Guess its time to talk about the whole reason I got ‘exported’ into this country - my co-op job. I work at this small-to-midsize IT company called “Invio.Inc”. At least I think that I work at Invio, I could be wrong - there are 3 companies owned by an umbrella company “Cube-C” and they occasionally exchange employees, keeping management somewhat busier. My official title of “system engineer” is a vague blob that could possibly mean that i get to deal with computers. As mentioned before, Mr. Dave Brown is my boss, and he’s a decently westernized guy - reducing the amount of crazy Japanese bureaucracy in my life. So far the workload has been enjoyable with enough new stuff to learn, but not necessarily go crazy over. The first few days were a bit of a stretch though, considering that my Linux experience was limited, and the first request was to ‘write & run this shell script, and then compile ruby from source for Debian’ .. i picked up on a few of the keywords. A barrage of questions to Dave, a week of time, and a fair share of Googling has seemed to cure my problems. Now I come in to work with a fair idea of what to do and how I’m going to do it. I’ve been configuring mail-servers and working on a ruby-based mailing-list system like no tomorrow. As I’ve said before, I’ve learned a lot and it’s enjoyable.
Workplace environment? It could be described as ‘interesting’ at some points in time. It seems as though the Japanese haven’t moved far from the manager/worker divide. Everything is a hierarchy when it comes to the workplace. Management officials watch employees with an eagle’s eye, and everything must be monitored and tracked - it really gets to me as an employee. However, i dont have it as bad as some individual who is constantly under fire for a project that is slightly behind schedule. It is ridiculous (in my opinion) that 40% of this man’s time is spent ‘being managed’ and told ‘how he should get back on track’ instead of him actually working to get back on track. Maybe I’m too westernized, but it seems counterproductive. Pretty happy that my boss is reasonable.
Complaints? That I spend too much money on lunch. Ironically enough the “Artem, you’re going to eat sushi everyday” stereotype is actually not too much of a lie. Its reasonably priced and makes for a good lunch. However, $8-$12 lunches aren’t always in the student budget so i should probably stop with that. Aside from all that.. work is good. Sushi is good. Life is pretty good. Guess the work-blog wasnt too exciting, but the following one should be more interesting..
