Carragee Consulting

Criteria for the ultimate work experience according to me

1) Collaborate with smart, motivated people who are generous with their knowledge and willing to consider alternative view points. There are probably 8-10 people I would work on any project they asked because I respect them and I know it would improve my well-being to be in daily contact with them.

2a) ~60/40 blend of technical and strategic work so that there’s a lot of asynchronous dev time and some time to socialize progress and validate that the output will be meaningful and be adopted

2b) Less than 25% of my work week booked in meetings, especially reoccurring ones.

3) Opportunities to work on data architecture, analytics and reporting in the context of meaningful business process innovation

4) Required technical skills in my mastery – ability to perform my piece of the project ~80% within existing software and languages I feel component with going in (Tableau, Power BI, Excel, SQL, R, Python) and ~20% need to learn on the job or opportunity to learn nuances and new techniques.

5) Interdisciplinary – gives me an excuse to meet people from at least 5 departments (finance, sales, marketing, product development, operations/logistics)

6) Compensation alignment with level of effort and sacrifice required to perform well in the job

7) Limited travel or onsite – I’ve been a remote worker since 2011 and with a 3 year old now is not the time to travel every week or return to daily office commuting

8) Discrete phases – know when we’ve hit progress milestones and how to move to a “completion state” even if that is an intermediate equilibrium in a continuous improvement process. Definition of DONE is clear

9) Referenceable – something I can explain to my family and friends with a sense of pride

10) Autonomy – once objectives are defined a wide degree of latitude in how to get the work done.

What would differ in your list?