What do you like about your job?

I genuinely love programming. It’s an amazing mix of being creative and being logical that nothing else has matched for me, and there’s no better feeling than figuring out how to logically do something and then watch it in action

Unfortunately, programming is only a small part of being a programmer lol

3 day work weeks are amazing. I work twelve hour shifts, which I know aren't for everyone, but having more days in the year that I'm not at work than I am at work is amazing for me.

I just really like setting up new systems that our developers use.
We have around 500 vm's (and 3 DC's onprem but those I rarely "touch") and I'm now working setting up a few k8s clusters on baremetal's.

It just give me joy to figure out stuff the company hasn't done before while also making sure my colleagues have a stable platform to work on.

Took a good 2 years before we got to such stability and redundancy by the way. But now we can easily take down half of our vm's for patching during the day (we do so every month) and the airport doesn't notice a thing.

Ah and I have a lot of freedom in how to do the job plus a good 40 holidays a year. so except for the pay (it's meh/okay) I can't complain to much :)

It provides an outlet for my introverted nature by allowing long periods of time on my own, reading, solving problems, puzzling.

I got lucky and my government job consists of only me driving around a specific area of the city inspecting houses of people who apply the house plans in the town hall.

We have to do 600 points every month to receive full salary, but it is really easy to do.

There are days I work 2h, some 1h, some none.

What I do is wait for the tasks to accumulate and separate a day on the week to do all of it (mostly Wednesday) . So it's one day of 3 working hours driving from house to house and the other 4 days I just go to the work building to clock in, chit chat for 30 minutes and go home. If I even go at all, because it's just signing a book by hand so you can sign all week at once.

writing your to-do list with a really smooth pen

I do really like writing with a smooth pen, actually!

I have a Lamy studio that I prefer to use. I'd like a Lamy 2000, but I'm saving it to be a gift for someone to give me.

That it ends next Friday.

My current job has been hugely problematic for my mental health for the past year.

THAT BEING SAID.

I adore being senior leadership. I get to figure out people problems in other areas of an organisation, i get to take technical weirdness and throw my brain into the fire to check it out, I get to work with some extremely bright engineers to solve said problems.

It's people problems, guidance and coaching all the way down. I love it.

I sell consultancy services.

Today, I like nothing of my job. I hate it with a passion.

Ask me again after I win a new project.

I’m an industrial mechanic at a chemical plant. I like the variety of my day to day (sometimes hour to hour) work. Any given day I could be welding, insulating pipe, driving a crane or aerial lift, working on process pumps and the list goes on. Aside from that is great pay, benefits, pension and 401k, almost guaranteed overtime. They definitely outweigh the cons, but at times the cons can be very dangerous.

The amount of successful and smart people on tildes leads me to believe I might be on the wrong website ; ). I make ~45k a year as an addiction counselor. I enjoy that i can use my natural skills in communication, socializing, and perceptive thinking in a positive way that helps people who are often thrown away as useless to society, I never have seen them in this way.

Over the years I have gone from backend development into a role that is sort of a mix of team lead and system architect. I don't write as much code as I used to, but I enjoy still being very much in the loop on anything technical on our platform. I read, QA and test all the code my team is writing and I love letting them write better code than I can, so I can focus on keeping the overall picture of the system design and make sure all the parts in our system work together with the desired business logic. Which the developers has less of a grasp of because they are working in the deeper details. I really like that separation of concerns and abilities, ensuring that everyone can work mostly on what they are particularly good at. And it is just great to work with smart professional people on the same product.

I guess the money? I successfully negotiated a salary higher than the base rate and I'm pleased with myself for that. Honestly though, with all the late stage capitalism chickens coming home to roost it still feels like I'm just treading water.

I know it's not true; I've tried to avoid too much lifestyle creep and I'm able to save £200 more every month but this stinks. My earnings would be equivalent to six figures back in the 90s and a holiday abroad still feels like it'd be too much of a stretch.

Having a job that makes me think and gives me some interesting problems to crunch over is nice too, but I think I'd be fine just switching my brain off and stacking shelves if I could make a comfortable living from it.

Two main parts:

My employer tries to get the decision making as low in the hierarchy as possible. So if and as long as you get the job done the bosses leave you in peace. They set the guidelines and see if the goals are met, and they're always ready to make a decision you can't make or give you advice, but they won't intervene in day-to-day work. "You guys are too expensive for a babysitter" as my old boss coined it. So how I set my priorities, if I make a call or write a letter or make an appointment with them - nobody will chime in.

The second is, my employer boasts with pride about how family friendly the environment is, they got a special certificate for that by now. And to be fair: They are. You don't have to chug down your personal matters at work to function. Like when my father started to get old I needed to leave earlier at work a bunch of times to transport him back from the hospital, or to drive my mother to him in the hospital if she was too nervous for driving herself. When he died I didn't have to take a day off as vacation, but I was declared sick - which in Germany means the employer pays the full wage, and this doesn't have anything to do with your regular days off. Or when my mother died under bad circumstances I was am heavily traumatized with the circumstances and might suffer forever. My employer told me that I now work on my conditions. I do what I want, and what I can't do anymore or not again is done by others for me. I am so grateful for this loyalty.

I'm a performance auditor for the national auditor here in Scotland.

I work on the large local government outputs which always get a lot of media coverage, so it's nice to see these huge projects that take an entire year to pull together being featured or quoted on BBC News, on the 6 o'clock news on ITV or BBC, the reports being brought up during meetings of Parliament at Holyrood, going to a Scottish Parliamentary Committee to speak about our report, getting feedback from local council chief executives etc.

It's also nice knowing that I'm working on these reports in the hope we can make a difference across the country with our recommendations.

It's a genuinely great place to work as well. You manage your own work, for instance along with the Local Government work, I also do weekly and monthly reports for the Accounts Commission and I'm a member of the work Equality and Human Rights Steering Group which is all voluntary but it's all fun and breaks up the Local Government stuff.

Because of this it means that you generally get left to your work day so I tend to just work from home, put a podcast on and crack on with what I'm doing.

Also, the 42 days of annual leave a year, flexi-time, union representation, and amazing career average pension help.

Its amazingly independent and flexible. Im a landlord/real estate investor but I do almost all my own maintenance and property development. So MOST days I have nothing thats pressing, and I get to tinker on whatever little hobby appeals to me, and some months my only job is to pay bills.

But other times there's a basement that needs to be developed and Im in there tearing out walls, building a kitchen, installing a bathroom, putting in flooring, installing lights... which would be a pain if it was constant but its generally a ton of work for awhile and then... sweet peaceful nothing after finding some great tenants.

In the beginning I had so many tenant issues that it nearly drove me nuts, but after 35 years Ive learned many ways to find great tenants and most months this job feels like easy street now. I worked for others for many years, but I'd never go back to a regular job again.

Background: lead dev in some startups, phd in math. Now analytics director for a global corp.
What I miss: Getting lost in a problem/flow states. Having well defined tasks and objectives. Being able to ignore politics.

What I like:

• Executive leadership treats me really well. Merit budgets were very small this year so I declined the pittance of an incease I was eligible for and distributed it to my team. C-suite decided to promote me a pay grade and give me a larger increase anyway. Vacation policy is also very sparse but each year they've given me much more than my tenure allocation.
• My direct manager is very hands off but available. I chat with him every day and he intervenes in situations I request it but otherwise he lets me run my team with minimal disruption.
• Mentoring and building analysts in the our businesses. I like seeing my team grow their skillset and gain confidence. Many other analysts and data scientists in subsidiary businesses also rely on me for sanity checks and advice.
• Big impacts. When my team takes action we see the signal in core business metrics. We are responsible for ~270k employees globally so seeing movement means impacting a lot of people. Going into a meeting with our CEO and convincing him to increase compensation budgets means a lot of people getting paid more than they would have otherwise. Providing analysis to safety teams and seeing reductions in injuries mean more people returning home in the same condition they came to work. Identifying ways to spend a bit more on benefits to reduce more expensive health conditions means fewer people experiencing fewer severe disease.

Adding my voice here to the throng of programmers. My current job is great; I get to work in clean energy and do math all day (3d modelling software using Lidar). The flexibility of remote work is great (although my work has a stipend for office rental which I take advantage of), and the pay is extremely good especially for how low my COL is.

One thing I really enjoy is that every week, the team I'm on has an hour-long hangout online where we just shoot the shit about whatever. It's been really, really helpful for keeping me engaged and wanting to contribute instead of falling into my usual job cynicism.

As for pens, I'm a Zebra Sarasa Quick Dry gal. Ride or die.

I really like, respect and admire most of the people I work with, and I generally feel respected and admired by my coworkers. There are many things I do not enjoy about my job, but the people make it easier and are a big reason I've stuck around.

I've had nothing but toxic, stressful and underpaid jobs for my career, but 3.5 years ago I landed on this one and while I don't love it, I like it and I'm wise enough to know that's a big deal.

The work environment is great, my team mates are wonderful people to work with, there's no blame culture, senior leadership's dumb decision making is often kept at arms length from actual work, we constantly try to improve and provide better value internally and to the customer. It's very healthy.
If I was paid a tiny bit more I'd say it was pretty much the perfect job, but I'm in the process of trying to make something work with my line manager.

I'm paid well for the work I do and I don't do that much work. I'm paid for my experience, what I can do and my responsibility.

The pandemic has given me a seismic shift in working from home (was 4 in office, 1 from home, now it's reversed) and because of how I kept the whole company working I'm seen as "IT Magician". My nickname is related to Dumbledore by a lot of staff.

Trust, agency, and variety. I've been at my current job a little over a year and I'm still pretty smitten. It's a non profit state music educators association and as a long time band geek, I love that I get to do work that supports music educators and their students. My position is a bit of a catch all and the variety of tasks helps keep me engaged and excited about work. My boss encourages us to ask questions, offer suggestions, and research/problem solve on our own, which is a huge relief after my previous employer expected things to be done an incredibly specific way but offered no guidance and would get frustrated any time you asked for clarification (and would then turn around and be upset you didn't do it the way they wanted).

My background is engineering, but I work in software QA for engineering software and I love having one foot in the engineering world, a foot in the applied math world, and walking in the computer science world.

Running performance tests feels scientific and I adore the pursuit of seeing software performance enhancements. I suppose I don't have any hand in implementing the changes that make these speedups possible, but I take pride in creating models that can exploit the speedups and demonstrate the progress that's been made.

In the QA realm, I cherish the art of creating fast, targeted, stable inputs that test something physically realistic because it allows me to be inventive and expressive. Reviewing results from regressions allows me to provide a "gut-feeling" assessment to devs, and I'm pretty good at sniffing out issues. Minor differences don't sit right with me and turn out to be critical bugs for specific configurations. It would have been easier to let that difference slide, but I value my intuition and experience.

At the end of the day, I revel in the pursuit of accuracy and performance. I always loved learning how things work, and switching between testing roles as both a basic user and a burgeoning expert is immensely satisfying because it provides an outlet for creativity and insight.

There are so many things I love about my job.

I love my co-workers, they are so thoughtful, patient, and creative. Getting to work through problems with them is a real treat. We have a relationship where ideas tend to bloom because it's a "yes, and..." environment instead of a "ok, but...". I think we're all excited to be working on the challenges we're working on and feel fortunate to have so much room to explore for R&D. There are so many ways to get to the solutions we need and it's just a joy to work with them on it.

So I guess off of that, I love the level of experimentation we get to do. The problem requires consideration on how/what data is collected, how we train and validate models, and how our users interact with everything. There are so many opportunities for error but there are also so many opportunities for new creative work arounds. We work in a pretty data rich but organizationally poor field so we have so much room to roam. We look at varied time scales, different spectral data, textual information, planning inputs, just a ton of different attributes.

The last part, but possibly the one I enjoy the most, is setting company culture. I've worked at places with great culture and ones with terrible culture. My co-founder and I have made this the tent pole of our duties. We're trying to set up a place where folks are excited to work, feel respected, well resourced, and encouraged. We set strict boundaries with work life balance and make socialization an opt in rather than opt out thing. So far dynamics are great and while we've had to handle a few things that crop up, it feels like the level of mutual trust and openness have kept us relatively stable.

I'm a software architect. It's fun for me to design something, and then lead the team into implementing it. Then, I get to see as it improves the lives of our stakeholders by improving other metrics or receiving positive feedback. A huge part of what I like about this field is the ability to learn and implement new things. You don't want to go too far with that because you'll wind up with a mess, but being smart about how to integrate something new/cool into your solution without too much overhead can be fun.

And best of all, the pay is more than I ever dreamed that I would end up making in this career.

I make video games. It's an extremely creative field and you get to see the fruits of your labor enjoyed by millions of players. Most people working on video games are also into playing them themselves, so it isn't hard to strike up conversation and learn more about others in this way. It ends up being a very social and casual experience in my opinion, but maybe I just got lucky with where I am in the industry. I know the majority of people working in this field struggle to establish a good work life balance. If you're good enough and know your value though, you can probably define your own working conditions and find a studio that respects you and gives you creative freedom.

Working from home is great. My alarm wakes me up right at 5:30 for a meeting I have to make (but don't really have to be on time for or participate in). Getting code to - finally - work brings a great amount of satisfaction. My experience with programming is periods of elation where I feel like I can code anything and periods where I feel like a total idiot that can't get anything to work, but it sure beats the other jobs I've worked (retail, landscaping, army, post office) in terms of job satisfaction.

I get to help people, and I particularly get to help people in what is generally a difficult time all around: when a family member or other loved one has passed away. I am not very well paid but as a government employee have a reasonably good benefit package, and I am part of a union that I generally feel does a good job at representing our workers (and I should hope so given I am often voted to be on the bargaining team). I've got consistent and steady hours and a decent amount of paid time off. I could work from home if I had a home internet connection stable enough (curse you rural America).

But it's often stressful and always full of weird bureaucracy problems, so I'm glad the helping part outweighs those at least some of the time.

The people I work with. If it wasn't for them I would have left (pay is ordinary , much of management feels clueless to point their might be issues next year ), for better job. Others feel similar.

I've had many years of finding workplace niches that let me use my disarray of talents, but my current job seems like I'm reasonably well into ikigai territory.

It's easy to feel a sense of mission in healthcare, but harder to deal with the many disparities, inefficiencies, market distortions and other failings of the U.S. system of delivery.

I'm working for a vendor these days, on the outside of the worst institutional messiness, which helps somewhat. The work still consists of application programming, network tasks, server installations, databases, interfaces, and other technical minutiae.

But it's a small enough company unit that any given work order might also involve me doing some project management, architectural design, UI/UX, data science, sales engineering, customer relations, QA testing, on-premises workflow analysis, and/or education...

It's never totally routine. Our platform and hardware/software technology stack is evolving rapidly, so there's always something new to learn and build. I feel like I'm being constantly challenged to improve.

I like most of my coworkers very well. There are people of all ages and backgrounds, but we're mostly various flavors of nerd (technical, clinical, engineering...). Even the sales, marketing, and money folks have some familiarity with the nuts and bolts of the products. Though we have different perspectives, there's a common frame of reference and our incentives are mostly aligned. Collaborating with them, sharing tasks regardless of job titles, transparency and willingness to teach each other, and the general lack of silos are incredibly refreshing after years of working with enforced hierarchies and internecine warfare between departments in bigger companies.

There's a far-away corporate head office, but it's a privately held company with a history of long-term thinking. There's not too much B.S. to deal with - no routine quarterly panics about KPIs and revenue.

I travel widely in the U.S. for surveys and fine-tuning in place. The travel can be taxing, but it keeps the adventurous part of me humming and reboots my head when I've been stuck facing screens for too long. My relationship with my spouse is better when I can bring home new stories and experiences to share, as well as a little advance scouting for possible vacation spots.

The company has presence in hospitals at all tiers, including the most advanced. I'll usually visit almost every unit, and spend time with the technical staff, caregivers, and administrators in the design/install/test/refine process. I can see direct improvements in care and safety from the work we're doing. One of my best moments was learning we'd saved a life within a week of a system go-live.

I also love, at a deep and perhaps unhealthy level, seeing all of the pieces come together in a working installation. I don't "own" the whole thing - my work is a component that's sometimes essential to the success, but it's still fulfilling to be just one of many players in a big effort.

I get paid... enough? I hear about (presumably non-healthcare) programmer salaries here and I'm not in that ballpark, but the compensation of actually enjoying my job is more than worth the differential. People with a vocation for public school teaching ought to be paid more than any of us, but they're working in spite of the pittance they receive.