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What's your dream job?
Do you have a dream job/one you've always thought about doing?
Do you work your own dream job? If you do, what is something you'd like to change about it to make it even better?
This question popped in my head this morning while not wanting to dive in to a weird work thing and after a quick look, it's been ~4 years since the last time a similar question was asked by @kfwyre (who posts awesome discussion questions!), and I thought that it's been long enough to ask again for new Tilders to chime in or for whoever answered last time to come back and see if their answers are the same.
I do not dream of labor. If I were left alone and to my own devices, no repercussions to my ability to have shelter and to feed myself because society has devalued my output, I’d probably write and draw comic books.
Is writing and drawing not labor?
Here's why the term "labor" is so loaded. If you ask two people what their dream job is, one might say "I want to work at an animal shelter", while the other says "I don't want to work. I want the ability to do things I want with my free time, like help at an animal shelter". It's the exact same work, but the mindset changes based on how you view terms like "labor" and "job".
In this case, I think it's because they want to write and draw with no expectation for "success". They can make a comic they are happy with, and even if nobody else even knows it exists they will still be fulfilled by the work they have done. Nobody else benefits consistently, it's for their own creative whims.
Correct. If I had the ability to singularly focus on this without fear of destitution, I’d be rich in ways other than wealth and power. But for now I trade a third of my life to justifying my existence, probably closer to half when you figure in things like recovery time from the micro injuries I’ve picked up over a lifetime of working.
In addition, accepting money for labour means assuming responsibility for delivering something of a certain quality in a certain timeframe. This completely kills the fun aspect of any activity for me, and I've always turned down compensation for anything I'm doing for the fun of it.
I feel like this is the answer I resonate with the most. My chosen craft would be my forge instead, but the sentiment is the same. I just made my first commission piece, and pricing it out makes me more anxious than working with red-hot iron. I just want to make cool stuff for myself and my friends.
Congratulations, and hopefully this will be the start of something you love.
It already has been! I have wanted to get into blacksmithing since I was 11 or 12, and almost 2 decades later I am living the dream! I only get about 4 hours of forge time a week, but it's enough to nourish my soul and keep my spirits buoyed. My forge isn't traditional by any means, but it's functional and works for my current living situation, and that's all I need.
As long as it works for you I’m happy for you. What sorts of things do you forge?
It's mostly small trinkets and household items like wall hooks, as well as tools so I can make other future projects. I made a pair of leaf-shaped pins for Elijah Wood and Sean Astin when they came to the local Comicon, and my first commission was a custom decorative piece for a friend.
I've made a few knives, mostly just to see how my skills are progressing, but even as I improve I don't think I'm going to focus on them. There's too many other fun projects out there, and I feel like people immediately think of knives and swords when they think about blacksmithing so it's fun to break that mold.
It might be that I’m a bit of a country boy, but when I think of things made by a blacksmith, I actually mentally jump to horseshoe blacksmithing first and foremost. Then I think of my grandfather and my uncle making their own bullets. Then I tend to think of blacksmithing as a good way to make parts for farm implements, and farm vehicles. Honestly, I kind of think of wood axes and kitchen knives before I think of swords. I genuinely tend to forget that people can still forge swords and weapon knives.
This matches how I feel the most. I don't think there's a single thing that I "dream" of doing from the perspective of labor defined as some work I am performing for others for money as part of the larger societal machine (especially a late-stage capitalist one). And survival in terms of shelter and food shouldn't be reliant on it
I have plenty of hobbies that would be a nice bonus if they could pay the bills, but I feel like the need for money poisons everything it touches. I would rather have the time to do these things without money corrupting them. The hobby becomes the slog, etc. But sure, if I could write or play music or 3D print or do photography or whatever and get paid enough to live, in fulfilling way that doesn't ruin my love of the hobby? Sure.
There are better and worse, tolerable and less tolerable, fulfilling and less fulfilling options for sure, and I am sure I have a hierarchy of preferences I could lay out for those. And unfortunately with the genAI craze, "tech" has fallen to an extremely low place on that hierarchy for me now. I refuse to work anywhere that requires LLMs, unless it gets the the point where it's use an LLM or starve (and even then I might choose starving)
There's certainly nothing so good that I feel so positively and passionately about that I would ever "dream" of doing it for a paycheck. The closest something could come to this would be something coffee related or something done for a non-profit or other beneficial organization making good things happen in the world, not just me slogging away contributing more to the money game
Once I got past a certain age and worldview, the idea of "dreaming" about how best I can fit into the rat race for survival just is a repellent idea to me altogether
At the risk of sounding like a 7 year old, definitely astronaut. I just want to see it so badly. If I were offered a trip to space tomorrow, even with no guarantee of return, I would absolutely take it.
Instead I work a blue collar job that I hate because that's my lot in life and I have accepted it.
Astronaut would definitely be a dream job!
I know NASA can't ethically send people to Mars, but I don't get claustrophobic (unless in an incredibly small space) and if there had been a program to volunteer for a one way trip to Mars to live in an underground shelter before I met my future wife I would have signed up.
Markiplier, is that you?
(Reference: https://youtu.be/jItnCGRsMjw about 53 seconds in)
While watching the recent Artemis II coverage I realized that I would give anything to see that view. Even if I was told "you go up, you see it and then you die" I'd still take it.
I'm fortunate that my dream job is my current job, software engineering! I discovered coding as a teen and never really lost the love for it. One thing I would probably change about it is the chasing of meaningless metrics to "grow the product". I'm going to bitch and moan below, just a fair warning! I'm grateful for the job and its compensation but the chasing of metrics is really dumb to me.
This chasing of minor metrics improvements is what end-users see when they see software getting worse. There is often only a focus on certain metrics (or statistics) being improved, with little regard to the overall user experience end-to-end. Companies focus on things like how many users are clicking a certain button, how long users are staying on a page, how many users click through an ad and buy things, etc. This is why software can feel like it's gotten worse over the years without companies realizing because those companies have hyperfocused on certain metrics increasing steadily month-to-month, year-over-year. One example I can give of this is that I discovered a pretty bad bug in a part of some software that my team is responsible for. The bug wouldn't let you save your changes to something you were editing. I discovered the bug and could've put up a fix but I was stopped in my tracks when asked what metrics my fix would move. No users had complained about it and I was being proactive about resolving issues. Since no metrics were being affected, my work would have no measurable "impact" and therefore not really have any value. As a result, the bug has existed for ~6 months now and will continue to exist until there's a metric it can improve.
Bitching aside, I genuinely do enjoy this job. It's quite entertaining understanding an issue that a business or end-user has, understand how it can be an issue, and then dig into the source code to understand where the issue is.
What's your take on how the trade has changed recently with llms?
I'm fairly early in my career (only been about 3-4 years) so I'm interested in seeing how my opinion differs from @Daedalus_1 and other experienced developers. I also work at a company which is always investing on the bleeding edge of tools so my experience here mainly lies in working with Claude Code and the Opus 4.6 and 4.7 models.
I think I can boil down what I want to say into a few points.
I think AI tools can be beneficial, if used correctly. Relying on them blindly is dangerous and can be harmful for long-term codebase health. To use them effectively, you must learn to frame your problems as tightly as possible, understand the overall system design deeper, and learn to evaluate and verify what the AI generates.
AI tools are redefining what a software engineer is. Building off my previous point, an effective engineer will be someone who can do everything I listed above. An average engineer will be able to just roughly identify where Claude needs to make changes and let it run wild and generate slop. The end result of a "working product" is very similar, but the underlying quality, maintainability, and robustness of the two will diverge quickly.
I think it destroys one of the great joys of software engineering: creativity. AI tools produce conventional solutions that match a generic pattern. Things work but it strips away the ability to be creative in how you approach a problem. The loss of this creativity, along with the ability to hyper-optimize your solutions for every millisecond of execution, reduces the space for engineering novelty and the deeply technical but elegant solutions that come with creativity.
These tools will only accelerate burnout in the industry. This is something that was already prevalent pre-AI but will only continue to intensify. Speaking from my early career perspective, previously I only needed to really focus on 1-2 projects at a time. There was an expected flow of planning, execution, testing, and release that all happened sequentially and independently. Now, I am required to focus on 4-5 projects at a time, while being in a constant cycle of planning, execution, testing, releasing for all projects in parallel. There is an exponential increase in the amount of context switching, which was already considered to be one of the most cognitively costly aspects of engineering.
I do share Daedalus's sentiments of losing some of the day-to-day joy of coding as the role shifts from "software engineer" to "software engineer capable of reviewing, prompting, and architecting with AI while also being a product-oriented generalist".
I have a coworker submitting PR requests and requesting review on code that I don't think he understands how to read. Its obnoxious. Like MAJOR security vulnerabilities, blatantly disregarding established patterns. AI tools have been great for my own productivity, however.
It goes to show how alarmist some of these "AI is making coding obsolete" people are. Sure, it looks like magic at first when someone with no coding experience sets up a cool-looking web app in 30 minutes. Those people are not replacing me any time soon.
I could rant about this ad infinitum. At my company, we've had designers and managers both submit PRs and aggressively request reviews on their "work". I get their excitement in being able to code but the moment that code gets merged in, they're gone. The burden of maintaining that code is on us.
I definitely agree that the "AI is making coding obsolete" folk are just hype machines. I actually recently tried vibe coding up an app I'd wanted to make. It was, as car guys say, a 10-footer. Things looked ok at a distance but once you started analyzing for any period of time, you'd see that the UI didn't follow Apple's guidelines and the actual code structure was a mess. I scrapped the entire thing instead of trying to iterate on it.
AI's been great for my own productivity for sure. I'm glad my team has been fairly smart in our adoption of AI. We've used it to build dashboards for our on-call to consolidate things that were previously under like 8 different sources. We're also exploring using it to automate a lot of the tedious manual work that is also associated with our on-call rotations. I personally use an internal version of OpenClaw to stay on top of my calendar and threads since I've got to context switch between those and all my projects.
I was about to ask the same. I'm a developer with 16+ years of experience, but I fear that I'll lose interest because of our LLMs solving everything for us and we basically become product owners instead of developers.
Archwizard.
I would love to do archival work. Especially around the internet. Double points if it also involves an educational aspect!
I watched a short program on archival restoration of old paper accounting records, how they make paper from pulp and their own glue and thread bind them to look original. Very meticulous and labour intensive but interesting
Yes! I have been getting into genealogy and local history and it's such a rewarding hobby. Would love to turn that into some sort of archive job.
One where I work from home, make lots of money and no one really bothers me or needs anything from me, so I can focus on my hobbies and my family.
Ah, sounds like “trust fund baby” might be right up your alley? 😅
Damn my parents for being working class.
An unfortunate affliction that affects far too many of us...
What's worse: it is somewhat hereditary.
Can I interest you in Technical Marketing Engineer? This has been my role for the past 10y.
How much are we allowed to "dream"? If I could take the job security of an engineering job to do the sorts of work I did while getting my degree, I wouldn't mind that. Bagging groceries, collecting shopping carts; calibrating rain gauges, repairing rain gauges that were hit by tractors, repairing rain gauges that were "hit by tractors", etc. But outside dreamland, I keep applying for things that use my degree.
(anyone hiring mechanical engineers?)
What's the most eye rolling rain gauge that were "hit by tractors" have you come across? How big of a problem is vandalism vs wildlife vs the elements?
I'm sure all kinds of places are hiring mechanical engineers....? Like, companies that are making rain gauges and lasers and piezos and other field instruments are probably always hiring
Cows get out and use them as scratching posts. Curious dogs will try to play with them. Birds try to nest in the top of them. Spiders build webs over them and inside them. Various kinds of animals will dig up and chew through the wires. Etc etc. We know that these things happen sometimes, and it's almost always better to let us know than to try to fix it yourself and make up a story later.
Vandalism isn't usually a problem. Rain totals from thunderstorms vary wildly over even a mile or two, so farmers appreciated having an accurate reading from their exact field. As for the elements, well... they're weather instruments. They're built to deal with the elements. But animals are always the wildcard.
And the last line is tongue-in-cheek because you would think so, right? :| While proofreading, I realized that I never actually said what my degree was in the comment, so that's a funny way to bring it up.
:D opportunity to up-sell 'chewed by cow' warranty!
To this day, this was one of the best jobs I ever had. I bagged groceries, collected shopping carts, and occasionally I'd help an older person with heavy items to their cars.
I loved 97% of it.
The 3% I didn't enjoy? it was the management nonsense. Forcing you to work until midnight on a friday night, and then forcing you to open the next morning at 6am. You had about five hours of sleep. Management required that all employees wear slacks and long sleeve button up shirts even though it gets 100 degrees in the middle of July and good luck collecting carts in that heat. Oh but guess what, you can't sweat or they force you to leave because your shirt isn't clean. Motherfuckers.
Yeah, that's what I'm getting at about separating the work from the job. There are a lot of things where the work is enjoyable, but the job sucks.
I suppose it was being a professor for a long time. I love teaching: coming up with creative analogies, seeing ideas click, and planning the slightly unhinged performance to maintain interest. I also love working in labs and discovering new results no one else has done before.
I don't want to go on a rant, but I think our expectations of higher ed have changed in a pretty sad way. It's viewed as mandatory for a career, forcing a lot of unwilling people into lecture seats they resent. The rise of LLMs has also thrown an overly verbose wrench into everything. I don't think, as the job is now, I would be happy.
I'm lucky that I'm a neuroscientist where we don't have teaching responsibilities. However, I'll still likely go into industry eventually, for the pay if nothing else.
Retirement, I've worked enough already
I'd love to just work on assorted projects all day. Woodworking, plumbing, electronics, gardening, etc. I love trying new things but I also enjoy doing them well and getting that satisfaction. Who knows maybe I'll be a handyman later in life.
You and me should start this company together! The types of work you're giving as examples, these are exactly the types of things I love to do. Today I actually was the plumber and tomorrow my plan is carpentry. Having a house that needs a lot of work is definitely my solution to craving different types of work.
I’m assuming a life of leisure doesn’t count as a “dream job” but something I’ve been keeping in my back pocket for a midlife crisis job or whatever would be to work on and design clockwork and related things. Originally this idea definitely came from enjoying the aesthetics of that side of steampunk, but as I thought about it more and matured, the idea has resisted being dismissed, because I think I would genuinely enjoy things like building or assembling clocks or watches, repairing or maintaining existing clockwork stuff, and maybe even designing clockwork mechanisms from the ground up.
I don’t think there’s much money in this kind of industry, at least not until I’m a wise ageing expert with decades under my belt, so making a career switch like this comes with a prerequisite of already being financially stable. But if I ever reach that point, I think it would be lovely to always be working and maybe even tinkering with tiny brass cogs and springs and all that stuff. It seems like a lovely balance between mentally challenging (keeping in mind how all the pieces interact with each other) and physical (the careful and deliberate dexterity of working with such tiny, delicate, precise pieces and fitting them together just so)
Can't say I have ever been obsessed with any particular profession. Even when I went through a phase of watching the movie Backdraft every day as a kid I didn't get super inspired to become a firefighter or anything. Every job has its pros and cons, and even the act of transforming a hobby into one's livelihood can often result in a dulling of the original passion.
Having said all that, astronaut.
Firearms instructor and journalism are the only things that come to mind right now. I will probably come back to this comment and modify it as it is super late.
I'd like to be a trust fund administrator with a very relaxed remit; making sure that all the wealth of the richest people in the world was put to good use building infrastructure and other public goods that provide immense benefit to society. I'd slap billionaire's names on a thousand hospitals and a hundred thousand public libraries if it meant they were left with basically nothing but a modest stipend and the public appreciation for having done the right thing.
Rural postie in South Island NZ
I'd love to work in a haunted house. I became interested in the idea when I was a teenager and babysat for the couple who operated Netherworld. They had a lot of horror stuff around their house, and their kid constantly wanted to play haunted house with me, which was a ton of fun.
Later on, I got to know a bunch of people who worked at Netherworld as a part-time side job during Halloween season, and they always seemed to be having the time of their lives. They got to play the coolest characters and wear the craziest costumes — and they gave me some really great scares whenever I went. Unfortunately, the timing just never worked out for me to apply.
Just before I emigrated to Australia, I almost got headhunted (har har) to play a zombie in one of those live action zombie apocalypse games (sort of like a Haunted House cross Escape Room). If I hadn't already bought my plane tickets and made moving arrangements, I absolutely would have delayed my move a couple months to do it. I still think about that a lot.
What does one do to be headhunted for the role of professional zombie?
I attended a zombie crawl, and they were there scoping out talent.
I don't think anyone would be surprised to hear I want to be a novelist. Though lately, motivation has been frustratingly hard to muster up...
Though really, I want to be a storyteller in general. I majored in game development because the narrative potential of games is so full of potential. I also have ideas that are better formatted as comics and TV shows... Telling stories is my greatest passion, and I'd love to have a job that lets me explore it in any mediums.
Alas, storytellers are largely undervalued and treated as secondary in nearly every industry...
I listened to Trojan War the Podcast which definitely made me appreciate how valuable a professional "bard" is when telling a story.
I hope you're able to find success in your writing and other story telling ventures.
I would love to be a shepherd in the way that I romanticise the job.
I would prefer to work on my own land and to be in charge of a herd of both sheep and cows whos function would be for meat, wool and leather besides the inherit landscaping.
Unfortunately I don't have land and I don't think it could be profitable for anyone involved (but once I get some land and retirement: I'm off!)
designing casual dresses or tailored men's fashion
Knowing what I know now, I wish I'd served in the (US) Air Force as a Pararescue Jumper (abbreviated PJ). Perhaps not as a forever job, but knowing how much I've enjoyed my time as a paramedic, and appreciating being in those high stress environments, I think I would have loved it.
My ideal job is one where I can show up, take care of whatever thing Im supposed to take care of, and go home.
The biggest pain with working is all the check ins, the status updates, the tracking, the required collaboration.
Id like to do something that provides for the basic needs of average people. Maybe something to do with water or electric systems. Something that would feel like I was contributing to peoples lives in a real way.
Unfortunately I have not had much luck in pursuing such a career and Ive just about given up on trying.
Making Art or beeing an Artist I think would be my dream job. I just wanne create and work on my art. Preferable even have like a small studio or atelier. But I think only doing that is sadly not sustainable and you can never live off it unless you are in the top 1%. Or you make Art that is for a specific group of people and I think that can limit the artist a lot. If it forces them to make something palatable for the general people.
But yea. Hopefully I will just be able to get a studio soon and still study fine art even though it's not really something you can live off ...
I would love to be a Systems Administrator (SysAdmin), but I feel like I'm too far into my career to make that pivot. I love tinkering with my homelab and have leveraged that to get experience in docker/podman, networking, ansible, and some other marketable skills. I recently obtained a Bachelor's in IT, which included relevant coursework.
But I cannot start at the bottom with help desk (again, did that at my very first job). I'm now a consultant for some specific software, have been for years now, and feel very trapped. There are other positions I'd like to pivot to, and have somewhat more of a chance to do - Business Analyst type roles, as an example - but my dream job would be SysAdmin.
I was the "sole" SysAdmin for a mid-sized company for a couple of years, it was a great time! I have "sole" in quotes as my manager was incredibly technical and did a lot of our infrastructure work, he would usually let me take a first crack at any project so that I could improve on my skills before coming in to help me iron anything out.
Edit: I also wanted to say I emphasize with you on the not wanting to switch careers and starting at the bottom. There are a lot of days when I don't really want to do what I'm doing or even stay in tech. I'm not sure what else I would do, but with a mortgage and kids I don't really have the option to take a massive pay cut and switch careers.
Academia, if it also paid well and wasn't as cutthroat
There are a number of jobs I've thought would be nice, but none that I'd take over my current career as a software engineer given the world we live in.
If I didn't have to worry about finances though, for some reason I've always thought it would be nice to run a small bakery (which I've enjoyed as a hobby but haven't done much of recently, maybe I should get back into that). Ideally it could also serve as a third space so have a café as part of it as well, though I'd let someone else be the barista.
I know that a "YouTuber"/streamer can be overhyped as a career, but I think I would enjoy being one of those smaller niche channels, potentially around gaming. I don't want to be super successful or rich, as trying to chase whatever is trending sounds exhausting. Having a channel that is big enough to support myself and my family and save up for retirement would be ideal.
The other thing I'd love to be would be a professional book reader. I'm not sure how well I'd do as a critic, but I know I love reading books and chatting about/recommending them to friends/family/people. I'd probably do some form of video reviews, and some other content like thrifting for some books. I've thought about blogging my reviews or making videos, but I don't have a ton of free time and would rather just enjoy reading as a hobby, unless I had this dream job scenario where I was able to do it for a living. It would also allow me to tell my wife that buying more books is a "business expensive"!
Fun to think about occasionally when work gets on my nerves.
I've been wondering the same thing. My wife says that my voice is pleasing, so I've considered hopping into streaming for extra cash on the side, with the hope that with time it could take off enough to be a more permanent gig. I just have an unfortunate sleeping issue that leaves me with so little energy that I can't quite feel like I'd be able to be super interesting at this time. Hopefully I can improve the issue soon so I can consider trying these things.
How niche is niche in your dream scenario? You could certainly do this now and slowly build your channel up but the money won't be there.
I'm friends with two different guys who have niche car YouTube channel. One of them has fewer than 2k subscribers and his videos regularly get 2,000-3,000 views and occasionally a video will get 50k views (he'll have one or two per year that will get 50k). And according to him, he makes all of $7-$8 per video. Meanwhile he spends a few hours on each video. The other guy I know has 19k subscribers and his videos also get about 2,000-3,000. As far as I know he's never had a video get more than 3,000 and he also claims he makes a few dollars per video. And this guy has been posting videos since 2011.
In my dream scenario, it wouldn't matter the size of the niche, and I'd be able to support my family off of it. I know that a good number of the fairly successful channels I think of are ones that still have the creator working outside the channel, so I would need a dedicated fan base contributing to a Patreon or some other regular funding source. For some example channels that come to mind for me are DasTactic and BATTLEMODE or the reading channels Mike's Book Reviews though he has definitely broken out of the "niche" territory and is a bigger channel, or Thomas R. Howell.
I know I could start up a channel for something like this any time and slowly work on it, and that is what a lot of people do. In "change something about the past" scenario it would have me have started this years ago before having kids and then having it bring in some small side income after growing the audience to where I could justify in my head investing time in to it on the weekends. I don't want to make it sound purely profit motivated, and I've toyed around with the idea for games I'd cover when I do give this idea some time. I haven't thought too seriously about doing a channel focused on book reviews, but I do read a solid ~30-40 books a year, so I would have plenty to make videos on if I were to sit down and do it.
Not related to those two ideas, but I did recently start a channel to follow another suggestion that my wife and her friend gave me a couple of years ago of reading story books for young kids after hearing me read them to my sons. It shouldn't take too long to go through and make a video with the "lazy" method of scanning the book and then recording myself reading it, but I keep running in to weird input issues on my personal computer that I haven't been able to fully resolve which can really hamper making those videos (by sometimes crashing my computer) and that has kept me from exploring any other options like gaming or book reviews. I don't have too much time to dedicate to troubleshooting these issues and often times I look at my computer when I have a spare hour after work and would rather just do something else like a workout, read a physical book, or get some housework done than spend another hour in front of a computer after work.
I look forward to retiring and engaging myself as a carpenter. I've always enjoyed building and assembling and engineering useful innovations--I only have fairly simply cardboard constructs at this time. I'd certainly love doing that without the pressure of business and ROI. And now with the advent of not-so-expensive and excellent 3D printers, I can use my programming skills to model and design. Thoroughly enjoyable, indeed.
Carpentry will remain a dream until I have the means to actually afford all the tools and of course, a dedicated workshop. 🪓
If money didn't matter I think I'd be a backcountry ski guide three days a week from January through April and a fly fishing guide three days a week June through September and I'd spend the rest of the year traveling or taking classes in interesting things or building cool projects.
I think my dream way of spending the rest of my days would be like a "gentleman scientist" of old, free from the need to earn a living to live comfortably and able to learn and research and create things as they interest me to my heart's content. Like Charles Darwin, but with interests that skew more towards linguistics and probably a much lower likelihood of making a big mark on history.
Of course, I'm also a communist, so I'm not unfamiliar with the horrible material realities that allowed men to live like this in the past, but hey, if I'm gonna dream anyway I can dream of a reality in which said endeavors are enabled by fully automated luxury space communism rather than hereditary wealth and the exploitation of an underclass. We're dreaming, after all.
I think the real-life person whose career is most similar to my dream job would be J.R.R. Tolkien (even if he had never published Lord of the Rings), as his interests overlap very significantly with mine and he had a lot of freedom to explore them. But then I didn't have to live through the Somme, so I can't be too jealous of him.