The Hardest Day on a New Job

There's a joke that you hear in every work place when a new person shows up for their second day of work. Someone says something like "Came back for your second day, huh? Didn't we scare you away? HA HA."

I think the hardest day on a new job is the first day of your second week. Everyone gets a free pass during their first week (unless you're working on an assembly line or you're a brain surgeon). During the first week you hardly know anything or anyone and everyone else is understanding. They say nice things like "Don't worry about it, it's your first week. You'll learn it/figure it out/pick it up." You feel dumb during that week and not very helpful but it's okay.

During the second week, everyone wants to help you get started on doing something. Everyone wants to start moving that extra work that they've been doing to you. That's why they hired you, right?

Today I started my second week knowing that I would have to begin doing what they hired me to do. Tomorrow I'll run a meeting with numerous people who probably won't be very excited about the work I'm going to ask them to do. I also have to start the same quality process for another project that sounds much more complex. Meanwhile, I still haven't even seen the company's product or had anyone explain any of the product features I'm migrating. I still don't know much about the two dozen development groups and I've forgotten people's names as fast as I've heard them.

Am I scared? depressed? losing sleep? Nope. There a few things about my new job that make me feel fairly relaxed. One, the time frames I'm working in are so long that when there's a problem, you have days to decide what to do. Two, people are very nice and take their work seriously so even though everyone knows I can't make them do anything, I know they'll help me out as much as they can. Three, I know if I make a good effort and things don't go well for other reasons, no one will blame me.

Hey, the job will be hard at times but I know I can do it and I know it's worlds better than what I just left (I'm talking about Widgets the company, not the people). The job may not be really exciting or fulfilling, but like any job (or anything else in life I suppose), it's only for a while.

Anecdotes from a Week

One whole week at my new job. Here's the odds and ends.

One meeting per day I spent most of Friday setting up one meeting. One meeting. I spent a lot of time asking people if they needed to be there and talking to the woman who would have to leave early because she has to go to the dentist because she has a broken tooth so could I change the time again, etc. By the end of the day it was done and everyone accepted. I even learned to use the room reservation web site. My coworker told me that was great and I should just go home (it was 2:30).

Meetings Everywhere During my first day I noticed a bunch of interesting/funny spaces all through the building. They are like big colorful cubbies, some with chairs and some with a table and no chairs and most of them irregularly shaped. During my second day I starting seeing people holding meetings in those spaces, usually standing up! I wonder how you schedule a meeting for the triangular purple space near the back door?

Quality Two jobs ago I was involved in several annoying and ultimately unsuccessful quality programs (TQM, ISO 9001) at a mainframe company. At Widgets, quality was a personal effort, not regulated but appreciated, we hoped, by the users if not by the people paying the bills who just wanted everything/anything asap.

In my new job I'm actually the person who makes sure that there is quality by making sure that everything that needs to be tested is tested and passes the tests. Because of my past experiences with quality, I was surprised the other day when I heard a senior manager say "Well, when there's a choice between having a quality product and making the schedule, it's obvious that having the quality is more important."

Acronyms I've worked in a lot of places as a writer/project manager now and the funniest/most tedious part of the first weeks is learning the company's acronyms. It's funny because everyone is spouting out these letter combinations that are meaningless to me and often sound quite funny but are deadly serious to them. I've become an expert at keeping a straight face when someone says something like "If BXS doesn't talk to the INZ subsystem, we'll get a failure in the IBS and you know what that means."

At Widgets we didn't have that many acronyms because the products all had one, usually obscure name. My favorite was the server named after an Egyptian god that had a spelling that almost everyone mispronounced.

At my new job I have a cheat sheet that I keep with me at all times with the key twenty or thirty acronyms. My experience so far is that no one knows them all. In a meeting on Friday my manager asked me what an acronym meant, then started laughing when he realized that he asked the new guy.

I had a classic acronym moment in the middle of last week. We were in a meeting about a product and someone was drawing on the wall (there's one wall covered in sheets of hard, clear plastic in every room). A guy wrote an acronym on the wall as part of a flow chart and a woman next to me said "That's not where the &&& system is." The chalk board guy looked around and said, yeah it is. The woman said, the (product name) isn't there. He said "no, &&& stands for (another product name)." The woman shook her head and said "Great, now that acronym stands for more than one thing."

Working/My Father Friday was the anniversary of my father's death back in 1978. When I think of my father, I always think about the government job that he held until his death, leaving the house every day at 7:30 and returning every day at 4:30 for thirty years. His job meant stability, a good living and the promise of retirement for a guy that grew up really poor in the Hill District in Pittsburgh (now famous as the setting for August Wilson plays). He didn't like his job much toward the end but he stuck it out because, I think, he knew things could be much worse. As a brainless teenager and twenty-something year old I saw his frustration and knew I would be different.

So how different am I? I always think my job should be better--that the management should be more appreciative, the work more challenging, the workplace nicer to be in, etc. That's why I was a union steward in two different places and, strangely, that's how I approached being a manager at my last job. (My manager apparently thought it was weird too.) I have, however, for many years worked regular hours at a number of companies so we could buy a house, new cars every decade, and send my kids to college. Not so different from my father really. I wonder what he would think about it.

Meetings

Okay, I knew my new company had a "meeting culture" but today I had my first experience with what that meant.

I met with a project manager for the S*** project in the morning and we had a great discussion about what he was doing and how that related to what I was doing. He also explained who all the people on the very long email list were and where they sat in the meeting I went to which was very helpful. We then agreed that I would hold a kickoff meeting for my portion of the project. I felt like I was doing something!

Set up a meeting--easy. I opened Outlook and went to the calendar. Wait....there are a million rooms and I need a speakerphone and I know that most of the rooms don't have them. Which rooms have speaker phones? Are there preferred rooms? Cold rooms? Rooms with bad associations?

About then my manager stopped by to say Hi and ask how things were going. I told him what I had done so far that day and he said "Cool." He was about to leave when I asked him about meeting rooms. I told him that I knew there was a room in the basement set aside for the project. "Oh, don't use that room! Get **** to do it for you."

So I went over to the admin's cube area and she said she would be happy to help but I should figure out the time for the meeting first. I went to my cube and opened Outlook again, put in the dozen names for the meeting and saw that it was impossible to schedule a meeting anytime in the next month that would include all those people. I knew we had to have the meeting next week though so I went over to the project manager's cube and asked him who were the least necessary people on the list. His eyes widened and he said "They ALL have to come." So he opened Outlook, repeated what I did and saw the same thing. "During lunch on Tuesday we only miss one" he said. "In the future, for the recurring meeting, look a few weeks ahead and start there""

So I went back and set up the meeting, which a lot of people (who weren't in meetings) prompty accepted. Then I looked a few weeks ahead in the calendar and I still couldn't find a time. My coworker came by about then to introduce me to someone and I asked her how to work this. She looked at my list and told me that half those people weren't necessary and I was missing a bunch more necessary people. That meant I had to redo the one meeting I had successfully called and start over on the next meeting.

The most interesting things she told me was the everyone important to a project was double or triple booked all the time and they just decided at the time what meeting they would go to. That made me wonder if anyone ever accepted all the meetings and didn't go to any of them...nah, not at this place.

So it was five o'clock (late!) and I had to do this meeting stuff. I decided it could wait until tomorrow and left for another Widgets going away party.

A lot of folks were at a St. Paul bar to send off a designer who'd been in the company almost as long as I was. Only one programmer was there and he came in right when I was leaving so I didn't hear much except that his stress level was way up. I told him my stress level was way down. There must be some stress balancing force in the universe--maybe I could get a job studying that. Hmmm, might be stressful.

The Training Is Over

I came to a great realization today. I think I actually sit closer to the door near the farthest parking lot so I should park there. It's not so important now but when it's 20 degrees below....

The other realization was that I have to start doing meaningful work tomorrow. A project manager came up to me in the hall and very politely told me that everyone on his project would like me to start the testing process right away. Could we have several meeting next week? I also have another meeting for a different project I have to cover which sounds more problematic.

I don't test, I force all the groups to figure out what they will test, document the dependencies, hardware and software, and then bug them until they do what they are supposed to do. I think there's some trouble shooting in there too. See! I have the 50,000 foot view down....just exactly how I do that will be a day-to-day learning experience. My problem is that the other person doing the job is considered to be nearly perfect so every time I don't know something or inevitably screw up they'll say "**** would have known that." Oh well.

I had fun at my manager's staff meeting. My manager has a great sense of humor and likes things to be loose so there was a lot of laughing and making fun of him which he seems to like. Nice people. We all had a really good laugh about the chicken coop they built to contain the smokers. They all said it was revolting and the smoke leaked into the adjacent building. I have to find that tomorrow.

I get up and walk all the time. If I go upstairs (there's five floors), I could probably walk for thirty minutes in the building. I guess there's a walking path outside but I haven't looked for it yet. It might be buried in snow in a month.

I used the library (there are a few in the building but I went to the main one), made it back to the coffee in the next building (where the only refrigerator in the complex is located), and signed up for a class. Sweetest of all, I worked my eight hours and took off, dropping the worries out of my mind as soon as went through that door. I can live with that.

Good news from the Widgets place. The dumbest waste of time web redesign project that I ever saw there launched on time tonight thanks to the hard work of several people whose skills were totally wasted. I apologize for assigning those people to those web sites. Please forgive me!

Uh, What Am I Supposed to Do?

The day started off well. I went to work later than the first day and actually got a space on the closest side of the third farthest (but not the farthest) parking lot, made it to my cubicle on the first try, and was greeted warmly and shown to the free coffee by the other person who does what I do....uh, will do. I even got my laptop docked without breaking anything.

If I had gone home then, I would have avoided a the "job starting up roller coaster." Unfortunately, I stayed.

First, I sat met with my manager who is a good guy. He just wants me to do my job and worry about the details so he doesn't have to. At this meeting he was supposed to explain to me what I'm supposed to do. Instead we wound up talking about the structure of the company and all the different groups and what they do. I had a ton of notes and I think we were about to get to my job when someone knocked on the door and said "Can Jay come to my meeting on ***?" My manager said, of course, and I walked awat with a group of guys whose names I forgot right after I heard them.

We walked around some part of the building I hadn't been in, then took the elevator to the basement where there were more cubes and a medium size meeting room. About a half dozen people were in there and more straggled in....their meetings start five minutes late too. I was introduced and everyone introduced themselves---nice people, very intent on their jobs but friendly.

Someone asked "And what is your role in the project?"
Crap.
"Quality lead."
"You'll organize the capacity and performance testing?"
Crap
The guy leading the meeting says, "Oh he'll do what *** usually does." Everyone shook their head and were happy.
Saved.

I managed to understand almost everything that was said and was not asked any more questions, although the top project manager (among all the other project managers) gave me an "action item."

I then spent a while locating my password and loading software from some servers to my PC. This was the kind of software they wouldn't buy at my last job (Visio, new version of Project), software we wish we had had (good bug tracking software) and source control software. The whole process was well documented and almost idiot proof--yes, my last build failed and I have to follow up tomorrow.

My manager came over with a pile of Powerpoint printouts and said he couldn't talk today but I should read these and we could talk about it tomorrow. He tried to show me where the sample project docs where but he couldn't find them.

My peer came over and found the missing documents (they were actually in the right place) and then talked to me for an hour in great detail about how she does the job. I was about to start weeping by the time she left, having no hope of ever understanding all the testing/quality/process/department terminology I had just heard.

My only chance was a caffeine-induced learning binge. I stopped by the inhouse Reindeer coffee shop, turned on Gilberto Gil on my iPod and started trying to decipher ppts, spreadsheets, and word docs. By the end of the day I had some hope of not looking like an idiot at my next new project meeting on Thursday.

Why, you ask, would anyone take a job not knowing what they were going to do? Well, I did kind of know what I was going to do generally, kind of but mainly I like the challenge of speed learning enough stuff to get by at a job (filling in the details later). This is, in fact, the third job I've walked into not really knowing what I was going to do. The bad part is when you stop learning and then I have to move on.

Still, I can't believe it's only Tuesday night.

At 8:15 this morning I was sitting in the lobby of Laws R Us waiting for my tour guide...no, orientation leader. A small crowd of us were taken to the fourth floor and a nice training room where I was alternately intrigued and bored for seven hours.

Two pieces of fresh fruit twice a week for everyone? Sixteen hours off a year for volunteer work in the community? A thirty minute recorded Powerpoint presentation on how to use the benefits web site where the volume went up and down on an irregular basis? I was overwhelmed and fried by 3:30. Also, there were no doughnuts or fruit and, ugh, the same Caribou coffee I drank for the last five years and am thoroughly sick of.

The facility tour part of orientation was fun. We went up and down stairs and through a few buildings and looked at the roofs of some more. I have a good sense of direction but I really had no idea where we were. I asked about an online map during orientation but apparently there isn't one. My method will be to just start walking and hope I see the right numbers on the cubicles before I get to the end of the building.

The parking discussion was really interesting. If you come in after 8, you have to part in the farther parking lots. If you come in at 10:30 for some reason, you have to go the farthest parking lot, somewhere near Lakeville, to get a space. Luckily, during the winter there's a shuttle bus to pick people up and drop them off in the lots. I don't know how I'm ever going to remember where the car is if I don't have a stable parking spot. Every day will be like the time I wandered around the Disneyworld parking lot for (what seemed like) an hour at closing time trying to fine my car.

I have worked in a large company and I'm pretty cynical but this place actually seems to have kept the employees in mind when they designed the building and benefits and developed the culture. Are they really that incredibly devoted to training and personal development? Can I really call a meeting in the huge inhouse coffee shop? We'll see.

There are some downsides to size, of course. The cafeteria has so many food stations with long lines that I grabbed the most convenient thing I could find instead of being swept out the door before I could get anything. One of the other newbies wound up eating something she didn't want because she waited for ten minutes in the Deli line and didn't want to start over when she got to the front and discovered she was actually in the salad line. At the end of the day I confidently started walking down a hallway toward, I was sure, the north exit when my orientation leader saw me and asked why I was going that way. "Uh, I was going to the door??" No, it was the other way. Will I find my cubicle again tomorrow?

It is a cubicle, kind of smallish with shortish walls and a table I can pull out for a work space or to have meetings with people sitting in the aisle. I took two minutes to explore the cube and the pile of supplies the executive secretary kindly collected for me. In fact at 4:30 just about everyone was gone or going, which I took as a good sign.

I have a nice little (geek alert) Dell Latitude D610 laptop and decent size flat screen monitor. No one gave me my password so I can't use it so that's a problem but it's my first day. My manager thought I should always take it home, at least until I got a locking cable in my cube.

I've already been announced as the quality lead on a new project and there are two or three projects I'm supposed to pick up but I'm not too worried. My manager grinned and wondered if there was a way to get the stress level as high as my last job. I told him I didn't think he could.

Tomorrow it really begins....

I had some emails from WYWW. The stress crackles through the letters. Some other Widget expats have heard the news about my departure and are also getting in touch with me, asking what particular thing drove me out or was it just everything. The answer is yes.

Ending One Job

I walked out of the Whatever You Want Widgets building about 6:15 p.m. Friday after a day of alternating between finishing up things I wanted to finish and hanging around and talking with all sorts of people that appeared at my deskticle.

The two weeks after I put in my notice went quickly. A lot of the time I was very stressed out about leaving people who worked with me and for me in a bad place because of the mounting workload and some ridiculous commitments made by the company (mountains of widgets promised in a relatively short amount of time). I worked on extensive documentation of what I do and was stupified when I sent it out and it was ignored by everyone above me in the food chain. I also created a staffing matrix that was used since it made so much sense and I gave whoever would listen my ideas about what to do next. I also did a lot of lunches and did my share of gossiping about the present and the future.

There were four leaving celebrations the last week, all very different. Wednesday I took my group of programmers out to a sushi place for lunch--the food was great and it was a nice relaxed time (I expensed it). On Wednesday night one of my old friends (you're not old) invited a bunch of folks over to a nearby restaurant for a sendoff--a lot of tech (and one editorial) people showed up, some with kids, and I think everyone had a good time. Thursday afternoon the department had a wine, and cheese and crackers thing at the end of the day--a lot of people stopped by to say goodbye. On Friday night seven people from my programming group hung out at someone's house and had a good time talking about work and the terrible things that happen on farms (scary).

So this weekend I'm cleaning up all the things I didn't get done (I know I shouldn't care but I do) and not thinking about the next job tomorrow.

Speaking of old jobs there's an interesting article on one of my former employers, Unisys, running massive overdrafts on a homeland security project. The best part is about charging $131/hour for a technical writer (what I did there) which is very funny. I don't remember making that much money....

On to the first day at the new job!