There are many reasons other than boredom that someone will quit. Your company might suck or be headed towards suck. This person might randomly get an offer that fulfills their life’s dream. There is a bevy of unpredictable reasons that someone will leave, but boredom is an aspect of their daily professional life you can not only easily assess, but also fix. More importantly, boredom is not initially catastrophic. Boredom shows up quietly and appears to pose no immediate threat. This makes it both easy to address and easy to ignore.

At the end of the day, the best thing you can do is to figure out what makes you happy and then do the hell out of that thing. You’ll probably do a great job at whatever it is you’ve decided to do. Hopefully, your passion for your work will result in positive outcomes that benefit you and your community. Maybe we’ll all luck out and the job that makes you happy ends up benefitting a large number of people. If not: hey, at least you’re not miserable.

I’ve hired my fair share of people now (fired them too) and having been through the ringer of young-person-just-starting-out close to a half dozen times, I figure I know it better than just about anyone. You’re scared but overconfident, clueless but eager to learn, just glad to be given a shot. I tried to think of a few things I wish I’d been told when I was just starting, things that would have saved me from screwing up. These are the things I still tell myself.

This is Robert Krulwich speaking to our generation, telling us how things have changed, telling us to be hopeful, telling us how to win.

I was recently asked what to do when a potential employer asks this question. In my opinion, it’s kind of a dumb “gotcha” question that, half the time, they’re only asking because they’re “interviewing a candidate”, and that’s one of the things you’re supposed to ask.

I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.

I wrote a comment for Hacker News back in August in response to a guy's question about what a non-programmer should do in a startup. My response received 164 up votes and is the tenth most popular comment of all time. In this article I add some depth to most of my previous twenty bullet points.

During a behavioral interview, always listen carefully to the question, ask for clarification if necessary, and make sure you answer the question completely. Your interview preparation should include identifying examples of situations from your experiences on your resume where you have demonstrated the behaviors a given company seeks. During the interview, your responses need to be specific and detailed. Tell them about a particular situation that relates to the question, not a general one. Briefly tell them about the situation, what you did specifically, and the positive result or outcome. Your answer should contain these four steps (Situation, Task, Action, Result or "STAR") for optimum success.

The first thing to remember is that a resume is a sales brochure – the goal of a resume is to convince the HR person and hiring manager to give you a phone screen. That’s it. Your resume is not your career history or academic C.V. where you list everything you’ve ever done – its only purpose is to convince somebody to give you more time to sell them on the fact that you are the right person for the job.

And that’s the greatest lie of the Noise. The idea that listening and reacting to the Noise is significant progress. Yes, these small bits of work we do all day are essential to getting things done, but go back to your last big vacation. After the first three days of decompression, when you were sitting in that hammock with a glass of red wine, under that oak tree that is older than anyone you know… tell me what you were thinking about. Was it the 27 bugs you left in an unverified state, or was it the epiphany that in the first three decades of your life you haven’t come close to building something as impressive as this damned oak tree?

Adam Birchall is one of those rare footballers who, when he says he loves playing for his club, actually means it. The 26-year-old, known as the Wayne Rooney of non-league football because of his prolific goalscoring form, loves playing for Dover so much that his eyes shine as he speaks with all the zeal of a religious convert.

Tony Hsieh: Yeah, on average it’s about 2 or 3% of people take it. ... We started this a few years ago and it actually started out at $100 dollars and we keep actually upping the offer.  It’s at $2,000 now and actually at the end of the training, which is 4 weeks we up it to $3,000 and extend it beyond that and we keep upping it because we feel like not enough people are taking it and the original motivation was to get people that...  We don’t want people at Zappos that are there just for a paycheck.  Is this a company whose culture I want to be a part of and contribute to and when they decide to turn down the easy money when they come back to the office on Monday they’re that much more passionate and engaged and committed and that has been by far, the biggest benefit.

Getting started in user experience can be difficult. Our profession has an identity crisis. You need look no further than swarm of acronyms that we hide behind: CHI, HCI, UI, UE, UX, IA, ID, IxD, IxSD,… the list goes on.
Our identity crisis means learning our field is like trying to inhabit the mind of a multiple personality disorder sufferer. For an aspiring interaction designer, figuring it all out is daunting. For anyone, it’s daunting.
This is my top-five list of what I’ve found to be most important to do and master if you want to get into design.

Last Day at the Office Emails catalogs and details the parting shots of people on their last day at work. In this post, we learn tested techniques from Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Neil's goodbye to the L.A. Times.

How do you hire a programmer if you’re not one yourself? Some things to look for…

Ryan Holiday: If you've ever been in therapy or know someone who has, there is all sorts of great advice in here to help make the therapeutic process short, direct and goal-oriented. Which is helpful because if therapy is not those things for you, it's really not worth doing, now is it? Haley has an amazing essay called The Art of Being a Failure as a Therapist where he attempts to look at the ways therapy might not be therapy, the idea being that if something can't be falsified it isn't scientific. Naturally, Haley is applying this test to his job, and we benefit from his conclusions, but we'd be even better off if we tried this in our own fields. If you can't say how you can fail at your job then it isn't much of a job. The essay about Jesus Christ is very insightful, but what separates this book from most books of essays is that the title essay is not the best one.

I’m feeling somewhat vindicated by the NYT opinion piece “End the University as We Know It” — a call for restructuring the old, creeky ways of the graduate university. The trajectory from graduate school to teaching positions is serpentine, at best. Specialization creates smaller and smaller communities of practice who talk to all seven or twenty or fifty of the other specialists. Ways of knowing become increasingly limited, confined to these small communites. Interdisciplinarity — worthwhile in spirit, certainly — often means getting some disciplines together in a room, rather than transcending the notion of the discipline all together, something that would allow more focus on problems from the top down, rather than as sub-problems of, say, economics or history or whatever.

One of the best questions ever is “What are you going to do when you grow up?”

Here are the top five reasons why being a “jack of all trades,” what I prefer to call a “generalist,” is making a comeback:

These qualities – the ones that make for a fulfilling career – can be distilled down into 4 main categories, or “pillars,” as I like to call them. They are: Meaning, Atmosphere, Passion, and Skills – aka M.A.P.S., a career compass to help point you in the right direction.

RT @rob_schmitt: How do I learn to program? http://t.co/1rkOOce via @37signals

I'll be leaving my job soon and will have to turn in my work laptop. How can I get my laptop sparkling clean so I can preserve my privacy and avoid runing afoul of IT or any corporate policies?

As some people here don’t care about making their living from the internet, I understand that this post will not be for everybody. However, if you’ve just made the leap to working for yourself, currently run your own business, or you’re looking to make your money online in the future, this article may be just what you need. Over the last 18 months of working for myself, I’ve learned a ton of things on my journey. Not every piece of advice I took on board has helped, with many ideas quickly being discarded. From reading dozens of books, speaking with hundreds of entrepreneurs, and living this life myself for a year and a half, there are a few lessons I would like to share.

You mentioned in a couple of your posts that it is common to see advances for new authors in the 5000-7000 range but I can't find any information about royalties. You do mention in an almost off handed way that each time you sell a book you receive about $1.12. What sort of annual income is typical for a author that publishes one book every other year. I think I could write a book a year if not more but I know the editing and everything else can drag out the process. I have no idea what typical sales for a book are. I understand that it is completely dependent on how well the book is received, I'm just looking for averages here.

Ryan's 35 lessons in 35 years is required reading if you are a man. And probably if you are a woman: http://j.mp/bzpCCY

This has done the rounds today, and it is fabulous: Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup http://bit.ly/9UxkLz

A contradictory set of truths about books and publishing in the abstract: don’t repeat yourself, and don’t write books that are too different from one another. Other writers will pillory you for the first, and publishers will be more than happy to pigeonhole you from the moment you achieve anything like success. Blow out your advance? Great. Now write the same exact book again.

RT @rogre: Career doubt, sabbaticals, process, education policy, priorities & why Finns appreciate design... A Note for @fchimero http:/ ...

Steve Martin is responsible for so many great comic and musical moments, so it's a shame that a whole generation will remember him from some pretty execrable comedies from the previous decade. Nice feature that rounds up his many successes, including his semi-rebirth as a bluegrass plucker.

Graphic designer Glaser shares 10 nuggets of wisdom from his long and successful career.

I've only recently heard of Frank Chimero and started reading him, but I'm delighted I have. Here he rails against our how-to culture (something I'm getting increasingly tired of) and gives us the one true piece of advice we all need: do what you're best at, and keep doing it. There are no recipes.

"With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice. 30 Months later, when my second child was due, did I go back to the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts."

"I took one (bad) computer science class in college, and I'm not a web developer. So in early 2008, when I decided I was finally going to build a web site I'd been fantasizing about for years, I was starting from scratch."

"Tips For Students with a Bachelors in Computer Science" - but relevant for many more.

"I decided to explore the idea of freelancing when several people from the office complimented my writing one after the other. My problem was that I had no idea what I wanted to do exactly. Yes, it was going to involve writing of some sorts. I discovered I had a knack for words (my boss even trusted me to write a press release about a new product we were launching — not bad for someone 6 months out of university!) but I had never been specifically hired and paid by others just to 'write stuff.'"

"The strange secrets of humor, fear and a guy who makes big money making little people laugh."

A neat venn diagram on why we should combine what we do well, what we want to do, and what we can be paid to do - aka the 'Hooray!' zone.