A slightly tongue in cheek response to this Medium story…

I’ll leave you to figure out the fact from the fiction! It’s probably best read in conjunction with the original :)

There is a job I want. I can’t find this job. I’ve not quite literally searched the world. I’ve found a few close approximations. But I’m not (yet?!) employed by any of them.

I’m less concerned with working for a named company than for a company with a set of values and a culture that works for me. This is more scarce than I realised until recently. I know of a handful of companies who fit the bill, but they don’t seem to have open opportunities right now.

I was talking to some friends recently about the sort of opportunity I want and it became apparent that there are very few companies who fit the description. Or at least publicise it! Given this, and the fact that there are so many bad job adverts for developers and engineers out there, I’m writing down what I’m looking for in the hopes that this company (you?) is out there:

• I am more than happy to see a task through (scary or boring) but within reasonable timeframes and with a degree of autonomy. I always work to the best of my ability in situations where I am allowed to manage my time and focus. Trust and respect help a lot too.
• I want to make it obvious that I am happy at work and have fun with my co-workers. But to do this I need a company who has a culture and values that support this and me. Some great examples are Lullabot, Automattic, Buffer, and Crew.
• I care about my work. Up until the point you make me not care. Treating me as an individual, a human being, someone with a life outside of work, and respect (there I said it again), will mean I will continue to care about my work and have that pervasive in my interactions with colleagues and customers.
• I’m more than happy to communicate. I like writing. More than willing to turn my hand to a bit of social media. I’m very at home in places like Slack, hangouts, and VOIP. Having a chat and some banter with colleagues and customers is as important as discussing a technical item with a co-developer.
• I want to focus on shipping software than matters to users and my employer. Sadly I often seem to be removed from this process, thereby disempowering me. Let me do this and I will!
• I have mostly definitely experimented with and survived (barely in some cases) many different types of development, project, and management methods. I have a healthy scepticism for all of them. However, I fully agree that they are necessary to some degree or other.
• I don’t like ceremony. I like getting on and doing. But a thank you, or nice work every so often doesn’t go amiss if it has been earned.
• I’m old enough and experienced enough to know that being pragmatic and playing by the framework rules, or legacy code rules, is sometimes the only realistic solution.
• Technology at work needs to tread a fine line between boring and shiny. I build what is needed, and sometimes what I fancy at home. But it is important (at least in native mobile development) to be aware of all the shiny that keeps coming out. Daily… Please be conscious of the demands this places on us as developers. Code we write today may be out of date in a couple of months. That’s a faster cycle than ever before.
• I am a good developer. I’ve been doing it years. I may not be the fastest or best at everything…
• …but I am honest enough to know that. And I’m able to turn my hand to most things and always learning and looking to improve my weak points. My experience allows me to take certain shortcuts with confidence. Learning is cool. Being made to look a fool is not.
• I love to teach and learn from my co-workers. Any and all of them, engineers, or otherwise. A company that supports the self-improvement of its employees is one that appreciates them. Where are you?
• I am confident with a number of programming languages, operating systems, and architectures. I want to stay in the world of native mobile development (objective-c, swift, Java). But that doesn’t mean that I am too dogmatic nor myopically focused on it that I can’t step back and knock up an API.

From my perspective, these are things that matter.

I don’t care if you are the largest company in the world. I don’t care if you organise hackathons or provide free lunch. Challenging projects is not a selling point. All projects have parts challenging and parts that are more mundane. I don’t care if you have amazing drunken nights out. If you just want to employ rock stars then you may not have the sort of open culture I am interested in. Though I can be a bit of a ninja sometimes apparently ;)

I do care if you want me as a complete package. To know that I have a life and family and friends outside of work so therefore I don’t spend all my time writing open source software. That you are happy for me to travel with my spouse (his job allows remote work) if we need to meet up. That you don’t stint on equipment to enable me to do the best for you. That you pay a good wage. And that you support remote working.

If this describes you, I definitely want to know you. I love building native mobile apps. I want to work in building a product I believe in and seeing it progress, release on release. Getting more awesome for customers as it evolves. If you are at all interested in talking to me, I’d very much welcome the chance to talk to you! Please get in touch. Or tweet me.