“Keeping you up to date with everything software engineering!”

NEW SERIES: Working Life with Fred Baku

Work Life | October 22, 2004 | 3 comments

One of my closest friends from software engineering at school just started a 3 month contract as a software developer in a large publicly traded company and we thought it would be fun if he documented his experience. Since I never worked in a large company I figured it would be nice to live vicariously through him.

We are not using his real name because he is working on a project for a large pharmaceutical company and we don’t want to get either him or us in trouble. So we will refer to him as “Fred Baku”.

I hope you enjoy this new series and please share your experiences with everyone. Let’s learn from our bad experiences and who knows. Maybe some managers our out there are listening.

---

So where do I start. I guess I should start from the beginning.

I never saw my workplace before I started my new job. The whole hiring process went really quickly… less then a day long from first contact to offer. I got an email from a company who needed someone who knew ColdFusion for a 16 week project that they were already 5 weeks into. The first guy they hired they brought in from Toronto and after a week they canned him because supposedly he did not do anything within the first week. To be fair to him it seems like they were looking for more then a developer and he just did not fit the bill. How hard could it be to find ColdFusion developers anyway. Another one is starting next Monday and he is being brought in from Boston.

Someone found John’s email address because he was the manager of the now defunct ColdFusion User Group here in Montreal and he forwarded me the email. I spoke to an account executive on Friday morning, she did a telephone interview with me, then an hour or two later I had a technical interview with someone from the companies New Jersey office and then a couple hours later they offered me a job and wanted me to start on Monday.

Monday rolls around and I show up to the office at nine like they asked me to. I had to wait 30 minutes for security clearance but that did not bother me. I was excited. This was the first large company I would work for and it was all new to me. A publicly traded company that has money and takes good care of their employees. I need a change from all those startups I worked for.

The reading material on the coffee table was very slim. I had the choice to read the companies last years financial report or a magazine that rated the Top 100 Companies to work for in Canada. This is a good sign. What large company would put a magazine rating companies if they were not in it. I spend 10 minutes looking for them in the magazine. I could not find them anywhere. I thought I was blind so I asked the receptionist where I would find them in the magazine. “We are not in the magazine… what made you think we are in the magazine?”. Why else would the only magazine you have here be a magazine promoting the best companies to work for in Canada… is it for me to figure out where I want to start applying next? Of course I said that out loud. She found it funny… I think :-).

The other thing on the coffee table was the companies last years financial results. I took two accounting courses in university so I decided to pick it up and check out how well the company is doing. The first thing I noticed was the amount of employees the company had year over year:

Year	Employees
1999	~5500
2000	~4500
2001	~4000
2002	~3500
2003	~2700

That looks promising. The company is making almost the same amount of money a year it is just they are doing it with less and less employees. I also noticed that the CEO and other key executives were all new in 2003. All bad signs… but I was still optimistic… the company I am going to work for is a big company after all and that is what my dad wanted for his son.

All the paper work is done and they are ready to throw me into the trenches the way I like it. Now show me my office. Office… you mean cubicle right? Ummm… a cubicle with four sides right? No… three sides. Don’t geeks prefer cubicles? Only executives and non-geeks need offices. Now why is that? We are the ones solving the difficult problems all day long. Management solves as difficult problems but they are more social problems then technical in nature and they need to communicate with people. Geeks don’t like being disturbed and is horrible for productivity.

So I am thrown into a room with eight cubicles. All I have is a 4 foot separator between my desk and the person on either side of me… it is not even a cubicle. It looked identical to a small call center. Is that a 15” CRT on my desk. Is that 15” CRT on everyone’s desk… wow. The university I went to has 20” LCDs and I am working at a profit making company that only gets new 15” CRT’s. Nice. NOT!

Ok… ok… everything is going to be alright. I never worked in a call center style office setting so I can’t judge it. I sit in front of the foot high of documentation I need to start reading. “Are you there?”… I look around… 3 seconds later… “Are you there?”… I look around again… 3 seconds later… “Are you there?”… what the hell is that? I turn to my co-worker and ask him if he hears that… yeah… that is Johanna’s (names have been changed to protect the innocent) phone ringing. What the hell!!!

Five minutes later 5 of the 8 people from the office gather around one persons phone and start to have a conference call… for 2 hours!!!! Welcome to the world of quasi-cubicles!

For all the managers and decision makers out there here is Fred’s first rule.

Fred’s 1st Rule for Keeping Employees Productive

Give each person an office or quasi office… i.e. a cubicle with high walls and a door. An office we can close the door to is the first defense to keeping people away from loosing ruining our train of thought (the zone). Oh… you say there are no offices available? Your looks comfortable, why don’t we switch?

After a nine hour day I was really discouraged. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Help Support Us By Visiting Our Sponsor

10% of our revenue from these ads go towards scholarships!

Comments

October 22, 2004 07:46 PM | Louis-Philippe Huberdeau commented:

I don’t quite agree with the conclusion. I worked in a quite large office (700+ employees) and I was in a cubicle. It’s actually quite efficient since geeks too need to talk to people. Development is far from being a single-person task and having multiple people in the same room does help solving problems faster (ever heard of XP?)

I wouldn’t expect a contractual employee that will be leaving in 3 months to have brand new material for his own usage. All companies usually keep their old hardware for new/temp people. Universities are usually more sponsored than private companies… that would explain the 20” LCDs.

As for the 2 hours long conference call, there should be a closed room dedicated to those.

But overall, the company seem to be totally unaware of what software development is. You just can’t hire someone and expect him to be fully productive after a week. There is some time required to understand the project and adapt to the environment (people and technical issues).

October 22, 2004 09:44 PM | David Di Giacomo commented:

I agree with Fred - though we do need to communicate with engineers, there are many essential times we need quiet time with no disruptions.

Whenever I have come up with a complex design, or do anything that requires a substantial amount of concentration, I book a conference room for 1. After I am interuppted in my cubie it takes a couple of minutes just to get back to what I was thinking of…

Fortunately, not many developers are doing this or else all the conference rooms would always be full :)

November 3, 2004 08:36 AM | John Kopanas commented:

I used to do the same thing at a company I used to work at. I would book a conference room for the whole day when I really needed to work and just take a laptop into the room to think. My productivity not only close to doubled but I am sure the quality of my work also improved.

I understand the need to work with other people but a problem solver needs both quiet time to work out hard problems and brainstorming time with his/her peers to hopefully solve problems faster. The layout of the office can probably help with this.

By having more then one team working in the same room you get a lot of background noise that does not concern you. If it is only your team you share a room with that might be ok. But in general you should have as quiet and disturbance free environment as possible.

That is probably why you hear most people say you can never get anything done between 9 and 5. :-)

Post Your Comments

Comments:

Name:

Email Address:
(note: not displayed)

URL:
(note: displayed with comment)