As I begin my second week with the new company (to rename nameless on this blog for anti-search purposes), I find myself reflecting back to the first week at my last job.
It was 2004. After graduating in May, I spent the next few months working for my father's construction company. And then I started with Symbiosys. My main responsibility in the beginning was just tech support so it shouldn't have been so bad. But as everyone knows, you don't know nuttin about nuttin when you get out of college.
It was pretty scary. I was trying to learn real-world IT skills, while learning how to act like an adult in an office, while learning how businesses worked (they have acronyms for everything). In my 2nd week I nearly got fired for making a joke to the wrong person.
It's like the first day of kindergarten. You get herded in to this place called "school", where you have to keep your clothes on, stay awake, and only play with the toys when they let you. So traumatic.
Anyway - This new job wasn't nearly as bad. After being with Symbiosys for 5 years, I've learned a ton of real world IT skills. I've also been working in a corporate business all that time. Oh, and then the whole grad school thing.
As I sat down in my "intro" meetings, I was able to understand everything they were doing right away. I had dealt with it all before. And I even made a few good suggestions for some things we were working on.
If you look back to some of my old posts, you'll notice that I often felt like I was cheating my employers. That one day they would come in and say "Ok Rob, we figured you out. You don't actually know anything. You're fired." and I'd just say "Well, I had a good run"
...but I don't feel like that anymore.
So the moral of the story is that you shouldn't be afraid to start a new job, because you're probably more qualified than you think.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
New jobs aren't so scary anymore
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3 comments:
With about 15 years of practical, real world experience, I still sometimes feel like a fraud. I think it's inevitable for most of us because we're only taught the basic skills in school and not technique. There's limited, if any, real practical application experience and the intuition you get comes with experience. Add to that the fact that we're always called upon to improvise on the fly, learn new things to advance our knowledge, and often make nothing more than educated guesses as to how to proceed - one day you wind up wondering how you made it THIS far.
Keep truckin' and good luck at the new gig!
David
P.S. What a weird CAPTCHA this thing is asking me to type - "faillinp" O_o
Yeah, it's crazy right? I never thought I'd get to the point where I'd feel some level of comfort with my expertise. I remember almost not taking the job at Symbiosys just because I felt so "dumb". I gotta thank you for knocking some sense into me all those years ago!
My captcha phrase was "cicqul". Is that some animal native to New Zealand or something?
It's always fun to see how people on the other side of the desk think. I can think of some rough first weeks and yours didn't even qualify. Not knowing nothing about nothing is easy to deal with, but people who think they are all over everything and then say stupid things to customers scare bosses.
You are certainly missed, but as I said "Learn some stuff and steal lots of office supplies" Seriously don't come back without an offering of an aisle of staples.
I got a capcha of "remanthar" which is a comic villian right ?
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