For 2 years now I have been very lucky. I have been working in a small consulting firm (5 developers including "executive" staff). We mostly do sub-contract work for corporate intranets. When I am coding, I code perl pretty much exclusively (except when I have to touch legacy VBScript code *yuk*). I am lucky too because my boss (he hates when i call him that) is a good friend, who i had known (and occasionally contracted out to) for almost 4 years prior. Then one day, the planets had aligned and the moon was in the correct phase, and whalla I joined his company.

I actually have no official title (although I may soon cause we have to print up the new biz-cards) and being such a small company I wear a lot of hats all the time. Last week I set up the new CVS server, the week prior I was the project-manager/creative-director on our newly re-designed company website, this week who knows, its only tuesday morning here in EST. But aside from these more mundane tasks, I am also the R&D guy. Of course we don't have a "real" R&D budget, but when I am not doing something else, my job is to find and code cool new stuff. Again, I feel I am very lucky, and eternally grateful. But it hasn't always been like this.

Prior to this job, I spent several long years working as a programmer in the advertising industry in NYC (through the dot.com boom too). Basically, imagine being surrounded by marketing people and MBAs (most of whom are educated way beyond their intelligence), and they always got the last word (but hey, thats advertising). I worked for some of the biggest too, talk about faceless, *sheesh*! But you know, it was good experience, and in the end I got some really nice names on my resume (although sometimes i think "at what price"). Hardly ever was this work challenging (except for some of the early DHTML stuff, cause browsers were so finiky back in '97/'98), and sure I wanted to shoot myself during many a meeting. But work is work, and living with a family in NYC is not cheap. I had to get through this to get to where I am today (living in the CT burbs, half-telecommuting to NYC and working for a great boss).

A lot of times you have to slogg through the crap before you can get to the good stuff. Before I got into computer work, I was an art school dropout waiting tables and working countless sh*t jobs. I got tired of that (obviously), so I bought some CS textbooks and several long years later ...

Your young, I assume you do not have a family, live you life, enjoy it, laugh at the corprate sheep "baaahhh"-ing in the cubicle next to you, read some good books, write some software in your spare time, and keep on truckin'. Eventually you will get to where you want to be.

-stvn