Poll: Career-then-location, or location-then-career?

[Ivory_Tower]

Poll question: Poll: Career-then-location, or location-then-career?

I've been thinking about this for a while after talking to a friend about it, and I still haven't settled on an answer.

If you had/have the luxury of making this choice, which would you do:
Find the ideal place to live, and then figure out what sort of work you could do there, or find your ideal job, and then figure out where you could do it?

Could you do any job as long as it was somewhere you loved, or is your career important enough to you that you would move to a less-than-ideal location?

I'm not giving an "other" option, either. (So there! :) )

I've been (somewhat) lucky in that I like what I do for a living, and I don't mind the general location where I live. I would be willing to change a few things, but I'm not miserable enough to take drastic action.

Just curious what everyone else thinks.

[Demobrat]

1. Under 30 - career then location.

Over 30 - location then career. At least that's what worked for me.

[Ivory_Tower]

2. That's sort of how I've been leaning

Although at this point I could handle just moving a little farther away from where I am (someplace with less concrete, mainly) and keeping my current job.

Plus with the growth of global communications, I think I could do a large portion of my job from just about anywhere. The big issues I have are hardware-related testing, and all the face-to-face meetings I have to attend every week!

[Ivory_Tower]

3. Gratuitous dinner-time kick

Just because.

[dofus]

4. You're presuming an ideal world.

Some careers absolutely dictate location. Other careers allow a lot more freedom of location. Maybe it comes down to which is more important to an individual.

[Ivory_Tower]

5. Well, that's what I was trying to extract

If a career absolutely dictated location, would you be willing to abandon it? Or you be willing to move to follow your job?

I was curious about priorities, and so far it's been breaking the way I would expect.

That's also why I qualified the question with the comment about having the luxury to choose. I understand that realistically some people can't move from where they are, and some people are bound (to some extent) to their careers. Of course, there are careers that are not necessarily location-specific, so it makes the choice easy for those people (location-then-career).

An imperfect poll, I admit, but I was hoping to see people's reasoning. And I was hoping to force a choice by not allowing wiggle-room for a third option ("find a job I love that I can do anywhere" or something).