
Ask HN: Your job satisfaction? - rvpolyak
With all the recent threads about salaries, I would like to poll the HN Community about their current job:<p>1) What are some of the best things you value at your job?<p>2) What are some of the things you wish you could change about your organization?<p>3) Besides money what is the one thing you wish your organization would offer you?<p>4) What is one thing the Founder or CEO could do to improve the leadership in your organization?
======
byoung2
I just left my job a few months ago because I wasn't happy. These responses
apply to that job.

1\. The money was good ($175k as director of engineering in Los Angeles) and
the hours were 9-5.

2\. I wish I had more autonomy to manage my team. Although I was director,
engineering was basically under the control of product and upper management.
Unfortunately they knew nothing about how engineering works.

3\. A chance to define a new role, possibly R&D or skunk works, so I could
contribute but not be bound by the traditional management hierarchy.

4\. Ultimately nothing, since he was the problem. He is CEO of a tech company
but he can't even plug in a thumb drive. He has said in the past he views
engineering as "black magic" because he doesn't understand it.

~~~
highsea
This sounds really familiar.

In my experience the CEO/Founder can be classified as either of two types:

1) Great sales guy but has no deep concept of the technology his product is
based on and other related aspects such as technical debt. Can be really hard
to explain why something is more complicated than it looks to him, etc.

2) Great technical guy who can't sell. If you're not doing something
conceptually new it can be difficult to acquire customers if your selling is
weak.

I wonder if any one has encountered the unicorn CEO/Founder who's great at
both of these things?

~~~
byoung2
Either of those would be preferable to what our company had, which was 3) Poor
sales guy with no concept of technology. Even the engineers were were begging
for basic marketing concepts like focus groups, A/B testing, user personas,
etc. We actually got in trouble for wasting time thinking about marketing
instead of doing our jobs.

------
blabla_blublu
1\. Work Flexibility and challenging problems to solve. I love the work/life
balance in my workplace as it stands. Work doesn't interfere with my life on
weekends and in evenings.

2\. There should be a clearer channel to communicate with the different
stakeholders. I might have good product ideas, regardless of what my
designation is (engineer, in my case). There should be an easier way to get
feedback on ideas - good or bad.

3\. Lopsided workloads should be regulated. It will be nice if all teams were
equally loaded. In my case, I have a very reasonable schedule, but in some of
my friends' case they work really hard!

4\. Give people more responsibilities! Nothing teaches leadership like taking
up ownership.

------
kdamken
I'm just gonna answer the questions I feel comfortable with.

1) What are some of the best things you value at your job?

The clients I work for are huge, well known companies. The work is
interesting, and I'm learning a lot from the other developers. They like to
encourage professional growth.

3) Besides money what is the one thing you wish your organization would offer
you?

Getting to work remotely as often as I'd like, which would be like 3-4 days a
week. Higher matching for the retirement plan comes in second.

------
maindrive
1) Rapport with Boss,Challenges, new technologies, value of participation,
projects in pipeline, company's financial health

2) Putting less skilled people in middle mgmt on top of engineers (thats a big
putoff bcoz we do check their profiles), measuring work more, valuing people
that actually work more

3) Sports area, occasional hangouts, spare time for personal projects

4) News updates, taking reviews, giving feedback, more involved, valuing tech
stuff, following future market trends

------
JoeyWendell
1)Flexibility 2)My organization is perfectly right.I don't like to change any
thing. 3)i would like to have entertaining programs monthly in my
organization.

