First Week

I just started a new job, and finished my first week. I’m working with people I’ve worked with before. However it’s been about 6 years since we worked together, so it’s a interesting mix of familiar and new, both culturally and technically.

Culturally, processes are very open and there are lots of discussions, both hallway chats and meetings. Of course everyone has these, but the thing that sticks out in this culture is that generally the content is “real”. Meaning it’s focused on topics that are highly relevant to the work being done on the team. Things like who’s going to work on what? Why is this approach better? What are we actually going to do next? There’s very little tolerance of high-level hand-wavy atmospherics. Business-speak is rarely used and often scoffed at. I like it.

Being an engineer, I’m probably more interested in how the tech stack is both familiar and new. The familiar parts are the application architecture (mostly 3-tier) and the programming framework (.NET). The new parts are that there is more automation in general, and more rigorous security practices.

An even new part of the stack is so new it doesn’t exist yet, because I am here to build it! That is, we want to build a data science stack, including all the big data stuff that entails. In short, to “bring in data science”.

Should be fun!