Is it really like Office Space?

When I tell new friends that I am a developer, and explain to them what that entails, I very quickly feel like Peter Gibbons from the movie Office Space. It's not how I see my career - not at all - but the explanation I give must sound like it is.

"Basically I take the HTMLs from a slicer and I turn it into code. That's what makes your website, you know, work."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0flsg4GMQxQ

Doesn't sound too flash does it? My new friend instantly pictures a cubicle farm full of nerds typing code, feverishly, that resembles what you see in The Matrix. Everybody sits in silence, the only exception being the mad tapping of fingers against keys and the occasional cough. Eyes dart between 14 windows at once and energy drinks are never far away from hand.

Well this is only the partial truth. I'd be lying if I said there was no accuracy to the above description (we do type fast and love caffeine), but one thing that is clearly missing is the FUN aspect. As a veteran web developer across all paths of website development - specification, design, implementation, testing and deployment - I've never worked in a sweatshop-style environment. That may happen with back-end only development houses, but when you deal with the web you tend to deal with creatives, and creatives like to have FUN. This breeds FUN into developers, who enjoy discussions on optimising code, why Umbraco 5 is a giant leap forward and why Futurama is better than The Simpsons (this happens a lot).

FUN doesn't just mean Hawaiian-shirt Friday (that readers, was a movie reference - we never have Hawaiin-shirt Friday at Wiliam). It means open-plan offices. It means open collaboration with all departments, not just the other developers. It means evenings (and sometimes whole days) that involve beer, burgers and trivia competitions - and not just under the pretence of Team Building; we all hang out because we are a close-knit company. And in regards to the development aspect; being web-focused means working with the latest toys and frameworks. We are rarely constrained by a technology to suit a client. More often than not, a client is excited that we offer the latest technologies to them. Get your HTML5's and MVC 4's here, folks! And IE6 can go hang itself.

Did I mention that we are hiring?