When I left uni, I had my plans sorted. I wanted to do a master’s degree and got accepted at several places with my first choice being Leeds (forensic linguistics sounded awesome). However, for recession-related reasons I got booted out into the scary world of job hunting instead.

My initial thought was ‘Must get job!! Then everything will be fine!!’ Unfortunately, for me, getting a job was the easy part. It was what came after that I found extremely difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I know how lucky I was to get my first full-time job (and my second…and my third…and my fourth), but it’s the daily grind that was the problem. I remember saying to friends, family – and whoever else would listen to my repetitive rants i.e. no one – that I had no idea how people managed to work full time for 40+ years of their life without going mental. Admittedly I had a poor work/life balance to start with, but after two and a half years plus of full time working, I’ve pretty much got it figured out. (The essential parts are being able to switch off from work and actually doing stuff in the evenings rather than crashing on the sofa).

But in past jobs, I was extremely stressed out.

I was tired, I was irritated, I was rundown, I was bored. When I started a job I’d be really optimistic, happy about the change of pace, and feel like I was progressing. Within the first few months this all fizzled out as I uncovered a whole different set of issues behind the company. Every company has its faults, of course, but it’s a matter of how they affect you personally. One place I worked at had appalling systems in place that caused a lot of conflict – but it was bearable because people were really close on a personal level. Two places had an horrific bottleneck ‘management’ system in place that meant a lot of poor decisions were made by one particular person who didn’t really understand what they were doing but refused to listen to anyone else. I don’t regret having any of the jobs I’ve had in the past because I’ve learned important things from all of them. What’s clear to me now is that they were all part of my journey to figure out what I wanted to do, which ended up being things I’ve done for years – blogging, social media and SEO.

I’ve been at my current job now for nine months, and I still love it. I still love weekends, obviously, but I also feel like I’m making a difference to the company and working with people rather than being pushed down by them. I genuinely enjoy what I do, and my job is very creative and very flexible. If I feel like writing a post on something web-related, I’ll just go ahead and do it. There’s no endless system of writes, rewrites, re-rewrites, people changing their minds about what they want or approving something and then telling you to scrap it. 90% of the time I’m even lucky enough to choose what I want to write about. It’s not boring. There’s no blame culture. It’s extremely efficient, and it runs through the whole company so stuff just gets done. It’s so refreshing to actually work with people who make sensible decisions and actually explain their reasoning to you. In past jobs, it would be ‘Can we do [insert reasonable SEO suggestion here]?’, it would be ‘No’. ‘Why?’ ‘Just no’. It annoyed me because it was a pure and simple power trip. What ‘no’ meant was ‘No, because I say so’ or ‘No, just to put you in your place’. Interestingly though, if someone else proposed the idea, the answer was often ‘yes’. Which says it all really.

At one of the companies I worked at, it was clear that the mid-management had no power at all, and clear that they often got frustrated themselves. At another place, mid-management had plenty of power and one person in particular threw her weight around a lot. Although she annoyed the crap out of me, I felt sorry for her because everyone (except me) was so two-faced. When she was around they’d pander to her every whim, and when she wasn’t there they’d bitch incessantly about her. Interestingly, they blamed the high staff turnover on candidates ‘not being able to hack the job/pressured environment’ rather than the simple reasons of terrible management, poor organisation and bad decision making topped off with a rubbish salary.

The people around you definitely make or break your working environment. I hate to say this on International Women’s Day, but I find working with women really difficult for plenty of reasons which I won’t go into now. The people I currently work with are men, every single person who works here is a high-level geek in one way or another, and there’s plenty of light hearted banter. In past jobs, there would be laughter, but there would be a far higher percentage of the following: groaning, whining, complaining, sighing, arguing, eye rolling and so on. I’m not saying that my current place is some kind of magical rainbow land where everyone walks around with a smile plastered across their face, but it’s a good atmosphere. No one holds a grudge. Anger happens and then fades out as appropriate – there are no stock characters here.

Another big thing for me is the opportunities. Even though my job is a lot more defined than previous jobs I’ve had, my work is a lot more varied and I get a chance to do more stuff. I’ve had fun interviewing people like Chris Coyier, I’ve been to a couple of reasonably big awards ceremonies, I went to my first web design conference in January and I’m going to an SEO conference down in London next week. In return, I’ve tried to give a lot back by coming up with ideas for tools, 50 odd blog posts, link building, guest posting, various contests, a full 20,000+ word site audit and lots of other stuff.

I understand now how people can work for so many years without going crazy. The weeks and months are absolutely flying by for me, and even though it was a stressful journey to get to this point, it was definitely worth it.