Meeting the Boss

[bjarvis]

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.

Comments

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

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.

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

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!