Meeting the Boss
Feb. 2nd, 2009 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bjarvisI 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 12:41 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 12:46 am (UTC)(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 subject
Date: 2009-02-03 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 09:19 pm (UTC)time zones are hard. lets go shopping!
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 12:56 am (UTC)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.