Posts Tagged ‘Work’

What do you mean I can’t come into work today?!?!?

You know, except for the fact that I don’t have a dubiously serviceable spaceship named Serenity (I don’t have a perfectly serviceable one for that matter either). Nor do I have a crew, rugged good looks or such a free-spirited approach to whether to follow the law or not.

Look at him there, what a man.

Pioneers, out there, working for themselves. Well, that is what I will be doing. I recently handed in my notice at Buzz Sports. It has been an amazing three years, but the time has come to move on and establish my own technical consultancy, which will be opening its doors in April.

So if you need help with your software project, get in touch. With expert knowledge of scalable web application architecture and a reassuringly expensive price tag, you’re in safe hands.

This evening has been rubbish. I got home, exhausted and haven’t really done anything. I’ve done a bit more work on some grant applications, answered some emails, done some more planning. But by 8:30 I was already giving up on being productive and went for a power nap.

I’m now fueling up on chocolate and Red Bull so I can get something done, but I wonder if there is just a better way.

For example, I always really enjoyed working nights at McDonald’s. There was actually something really satisfying about working twelve hours until 4am, then (after a quick picnic in the Tesco car park) heading home and just going to bed, knowing that you didn’t have to be up again at some irritatingly, and quite frankly painful, hour in the morning.

Of course, that isn’t really achievable in the real world because of the whole 9-5 office thing, even with the flexitime we have at work it still doesn’t grant me that kind of flexibility. But how about a whole different approach. What if we should shifted our day pattern to accommodate this?

So, let’s say that I sleep seven hours a night. I’m at work from approximately eight until six including travel time, so that takes up ten hours of my day. That gives me seven hours per day of free time. Instead of getting up at eight and going to work, I could get up at one in the morning, spend the morning doing productive stuff while I’m still in the mood for it, go to work at eight, which doesn’t matter how tired I am because it’s work so it’s inherently self-motivating (because it’s not voluntary so you don’t have to choose to do it, you just do it), come home at six and go to bed.

Of course there would be lots of problems with this strategy, notably that because society is geared to holding evening events, half the time I would need to be up when my new schedule says I should be asleep. It also means being awake in the middle of the night when it will be dark but then during winter it’s dark in an evening anyway.

The former I think it really an insurmountable problem in the long term, though I do think it would be fun to try for a fortnight. If nothing else, it would probably make an interesting YouTube documentary.

Here’s an interesting fact you may not know (or to be fair, even find interesting). The American expression “my two cents” is actually just an Americanised version of the original British idiom “my two pennies worth.” Yep much like whisky and invading less powerful countries, the phrase is just another concept that actually came from the British Isles and was merely imitated by the United States.

So, given many of us are soon to be or indeed have started graduate jobs, I thought I would throw in experiences and thoughts given I have been working for over a month now on the off chance it is helpful but mainly because I am guessing I can score a few cheap jokes somewhere in this post.

It really is a lot of the things you imagine to be honest. You know when we were doing things like normalised databases and understanding business processes before designing a system and we’re all sat there thinking this clearly is a better way of doing this but nobody is going to be doing this in the real world and because I know this it’s then going to be my job to have to go in and sort it all out which is just going to be painful.

Well, that is exactly how it is :D. Having arrived for my first week by boss Nick announced he was going to be away for the next week so I used the time to almost entirely rewrite a big system we had written for a client so it is all normalised and doesn’t duplicate silly amounts of code (it now only duplicates a large amount of code ;)). But it’s far less painful to actually sort out – it’s more of a fun challenge once you actually get into it.

You’re going to like the people you work with. Possibly because they geniunely nice people. I think I’ve got lucky in that the people I work with really are geniunely nice people. Even if they weren’t though, you are still going to like them because it’s like that in halls – you make friends and then looking back a year or two later you realise that they were actually a right bunch of losers.

The first week or so you haven’t really got into the swing of things so they can be a bit boring while you really build up the knowledge to just be able to walk in on a morning and get on with things. So if there is some serious clock watching in that first week, don’t worry, it’s going to get better once you’re up to speed.

Chances are, you aren’t going to be a newbie for too long. Most of the companies we are going for will have a relatively high turnover compared with companies outside of IT and not recruiting graduates who are going places so with all probability there will be someone else who started just before you and will soon be someone newer than you too. My company recruited a few months before I started and have some else starting in about two weeks.

Things happen slowly. This is where your experience running societies comes in. Remember all that nagging of people to get things done that a president has to do constantly throughout their term? It is a skill that will come in handy a lot. If you missed out on the experience of running a society then don’t worry too much, you’re just going to feel far less flustrated when nothing gets done.

Finally, whenever you get stressed, just remember that you only have 40 years of work left. And a good few years of people telling you that joke. Over and over. Like Thursday crashing a car. So yeah, good luck!

It’s week two of my job at Open Door Design and it’s coming along nicely. I’ve been working around with one of their previous big sites which I’ve really been able to get my teeth into and rip apart. It’s everything you expect when you get into the real world, I’ll leave you to fill in what that means :D.

So, I started work this week.

It’s not the best thing ever to be honest. I have to get up and dressed at like 8am. Not pm – am!

Still, the job itself is pretty good. While I’m currently in the getting myself up to speed stage I think once I get my teeth into some good projects it is going to be an excellent job. Plus the people are really nice and friendly and we’re just round the corner from Elland Road McDonald’s. What more could you ask for?