Being Your Own Boss—Part I: The Ideal Job
This is the first of a series of columns on our work as developers and how we can have truly satisfying jobs. This first column in the series discusses ideal jobs, what developers like about their work, and what they find annoying and unpleasant. It then describes how the developers’ and managers’ views on project success differ and what this means for both developers and their organizations. In subsequent columns, I will discuss how to turn almost any job into an ideal job, some of the issues you will face in trying to do so, and the level of support you will need from your managers and peers to be successful. While there are a few basic conditions that must be satisfied before you can expect to transform any job into this ideal, it is surprising how many jobs can be rewarding when you approach them in the right way.
Job Satisfaction
In discussing job satisfaction, we must first answer the question: “Satisfaction for whom?” One would expect the characteristics of a satisfying job to be different for the person doing the job and for the person for whom it is done. However, there is one condition that is common: the job must have been a success. This, of course, leads to the next question: “How do managers and developers view project success?”
This question has been researched by Kurt Linberg [Linberg 99]. He studied the views of developers about project success for his PhD dissertation. In this study, he asked groups of developers to identify the most successful and least successful jobs on which they had worked. Then he examined the characteristics of the most successful and least successful projects.
Successful Projects
From the developers’ perspectives, the most successful projects had three common characteristics:
- The project was a technical challenge.
- The final product worked in the way that it was supposed to work.
- The team was small and performed well.
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