How to decide if you have a good job

"... The rest of the sentence, that they [TechCrunch] published an hour early, an hour before they were supposed to, an hour before the embargo lifted and we were going to launch the site doesn’t need to be said..."

TechCrunch has a public policy of not honoring embargos:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/death-to-the-embargo/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/04/survey-says-pr-people-l...

I went to the linked site (alice.com) that the article is about and had a severe case of flashback syndrome.

You see, eleven years ago I was slaving away as an intern at a consulting firm, building up mybasics.com. Which was the exact. same. thing.

Not quite so slick, of course, since it was 1998; but it was the identical idea, all the way down to using "never run out again" as marketing copy.

(mybasics.com did not survive the .com bust; I think it failed late '99?)

I suppose I don't really have a point, but felt the need to comment anyway. Everything old is new again!

I wonder if there's 'serial entrepreneur' success to be had by re-pitching the business models of .com failures to VCs. After all, VCs bit on them plenty hard the first time around. :)

Speaking as someone who's had several good jobs in the past, and abso-fricking-lutely love the one I have now:

If you have to read an article hoping it will help you decide if you have a good job, save your time: you don't.

I'm glad the author was excited by fast-paced challenges, but this type of thrill can arise from many situations, and when it's a job, it's not necessarily a good job.

I've worked all weekend to put together a payment system for a high-volume ecommerce site. It was exciting watching the logs for possible problems and seeing money start to roll in during the early hours of Monday morning, and it was pretty satisfying that everything worked after slaving away through the weekend, but I wouldn't say it was a particularly good job at all.

Good article though - it's definitely important to seek out satisfying (and potentially exhilarating) work for oneself. Kind of the opposite of cubicle numbness.

The sites listed for coverage seem totally at odds with (whom I assume is) the audience of Alice.com. I guess it's cool to get covered by TC, Business Week, and Financial Times, but that seems off the mark to me. Shoot for Martha Stewart or Better Homes and Gardens. Isn't that where the customers would be?

Still, sounds like a very exciting day, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't envious ;)

Down one demerit for techchrunch (or maybe not, they seem to make a valid point about embargos), but we might call this the 17 hour test--if you are working 17 hours and don't want to or forget to go home, that is a sign of a good job.

I couldn't find any info on the site, is the name an allusion to the Brady Bunch?