I think I’d better write down day #1, week #1, month #1, and so on to track everything, or even better, write down something every week or even daily. Daily is hard to be true, though.
First day, everything is totally new. Boss told me that this is a company that is growing up, so all workflow, process, etc are still under construction, which seems to be a good experience to see things are growing up, but to me it’s not that fun :(.
Anyway, orientation is not that bad, since the company outsource everything to FESCO (I was almost confused with Beijing FESCO), and people from there are pretty nice, patient, and processional. It seems outsourcing is always a good solution for services, and obviously people in this city is good at doing service business, no wonder for sure.
After the orientation I had lunch with boss and 3 other people that got involved in “my” project. It’s kind of tough to me to catch up, especially in memorizing names … you know I told myself from time to time that I need to memorize people’s name, but obviously I’m not that style of people, so I’m still doing well. However, I found that I just need to interact with people, then I can make it easier – now I know the name of the HR, name of boss’ secretary, name of the production person and technical person who are currently helping my project, and tomorrow I should have meeting with them so I would behave better since I can spell out their names.
After the lunch here came the toughest task: setup my working environment, it’s really tough. I don’t know the reason but this company ask each individual, the newbie, setup machine and everything ALL BY THEMSELVES, from Windows installation to e-mail setup, and internal IM, printer, and so on. You know I’ve been in this industry for quite some time and I’ve been being an IT guy for a year or so (part-time though), but even with my experience it’s still tough. I have to say their documentation job is pretty cool, that if I have followed the instruction step by step everything should be fine, but …
Obviously they put my machine in a wrong cube so I didn’t have network connection at the very beginning (it was connected to the lab network), after moving to new cube I found that I mis-changed my password for Windows domain, while the correct thing is change everything in one run (domain, email, IM), then my IM didn’t work and it seems they didn’t enable my IM account, then I have problem accessing my email although it is just simple POP3+Outlook. After 5 hours fighting plus 4 calls to IT team, as well consulting someone else 2 or 3 times, finally I got everything up and running and it was 6pm already.
Boss came just on time, asking if I have everything settled down. Thanks god I didn’t lose my face so I was able to step into his office to talk about what I’m going to do in the coming weeks (actually, only two weeks since there will be a checkpoint after that). Other than setting up my team, digging out product direction (note, we were not talking about plan since the direction is uncertain), I still need to help some other teams, working as a consultant to see if they are doing the right thing. You know these are quite a lot jobs – hiring technical people AND production people, and some JD are still not available; doing research on current potential service provider AND looking for another alternative so that we won’t put eggs in one basket; helping monitoring system setup/development AND composing SLA proposal to customers as they asked for it, and after all I need to give a presentation in 2 weeks to show to big bosses what what we are going to do with my project and plan draft.
It will be two busy weeks to me, I also need to find out where I can rent a acceptable apartment, and I have dinner appointment with people from US (this is kind of building up network), and I will visit boss’ house.
Good thing is that hotel rental is paid by the company, so I’m thinking mabe I can leave house hunting job to the end of the month. Anyway I didn’t bring enough cash with me so I’m really poor guy now, living on creditcard :D.
Busy day #1, but by the end of the day, especially after talking to boss I feel kind of relax, since I know what’s in front of me and what I can do. I’m still in my old style – feeling confident after getting on board, since I don’t have any plan B so all that I can do is moving ahead.