Corporate Culture

[tamaranth]

It feels wrong to generalise, especially when I've been here less than two days: but the corporate culture of this open-source site feels qualitatively different to the restrictive practices I've encountered elsewhere. Perhaps it's simply that I'm working in a technical environment again, rather than being the sole geek in a shipping, or financial, department. In the last few contracts, I've been the power-user, the 'IT expert'. (Please don't laugh!) Here, I'm probably the person who knows least about the system. It's rather refreshing.

I look back on some of my previous jobs and find that I'm still annoyed, after many years, by the attitudes I encountered. I've had a couple of managers who'd have been better as primary-school teachers: the sort of person who believes that unless each member of staff is closely supervised, they'll be skiving, or cheating the company, or staring into space. Staring into space and drooling.

None of that here. I have a checklist of things to accomplish by Christmas, a team of colleagues who are willing to answer any questions I may have, and a Wiki full of words: and I've been left to structure my learning in whatever way I please. This approach suits me much better than an intensive week of training courses, info-rich sessions with a mentor, etc. My concentration span's not great at the moment, despite zinc + echinacea + Beechams + coffee, but
I can skip from topic to topic, activity to activity, and achieve.

I'm enjoying playing with new -- open-source -- software, and ferretting around in the help files. (Unix types should skip the rest of this paragraph, in which I discover the wheel.) Mayan calendar options, with explanations! Antinews! Morse code utilities! Colour-coded bracket matching! A help-file entry entitled 'Total frustration'!

Oh, and if you're wondering why I'm writing this, instead of working: composing an LJ post, and editing on the fly, is an excellent exercise in using all the new text-editor commands I've been learning.

Sadly, the emacs spellchecker doesn't recognise 'skive'. (And why doesn't it have a word-count, eh?)

Comments

[melusina]

Sounds fabulous! I've been thinking about this a lot as I think about going back to work - both the current possibilities are small high-tech companies where the company culture is definitely on the "trust the worker to get the job done" side rather than "stand over you and make sure you do it" one. I know I work better in that environment and I'm really hoping something will pan out at one of these two companies. . .

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

Yay for being treated as a rational thinking being by management!

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Wordcount: use "wc -w" in the shell

Spell checker: it's probably using ispell as its backend. You might want to read the manpage for that.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

the culture of presenteeism - the Taylor view that employees can't be trusted and are interchangeable components (peopleware!). bleh ;-)

[dalmeny]

And why doesn't it have a word-count, eh?

I've been counting spaces using count-match to get rough estimates, so I've learnt something today from damned_colonial.