New job, week 1 thoughts

I can hardly believe that it has already been a full work week at the new job. It sure seemed to sail by quickly, but that's not really a bad thing. Everyone I've met so far has been so nice and happy. I feel like I've been around for a few months by the way everyone treats me. Even the collections department that sits a few rows away from me sounds quite peppy all day long... it's nothing like my days with the collections department at Chase Bank. I'm just glad that I've had enough real-world experience that I could land myself a nice developer position with a big company, so I don't have to settle for anything like that anymore.

The other nice thing about the position is that since it is with a bank, they have a lot more money to throw at projects than many other companies. They're still in the planning stages of our project and having frequent meetings with Microsoft reps, but it sounds like we're going to end up with a brand new server loaded up with all of the latest and greatest software. They're really pushing the 2007 Office System on us, and luckily I've had some real-world experience with that since I've been in the beta test for the past 10 months. I'm guessing this is one of the big reasons I got the position so easily. Our software budget alone is probably going to break five digits by my estimate, and it's positively exciting to be able to be part of this project. There is even rumor that we may end up writing the code that will serve as the base templates and classes for any and all future projects for the bank.

So far, there have been very few problems. I've had to wait to get accounts and passwords set up for all the systems that I will be working with, but overall they seem to move fairly quickly to get those set up. I had to fight the first three days with the laptop that I was given to work on because the last person to use it left all kinds of screwy permissions on the registry and directories, pretty much leaving it a useless mess. Thursday morning (after the new Office 2007 beta versions were released and refused to install), I finally broke down and requested for the help desk to just re-image my hard drive. I dropped off the lappy a little after 1pm and got it back, fresh and spunky one hour later.

Next week, I should have all my accounts set up in the systems so I can start looking over the code and databases from the old project to start learning how it all worked and what we can do to improve it when we rewrite it in .NET 2.0. What a wonderful job this is turning out to be!