We play D&D

Ever wonder what the consultants you work with are like outside of when they're helping you succeed each day? Let me walk you through a few things.

We play D&D

At Ocelot, we have a D&D game every other Thursday that eight of us are involved in. That means we all get on our machine, login, and pretend to be heroes and fight off dragons and fly magical ships. This game is open to everyone at Ocelot, one of our most senior employees, who has been around since nearly the beginning, Kara, played alongside one of the Partners here at Ocelot. Other times, it's a mix of senior employees, talent acquisition, and some newer-to-Ocelot employees. Once, the president of our company visiting employees in Omaha even sat down and played a game!

We also have a ping-pong table at HQ where one of our co-owners, Chris, and the talent acquisition lead, Ryan, will pretty much pick up a paddle and play anyone. Chris will usually win, though, and we tried to get him to play at the tournament at AWS re:invent last year, but he politely declined to focus on the rest of the conference. When some of us remote employees come in, it's almost tradition that we play a round of ping-pong, even though some of us are not the best at it. I am a liability to lighting fixtures and still have played once.

Internally, we debate about all kinds of topics, such as should we use Slack to train our internal LLM (no, because not everyone consented to that before using it), whether Provel is a correct pizza topping (an ongoing debate), and which board games are good for which groups of people (family board games and quick board games being two of the bigger categories). They're all friendly, filled with emojis, jokes, and logic to answers (evidently Provel is better freshly hot and not delivered according to internal discussions).

Why talk about this?

Ocelot is not a traditional consulting firm. We are professional engineers with a lot of thoughts and opinions but also strive to work together towards goals. Rarely do you find people in shiny shoes writing PowerPoints here.

1. We are all doers, from the President, co-founders, and partners who all do work on internal and external projects, to our recent college graduate hires.
2. We all have the normal hobbies one would expect from an engineer-focused firm.
3. We all work together to go for goals, whether it's beating a dungeon in D&D, figuring out LLMs, or helping our clients meet their goals with hands-on, engineering work.

Want to know more?

If this seems like the kind of person you are - someone who puts hands on keyboard and works hard to help other hit goals, reach out to us.

If you want truly professional work done that's delivering results beyond documents and powerpoints but with day-to-day work experience from top down, let us know by hitting "Contact" at the top right - we're glad to talk to you.

About the author

Marty Henderson is a Staff Consultant at Ocelot Consulting. Certified Architect in Google Cloud and AWS, Marty leads and designs complex projects based on cloud technologies, with heavy emphasis on teaching and enablement of teams.

Photo by Alperen Yazgı on Unsplash