Five Things I’ll Be Missing

A few days back I wrote about the five things that I would most definitely not be missing about Corporate America. Tonight I’m staring at two more days, and I figure it’s time to turn the tables. So, what, you ask, are the Five Things I Will Be Missing about Working in Corporate America?

I’m glad you asked:

1. Working with some of the very coolest people ever: In all seriousness, my company is filled with a remarkable collection of diverse, intelligent, driven, and passionate people. Proof? We are a big, messy organization with processes that, well, rely totally on extraordinarily great people who do remarkably great things. Given that this company has been a consistently high performer, and that it’s been consistently ranked among the best employers in the nation … it’s been a true privilege to work with so many excellent people.

2. Remarkable work: Throughout my professional career I’ve done actual rocket science. I’ve been involved with embedded controls software development. I’ve done IT work. But honestly, nothing has been more complex, more intriguing, or more educational than the last 13 years in various broad-scoped roles centered in the Human Resources department. People are amazing, and very little actually beats the feeling you get when you see an entire organization of 40,000 people change in positive directions because of what you’ve done.

3. Global scope: I used to say that one of the greatest things about my job was going to bed at night knowing that your work is making people’s lives better in China or India or Australia or … With this company, I’ve had a chance to see a lot of the world. It’s a small place.

4. The money didn’t suck: Given corporate America’s compensation scheme, and given that I was a fast-riser relative to my age peers, I was probably considerably underpaid for the first fifteen years of my professional career. But, it all evens out in the end, I suppose. And let’s face it, a steady paycheck made it easy for the rest of my life to just kind of happen.

5. Flexibility: My company is actually pretty cool for a big company. I mean. It tries. My work schedule, for example, is completely my own, and has been since the day I started. It took me a few years to really get comfortable with that fact (no one actually told me about it, you see, I just figured it out–this practice pretty much continues today, really, which is actually a problem, I suppose), and it took our IT systems several more to catch up well enough that I could really take advantage of it.