Money, but until a certain treshold. After X per month other factors kick in, specially whom am I working with and what. Boring work can be made awesome with the right people, the opposite ain't true. People will crush you even if you're doing what you love.
All those are important, and any honest person will say that most of those things matter to a large extent. Who wants to work with great technology, compensation and responsibility, but with a lousy team and environment?<p>What you really want to do is to get people to order them, rather than just vote on them.
It is really a flaw of me, but if it's not challenging I don't care about it and I am incapabable of doing a good job.<p>Luckily I am in a position wherein I can choose my jobs.
Stability probably should be on the list. Not very important to me personally, but I know it's a huge consideration for a lot of the people I've worked with and interviewed over the years. The largest employers in the world (governments) have that as their main benefit.
I think the environment/atmosphere is key. If you're getting hassled all day, horrible coworkers, management issues, etc, it takes a really resilient personality to deal with that just for the money.<p>As such, it surprises me that compensation and challenging work go above it. Even if I were being paid $200,000 a year to do cool work, if I had to deal with mega social and management issues, if I had to stay there I'd be deeply unhappy.<p>(Of course, the flip side is if the perfect environment offered a salary of, say, $10000 a year, that might be just as useless.. which makes polls like these a bit pointless really).
Read this:<p><a href="http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-gu-1.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-gu-1.html</a><p>"Once you have picked an industry, get right to the center of it as fast as you possibly can."<p>"Every job, every role, every company you go to is an opportunity to learn how a business works and how an industry works."<p>When you're young, you should always trade income risk and get to the center of the action ASAP and decide which "businesses" you want to learn. For example, if you want to start a enterprise software company, you would work at SAP.<p>This is only for you're very ambitious. If you're not, focus on the compensation, challenging work, environment, etc that everyone talks about. The fact is if you're doing a startup, you learn about the business from being in a company in the space. (SAP spun out of IBM, Salesforce/PeopleSoft/Siebel from Oracle, YouTube/Slide/Geni/Yelp/Linkedin from Paypal (all consumer internet), etc).
You <i>take</i> a job for the compensation, the benefit and the technology.<p>You <i>stay</i> in that job for the team, the environment (not sure how those two are different) and the product (it's your baby by now).<p>You should <i>leave</i> when the work is no longer challenging.
First to suggest that this is a horrible poll? Why: how would you answer this?<p>Accept = A x compensation + B x environment + C... + H x responsibility... + ... Z unknown factors + $alpha$ Hidden factor 1 + $beta$ Hidden factor 2<p>Step 1: Ignore all factors beyond H. Fair enough, given how you're framing the question with respect to only these variables.<p>Step 2: Compare several jobs and then what, minimize the errors, and find the largest coefficient, ignoring any and all covariates!?
From original thread: Team, Geographical location, Environment, Freedom to experiment, Impact, Size, Equity, Technology. Most important I think is personal belief in the product or result. Especially if working on a startup. For example, If I love all of the above, but we're building a silly twitter app, a new todo management app, or a POSN (plain old social network), no amount of cool people will make me like my job.
Not being a nine-year-old girl forging lead hand tools in a communist sweatshop tops my list.<p>After that, challenging work is the idyllic and romantic answer. But damn, that compensation sure is alluring.
Waking up every morning and looking forward to the challenges instead of wishing you didn't have to go to work.<p>Oh, and lots of money. That'll take the edge off of horrible work any day of the week.
I'd put team as part of environment/atmosphere (or vice versa) - I know they arent perfectly matched, but dont the people you work with directly impact the atmosphere?
Results from my not so successful attempt: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128258" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128258</a>