a must, I guess, I can bring my own as I did in the last place), quiet offices with no more than 2 or 3 developers in each. The best software tools should be available, or at least a management that agrees to buy the stuff the developers need. I shouldn’t have to beg for a ReSharper license, right?
- Great atmosphere. Because work should be fun, not a chore.
I know it might not be realistic to find a job at such a place, but I would be very excited if I could.
If you live in Israel, and happen to work in my ideal workplace (or even your ideal workplace), and you’re looking for someone who loves developing great software, you can contact me and I’ll send you my C.V.