Good Job

Last week, in the middle of a job interview, someone asked me a really interesting question: “What are you looking for in your next role that you didn’t get in your previous roles?” I was caught off guard by that question. After all, I had spent the past two years in an academic environment, and my life as a supply chain/e-commerce professional seems like a distant memory at this point. It also doesn’t help that early in my career I did a lot of exploring, saying yes to any job that seemed remotely interesting to me – I feel like I had everything I wanted, just not at the same time. I want a good job. What does that even mean?

It’s hard to pin down what makes a job good

When people give me career advice, they tend to express sentiments along the lines of “you should do XYZ so you can get a good job”, but they almost never elaborate on what “good” means to them. Over the years, I’ve expanded my once radically narrow perspective on what a good job entails. When I was still a student at UCI, I thought that a nice title combined with a decent salary will confer vocational bliss on me. That was not it. Three years into my professional life, I got there – ahead of schedule – and I promptly went back to school to reorient my career.

What am I looking for now?

People are often surprised when I tell them that I’m not fixated on software development jobs, considering that I went back to school to study computer science. While I did apply for internships at tech companies, a career in tech was not what motivated me to complement my Economics B.A. with a Computer Science B.S. In an earlier blog post, I explained that it was a supply chain management problem involving Dijkstra’s algorithm that sparked my interest in improving my computational problem solving skills. I was motivated primarily by intellectual curiosity, and secondarily by the prospect of having Winter and Summer breaks again.

What I am looking for now:

• A role in which I can develop mastery in some subject through experience and deliberate practice.
• A shared sense of purpose with my team.
• Earned success.
• A platform where I can use my domain knowledge in conjunction with my technical skills.
• Work-life harmony.
• Upward mobility.

I recognize that these things I just listed above are nebulous, and that’s by design. It’s not a checklist; it’s not even a wishlist; it is a merely a cue for myself, nudging me toward some career path.

If I must map out my career for the next five years, I think it’ll look like this.

graph TD;
    MM[Merchandising Manager] --> CM[Content Manager];
    CM-->PM[Technical Product Manager];
    CM-->BSA[Business Analyst];
    MM --> EA[E-commerce Analyst];
    EA --> DA[Data Analyst];

    DA --> DE[Data Engineer];
    DA --> BI[Business Intelligence Developer];

    APM[Associate Product Manager] --> SCA[Supply Chain Analyst];
    EA --> BSA;
    SCA --> DA;