The Happiest Person at Stardock is...

Yeah, the QA guy.   I've done software QA before and I'm here to tell you, that's a load of crap.   Now *VIDEO GAME* QA, that's cool.  Basically you get to play games all day and get paid for it.  Doesn't take as much skill as other software QA, either.

Culturally, the QA people are second-class to the developers, even though their job can require a more advanced skillset than development.  It takes a lot of computing resources to bug-hunt, and frequently you're juggling between batch jobs running in parallel on a bunch of computers at the same time.  There's postgraduate-level theory behind bug hunting and verification that makes polymorphism, inheritance and the like that developers deal with child's play.  While developers get to create, QA gets to debug.  And when a bug escapes to the customer base, guess who gets the blame?   I'm calling BS on that one.   The happiest job is the architect.

No way...

Beta testing can be fun, QA is not.  Professional video game QA personnel do not play games.  They run through iteration testing procedures, over and over and over.  Is it as boring as bug hunting enterprise business applications?  No.  It's still boring though.

Correction gladly taken....

Get back to work.   

The list is a lie. People who own business are the happiest.

Pretty sure Brad is the happiest person at Stardock, unless there are other millionaires there.

Well I thought it was Curt Hendzell.

and warehouse managers are not happy people.

I would say I'm pretty happy.

Will be happier tonight at our trivia game though 

In my experience devs are happier than QA people... Oh wait... Maybe that's just me.

Game testing sounds like a terrible job to me.  Maybe I've read too many of those stories from that Penny Arcade site, but it sounds awful.

Aren't happy people the happiest? My job doesn't make me happy, I make the job happy.

From what they describe they actually polled, it sounds like what they actually found is more akin to a satisfaction level, rather than "happiness". Many of the factors they mention are things which can dissatisfy by their absence, but don't really being happiness by their presence. Other jobs (such as development) might put you under more pressure, but the work itself is generally a lot more interesting.

Heh.