second day at my second job « verdure
second day at my second job
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

My second after college, being all adult-like from 8-5 job, anyway.

This place is much smaller than my first after college job. I will, after many mistakes and requests to remind me again, learn every developer’s name, and those of the QAs and BAs too. People say hi in the maze of hallways more. It’s a bit chaotic (why is this person’s name on this ticket?). There’s no documentation to speak of. I could really, really use a data structure map of the main databases.

My work wardrobe is a notch too dressy for this place, and two or three notches too warm. But I won’t complain about getting to wear jeans any day of the week. As a result of some business partnership, we are called leased-employees in the handbook, which strikes me as one of the worst names they could have chosen. It feels really weird to being driving to work. All these stoplights, waiting, without being able to read or zone out. At least parking is free.

I’m just thrilled to be in a bunch of actual developers. Everyone speaks the same language, and I have people to ask questions of. (A lot of questions right now.) I don’t know enough to be useful yet, but I feel a lot less deer-in-the-headlights this time around, and more confident about asking the stupid questions now in order to bring me up to speed faster than silently hoping that I’ll find the needed clue, eventually. It felt like college had pretty much nothing to do with what my first job ended up requiring in the navigation of business speak and process (or really any of the work I actually did, for that matter). Knowing some of the business speak now is certainly useful, but there is so much less artificial process and rule making here, where you have to interface with several other departments to get anything done, who all scrutinize why you need access, redirect you to get someone else’s stamp of approval. Not that good communication and consistency are bad practices, and are indeed what business processes are supposed to enforce, but I get the feeling here that if you have the time and ability to get something done, people here would love that you have volunteered, and let you have at it. It’s refreshing. And I’m enjoying my blissful optimism before I get to digging deep into whatever bad practices or choices that inevitably have been made here just like every other organization.

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