The perfect workplace for me is a place where:
- People have the required skills and motivation to perform their jobs competently
- People are honest about mistakes they make… after all, we all make them so we might as well all be honest about them
- People who play the political game are fired, or if possible, not hired
- People aren't offended when told that something they did was not good or could be better
- People who are sick just stay home instead of infecting others
- It is accepted that developers spend a little of their worktime to read blogs, mailinglists, etc... to learn
- People are judged on what they do, not how busy they look
- People who work together on something are located in the same room
- People have enough common sense to go to a meeting room or a more secluded area to discuss something that is specific to their project, so they won't bother everyone else in the room. If that's not possible, a little bit of voice control would be nice
- People don't engage in Buzzword Driven Development ( = claiming to do certain practices or activities while in reality hardly doing them or doing a half-assed job of them)
- Managers trust the developers
- Managers don't make promises they know they can't keep
- Managers prefer a long-term vision instead of going for the quick short-term win while completely ignoring the negative consequences that will pop up after they have been reassigned
- They have proper airconditioning
- You have access to cheap (or free) drinks and snacks of a wide variety
Unfortunately I was sentenced to Enterprise Hell about 5.5 years ago so I'm not used to most of the stuff mentioned in the list... luckily i'm up for parole in about 2 months!