It's late. I had soccer, dinner, and then walked the dog in a picture-postcard snow storm so there's no time to blog.

My topic for tomorrow is......"How do you make people feel appreciated in the work place?"

Note: It's just days until the Widgets crew starts popping out major projects asked for by the evil people at The Network Who Shall Not Be Named. Okay, not all the people there are evil but certainly some of them are. Working with them goes with the theme of appreciation since our work for them was NEVER appreciated. I'm sure people are working right now even as I think about reading Jane Eyre and then going to sleep. I hope things go as well as possible so employees won't have to suffer even more for management's mistakes in negotiating schedules with that network.

I just wanted to say a few words about the intranet at my workplace. How people share information/knowledge inside a company is an interest of mine so I was curious about what I would find at Laws R Us.

A little background. I learned the web as, along with a few coworkers, we built the local intranet at Not Big Blue. There were no rules to follow so we created a bunch of stuff--mostly ugly pages with piles of links to things that usually loaded when you clicked on the link. Most of it was built according to the whims of the managers who used our services, particularly the "vanity" pages with the manager's picture and some words of corporate wisdom or a mission statement. That intranet was well used but it was nearly impossible to find specific information since there wasn't an intranet search available.

At Whatever You Want Widgets there wasn't much time to write things down so only the very dedicated people did it. After years of information frustration, however, we did get a movement going to use a wiki (look it up at wikipedia.org) to collect information that everyone needed but no one knew how to find. Some people entered information consistently but most didn't and I don't think many people looked for information there since they didn't expect the information to be written down. I hope it's working better now but people there are even busier than when I left so they have even less time to document their work.

At Laws R Us someone has implemented a fancy templated solution. Home pages are for "communities" which could be a company organization, an interest group, or any group that needs the same information (e.g., new employees). Projects have mini-repositories that allow you to easily find, upload, and download documents, even letting you do searches inside individual projects. Every project in my part of the company has a repository and I can view information in all of them. The problem with the intranet is that's slow and I often have trouble downloading documents. Some days it drags so much that after I click on a document link I flip to another task instead of waiting. I love the potential benefits but it's irritating.

Some people work outside the system. My organization has a minimal templated home page but also has a great, old-school, ugly web page with lots of very useful links that I use every day. It loads fast, everything works correctly, it required no software to create, and it can be updated quickly (but only by the owner).

So which is better? Well, what is technology for? Answer the second question and then you'll have your answer to the first.

What are the worst days to go to work? Here's my short list (not in any particular order).

- The first day after a two week vacation
- The day you have to lay someone off
- The day you know someone is going to yell at you about something you did (or didn't do)
- Any day you come in early after working late
- Any day after you've already worked six or more days in a row
- The day after your manager asks you why you work there (you know who I mean)
- The day after Thanksgiving

Okay, today wasn't that bad, but after the Thanksgiving four days off I seem to completely lose the desire to work. During the Thanksgiving vacation you hang around family and friends, do entertaining things you wouldn't normally do, and maybe travel and see some new sights. You sleep late for four days (well I do) and get relaxed.

Then BAM, you have to get up Monday in the dark, pull on the business casual, crunch some breakfast and stumble to the car in the November gloom (rain today). I had to go to the coffee shop as soon as I got to work to brace myself.

I probably also had a hard time this year because I have only had two days off in 2006. Widgets gave me four weeks of leave a year and took back most of it every January when I didn't use it. I couldn't use it when I wanted to because there was always some crisis that required my group to finish something or all hell would, literally, break loose. My former people are living through that again right now. If I had stayed there I wouldn't have a shot at a day off until March.

In a month I'll be vacationing in the Arizona sun, not thinking about work, freezing rain or gas bills, but right now it's the day after Thanksgiving vacation, it's dark, I'm tired and late December seems a long way off. It's going to take a lot of caffeine...

I’ve finished my work—actually got drafts of almost all the quality documents I’ll need for the next few weeks—so I’m going to blog for the last few minutes until I leave.

I knew it was going to be slow when I got a parking space in the second lot from the door but my meetings have been full and I had a friendly one-on-one with a quality guy from another organization. I even hung out after one of my meetings with the big brains from two groups who used my architecture drawing to figure out where the holes are in the current plan (that’s what it’s for!).

My biggest accomplishment was finally setting up the quality meetings for my most important project. I had to negotiate with several people to not have them come because there was no way I could get all these people into a room at the same time. It may come back to bite me but someone had to be tossed off the island.

People have been drifting out of here all afternoon—quicker than usual—but there are still lots of people in the building. My manager was out all day and my peer is gone so I may as well leave.

I hope you have/had a Happy Thanksgiving!

I got my free turkey at work today. We don't need it for Thanksgiving so I took it right over to the food shelf. I hope it's good.

Not much else happened today. I'm still trying to set up a meeting for my biggest project, going out several weeks to try to find some open times. No luck so far.

I did have my biweekly hour with my manager and after some funny stories about traveling he asked me if I had produced any of my prescribed documents. I said no. He said well hopefully things will pick up for me since I added a project because he wants me to start cranking these things out. He was very matter-of-fact about it--he just wants to see progress in the whole migration program.

We finished with a whirlwind tour of how to write job goals that my next review will be based on. By the end he had almost decided I should just copy the goals of the person that does the same job since we're doing the same thing. I'll talk to her about that tomorrow.

I was wondering today how long I can say I'm a NEW employee. When I've met with people one-on-one in the last week I tell them I'm new and ask a question and they say "You're new to the COMPANY? Oh, here let me explain." They would certainly answer the questions anyway but the "new" tag does cause them to be very careful and thorough in their explanations.

Two weeks ago I was talking with someone who said they were new so I asked when she started. She said six months ago. That's new? I guess it is in a company where people get in and stay forever. They move between groups and jobs a lot but they stay.

Does that mean my five year rule (When you've been at a job for five years, it's time to move on) doesn't apply here? Possibly. Maybe if I move to some other challenging job at the same company and that makes me want to stay for more than five years, I'll amend the rule. That's a long time from now so the rule stands for now.

The most interesting/fun part of the day was a monologue by my manager (in a meeting to talk about a meeting)about a five day creativity boot camp at a hotel he was sent to in 2000. The dozen people worked in small groups to plan software to achieve some great good (e.g., finding missing children). They had intense group discussions all day and night but could "check out" of any meeting and draw or color instead to release their creativity. Some of the people loved it and some hated it which led to loud arguments when people went back to work. The whole program was cancelled after a month but he came out of it with some great stories and some terrible drawings.

On Friday I had my first Widgeteer guest for lunch at Laws R Us. That person compared my workplace to working downtown where you can quickly walk to stores and restaurants. I think that was the intent of the executives who designed the place. My director (two levels up) told me it was better to have all this stuff in the campus than to have people leaving work to wander around the Small of America.

On Friday I completed a diagram of the software architecture of one of my projects and had another great talk with one of the people that doesn't show up at the project meetings. He explained what he did in a few sentences and I understood that he really didn't need to come to the meetings yet. I talked to a new senior project manager about starting work on his project and, other than the fact I kept spacing out during his long monologues, it all seems doable. There is an actual release date for one piece of that project---next June--which means I do need to get started right away.

Project management has been a hot topic in my emails and conversations. In my post a few days ago, I linked to a piece of what appears to be a really good book about project management. The premise of the chapter in the excerpt is that you can't organize people and work without prioritizing your work.

People were particularly interested in the section titled "Things Happen When You Say No" which he begins with these lines:

"One side effect of having priorities is how often you have to say no. It's one of the smallest words in the English language, yet many people have trouble saying it. The problem is that if you can't say no, you can't have priorities." The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun.

This was appropriate since a new major project was thrown at the folks in the basement at Widgets and like all the other projects it's Priority 1. I'm so sorry.

I should have read some of my testing book this weekend. I'll try to find time at work--I'll go hide upstairs in the comfy chairs behind the library. Lots of people are out this week so it'll be hard to organize anything much. I'll just work on cancelling and creating meetings. I know it could be much worse.

I had my first thoroughly enjoyable day. First, I had a half day class on the basics of the company's big online product. The teacher was an attorney (is an attorney the same as a lawyer?) who does legal education. She told us the history of the product, how to find and choose databases to search (there are more than 20,000 databases), and how to search them. As soon as I was knew how to do it, I did the legal equivalent of googling myself--I went to the case records database for my state and searched for my last name. All I saw was a bunch of cases concerning a big company run by people with the same last name. I have a lot more exploring of the product to do.

I need to squeeze into the upcoming Intermediate product class soon because I need to understand the features better, but for now I can get on there and play with my free account. (Lawyers pay big money for access.) I'm also signed up for an eight hour class on the US legal system and I'm waiting for the Legal 101 courses to start back up in January to do some basics. Meanwhile there's a class on estate planning (to try to understand what my mother is doing) coming up. I also have a tour of the data center (the above ground one, not the backup "bunker") and a tour of the printing plant coming up in early December.

I had lunch with a guy who was my manager for a while at Not Big Blue. He's a very nice guy and I enjoyed talking with him He had four jobs during the six years I was at Widgets and he's only a contractor at Laws R Us. Tech writing is a very tough field to stay employed in--I'm glad I left that behind. Writing is not valued in technical organizations but they employ most of the tech writers and the pay scale is higher for writers at tech companies than in most companies.

I had a couple of meetings in the afternoon with people who are on the S*** project. The first was with a guy who is invited to all the meetings but never shows up. He was a great guy and recognized that he had stayed away too long. We came up with a plan for estimating system capacity which consisted of me calling a meeting so he could ask a lot of questions and figure it out. Perfect.

Then I met with my favorite developer, who showed me a software architecture map she had created. It was exactly what I needed to move the testing discussion forward. We talked about kids and holiday for a while and then it was 4:15--time to go home!

Great day.

It's late. Not a great soccer game but I still had fun. Next week is the traditional late game on the night before Thanksgiving that no one wants to play in. I'll be there.

I made a lot of progress at my job in the last two days. We actually had a very good discussion about software architecture in my S*** project meeting and I was able to draw that out and get it reviewed. I also got off my butt and started asking people if I could stop by their area and talk about what they do and how it fits in with what I do. I told my manager I had too much slack and we agreed that I should add a third project.

The developers told me today that they now have a planning meeting at the same time as my quality meeting. I had that damn meeting scheduled, including room and speaker phone scheduling, until March. ARGGGGGG. It'll take me two hours to reschedule.

I haven't heard any ideas for Widgets stockholder resolutions. I'm considering 1) they hire someone to actually clean the building and 2) that all "profit" from the Olympics be split among ALL the employees. I guess the second one is better, huh? I know you Widgeteers are too busy working (even as we speak) to come up with ideas or even read the blog but I'll be here waiting when you get a minute.

I blew all my blogging time on AIM. Sorry. Tomorrow I have my first class, lunch with my exmanager (that I liked) and some time with individuals. Should be fun.

I have bad memory. Not "a" bad memory, bad memory sticks in my laptop at work. I started getting BSODs (blue screen of death) yesterday and called the tech support number, wondering where in the world I was calling. The guy who answered asked me some good questions, then said,"someone will be down right away." A guy came down in ten minutes (presumably not from India), goofed around with the computer for a while and then asked why there was 504K of RAM in my computer. Huh? He thought a memory stick was bad since it should have at least a gigabyte of memory. He told me he'd be by later to take care of it but didn't show up again today. I hope he straightens this out soon since I can only run a few programs at a time and if I run a program like Visio, the program crashes after a random amount of time, usually right before I remember to save what I'm doing.

There was a long excerpt (excerpt - what an awkward word) on Slashdot from a new book on Project Management. I read some of it and ordered the book. It's a common sense guide to managing projects and I think this guy really knows what he's talking about. All you aspiring project managers should read some of this. I'll be ready to loan the book out by next year.

I'm beginning my career development work. Step one was asking the company to pay for my membership in the Project Management secret society. I was told the company would pay for classes, books, memberships, and certification. Next step is to get myself qualified for certification. That may be harder than passing the test because I have to prove I've led projects for 4500 hours and get someone to back up my claims. Someone reading this blog may hear from me very soon.

I am now the proud owner of a major chunk of Whatever You Want Widgets stock. Ok, major for someone like me, tiny compared to the President/CEO, the guys on the Board, or the former leader of our company who now is driving people crazy at some other company. I'm open to sponsoring some shareholder resolutions so send me your ideas. I really want to show up for the next Board meeting in Minneapolis. This could be fun.

Lately I've been helping people figure out how much they are worth to a company. The related question is how the company should express their recognition of that value. I'll write about this when I've thought it through but send me any ideas you have.

Extreme Learning

By the end of last week I was sure that I wasn't sure how to do my job. During my first two weeks I thought I just needed a cheat sheet--a list of questions that the technical people would understand (even if I didn't) to start discussions that would give me all the information I needed. During my third week I tried to create this list of questions but was frustrated because I still didn't understand enough about testing/quality in general to write the questions.

I've been in tight spots like this before. When I was tech writer, I was hired to analyze and design documentation for Accounts Payable software. My contract shop knew that I didn't know anything about Accounts Payable but they told me "don't worry, it's just like every other kind of software" and gave me a slightly better rate than usual as an incentive. I bought a college textbook on Accounts Payable (I probably should have looked for the Dummies book), crammed during my billable hours, and completed the work.

Last week I decided it was extreme learning time again. I went through the company library's books on testing (mostly REALLY boring) until I found the perfect book, a guide for new software testers. It explains the concepts, defines the terms, and gives the questions to think about while you're creating a test plan. I bought a skim cap at Reindeer coffee, turned on the iPod, read, mumbled and took notes.

After I finished the first chapter of the book I realized I had completely misunderstood one of the major tasks I needed to do. I was planning to discuss this task with a project team late last week and I would looked like an idiot if I had based the discussion on my old understanding.

I still have a lot of reading to do but I feel much better about figuring out the job now. Company libraries are wonderful--otherwise I would bought several useless books.

The only other interesting thing today was a discussion about outsourcing. My company outsources software testing on an irregular basis to an Indian company. My department is trying to figure out how to measure whether it really is cheaper to have this Indian company do the work and if they really do the work as well or better. It seems like someone somewhere just assumed it was faster/cheaper/better and started outsourcing a while ago. More on globalization later this week.

Project Management (Not Too Boring)

So I'm learning more about project management from my peers and from the expensive contract Senior Project Managers we meet with occasionally. What I'm learning is different than I expected--it's lessons about flexibility and analysis of the specific situation you're in, not just applying abstract formulas and rules from the Project Management Book of Knowledge (yes, that is the actual title). In the end, I think the organization you're in really makes this type of process possible, or not.

As I understand it, the official parts of managing a project are to figure out

- The requirements
- What work you need to do to meet the requirements
- How long the work will take
- Who can do the work and when are they available
- How you will test it
- How you roll out/deliver it

They're all equally important.

What's my experience with this method in different organizations? At Not Big Blue, my former mainframe company, there were requirements written for the projects and plans created for the work. Testing and delivery were well covered. There were two problems, though. First, everyone created plans that ended at the date suggested by upper management, not the date they might actually finish. Second, whenever things didn't go well for any reason, the plan was changed so it looked like there never was a problem.

During my first years at Whatever You Want Widgets, my group was run by a very disciplined Project Manager. Okay, she went too far sometimes and couldn't get the upstairs people to ever completely buy the idea of project management, but she set up a methodology for launching web sites that was the basis for launching almost seventy new sites on time and according to requirements. Back in those early days we presented our company as people who knew the internet and our partners respected that, negotiating the requirements and delivery schedules for their various sites. For the last few years the partners starting ignoring most suggestions and dictating schedules that allowed for some collection of requirements (depending on the project), a little bit of planning for resources (more like scrambling), no schedule for the work beyond the end date, no real testing and exhausting late-night rollouts.

Lawyers R Us has put a lot of money into project management. That doesn't mean things go perfectly because they don't. Some development groups create large products with no documentation so no one's sure what they have, business people don't like to write requirements, and there is no history in the company culture of groups talking to each other about the product they are getting integrated into. But we're working on all those issues and everyone involved knows it's necessary to do the planning so they're doing it with surprising enthusiasm.

I think an important factor in our sucess at Widgets was mutual respect among the team members. The project managers respected everyone's opinion as they assembled requirements and created schedules, and management respected those schedules and based their decisions/communications on that information. Everyone in the group respected each other's contributions and their difficulties. Everyone felt like they were in it together.

Those early days at Widgets were fun and I miss them but I think things will go well at Lawyers because the management support and mutual respect are there too. We'll see.

*******

Thanks to Soccer Girl, the famous Coed Rec player, for mentioning my awesome goal on Wednesday night. I don't score many goals and I think this one was the best. In return I'll feature her next goal. :)

Just a short one since I stayed a long time at the Widgets going away party for L. It was really nice to sit and talk with my friends again. I definitely made more friends at Widgets than I have at any of my jobs and I enjoy being with them when there's an opportunity--as long as I don't have to walk into that building to see them.

I had a nightmare last week where I was back in my old cube at Widgets in the middle of frantic activity but I was just in people's way--I couldn't do anything to help and I was really frustrated. That was either a message about the present, a sumup of the past, or both. Or maybe it was just a dream.

Commonly Asked Questions:

What are the people like where you work?

It really looks like a little city. There are all kinds of people of all adult ages. Okay, there are more people from India than you see walking down Lake Street but otherwise it's about the same.

People work at all kinds of jobs. There are lots of software developers, but there are also testers, librarians, attorneys, business representatives, etc.

Everyone dresses casually. Business casual is the most dressy in most of the building but you see suits on the upper floors where the corporate offices are. I haven't been in the manufacturing building or the system administration bunker.

Are Work Hours Flexible?

My manager asked me when I wanted to start and I said 8:30. Thinking back on it, I should have asked what the choices were. It looks like the core hours for most groups are 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. because before 9 there are streams (not rivers) of people going into work and after 3 people are streaming out. I can't tell you how hard it is to work at 3:30 when you can see people leaving in large numbers.

Do You Still Get Lost?

I really thought I had a method for finding any place in the building. When you get off the stairs or out of the elevator, you just find a number (like S654), figure out if you're on the right side of the building and then start walking and watching the numbers since you may be going in the wrong direction. Today I got completely lost trying to find a room on the fifth floor I was in last week. I intentionally got lost after the meeting so I could find myself (trust me, it makes sense). It turns out I was completely turned around. Oh well.

Dumb Employee ID

I work in a secure building. You have to show your company picture ID to get in and you're supposed to wear it at all times, even though there's no security inside the building (that I'm aware of). I wear the ID around my neck on the shoe-stringy thing they gave me. I know if I clip it to my belt I'll lose it and who knows how much that would cost.

Are the people fun?

I work with different kinds of people. The very nice, incredibly geeky, very smart people I work with on projects tell jokes that involve products or concepts that I usually don't understand. Right now I appreciate the effort but not the humor. The lead people in my group, who I seem to meet with all the time, are a lot of fun--we spend a lot of our meeting time joking with our manager who likes a goofy, loose atmosphere as long as things are getting done. I sit away from the group because there was no space there so I'm a bit isolated which is not great, but the distance allows me to do pretty much whatever I want during the day without any monitoring me.

What are the holiday party plans?

(I had to throw this in) There is a reception for everyone in the building at the beginning of December, our large organization is apparently having a party at a brewery a week later, and our smaller group is doing a potluck.


I've got soccer tonight so that's all for now.

The start of week three was a good day.

I had a meeting with the S**** project folks early in the day. People brought the information that we needed for planning but a key person didn't come so we figured out what to do next time and finished early. A few people actually smiled at me and asked me questions, some of which I could actually answer. The next meeting we'll start doing the work I'm supposed to be doing which is a relief. Of course then I'll see if I can actually do the job I'm supposed to be doing.

I had lunch with a waggle of Widgeteers. Everyone seems fine, not much new except another person quit that I worked with. The horrifically scheduled projects are progressing. There's a goodbye party Thursday night for my former coworker.

**I had a rant written in here about the idea being circulated that Widgets management "just figured out" what a poor job they have done in training and staffing programmers. I thought it might be a little too "hot" for this forum but it's available in it's entirety if you buy the full subscription to this blog. ;)**

Lunch tomorrow is with a guy who was my manager for a while at my job before Widgets, at a mainframe company (Not Big Blue). He's a contractor at Laws Are Us now, trying to get in as a captive.

In the afternoon I had my first one-on-one with my manager. He told me he was going to explain the goal writing/evaluation system and then embarked on a twenty minute critique of the system. There's a lot he doesn't like about it. Then I made an observation that caused him to launch into a long critique of how projects are managed where he gave me the whole history of how things were done in the past and how they got the way they are now. He's very good at explaining why things are the way they are without talking about individual people.

We managed to squeeze in some discussion of what I was doing. He wanted to know if I could pick up more projects and I thought I could (since I have too much slack which I didn't tell him). My coworker is doing about seven and I have two right now.

Then I asked him if I was supposed to be time tracking. He said "Oh, you're not? That's not good." He showed me the system and sent me the link and gave me some numbers to charge to. We agreed that time tracking was the most irritating thing on earth and changing jobs just to get out of time tracking is an entirely reasonable thing to do. Later, after I was unsuccessful in logging on, he figured out that the department never bought me a license or set up an account for me (which is why I wasn't getting those damn emails from the system). So now I have to wait for someone with a license to leave and then I get to enter all my time all the way back to when I started. AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

The free fresh fruit of the day was.....apples. I hope it's pears on Thursday.

Tomorrow: commonly asked questions

What do people wear at Laws (yes, clothes, but what clothes)?
What hours do people work?
Is it possible to not get lost?
Why do I have to wear the dumb employee ID all the time?

If you have any more questions, comment or send them to me.

Spaced Out

I went to work with some kind of cold/allergy thing today. You know, the kind of thing where you get a little plugged up and cough a little bit but you're mainly uncomfortable, run down and spacey? I thought I could get through the day pretty easily since I didn't have any meetings, just some notes to write and agendas to figure out. Besides, it's the beginning of my third week, I can't call in sick.

I wasn't there more than an hour before two meetings popped onto my calendar. I still get emails that say "Hey, I don't think we ever sent you the notice for the regular meeting of the *** group that you need to go to." I wound up with three meetings beginning at 11.

NOTE: I'm happy to say I'm double booked twice every week now--I'm really part of the team. On the other hand, I have at least two lunch time meetings, one biweekly.

I figured at this point I should take a cold pill so I wouldn't start sneezing at the meetings. I know the pill will make me more Spacey which might be worse than being Sneezy but I figured I'd take the chance.

The first meeting was supposed to be a "showdown" meeting with a manager who doesn't cooperate with "our process." Of course the manager didn't show up (which showed again how much he respects our process) and we just talked with the people in his group who said THEY wanted to cooperate.

The next meeting was one of the dozen or so regular meetings I go to with other "lead" people--lead people who are working on the same kind of testing, on the same kind of projects, that have the same job title, etc. I can still play the "new person" in these meetings because while I usually understand what people are talking about, I don't usually have enough context to understand why the topic is important or how to look at the problem/issue/action item in a different way. An hour long spaceout. Mmmmmmm.

Then I met with a very nice developer to ask questions about some project information I missed in a group meeting. This guy is very good at explaining things so I thought even in my attention-deprived state I would understand him. It's vital to my work on the project that I understand what's going on.

In fact we got through all my questions pretty easily and after thirty minutes I thought I had the information I needed. I was ready to go space out in my cublicle for the rest of the day when I HAD to say one more thing. Some automatic speech generator in my head output the following. "This should be pretty easy."

His face fell. "No, this is going to be very hard. Just because we can figure out the...."and so on and so on. I blurbed out short explanations of what I really meant, which was that it was going to be easy to frame the questions (or something like that) but I was sure he thought I had misunderstood what he had told me.

I slunk over to Stairway K and went down to my cube. I tried to fix the meeting notes using the information the developer had given me but it's tricky stuff to summarize so I decided to take some time to think about it. I'm sure it will all make more sense tomorrow.

Meetings/The Basement

Well I spent a solid hour each day last week setting up meetings for the S**** project. I can use any meeting room on any of the six floors of the building or the room permanently reserved for that project. Since I have no idea what the rooms are like and the pictures in the reservation system are sometimes not that helpful, I started visiting the rooms to see what they're like. I was in the premanently reserved room on my first day (see blog entry on What Am I Supposed to Do?) and I didn't remember what it was like so I decided to wander down there and take a look before I used the room again.

I took the closest elevator down since the stairs near me didn't go to the Lower Level. When I walked out of the elevaor, I turned to my right and saw an underground parking lot. There were Beamers and Lexi and open spaces....open spaces! Who gets to park here? Where's the secret entrance? I wanted to investigate the parking lot more but figured there might be a guard watching the cars with orders to shoot on site. (I'll investigate more later.)

I turned the other way and found myself in an area with high ceilings and brightly-colored carpeting and walls. This was apparently the "creative" hallway and I found myself going past the Design area (just signage I think) and the company photography studios. At the end of the creative hallway, I came to a fork where I went south and wandered past some nice meeting rooms, then past some drab open spaces with chairs set up for employee group meetings like Weight Watchers. (I knew it was Weight Watchers because there was a big sign.) I continued on to the area where our group's reserved meeting room was. Now that I took a good look at it, the room looked pretty small for a group of twelve with not very comfortable chairs. Oh well, back to the reservation system.

Contractors

The building is full of contractors working on various projects including the ones I'm working on. Some of them are high level project managers but I think most are programmers of various sorts. There aren't enough cubes for everyone so the contractors are either sitting two to four to a cube or they have desks in the hallways that are a bit larger than their computer. I almost feel guilty about my luxurious (small) cubicle with extra chair.

Misc.

In a couple of weeks they will apparently bring in a bunch of trucks with enough frozen turkeys for everyone in the company. You can also donate your turkey to Second Harvest, which I think I'll do.

I had a really fun introduction to the way legal cases are received in the building and then processed to add analysis and linking. It was like the "How a Bill Becomes Law" song. I was taken to each step and told what the people (paralegals, attorneys) were doing. Everything made a lot more sense after that. Okay, a few things made more sense.

I think I'll blog for another week and decide then about stopping.

Big Company/Small Company

Some people rolled their eyes when they heard I was going to a big company that had thousands of people in one campus. Is big always bad? Is small always good? Here's a short version of my opinion. Comments are welcome and encouraged.

I think that if you can answer yes to ALL of the following questions, your job is okay no matter what size company you're working in.

Are they paying you what you could get somewhere else doing the same job or hopefully more than that?
Are your benefits good enough for you and not so expensive that they take a huge bite out of your check?
On most days do you feel good on the way to work AND on the way home?

The last one is the most important because many of us have put off a better paycheck to stay in a place because of the promise of fun, learning, and stock options that might become Googlized.

Let's run through the most common big company/small company issues.

Who Do You Work With? Whatever the size of your company, you spend almost all your working time with your group. In big companies the groups get to be a dozen. In small companies they may be smaller but not necessarily. In big companies there are groups within groups within groups, etc. but you can ignore most of that. If the people in your immediate group are nice/fun/cool, you're okay wherever you are.

Managers. What's your manager like? I like managers that let you do your job without a lot of interference but are there to support you 100% if you need them. I've had managers like that in both big and small companies. Also, your manager's manager needs to be reasonable too or the stress will follow the laws of gravity and flow down toward you. You do wind up with more managers in big companies but you can disregard almost all of the higher level ones and delete their cheerful mass emails without reading them. There's no guarantee that you can talk higher level managers in big or small companies--I was actively discouraged from speaking to my manager's manager at Widgets. (I did anyway and it was very helpful.)

The Place. Is it a nice place to be in for ten hours a day? Again, I don't think there's a big/small company rule here. Is it so huge you can't find your way? Hey, with some wandering I've been able to find any room I needed to find at Lawyers R Us although I did have to ask for help once (yes, some guys do ask for directions). You get the nice perks at the big places like cafeterias, libraries, and inhouse classes that small places rarely have but that's not important to some people.

Parking. Okay, that is an issue. Luckily I have a lock for my computer now and I don't have to carry it across the parking lots.

Would I leave my big company to go to a small company again? If the job, people and place were right, I'd leave in a hearbeat. My first two and half years at Widgets was the best job I've ever had and that showed me that a small group of people working together can have a lot of fun and do great things. For now though, I'm happy on the big cruise ship.

Just a few quick things since soccer went really, really long because of a maybe serious injury to someone on the other team.

Walking It was so beautiful today that I tried out the walking paths through the woods and around two small lakes on the company grounds. Not exactly rustic but a nice place to walk. I did the short loop but I might try the long loop tomorrow. There were a lot of people out there.

I Went Back to Widgets-Briefly On Tuesday I drove back to Widgets after work to drop off my crappy laptop that they let me use. It took me until last weekend to get my personal files off it.

The closer I got to the building, the more stressed out I felt. Seriously. I devised a plan to just go to HR and drop off the computer and run out. As soon as I was inside the door, however, I saw some friendly people who wanted to say hi and to tell me that it still sucked there. I even got a hug.

After a few minutes I got to HR where everyone was friendly, asking about my new job. Then my previous manager showed up and made the obvious joke about "You can't come back." Ha Ha. I escaped soon after. I hope to never go in there again.

Widgets Update One of my longtime coworkers has gotten another job. Yay!

Today I also got an update on the hellish projects that are progressing poorly and good initial reports about my replacement. I'm hoping for the best for all the programmers.

More tomorrow.

Benefits/I Ran A Meeting

Benefits This weekend I finally got into the HR system to sign up for benefits. It's actually the web site of another company (HR for Hire) that provides all your HR needs over the phone or on their website. Who needs people?

Getting to the correct web page was painful. I had to log into my company's portal, go to the My Benefits page, then click to the benefits intro page on HR for Hire, then to the specific benefit pages. Unfortunately, every time I got up from the computer to check my current benefits or talk to my spousal unit about benefits, the HR site timed out and I had to start over on my company's portal. This happened ten or eleven times.

Why did it take me so long to choose my benefits? The health plan was completely different than anything I'm used to. Instead of the typical choice of one plan or another, there was only one plan but you had to choose from among several levels of co-pay or deductible in four different areas. There must have been at least one hundred possible combinations.

To make it easier to choose they had a tool for creating three different health care "options." You could then plug in numbers for how many times you might go to the hospital or the doctor or get prescriptions and a page would come back showing you how much each of your options would cost you over a year. When my session timed out in the middle of all this choosing and calculating, I had to go back to the company portal and take eight or nine steps to get back.

Three hours later I finally hit "Save." The success screen read "Congratulations, your 2005 benefit choices are saved in the HR system. WARNING: You only have 14 days to make your 2006 choices!" Maybe next weekend.

My First Meeting I ran my first meeting, a quality meeting with the S*** project team, a very vocal and dedicated group. I explained what my job was, what information I would collect and how I would run a weekly meeting to talk about testing. They immediately started asking really good questions about how we could actually get enough information to complete my testing documents. Caught up in a wave of enthusiastic responsibility (enthusibility?), someone suggested we meet twice a week at lunch times to pull together the information since it would be impossible to schedule this group at any other time. Everyone (else) agreed immediately.

This is what I anticipated really. Who I was didn't matter much. These people are zeroed in on what they need to do and if I can help them, great. I'll try.

Parking Again Yesterday I went out for lunch for the first time so I could hang out with a Widgets friend at a coffee shop. When I came back, almost late for a Career Makeover meeting, I hoped to steal someone else's place in a close parking lot. The Security guy told us in orientation that this was possible.

I didn't see any spots in the closer lots and had to go all the way to the end of the farthest lot to get a spot. I jogged to the building and was only a little late (a few minutes after five after) but it was okay because my manager came in a few minutes after me. What a great manager.