[rudenoise]

I'm a software engineer. I work on a contract basis, contracts last 3 months to a year. I've recently made CI pipelines, Win 8.1 apps, IOS apps but mostly web-apps. The pay is good and the people I work with are cool.

I don't love it though. It's OK. It'd be better to code 20% of the time and observe, talk, think the other 80%. I think that this might make me more efficient and more productive.

My best job was my first. A guy had a profitable web-site and no technical knowledge, there was no notion of best-practice, and he hired me to do everything/anything. The environment was smokey, the equipment shoddy and the business practices disordered. I was straight out of uni and free to make any decisions I saw fit, any mistakes were on my head.

[edit] Thinking about it, it was the shear honesty of the place. I don't think anyone even tried to dress up what they were doing in jargon or exaggerations. Words like 'passion' were never applied out of place.

[eldavido]

Have also experienced this. More of a "blue collar" feel of "it's just a job", rather than all this loaded mission/passion/vision BS that seems to accompany many white-collar jobs. I also find it refreshing.

Anecdotally, I've found this "honesty" more frequently in owner-operated companies, family businesses, etc. than in "white collar" "professional" settings. I like when people have the honesty to say, "we're doing it this way because I want to" rather than having to dress it up in some quasi-rational, quasi-scientific "we've evaluated the costs and benefits, and concluded that this way is superior" when the decision was 100% emotion/preference/it's my friend's company/we did it this way before/other silly reason.