Starting a new job is exciting, well it should be anyway. If you aren’t excited about it why would you have accepted the offer in the first place?
My first week at EMC was spent reading. Perhaps it is better described as an opportunity to learn what it is I don’t know, which is always more than you think. This is in no way a surprise or a source of frustration; I’ve come to realize that I work with some fairly unique (and highly skilled) individuals within the organization whose talents are in demand. The reading also helped prepare me to take an internal exam, which you must pass before you are given access to certain sources of technical information.
My immediate team is rather interesting. My team lead was at Cisco Live last week doing a variety of things EMC related and my coworker (peer if you will, although I wouldn’t use that term just yet) is going up to HQ (Hopkinton, MA) this coming week to perform a customer proof of concept demonstration. My purpose on the team is to be able to equal them as closely as is possible, and I can already tell you that it is going to be among the most challenging things that I have ever done in my career. My team is responsible for developing documents likethese, and I’ve been pouring over them and many like them as I’ll be expected to participate in exercises like that as soon as is possible.
Some things that have become obvious over the last week:
- If you paid any attention to the vSphere 5 launch this week and follow the top tech blogs you can’t help but notice that EMC employees that blog (particularly the vSpecialist team) were ready with article after article immediately after the launch. I use Google Reader (my feed list is linked in the left column of this page; EMC maintains a list here that is fairly accurate) and I was overwhelmed that day by post after post of analysis about the announcement. I don’t care if you like EMC or not; if you want timely analysis of virtualization news you should be following them.
- Hard work does pay off but luck never hurts. I busted my ass to get where I am today but it took an alignment of the planets to finally get me in the door at EMC. My advice to those who want in: network with employees (this is nothing new) and get to know recruiters (thank you LinkedIn). I had a very helpful recruiter who gave me some resume tips and then got that updated resume to who it needed to get to. I had applied to EMC at least seven previous times and I can assure you that getting an interview is not as easy as you would like. Oh and ifyou do interview and it went well BE PATIENT. Just trust me on that one.
- It is very cool to be among a very small number of people in the company who get to see or hear things first. I can’t really get into details but the fact that I got to learn something BEFORE people whose blogs I read religiously (and go to for news) is pretty exciting. For me it is just another reminder that much will be expected of me and that nothing less than 100% effort is going to cut it.
- When do all these people have time to write? It requires discipline that I do not yet have. Give me a few months though and I might be able to post some of that “Day 0″ news that is likely the biggest inspiration for them to author new posts. My closing thought: Great things lie ahead; I can’t wait.