TORONTO – My name is Daniel Rose. I'm 27 years old and I live in Toronto. I went to York University where I studied mass communications and philosophy. I got involved with media in university, doing newspaper, radio and eventually Web stuff in its infancy. I started working at TSN as a writer while I was in school and stuck with the Web after I graduated.

Work is one of the easier ways to express yourself. I consider that to be an important part of selecting a job. If I can use some creativity and have some valuable input into a project, I'll find it satisfying.

I think for a growing number of people, work is becoming more and more part of a cohesive entity, rather than an end in itself. It has to mesh with life better than it has in the past, in terms of working with people you like. It bleeds into your social life a little bit. You don't leave the office at 5 and shut off. And if it's not working out, I think people are more willing to give up a job or even give up working entirely, if possible, to pursue other interests.

I'm fairly wired – more wired than most. It's a question of control. If you own a project and it's something you're responsible for, then you want to check in on it and fix it whenever you can. And if that means carrying a cellphone around and being bothered after 5 p.m. then that's OK. I don't mind having a laptop, checking my e-mail and fixing objects remotely if that's what's expected of me. That's what makes owning a project fun. It's a give and take. The more responsibility you have the more you have to expect to have responsibility at all times. It's just part of the new more frantic pace of business: it doesn't really turn off.

My expectations of work are definitely higher than my parents' were. I think there's not as much corporate loyalty as there used to be. I don't think companies care about their employees as much as they used to and, conversely, employees don't care as much about the company. I think it's almost unheard of that someone coming out of school now or even in the past five or 10 years would assume they're going to be with a company for their entire career. I've been out of school for four years and if I get a job soon it'll be my fifth job and fourth company! That doesn't strike me as being unusual. I know other people who think the same thing and I think that's indicative of a general trend.

What I'm trying to do if possible is to gain a lot of knowledge about the industry I'm in, meet a lot of people and then eventually try to think of an idea or see something that's missing in the industry. Then I'll strike off on my own and create a good core group of five or six people and try to meet that need, make a billion dollars and retire!

You see that more and more – little groups of people getting together and starting up a little company and seeing where it goes, hoping to make a million and retire or sell it to another company

People are taking more responsibility for their careers now. Hopefully it makes the workplace more of a meritocracy. Hopefully if you're within an organization and taking control, you'll be rewarded over someone who's simply been there longer. It's a bit more cutthroat. I guess that's a bit of a downside, but that's the nature of business, I suppose. Corporations compete against each other, people within those organizations compete against each other. That's how it works!

I think there are people out there who would enjoy being in a safe secure position, where they're not competing against other people; they just do their job and do it well. They're not worried about all the back-stabbing and politicking that's going on around them and they're happy with that. Maybe I'd be happy with that. I'm not necessarily a Type A having to climb the corporate ladder, I'm happy doing my job. I don't necessarily feel the need to climb the corporate ladder.

I started work at TSN as a writer. I wasn't hired as an HTML or Internet guru, but I was told I would be able to pick the skills up, which I did. But that was 1997. You probably couldn't get away with that now. In 1998 I moved to offline marketing, and worked on the corporate Web site after TSN bought an Internet service provider with a new media division. Then I moved to Yahoo central services working on back-end functionality such as improving the search engine.

I lost my job in November and it wasn't a total surprise. We knew there were going to be cutbacks – we just didn't know if there would be any in Canada. But I knew that my job wasn't directly responsible for bringing in revenue. I was working on wireless projects, which typically weren't moneymakers and still aren't yet, so you couldn't put some profit beside my job description. Five others were in the situation as well so we got let go.

I liked my job and I wish I was still there but I guess I'm just a glass-half-full guy and I saw the opportunities. The company paid me a three-month severance package which allowed me to take classes and work on personal projects. So I saw it as a great opportunity. Going home that day I was listing all the stuff I could do. It was fun!

Right now I've got all my eggs firmly nesting in one basket. Someone I knew at Yahoo was adding to his group at Sympatico in a big way. I called him out of the blue and he said, "How come you're calling me?" I said, "Just calling to see what's going on." He said, "We're hiring 25 people, and we've got to get them in right away." We had a good conversation. I've had three interviews and it looks positive – fingers crossed.

P.S: Daniel Rose was hired February 11, 2002 to be associate director of convergence applications at Bell Canada.