It’s going to be tough to blog about work, mainly because I’ve signed an NDA about everything I’m working on, and frankly, IBM seems to have something to say about much of what the people who work there (as employees or even contractors) say or do online. I’ve always tried to be mindful that anything written here can be seen in all sorts of places I hadn’t expected (murmurs can be very loud indeed). So let’s see what I can talk about this first week.
First of all, re. the trips to Burnaby and back: The first 2 days we drove there (or rather, I drove Pam to her work and then on to my office, which is thankfully, a very short distance after dropping her off). That wasn’t bad, but driving in Vancouver is never what one would call ‘fun’ (despite the Nissan commercial — was it Nissan? — that has a car smoothly cruising at high speed across what is very clearly the Granville Bridge toward the high-rises of Downtown). From the new perspective of our new (used) car, the roads seem to be perpetually congested, and the construction work on the CanadaLine as well as all of the buildings being built all over the city make for a challenging collection of choke-points in traffic flow. The oil spill closing the Barnett highway this past week didn’t help matters, even though it was nowhere near our commute (but we think the extra traffic from there might have made a difference). I’m not sure I’m going to like having a car here all that much, except when I can get somewhere that I couldn’t have gotten with the bus. Perhaps a trip out to some gorgeous spot in the coming weekends will help in that department. For the rest of the week, we followed the plan that we had for good weather vs. bad weather: If the sun’s out, it’s buses and the Skytrain; If it’s cold and/or raining, it’s the car. So, with the typical Vancouver July sunshine, we headed out to the bus stop (me a bit earlier than Pam because I had further to go and intend to get in at or before 9 AM most days). The #84 bus leaves from nearby 4th Avenue and Fir street at just about 8AM on the nose. It dropped me off right by the new Vancouver Community College(VCC)/Clark station in about 20 minutes, and the Skytrain from there to Brentwood station was about 15 minutes. A final bus, the #123 from the Brentwood station goes down Willingdon Street and takes a left onto Canada Way, and after about a 7 minute ride, reaches a stop fairly close to IBM’s offices. I’m in by 8:50 or so, having listened to almost an hour of ‘The Assault on Reason’ by Al Gore on my iPod. Books on tape or podcasts will be increasingly handy for the commute. I saw a lot of people on the Skytrain reading ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’.
There, I guess I’ve dissected the commute in detail. What else can I describe without breaking any laws about secrecy?
I work on the first floor. This has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that it’s a very pleasant, open environment, and not a cubicle farm at all (which is the case with the other 3 floors). Every chair is an Aeron (how 2000!) and other attractive office furniture and 3 floating flat-screen TVs flank a round meeting room, glassed-in conference room areas, and a bunch of stretched fabric accents at the corners of spaces. The mountains in the North are clearly visible from the floor-to-ceiling windows, and because there are few offices, everyone can see them. It’s beautiful now to look out, but it might get a little depressing with the full view of the rain in December, January and February. The main disadvantage is security, or perhaps I should say SECURITY.
- You may not leave a single paper with anything relating to work on your desk when you are away from it.
- All laptops must be bolted with cables to each desk.
- This laptop must be locked away in a steel cabinet before you leave at the end of the day.
- After you turn on your computer , you typically have 5 passwords to enter at various screens before you can actually do any work.
- Finally, when you leave your desk for a meeting and don’t bring your laptop with you (which is rare), it must be screen-locked and often have the lid down.
There are spot-checks by security personnel and if you fail 3 of those, you are summarily fired, with no hope of a reprieve.
The software situation isn’t so hot either. Did I mention that they use Lotus Notes for mail? Geez, I never thought I’d see a mail program that makes Outlook seem…‘elegant?’… They’ve standardized all of their UI diagram and wireframe work on Visio, the worst drawing program I’ve ever had to use (and unfortunately used at 2 of my last 3 jobs).
And as for hardware, of course, everyone must use a ThinkPad. My ‘new’ one (which arrived on Friday, forcing me to use a loaner for most of the week) was a T60. Lenovo has not changed the design much, and this model has a curious battery pack sticking out of the back hinge like a big plastic ridge. I have to say that I’m not a big fan of ThinkPads. If only they had different colours, or tried to smooth the edges a bit, because their dull black has a certain drabness, especially when you get a whole roomful of them in meetings. It’s conformity resulting in an almost funereal dullness; perhaps the one remaining piece of the ‘old’ IBM culture.
Of course, trying to get this ThinkPad to actually work, even though it was brand new, was a challenge. Here we ran into the usual disastrous combination of Windows and Corporate software policies. I was not able to get Visio actually installed on the laptop from the corporate servers. There is a complex license rental that must be invoked and the rental software, Tivoli License Manager refused to load. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it done next week. Trying to connect it to a printer also failed the first 2 or 3 times, requiring multiple installs of the driver software. I was amused to see that several obscure software packages were preinstalled on it, including Lotus’s Lotus-123, Organizer and Freelance Graphics. I guess it’s nice to know that those relics of the pre-Internet era are still on hard drives somewhere. Much of IBM’s desktop software (for logging time and getting access to documents, for example) is so ugly and clumsy that it’s almost laughable. I challenge any IBM employee to contradict me there.
Despite those low-points, I can only say that the project that I’m on is really interesting, and I actually feel that it’s worth working on for the good of everyone, rather than just getting a paycheck. Oh, excuse me: paycheque.
It’s nearly 11PM, so I’m going to turn in early. TGIF.
David,
Sounds like you are settling in to the job experience. As with any positions, there are good and bad points. Hopefully, the good will outweigh the bad … Enjoy your weekend!
Hi David, how interesting that you’re now at IBM.
I can assure you that your reaction to all the security measures and the weird and wonderful software configuration is perfectly normal. 🙂 It’s too bad that they have implemented the licence rental policy — when I was there, you could still get good old-fashioned individual licences for things like Visio.
It’s good to hear that you’re enjoying your project, though, and I wouldn’t worry about saying too much in a blog entry — one of the great things about IBM is the well-established culture of both external and internal blogging, which is pretty remarkable for a large enterprise.
Good luck at Big Blue!
Hey, I heard about the “three strikes and you’re out” rule (my wife’s ex used to work for IBM in the 80’s) but I had no idea it was still in effect.
Interesting article about IBM employees in Second Life. Though when you read it closely it does say for example
If we’re talking about people representing IBM in various forums, then it’s very reasonable that IBM puts out some guidelines, right?
I see from the Flickr photos that you and Pam went with a snazzy little Mercedes for your new (used) car. Bad move, guys, now it’ll be impossible to settle for anything less in the future. You should’ve gone for an old clunker. 🙂
Hi Dmitry — Small world, eh? Thanks for the advice about security and blogging, etc. Perhaps the ‘clean desk’ policy will even get me to reform a bit when it comes to my pack-rate tendencies of having papers pile up.
Jan — Good point about the Second Life specificity to work. Given my tendency to tread lightly on work issues in my blog, I probably won’t run into any problems. Of course, I wouldn’t mind railing a bit against all of the loss of productivity from using Notes and Visio for email and drawing. The number of hours lost on these two horrible software packages must be costing the company millions over time.
As for the car, yes, you can see that Pam had a large say over the make and model. I don’t know if I’ll be hooked on the Mercedes. Frankly, some of it seems just stuff that will be an expensive problem some day. Power windows drive me crazy, and all of those key-less locking and other electronics are just options that add some value, but mainly are expensive to fix, and they all will break down, sooner or later. The servos and electric motors, as well as the sensors and even the wiring are sensitive to temperature and humidity changes, not to mention friction and entropy, and they are nearly always hard to get at. Great for a new car, but in a used one…well, we’ll have to see.
Wow, did you get a job at the FBI? 😉
Sounds like you’ve got an interesting project to keep you busy, anyhow! Congrats!
Hope to see you at one of the meetups, soon! Are you going to BarCamp?
Hi NetChick!
Yeah, the security is a little weird, but I guess the upside is that it forces you to be neat. (You have to keep a clean desk pretty much at all times).
I’m planing on BarCamp — hoping to do a presentation this time! In the meantime, I’m hoping I can make the next Meetup, as I had to miss the last 2.