I love my job. I’ve mentioned this before, but it is just so much fun. A recent contract was the longest I’ve ever spent on a single project. The main reason for that was that it was fun. The work, for the most part was challenging and interesting, and the team was entertaining and mad enough to make every day onsite something I looked forward to. Most mornings I’d be grinning on my way into the office - no small feat before 9am and before the caffeine had hit.

In general, I reckon it’s important for a team to enjoy what they do. It is possible to work and not enjoy it, there are many folk who are in it just to fill the hours and get paid. It’s a shame (in my view) but it’s a valid career choice. It’s a path I have actively avoided though. Contracting gives me the flexibility to avoid being locked into that kind of situation. When a contract ceases to be fun, I just choose to not renew or extend, and go somewhere else.

The same option exists for permies though, it’s easy to move around in our profession, and that’s a good thing. It lets devs vote with their feet when dealing with different corporate environments. The dev resource landscape stays fluid and companies have to be realistic about their corporate policies and remuneration.

That’s not to say I just stay in places where I can goof off, and leave when things get hard. I enjoy the challenge of a difficult or high stress project. For me, that is fun. I’ve had a couple of projects which needed to be delivered under extremely tight time pressure. That was exciting - the pressure both focuses the mind, and removes a lot of the bureaucratic rubbish that would ordinarily slow such work down. On those occasions, my teams delivered on time, and we had fun doing so.

To enjoy the work, a team has to be used to winning. Mentioned before but bears repeating. Success breeds success, and a winning team is just happier and enjoy their work more. A team stuck on a deathmarch project are not having fun. At that point, people will leave.

People’s views on what constitutes fun differ, obviously. There’s enough variety there that most projects have something for everyone. For me, it’s having a challenging problem on a codebase large enough to require a bit of thought in managing it. As I’ve said before, I enjoy working with legacy projects. Taking the opportunity to improve and refactor legacy code is satisfying and in my opinion also cost effective. The code is cleaner, clearer and more maintainable. As a matter of course, the test coverage is generally improved, and overall the quality increases. It’s hard to quantify as a simple cost value, but every hour less spent by future devs in trying to figure out unnecessarily complex code as it was before the refactor adds up.

I doubt I would have stayed so long at that client if I wasn’t having so much fun. The work was challenging, and there were enough fun interactions within and outside the team to make it worthwhile. We got the job done, and there was a lot of laughter while we did it. That’s very cool.

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