- Working 4 days a week.<p>- 6 weeks of (paid) vacation<p>- Private office, with a door<p>- Ability to partially work from home<p>- No on-call<p>These are probably less about the offer and more about working environment:<p>- Freedom to choose my tools (incl. laptop, development OS)<p>- No Agile<p>- No team, or very small team with smart colleagues<p>To summarize, the above are about satisfying two needs: for authonomy, and to not be worked to the bone.
The freedom to work on whatever I wanted (it would be computational chemistry for the next 5 years)<p>Enough salary to not worry about money.<p>All of my work and datasets are open source so everyone can benefit.<p>The ability to mentor juniors as I enjoy teaching.<p>The ability to work my own hours - because this is more productive (I frequently do 4-5 hours work, take a 2 hour nap, then do another 4-5 hours) every day
In order from most realistic to pipe dream: Meetings don't happen without agendas and needing input from everyone. Hard problems where half-baked solutions genuinely can't work for the business (this is why I gravitated to ads and payments). If I conduct interviews, attract a good portion of strong candidates I'll be excited to work with, and filter out the ones who can't code at all. Don't put me on call for stuff I didn't write with no runbook (corollary: get runbooks written before the whole team moves on). Windows of undisturbed time for deep work. Support DSL design; don't limit me to blub languages and libraries that the median candidate can handle. Let me ramp up on formal methods and start using them.
- working 5 days a week, 4 to 6hs per day on my own schedule (most of the time)<p>- 8 weeks of paid vacation<p>- interesting and high value work<p>- private office when I need/want to go<p>- remote whenever I don't need/want to go to the office<p>- 5x the salary needed to mantain a frugal style of living
Flexibility, autonomy, clarity in strategy, open communication, a genuine effort to do the right thing and a clear drive to win as a business from which all the other points flow.