What makes a coding job rock?

I was just chatting with my friend Björn about what makes a good programmer tick - what motivates them, engages them and makes them happy? We got into the discussion because the Mayflower/ThinkPHP team is looking for skilled PHP programmers who are willing to come to Munich and work on cool projects (Things like managing over 80,000 SQLite installations or interfacing 1 Mil. lines of Cobol code to PHP or hacking PHP/XUL or bringing PHP to the HypoVereinsbank.)

So, good (PHP) programmers of the world, what makes a job a great job?

Personally, I care most about having:

• a healthy company culture that doesn't suck the life out of me
• being able to be responsible for the stuff that I care about
• an opportunity to grow by doing new things and being able to collaborate with my Free Software/Open Source peers
• interesting/challenging projects
• doing stuff that helps the Free Software/Open Source community
• a decent paycheck
• having some of my work be under a Free Software/Open Source license so that I can use it even if I leave a company

So... what do other people think?

There were a few comments on this post:

Yeah it's true - we're again hiring. For those of you who want to work in a good environment for large customers with quite interesting PHP projects (and enjoy working together with people like Sascha or Pierre), try the job form at ...

Posted by: Björn Schotte at September 14, 2004 11:36 AM

I'd also have to add here (in addition to all the great points Zak makes) that being able to solve challenging problems where the solution ultimately increases the overall quality of life for a large group of people is also pretty important. While I love solving programming problems simply for the sake of the solution, it's much easier to sleep at night when that solution makes life better for a group of people.

Posted by: Jim Willis at October 1, 2004 12:45 AM