Redmond in November!
It's finally come to pass and I've just spent a week working with my new employers. I have yet to receive my office and building passcards and there doesn't seem to be a central search engine for the raging torrent of important and semi-important websites/resources that I'd need to survive - but it's still been a revelation so far.
A few of my external impressions have been disproved - for example, Micr0s0fties aren't actually as stuck up as I'd made them to be, bar a few exceptions - and a few things that I'd suspected before this are actually true, stuff that I'm not in a position to reveal, unfortunately.
One of the major things that I've been having to get used to is hotdesking, which means that I have no permanent desk in the office, having to occupy any available desk when I'm at work. Due to the limited office space, employees on the go are encouraged to stay away and be on-site or work from home.
That's a really cool thing - with remote access, I'd only need to come to the office for managerial meetings and administrative stuff like handing in expense claims. At the moment though, I'm on a 90 day training plan, which means that I'll mostly be in the office until I start working on my customer accounts.
One thing that I've noticed about most people is their willingness to talk - some more fluent than others, a trait that seems directly proportionate to the the height of their positions on the org chart. That's management I suppose - but on the whole, the top managers here seem a lot more intelligent than elsewhere.
A few of my external impressions have been disproved - for example, Micr0s0fties aren't actually as stuck up as I'd made them to be, bar a few exceptions - and a few things that I'd suspected before this are actually true, stuff that I'm not in a position to reveal, unfortunately.
One of the major things that I've been having to get used to is hotdesking, which means that I have no permanent desk in the office, having to occupy any available desk when I'm at work. Due to the limited office space, employees on the go are encouraged to stay away and be on-site or work from home.
That's a really cool thing - with remote access, I'd only need to come to the office for managerial meetings and administrative stuff like handing in expense claims. At the moment though, I'm on a 90 day training plan, which means that I'll mostly be in the office until I start working on my customer accounts.
One thing that I've noticed about most people is their willingness to talk - some more fluent than others, a trait that seems directly proportionate to the the height of their positions on the org chart. That's management I suppose - but on the whole, the top managers here seem a lot more intelligent than elsewhere.