bjarvis | Meeting the Boss

I arrived at my employer's offices in Foster City before 9 AM today. That was a mistake: it seems most folks here stroll in after 10 AM so there was no one here to meet me. At least they had publicly available wifi in the lobby so I could catch up on LJ and reading while waiting for someone to arrive.

Eventually, my director came by to collect me and performed a series of introductions to various people on the extended team. I already knew most of the people via email but it's nice to have a face to associate with them. As expected, I'm seriously overdressed for this office; shorts, t-shirts and faded jeans seem to be the law of the land. I'm more comfortable in business casual: my clothes help me delineate between my work life and home life.

My director then gave me an hour-long presentation on the systems architecture: this was one of the things I most desired from this visit, a representation of some kind where all the little ones and zeroes flow or reside. This is one facet but I still need to know on which hardware all of these apps reside, where geographically they are kept (DC or California) and how the responsibility for the care of the apps and systems are distributed among systems engineering (my team), network operations, software engineering and anyone else who might have a stake in this.

I had nearly two hours with one of the other people on my team about staging and deploying software rollouts to production and non-production servers. It's a convoluted process but I have a vastly greater sense of what is involved than I did previously, so that's a second major coup of the day.

I received my RSA token, the random number generator which will allow me to log into equipment remotely and securely; I also got myself added to the California jumphost. Now a stack more of equipment is accessible to me.

Just before I left DC last week, I was notified that one of our clients would require all of us to be fingerprinted and tested for drugs. This was never required for working with hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages at my prior firm but a client once-removed from my employer demands it. Go figure. I have a mid-morning appointment in downtown San Francisco tomorrow to have the fingerprinting completed. The drug test would be in Palo Alto but I have no contact information for that yet.

I may yet come to enjoy working for these people if I can continue knocking down these barriers to productivity.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm curious, Brian. I know how I feel or react when I see workers in tee-shirts, jeans, shorts in positions of authority in corporate America. I also know how I would react to workers strolling in at 10 am. Did you have a distinct reaction to the casualness and laid-back atmosphere? In general, how do you feel about this?

To me ... It gives off an aura of "I don't care" about myself or what I do. Just my opinion, but when I encounter folks at a formal concert, the theater or at church dressed like they've been at a picnic .. shorts, tee-shirts and flip flops, I think it's disrespectful to those people presenting the work.

Do these new peers of yours dress that way when meeting with clients? Your thoughts?

It's definitely the culture in Silicon Valley that people dress casually -- t-shirts, jeans, sometimes shorts, often sandals. This will often apply to not only the programmers & grunts, but also to the upper management (who might wear a button down shirt, but usually open collar, not with a tie). When meeting with anyone who could remotely be considered a colleague, the dress wouldn't be any different. I even got pulled into a few customer visits when I was wearing a tank-top & shorts (although if I had known beforehand that would happen, I probably would have worn a regular t-shirt and jeans).

Also people arriving to start work at 10 isn't at all uncommon. People tend to work late, and so don't always come in early. I used to get in around 8-8:30 so that I could get a lot of work done before others arrived with distractions.

It was unfortunate that they didn't let Brian know ahead of time when to arrive, and to have someone there to meet him. Sounds like they aren't familiar at all with having remote employees.

aren't you their first remote employee?

(my other thought was, if they don't start till gone 10, that makes the overlap with your conventional work day, three timezones away, larger)

No it doesn't -- it makes it shorter.

of course you're right. not sure what made me think that -- prolly calculating on Brian going in 10-6.

time zones are hard. lets go shopping!

Sounds like they aren't familiar at all with having remote employees.

The time of arrival, the dress code and a tonne of other little things tell me they have absolutely no clue about remote employees. They seem to be very tuned to chatting over cube walls or sending brief instant messages and not at all to dialing telephones, writing detailed emails.

I'd prefer to think of the timing issue as forgetting to inform me that I should arrive closer to 10 AM instead of 9. The alternative is that, despite knowing I was coming, they just didn't think it a significant breach of etiquette to not be present for the arrival of a guest.

I'm observing this as a difference in cultures. I can't say if it's an east coast/west coast thing, or if it's an age-related schism or some sort of class pretentiousness. People working later in the day and dressing significantly more casually than me doesn't make me uncomfortable in any way... it's just different.

For myself, I do prefer to be prompt at all times as a display of respect for the time of others, but perhaps that's because I place great value on time. People who have a different perception of the flow of time or radically different priorities wouldn't share my enthusiasm for timeliness. I demand promptness from myself but I cut a lot of slack for everyone else.

As for clothing, I feel personally that geeks like myself are discounted in business & management because dressing poorly makes a devaluation of our opinions much easier, especially on topics not strictly technical. Business casual --in my experience anyway-- levels the playing field a little my ideas can be addressed more on merit rather than unconsciously (& wrongly) dismissed as coming from an unkept and unknowledgeable hick.

I don't know how these folks dress for dealing with clients or outsiders: I just haven't been here long enough. I hope they would dress up in a fashion appropriate to the work and local culture, whatever that may be.

Thanks for answering me. I truly was curious. Sometimes, I feel that my take on things is old-fashioned. Your paragraph on clothing is a much more articulate position on it than I wrote. I was always taught that dressing up was a sign of respect. When I worked at the nursing home, the senior citizens always remarked on my ties and jackets and told me that it was obvious that I cared about them because I took the time to care for me. I didn't have to wear ties, sport coats and slacks every day, but I did without fail. I was in a new industry and I wanted to be taken seriously.

Hope you're having a wonderful time with our mutual friends! HUGS!

Aha! ... I believe this building is just a couple of blocks from our local Costco ...

It is indeed, between the office and the hotel where I'm staying.

what! no pictures of the hotties at the office.

I'm very disappointed in you, young man!

The office is kinda light on hotties. There are a few though but since we have a wall-less open environment, it's really difficult to surreptitiously snap a few shots, especially indoors.

I think your headquarters are very near where I used to work.

Silicon Valley is a world removed from the east coast. Or it was back in my day. :-) Dressing in business casual would have brought me no end of ridicule from my peers. I still remember the day they issued a memo stating we had to wear shoes. How does that help with creativity? *grin*

Silicon Valley may be a world onto its own but here in Seattle/Bellevue area, it's business casual for the most part. At my site, most people were nice jeans and a shirt of some sort, occasionally, you'll see someone dressing less than that and occasionally with clients, business suits and/or ties, but not too often. Heck, even our executives were business casual but pretty much everyone looks decent, even the maintenance/janitorial staff were work related polos and jeans.

Most people are at work between 8-9AM but if they go in late or early, they get off at the appropriate hour accordingly.

However, when I worked at the mortgage company, we had to instill something of a dress code for there'd be people insisting on wearing tops that showed midriffs, flip flops etc - in essence, one had to be presentable at all times.

Now for warehouse and other type of jobs, overalls/coveralls etc are much more appropriate attire but at places like T-mobile, a TV station on crew etc, business casual is generally the attire of choice.

I think that, somewhere during the arrangements process, I might (might, I say) have thought to ask what time I should plan to show up the first day. Maybe that's because everywhere that I ever worked was pretty flexible about hours (as long as you got the work done, and were available for at least most of the time that your colleagues were likely to need you), and I've always considered 9:00 AM to be "early".

Meeting the Boss

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