I am a computer programmer. In particular, I make games. I've started writing games in QBasic when I was 13, kept doing it on my own, and then went to a university to get a computer science degree. After that I worked almost 2 years for a company programing games. Now, I am very close to finishing my own game, which I also designed.
I really enjoy my job because the culture in game studios is very informal and fun. You meet lots of interesting people, you do lots of cool things as a company (most companies try to foster a good atmosphere), and you get free snacks. Programming is a task that's pretty challenging and fun, you often have some autonomy, and it pays relatively well. After a year and a half of working, I was able to save enough money to take a year off and fund my own game. As a game programmer, you can also transition into very interesting sub-fields like: game design, graphics programming, tools programming, etc. Each has its own unique problems to solve, and each fulfills a certain craving in me as a programmer.
You can also choose what kind of company you work for: big one or small one, main stream or edgy/indie, well known or tiny and new. You can also make your own games, if you want, because you'll have the most difficult tool (programming) mastered, and the rest you can outsource. My favorite part is that I can combine making games with spreading rationality. I am going to pursue this idea for a long while, and I think it will have many wonderful insights and unexpected results along the way.
I've recently been thinking about future job prospects and ways that I might alter my preferences to increase the likelihood that I'll be happy with my future career. I have read some of the LessWrong resources about this issue, but they don't seem to address my particular concerns. I think there is a high relative importance for selecting a career with a high capacity for making me happy. It will consume at least 8 prime daylight hours of my work days and in many cases also some of the weekend. In all likelihood I will also be forced to sit in front of a computer for extended periods of time. The tasks I am assigned may have nothing to do with the things that I happen to find intellectually interesting or of ethical importance. And the work will likely zap me of most of the energy that I could use to pursue hobbies or other more "intrinsically worthwhile endeavors" (intrinsic to my personal preference ordering). Given that I believe these factors will largely determine whether I feel happy in many future situations and also whether I feel generically happy about the content of my life as a whole, I think it is worthwhile to seek advice from other rationalists in how to choose an appropriate career goal and take steps to pursue it.
What I have found on LessWrong, however, is that ambiguous and open-ended pleas for advice generally steer off course, even if the tangential issues are very interesting and insightful. Rather than query everyone for open advice about preference hacking, vague goal achievement, and wisdom for properly assigning value to some of the factors I have listed above, I propose a simpler informal job survey.
If you are interested, please briefly list the job you have or the job of someone you know very well (well enough that you feel you know relevant details about the job, details that may be hard to gather in less than 1 hour of internet searching). You don't have to reveal the location or name of the employer or anything like that, just the type of job. Optionally, please also include a sentence stating whether you (or your friend, etc.) seem to enjoy the job and why. For example, my entry would be like this:
I am a graduate student studying applied mathematics. I enjoy the access to educational resources and the flexible schedule that my current job offers, but I think my personal displeasure with computer programming and my perception that future jobs doing mathematical theory are scarce cause me to dislike the job overall.
If enough people are willing to participate, my hope is that the stream of small anecdotal remarks will serve as a brainstorming session. I hope to hear about jobs I may never have thought of, and also reasons for liking or disliking a job that I may never have thought of. The goal is to spark additional search on my own and also to gauge my current preferences in light of preferences that others have experienced with specific jobs. Such a survey would be a very helpful resource allowing me to synthesize data about job directions where the initial search will have a higher probability of being helpful for me.