Amusingly, my previous post choose boring employees was shared to hacker news under the off-by-one erroneous title choose boring employers. That seemed funny enough to run with, but what does it mean to choose boring employers?
One interpretation is that a boring employer is one where you do not live in interesting times. Where you can get on with your job, and with finding new and better ways to do your job, without constantly fighting fires.
But what if you’re happiest in an environment where you are fighting fires? In that case, you probably should surround yourself with arsonists.
Another interpretation is to invert the discussion in Choose Boring Employees: find an employer who spends their innovation tokens wisely. One who’s OK with the answer to “how do I store these tuples of known structure” being “in a relational database”, or one who doesn’t mind when the answer to “what platform should we base our whole business on” starting with “I skim-read a blog post on HN when I was riding MUNI this morning and…”.
But, let’s be clear, there’s a place for the shiny new technology. Sometimes you do need to spend your innovation tokens, so you don’t want to be somewhere that won’t let you do it at all. Working on a proof of concept, you want to get to proof quickly, so it may be time to throw caution to the wind (unless the concept you’re trying to prove involves working within some cautious boundaries). So boring need not get as far as frustrating.
