Who the hells wants a fast-paced environment?
** raises hand **
A 'fast paced environment' can either be an environment from hell, or one where technological challenges abound. I stay away from the former, but I purposely seek the later. Obviouly one should seek a balance (specially if you are like me, with family and kids). However, if your job doesn't challenge your skills and passion, you are not learning. And that is the worst you can do to your professional career development.
To assume a fast-paced environment is always bad reveals a particular outlook to life and the type of technology-oriented career we have chosen for ourselves. Every job has its warts. What you make of out them, even the worst environments, it is solely and squarely up to you.
There are some 'fast-paced' jobs (on the bad sense of the word) that were just horrid, and I would never set foot on those companies again. But the experiences themselves taught me how to handle pressure in a professional manner, and how to get things done as much as humanly possible. Those jobs were horrid not because of the technical and requirement challenges, but because of horrid personal dynamics and management style.
On the other side of the coin, the best jobs I've ever had were also 'fast-paced', in terms of changing requirements and technological challenges. That's where you really learn how to rise to the ocassion and deliver, which is ultimately what every programmer (or any professional) ought to seek.
Difficulty of something is not an excuse for avoiding its accomplishment.
Just people change their minds when it comes to software is not a bad thing. It is a reflection of world dynamics, and we in software, we are the business of creating realistic executable models of the world. I'm amazed at how many programmers actually fail to understand this.
The challenge is in knowing how to manage the continous (and usually chaotic) rate of change. And there are two sides of the coin in this: there is non-technical management and there is technical management (your part as a programmer and software engineer). And the later is as important, and perhaps more so, than the former.
Ultimately, you want to stay away from bad working environments, but for the purpose of cultivating your professional career, you should always look for legitimately fast-paced enviroments. Otherwise, we might just look for a 9-to-5 job maintaining COBOL/RPG reports.