clock watching

I have my dream job: working in Internet/networking/telecom field at a start up company that makes a really cool cutting edge product. I've had jobs that sucked before dealing with boring technology, so I'm in a good place right now.

I've always given myself to the idea that you really have to like your work. You sit in an office for 40+ hours a week, and with the driving time, it's almost more than half your life. There are others who just want a steady paycheck so they can make the most of the rest of their lives. and that's fine for them, but I can't understand it personally.

It makes things that much better when you are excited create or learn about your product.

Now of course there are slow times or boring busy work to get through, but when you complain about nearly all your tasks, something is wrong. Change jobs, position yourself to do something you like, but damn it, you're bring me and my kind down!

I always found it a little bit hard when making small talk with people and the topic of their job comes up. I'm a bit embarrassed to chime in "well I actually like going to work, we make a REALLY cool product.” It's just like in school when most kids would proclaim ‘school sucks, I'd rather be out.’ Well, half of the time I liked school!

This is a perennial argument, I know.

So yes, I like technical writing, and documenting software and hardware. And no, I just don’t do this by day.

Now I can’t speak for other fields, and lets keep this to tech stuff, but sometimes I feel that tech writers are especially guilty of not really having their hearts (or at least a portion of their hearts) in the core work of their job-getting some kind of information from a developer’s mind into a customer’s mind.

Some tech writers like the fact that they have a solid white collar paying job, some like to play editor and correct a poor engineer’s grammar (thereby saying nyah – you don’t know that much more than I do), and some like to layout and design documents. But I swear, I think the vast minority of TWs really don’t love the information transferal part of the job. There’s the aspect of the job where we play the content editor and disseminator, and I think few of us are fixated on that task.