I'm now about 12 hours into my career at my new job.
And let me tell you -- I think I'm home. I mean, not Palo Alto specifically (which is still far scarier than Avenue D could ever be), but with this company. My initial impressions are even better than I had expected.
First off, everyone I've met here is friendly and kind. Everybody stopped in the hallway to say hello and talk with me about what they are working on. Yet people aren't sitting around chatting all day, which can happen at a company when things are too slow. Nor was anyone acting like they were too busy to even meet someone new, which can happen at a company when they are in panic mode and late on release dates. Just the right balance of engagement.
(And speaking of kindness, the head of the company called me up in NYC the other week when I was sick just to see how I was doing. You'd be surprised how rare things like that are in the business world.)
Then you start talking to people around here and you realize how smart they are. That they the experts in these technologies. That they had been recruited from all the top companies in the industry. (Seriously, the résumés here are a virtual yellow pages of the top 50 companies in technology.) I was joking with the CEO (the guy I work for) that I felt like I had just made the All-Star team. That's pretty much the caliber of individual that they've hired so far. (Makes you wonder how I got through the interviews, actually.)
Everyone here is an engineer. I'd estimate that 95% of the people in this building can, and do, write code. Hell -- someone set up an application on a computer next to one of the Foosball tables (yes, there is more than one), that keeps a running tally of individual and team wins and losses. With realtime rankings and sortable statistics.
The fact that this is an engineering company shows up everywhere. The work environment is ideal -- quiet, private, but with plenty of places for people to come together and collaborate. My first day, the initial orientation went as easy as you could imagine. I even had a fancy new computer set up for me (a dual-proc HP running RedHat, very nice) with a huge monitor in a nice private office. There's a big kitchen, filled with snacks and a rather decent coffee (I say after my 5th cup today). And the first thing I saw on the intranet site was a link to the internal Wiki, right next to the link to our internal Bugzilla instance. (The guys from my old job will get that one.)
It just makes a guy want to start coding, you know? For a while I had thought I didn't even want to write code any more, and drifted off into management and visionary type things. In fact, it may have simply been that I hadn't been in the right environment for it. I.e., in a place where you want to write code because writing code is the most effective way of seeing an idea turn into reality. Now that I think about it, I haven't seen a company "get it" this much when it comes to writing software since my time at Microsoft.
Most importantly, what has really blown me away is the number of ideas that are bouncing around this office. I've already seen early builds of our new technology that seriously floored me with just how cool they were. And, even though I've been here just one day, I immediately started getting feedback and support for things I want to bring to the company. And you know the best thing -- it's my job to do exactly that.
(Oh dear lord. I'm finishing this off at work, and I just spent 15 minutes juggling with my boss. Really. Literally juggling. Bowling pins. I heard a noise right outside my office, and there he is, three pins in the air. He's good -- I'm impressed. Especially since he wrote the textbook I used my sophomore year of college.)
I'm not going to kid you -- part of the reason I'm writing this because I want you to send your résumé over to us. If you're an world-class Java or C++ engineer, an expert on search technology, or a recent PhD in Computer Science with an interest in data-mining or scalable infrastructures, we're hiring.