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

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

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?

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

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

[low-fat-muffin.livejournal.com]

what! no pictures of the hotties at the office.

I'm very disappointed in you, young man!

[bendoutdoors.livejournal.com]

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*

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

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.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

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".