Today was my last official day of employment as a Student On-Call for IBM. My About and Resume sections give most of the official details about my work there, but a more general overview would be that I worked from home in Waterloo for two terms of four months each – in Summer 2006 (May to August) and Winter 2007 (January to April). It’s an interesting experience and a great opportunity, but any longer than about four months consecutively and the work would probably have lost focus. It was really a huge relief to be able to get back into the office in September 2006 and get a decent eight hours of work done, without worrying about VPN connections and whether other people were going to be online to answer questions.
Tomorrow begins my orientation at Research in Motion. I’ve been hired for an eight month term as a Tools Developer for BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service), which will count for two co-op work credits. It’s great primarily because the company’s local, I can take another CS course up at the university while working, and it’s an excellent opportunity for a second year student.
I’m not necessarily looking forward to certain parts of the day, as they’re bound to be the typical corporate necessities that you definitely wouldn’t find in a smaller organization. What’s more, since it’s a group of students all starting tomorrow, the focus will be on making a large production and event out of the day. I’m glad it’s only one day dedicated to the process, since IBM’s Lab student orientation took the better part of three days to finish up.
For example, things I (and other students in the same position) can learn from a webpage, instead of a laborious presentation put on with much pomp and circumstance:
- Workplace security. This was the largest part of IBM’s orientation process, and by far the most difficult to stay awake during. There’s an extremely heavy emphasis on what’s considered confidential information, which always ends up being defined as “anything that says it’s confidential, and even if it doesn’t, use your best judgement.” There are items called non-disclosure agreements, and they have to be signed, sealed and delivered before you can even step foot inside the campus. You get canned if you leak the information, and that’s a very heavy emphasis from both the school and the workplace.
- IT security. Anyone in computer science or a related field is keenly aware of what can happen when you use weak passwords, insecure protocols, or don’t test your applications properly before deploying them. This should be listed under “common sense”. I’m not going to remember how many characters, digits, and symbols have to be used for your passphrases if you splash it up in PowerPoint; show me the restrictions when I go to manage passwords.
- Email use above and beyond sending and receiving. IBM gets a bit of a pass on this one because they use Lotus Notes internally, which is a bit of a unique beast on its own. Notes also has concepts such as “replication” and flagging that aren’t necessarily part of Windows’ standard UI. Instead, go over the basics (how you log in, where you might find and change your user/pass combination, sending and receiving) and put the rest in an online demo. Chances are, your employees aren’t going to be working all eight hours that you have their attention during the day, and especially not at full capacity during the first week. Why not take a week with an intern, record some Flash demos of setting up more advanced items, then point new students to the Intranet address if they have any other questions?
- Intranet addresses are another huge thing. Without revealing any confidential information, companies can have a confusing local network structure as it is, and there are often multiple Intranet sites to accomplish similar purposes. Don’t just flash up URLs in presentations and expect people to remember them, especially if they end in “.nsf”, followed by a question mark, followed by a ridiculously long series of characters. Give the root site, then the navigation path – people are more likely to remember a series of steps than a series of seemingly-random characters.
I’m also not necessarily impressed with my start time tomorrow: departure from the HR building at 7:45am, which means getting there earlier. The Toronto Lab had a huge population of people who would come in at, say, between 10am to noon on a regular basis – but then they’d stay late into the evening or work from home at early hours of the morning. I never had a scheduled meeting at IBM earlier than 8:30am, which was because the presenters had schedules such that the only time they could talk to students was at that time.
In this case, it’s probably best to think proactively, and get some sleep knowing that this event requires the commitment of changing my sleep pattern.