09/13 - Second First Week

Today, Saturday the thirteenth, I celebrate the completion of my second first week of work. Its been a pretty tough road trying to find work. I will be totally honest, this job is not my first pick. If I had my way, I would have gotten an 8+ month internship for software engineering at a company like AMD, Nvidia, whatever. But alas, it takes some knowledge (of skills and/or connections) to get those, and my lack of the latter (maybe a bit of the former) doesn't do me any favours in terms of securing such a position. However, count your blessings whenever you can, this job is not the worst in the world. I am a software analyst, so it seems to me that I can weasel my way into the software engineering pipeline. Of course, I also get a decent chunk of change for an internship, the people I am working with are great, the office is pretty nice, this is a great learning system, I am being exposed to the more DevOps side of things which is an exposure that I have been desperately lacking.
So, now I am going to do what no-one asked me. I am going to talk about lessons and observations I have made and experience this first week.

1. It pays to have extracurricular activities under your belt, even if you are dogshit

When I was getting set up with my laptop at IT, literally the first thing the IT guy asked me was "Do you play table tennis?" I have not played for a couple years, however, I have played in the past. Now, I am not going into get into too many details of my short lived and rather tragic table tennis career, however, I always knew I was dogshit at it, and for a number of reasons, I was not very enthusiastic about the sport when my parents forced me to play. But now, I do understand that even in like a formal setting like an office, there is room for stuff like this.

2. Read the motherfucking instructions

It is always worth it to read the fucking instructions before you do something. Odds are, any trouble or questions you will have will be solved or answered respectively you have. Who knew!

3. IT issues are ever fucking present

I would say 3/5 of my time spent this first week was either waiting on IT, or fixing some stupid tech issue. Not to dog on IT or engineering where I am working, but just saying, it took a lot of my time. So if you are starting an office job, make sure that you get your environment set up ASAP and properly so that you can either debug whatever problems you encounter, or you can start working as soon as possible.

4. Learn the acronyms ASAP

Oh my fucking god the acronyms are terrible, and documentation that is supposed to explain acronyms does a half ass job. Again, not blaming anyone, its hard to program, and I get how ass it is to explain your work to other people, but the usage of acronyms hides a lot of meaning, and it can be more difficult to understand the stupid capital letters than the code base. So, if you are starting some kind of programming/software related job and its your first time and you want to find out what to pay attention to first, the acronyms are a good start.

5. Be prepared to learn about almost anything other than code

Most of my learning has not been anything related to the DevOps process, coding, or whatever. Most has been about what the code is talking about, the physical objects that the code is supposed to manage and manipulate. Turns out one of the best ways to understand what something is trying to do, is to understand what the underlying thing is.

I don't really have a great point with this, other than to outline my thoughts.

Josh