[captobvious]

Ok I'll name my working conditions: A work environment with peace and quiet to be able to concentrate. Have enough time to be able to deliver though-out quality work. Having reasonably specified tasks, and if not, have the decision power to fill in the blanks as I see fit. Not being constantly interrupted.

Not being under constant stress and pressure to the point where I feel that my health might be suffering.

From my experience these (common sense?) demands on working conditions would rule out pretty much most programming jobs.

[jlgreco]

Do you think low stress heart surgeon jobs exist?

Work conditions in tech have more to do with what those jobs are than economic conditions. Companies are desperate to fill positions and you see many going out of their way to create as low stress office environments as possible but after a certain point you just have to come to grips with that's just what the job is.

That said, low stress programming jobs do exist, but in my experience they tend to exist in companies you would not normally look at for programming jobs. Damn near every sizeable company has programmers but we tend to only look for jobs "in industry" at the Googles, Microsofts, Facebooks, etc. Think east coast, foundations of the company not in tech, non-glamorous. Basically the equivalent of your heart surgeon working in some sort of research instead of in a hospital on live patients.

[marshray]

Most surgeons spend the great majority of their time in a regular doctor's office or making the rounds in a hospital. I've worked for surgeons and have spent hundreds of hours in the operating room. Tense moments happen but on the whole keeping a busy webserver up and running is probably more stressful for the staff.

[jlgreco]

Fair enough, I was under the impression that surgeons had particularly stressful jobs. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of inherently stressful jobs though. Maybe table waiting, depending on levels of business.

Stress in the workplace seems to be to be a function of responsibility and activity. Speaking from experiance, lifeguard jobs have very high responsibility but (you hope) very very low activity; meanwhile jobs like being a farmhand are high activity but usually very low responsibility. Both of these were the lowest stress jobs I've ever had. Stress seems to go up when both of those factors are up, jobs with neither activity nor responsibility probably don't really exist (or at least pay well).