dybr

Intro

Sean Urbain found me this company, after I was laid off from iHeart, when iHeart was in a bad financial situation, and was getting rid of all "high-paid" (by the East coast standards) people. Sean is a great recruiter, and he was always finding me the jobs I love; including this one. The interview went smoothly, I enjoyed it, especially talking to Samantha. Really nice and smart people. So, while the position was rather low, and it was a contract, not a permanent one, I agreed. First of all, I was curious about how is it, working on a contract; second, I'm on Medicare now, so I don't care about health insurance; third, I did not have to work, but it was all I could do, all my life: I never tried anything else but work

 

Day 1

Started work at nine, in my "temporary office". I have a large desk, since I need two computers and two monitors, and probably something else.

Got a UPS package, a huge box, containing a small box, containing a mouse. Started charging it (why do I need a mouse?)
Assembled two monitors. Connected one to my own computer, another to my work computer. Tested it on Mike Naki show. 

At 9:15 had a meeting with Jeremey (he's my manager in Puppers - that's the name of the team) walked through the list, what to do, where to log in, etc. And ok, have to use Okta. Fuck Okta, but I have no choice. Installed it on my phone. And? We spent a couple of hours trying to do something and making calls to their support. A support guy (half of the time this was Jeremey's friend) every time asked credentials: where we was born, what's his mother's middle name, what was his first car (now I can impersonate Jeremey). Support was making long, long pauses (I guess, spending time with chatGPT). 

But then we figured out: Okta's interface on the phone is the same as HSBC bank: you push the "eye" button, and they show you the access code to enter on your computer. Sure!

And then I was configuring all kinds of stuff. The company is migrating from Microsoft-365 to gmail, exactly today. So I have two email addresses in this company. Except that I never managed to log in with my Microsoft login.

What next? Chatted with Jeremey again. In his presence, I logged in to Slack. Which wasn't trivial, for some reason. The main trick was, when everything's configured, you need to kill it and start again. Exit and enter, Microsoft style.

Now what. I'm on Slack, and everybody's there, greeting me, and I'm greeting them. Tomorrow there's a special meeting, dedicated to greeting me.

And meanwhile, my Mac is getting on my nerves, telling me that I have to upgrade it ASAP, since they have a security hole (I don't believe it) - so I also launched that big upgrade.

Meanwhile, Jeremey gave me lints to their internal wiki. Looks pretty impressive.

Since I was showing my iPhone screen, and it's all in French, he asked me what is my native language; and then we talked about teaching in a Catholic university, about my Orthodox background, and cultural peculiarities of the South (he was born in a small town an hour away from me), and about how's everything.

I did not tell him about the two main problems of California (roads and idiots): demonstrating sarcasm the first day at work is not a good idea, now I know. Be always positive, nothing but positive! Ok, I told him why Samantha Lemonnier sent her kid to a Russian kindergarten, that I told him. (The story is this: Samantha was my coworker at Google, and when she told me this about her kid, I asked her why, and she said that there's jungle out there, and he has to get used to it.)

Github insists that I use my own account, but with my work email. Weird. Spent a couple of hours setting this up, attaching the new email and validating it on my github account.

Then there was a Scrum. I'm curious of course. They show Kanban. Kanban, like in every software company around the world, has Typial Cases.

- How can a new user configure their account?
- we need to get rid of the infinite login loop
- switch from (some) library to Cats

And so it goes. Been there, saw it.

Then the meeting was over, it was around 5PM. After which I managed to finish this issue with github access using my new email.

That was my first work day.