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Saturday, May 20, 2006

Three months

It's been exactly three months since my first day at work. I also spent almost exactly three months at my internship at Google, and I've been thinking how different it's been in many ways.

In three months at Google, I...

  • made a big group of friends (probably around a dozen) that I knew well enough to call up on the weekend

  • made a couple of really close friends

  • generally knew everybody... I figure by the end of summer, there were probably 50-75 people I knew well enough to say "Hi" to if I passed them in the hall

  • made a couple of excursions to Great America

  • improved my skills at pool and volleyball

  • played in the ball pit

  • had eaten lots of really good free food

  • biked to work almost every day

  • had a project that, while intellectually interesting, would probably never have had much (any) external visibility

  • had an awkward relationship with my manager, one of the very few people I didn't hit it off with there

  • wrote some code...


In three months here, I...

  • have made a good enough impression on my coworkers that several of them have sent out nice visible thank you notes about what I've done

  • biked to work a couple of times

  • went to Canada once to hang out with a friend who happened to be up there

  • learned a hell of a lot about web technologies, especially considering I knew absolutely nothing about them when I got here

  • am getting to work on a really awesome project that millions of people will see

  • am working on the exact part of the project I've wanted since I heard it existed

  • have an awesome mentor (who has become my manager in the time since I started), who's basically the guide I've needed and wished I had since I got out of high school



So, my social life isn't as good here (I was going to say "maybe," but there's no comparison), but my professional life is orders of magnitude better. Sure, there are tradeoffs, but as much as I loved being at Google, it was the toys I loved... not my job. Here, there are no toys, but I can hardly think of better work I could be doing.

There's a lot to be said for a job where you get to go to work.

ps. One side effect of this is that I wonder, when I post, if I'm just talking into a void... but then, the Internet is where having friends in other states is just as good as having them here :-)

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