Most of the time I like my work - as you can probably tell, I feel injecting some passion into your work is important. The way I see it I'm going to be spending decades doing this stuff, so I may as well enjoy it. Like anyone though, I have things that nearly make me pull my hair out, and have had moments longing to try something else out. Read on if you dare (care?).

The quality of your boss can make a huge difference in your job. I sensitised to this as I am both a leader and subordinate. A strength and possibly strength overdone at times (thus weakness perhaps?) of mine is that I spend a lot of time thinking about this. I recognize that it is easy to get this wrong as I discussed in Technology management/leadership - we're doing it wrong. The observation I made was how surprisingly rare it was for technical people to admit/embrace that they do not want to lead/manage. For most of my 15 year career I've met people in leadership roles who (although few said it out load) seemed they would be *much* happier doing a development role. The very strengths and skills that made them proficient as a developer were no longer as relevant as a leader. Furthermore, the new skills the leadership role demanded from them such as budgets, performance reviews, hiring/firing, and more were very different.

In many ways, technology firms give technical people no choice. Often there is no further career/seniority path other than to a leadership role. Another gem of an article showed up on my radar this week entitled Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis by Alex Papadimoulis. In a way, the article presents an alternative to promoting developers to leadership roles. Papadimoulis' explanations for why more highly skilled talent reaches a point where the obvious choice is to leave makes a lot of sense. Personally, it was why I chose to leave Nortel in 2006. Well that and other serious concerns that I need not mention since it's obvious now. I've recognized similar feelings/thoughts in my talented co-workers over the years. The notion of doing things to stretch out the point in which an employee reaches the point that it's simply time to go makes good financial sense. How can a leader take steps to help employees stretch out the time before they must leave without condemning them to misery in an uncomfortable fitted leadership role?

This brings me back to Joe Brockmeier's A Good Company Looks Like A Good Open Source Project. In particular Brockmeier's suggestion to give employees a mix of useful tasks and reasonable deadlines is targeted at this. It also sounds a lot like companies like 3M and Google known for their innovation and allocation of a portion of employees time to let them experiment and try new things.Thus no surprise Google is so prolific creating new products.

I dig up some classic gems that continue to inspire me. For example, Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money and How to recognise a good programmer. If I had to pick just three things from these articles that matter more than the others, it would be: 1) Being set up to succeed 2) Learning new things and 3) Having a voice. It isn't that the others aren't important as they most certainly are. It is more that in my experience, these three can often make up for weakness in the others.Perhaps they can help extend the departure event horizon for top talent further?

And of course a dedicated employee is a powerful thing. :-)