A project goes well. What actually pleased you?

The people were better off at the end of it than the start.The thing works, and it is going to keep working.Somebody who was struggling with it isn't now.The whole mechanism is simpler than when you found it.

Pick the bad day you could actually tolerate:

Six difficult conversations, every one of them necessary.Eight hours on one fault that will not reproduce.A day of meetings where you had to read the room throughout.A day of documentation that nobody but you will read.

What do you notice first in a new job?

Who actually makes the decisions, and who is unhappy.How the work moves, and exactly where it gets stuck.Whether people here are straight with each other.What is being held together with tape.

Pick the training you would genuinely enjoy:

How to have the conversation nobody wants to have.How the thing actually works, in detail, from the bottom up.How to teach something to somebody frightened of it.A qualification that proves you can do the technical part.

Your ideal week has:

Much the same shape as last week.No two days alike.A diary you can see a month of.Room to chase whatever turns up.

Something urgent lands at four in the afternoon. You:

Are annoyed. It should have come through the process.Are faintly delighted. This is the interesting part.Deal with it, then fix the process that let it through.Drop the plan. The plan was provisional anyway.

How would you rather be measured?

Against a standard, consistently, with a clear bar.By the thing you pulled off that nobody had a method for.By whether it was right, to the spec, on the day.By what you started that had not existed before.

Pick a workplace:

Established, orderly, and still there in thirty years.Unformed, understaffed, and making it up as it goes.Well run, with a handbook you actually agree with.Somewhere your job description is a rough guide.

Why you would stay somewhere for ten years:

You would become properly, unarguably good at it.It would be doing something that genuinely needed doing.The craft. You want to get to the top of the trade.You would get to watch the change actually land.

Pick the compliment you would rather have:

"Nobody does this better than you do.""This would not have happened without you.""That was beautifully done.""It mattered."

More money, for work that helps nobody in particular:

You would take it, provided the work itself were excellent.You would not last a year.You would take it if it made you better at the craft.You would take it, and find the mission somewhere else.

What would make you feel you had wasted a decade?

Having been mediocre at it the entire time.Having been excellent at something that did not need doing.Never getting good enough to be trusted with the hard ones.Realising the thing you built helped nobody very much.