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You just got hired in IT. Awesome. Welcome aboard. Here is a list of some tips that I have thought about many times as new people come and go in our organization. These should generally apply to any position. This article is only the beginning of the possibilities for a list like this. If you have any comments or ideas you can comment below or email feedback at itminddesign dot com.

1. Don’t talk much, just listen

I’m sure this applies to more situations than at work or if you just got hired. However, it never fails, as some newbie comes in and can’t learn anything about company or what goes on around the place because they are too busy running their pie hole. This is extremely critical if you are relatively inexperienced or move to a vastly different field or area from the last. When your talking too much, people think you must know it all or don’t care to listen to what they have to say. Every place has its own local jargon and the only way to pick up on these things is to listen.

You can also learn interesting details about your coworkers. If you just let them talk about themselves most people will begin to talk about the things that interest or are important to them. This is often true if you throw in the occasional open ended question.

2. Ask questions

Most people have a natural design to want to help people. If you ask questions and ask for help most people will be glad to lend you a hand. Asking questions is a great way to start piecing together various information. I remember when I first started this job. I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. The company has always been heavy on acronyms for things. It seemed almost as bad as the US armed forces. So for the first several months, I carried a pad around with and would right down any terms I didn’t understand. After the meetings were over I would ask my teammates what the terms meant. I would suggest writing down the terms and any answers you may have a hard time remembering. Many people become irritated after you ask the same questions over and over. It also may give some people the impression that you don’t value their time. Any help you get from others should be seen as valuable because they are responsible for doing all of their normal work plus the time it takes to work with you.

Another value tool with a question. It is often very disarming if you are confronting something you see as wrong. Maybe an example will help. Read these two sentences and pick which one seems to be less confrontational.

“Joe, this server’s network connection is configure totally wrong.”

“Joe, let me ask you question. I thought that a server’s network connection should be setup like … Did I misunderstand something?”

I have always found that people don’t read the second sentence as being attacked and comes across like you have a question and you need their help to verify it.

3. Either remember what your told or take notes

I have spoke about this some already. If you don’t remember things easily, then right it down. It’s about efficiency and respecting someone else’s time. If you don’t, your going to find that people are going to become irritated after explaining something repeatedly. If it’s gets bad enough, they may start to conveniently forget things. I’m not saying, that if you don’t really understand something not to ask questions, because that’s tip #2. However, if it’s the same set of information over and over — write it down.

4. Understand the unpublished organizational chart

Most organizations have an official org chart that they give you which is very useful as it’s nice to know who’s the boss. However, the “grapevine” and the interpersonal relationships are just as important. A good example of this is often some manager’s administrative assistant. The assistant often has tons of inside information and direct access to the boss. People who have been around or have known others for years have lots of influence with them. Before you take on someone you should have an accurate read of the interpersonal landscape. The best idiom I know of for this tip is “The toes you step on today may be attached to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.”

5. Understand why something was done a certain way

Before commenting on how bad or wrong an existing solution is, it would be best to ascertain how it came about. Everyone wants to do a good job but there are always issues. Typically there are only two things that stop something from getting done, money or politics. People often feel like they own the projects and environments they create personally because of the amount of blood, sweet, and tears that go into it. Before you tee off on some existing design or environment it might be good to reread tip #2. If you don’t, people may feel attacking the solution is the same as attacking them.

6. Over at company ABC we use to …

This tip is not meant to squash the new ideas new people bring to a new job. However, until you have a good understanding of an environment, you may want to go easy with references to how we did over at <insert your last employer here> . Obviously, if the opportunity comes up for something brand new and it’s appropriate, there is nothing wrong with suggesting or explaining how that was dealt with at the old company. Most folks don’t deal well with change and new people being hired is a change.

7. Seek to understand before you seek to be understood

This one sounds easier than it is. It even applies to the people you don’t like. Everyone person’s pathology is different. There are reasons they are the way they are and how they became that way. I’m not reducing a person’s culpability for their actions and attitudes. I am saying that knowing what a persons true intent is not possible. The closest thing to knowing what it truly is by getting them to articulating their motives. We all often want to default to seeing every perceived wrong against us as malice. I know that this is a significant personal growth area for myself. Also, you are not going to agree with all the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs once you seek to understand someone. Even if you can’t agree on anything

8. Do not be afraid to make mistakes; own them when you do

This tip is not a license to be negligent and there should be lots of caution used in a new job and a new environment. When I first started I didn’t really know anything and I remember to this day the director saying to the guy I was replacing “You can take him out there but don’t let him touch anything”. However, being paralyzed by maybe making a mistake would be career limiting. I see in our company now, some do not want to make a decision or take a reasonable response to resolve a problem because they don’t want to break something and get in trouble. However, they don’t seem to realize that no one in the 11 years I have been there has ever been fired for making a mistake. If you do make a mistake, own it, and learn from it. Just don’t keep making the same ones over and over. My view is, that if you do the best job you can in what is viewed as the best interest for the company and they want to fire you for it, you really didn’t want to work for those people anyway.

9. Be on time to meetings

This one really applies to new and veteran employees. If you commit to coming to a meeting show up on time. It’s a simple courtesy to others and shows that you respect them and their time. It also shows that your organized which is important. Having your act together always looks good when it comes raise and/or promotion time. If your already having chronic lateness here are a few tips on how to stop being late. I will add one of my own as well. I maybe channeling Dr. Phil or something, but many people get something from being late. To define “something”, I mean some subconscious issue is occurring that gives you some kind of “reward” for that behavior. Subconsciously, the person is getting something out of being late. Humans don’t usually do things that they don’t get some kind of subconscious “reward” for. Don’t read any negative insinuation in this either, it’s just the way humans are and we can always improve.

10. Some things are better left unsaid

A good friend and ex-coworker exposed me to this phrase. I didn’t really believe it much when he first started to say it, but he was right. If there is no good or value to anyone by saying something, then saying it can only make things worse. Seems reasonable to think that it shouldn’t be said. In a new job until you have fully done the work of tip #7 will someone be able to evaluate what is safe to be said to someone. Lucky for me I work with some great people who don’t mind most of the things that come out of my mouth. However, if we hire someone new, I stay very professional and exercise tip #7 until I can feel safe in stretching the boundaries of professional talk. Obviously, the best advice is not to go anywhere inappropriate and you will always be safe from those folks in HR. That just doesn’t really work for me. I did once call our receptionist “Dear” and got hauled down to the director’s office for a little counseling about harassment. She never did tell me personally that she didn’t like it. If she had, I would have stopped. However, if I had followed some of these tips before then, I could have avoided my one and only slap on the wrist.

I had previously written about Sun buying MySQL. Since then I had some more time to process the event and wanted to add some deeper thought about the matter. The same day that Sun acquires MySQL, Oracle buys BEA Systems. I mention this because it is an interesting set of events for both companies. Sun continues down its path of becoming an open source software company while leaving behind the proprietary world of its hardware. I know Sun did acquire StorageTek back in 2005 for 1.4 Billion USD. I do think that purchase was a mistake but that was under the watch of Scott McNealy. Sun, just like IBM, has seen the writing on the wall.

However, Oracle, who had tried many months before, finally came to an agreement to acquire BEA Systems. There was bit of press warfare going on between Oracle and BEA. Oracle made a low ball offer for the company and Oracle refused to pay anymore. Well, Sir Larry must have had a change of heart because he paid up. Oracle and its many products are all proprietary. Also, BEA Systems and its products, though some are built and utilize Java, are proprietary. They both should make some serious cash as customers pay big time money for the licenses and support from those two companies. However, I am intrigued as to what is going to happen to the Weblogic Application suite and the Oracle Application Server suite since these are competing products. If you utilize Oracle Forms you don’t have any choice but to use Oracle Application Server, which one of the Business Unit applications the Data Center requires Oracle forms.

With IBM, Sun, HP, and others embracing and moving more toward providing and interacting with open source, I am curious as to why Oracle has hung in there and focuses on being proprietary. First Peoplesoft in 2004 and now BEA Systems this month. I know Oracle offers the Unbreakable Linux which was a play to compete with Redhat and take some revenue away from them. We haven’t used Unbreakable Linux and don’t plan to. It seems that Oracle really isn’t taking any significant market share from Redhat and there have been issues with Oracle supporting Linux. Maybe with the BEA acquisition Oracle will change the Weblogic support model to be like Redhat’s JBoss application server to again try and take some cash away from Redhat.

Who knows what Larry and Oracle will do next? I’m surprised Oracle has not gone after a hardware vendor. Then they can pretty much offer the whole stack, Use Apache in the web tier, Weblogic or Oracle Application Server in the Application Tier, all connecting to Oracle Databases Enterprise or RAC. BEA has Tuxedo for an SOA type architecture, which has connectors into CORBA, Weblogic, and can even touch back into the legacy tier — the Unisys Mainframe world with the E-Link and OSI-TP products. It will be a nice portfolio of products for Oracle, but with the Open Source movement continuing to gain momentum it begs the question to see who wins the tug-of-war — proprietary or open source software?

I’m sure many know that Sun Microsystems bought MySQL. Jonathan Schwartz gave some history of how the acquisition came about and answered some questions that many have been asking. You can find his blog at Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog: In a Vortex. I think it is a good move for Sun as they move from a proprietary hardware vendor to a open source software company.

A discussion with a colleague of mine around career paths made me want to write this post. He indicated that he was always interested in learning new things but mentioned that he would not take a certain certification because it is not down his “chosen” career path. My immediate thought was, “Wow, how those statements must be in conflict.” He went on to say that being involved in hiring at a previous employer, he was instructed to look for a consistent track in the previous employments of a potential candidate. I think what struck me the most was his hubris about not taking some classes that would actually allow him to provide some value to his team. The arrogance to think that he knows what path he is on and where he is going and anything “beneath him” would just be wrong. I can respect not wanted to focus in areas not in your perceived path, but you don’t have to be condescending about it. I do not have that certification that he doesn’t want, however I think it would help all of us if we had it, and I am more than willing to take the classes. Any training a company is willing to give, I think employees should want to take. Whew, I feel better now.

So, my little rant leads me to want to look at this more. We need to flush out any realities in his perspectives. What makes a career path? Is it really possible to fully plan one out? I know that expectations of what makes a good career has changed. For my father’s generation it was find a good job with good benefits and work hard. Longevity and loyalty was rewarded. Regrettably, those days do not really exist anymore. I remember not too long after the company’s transition from mainframe technology to Open Systems. When my boss at the time and I began sorting resumes for an additional Unix Systems Administrator, my “old school” boss did not want to talk with or meet anyone who jumped around from job to job every couple of years. After finding very few candidates, we learned that the reality of the candidate market for open systems was one where longevity did not really exist. As I have assisted in the candidate acquisition in my various roles over the years, the pattern of job hopping still is predominate.

To try to answer the “What makes/is a career path?”, I think the answer is the some total of jobs and positions through out someone’s life. Individuals often define themselves in terms of their occupation or career. Don’t believe me? Try this then, start meeting new people and keep track of how many minutes or seconds go by before they ask you what do you do for a living. I’m not discounting a person’s job. I am trying to point out that for some it is the greatest defining factor to”who they are”. So, be careful in handling that factor, it can be extremely fragile and easily crushed if inadvertently stepped on.

Now, to evaluate the realism of a fully planned out career. I find out it hard to believe most people, if they had a plan at all, end up where they had planned. I admit there are some with a clear path, who have one goal and work their whole lift to achieve it. Those who want to have a professional sports career or participate in the Olympics. However, the majority of people who set out for these laudable goals ever make it. For those of us with careers that do not have a clear, predefined pinnacle position, how do you know which paths will take you to the perceived “top” position. When I went to college and got my first IT job, all I knew was that I wanted to work in “computers”. At the time, I had no idea how vague that statement really was. Lucky for me, the folks who hired me must have saw something or felt I was worth the chance. I was told long after I was hired that one reason I was hired was that I had worked at one big-box retailer for many years and they found it odd that someone so young could take a job and stick with it. Some more of my embarrassing remembrances about my interview can be found in the posting, IT Workers - The Next Generation. Lucky for me I had “old school” principles.

I have been reading the book Age of Turbulence by Allan Greenspan. I am more than 2/3 through the book and one of the biggest surprises to me is that, Greenspan did not start out focusing on being an economist . He played the clarinet as well as a sax in a jazz band in college. When he went to college for economics, I do not think he was driving toward becoming the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. I’m sure in regards to the careers of economists this position could be seen as one of the capstone job. It is not fair to say that if someone does not reach a pinnacle position in their lifetime that they were not successful. Success, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. As for IT, what job could be considered the pinnacle? Being a CIO or CTO? Maybe. What about those awesome technical wonders who could not manage a team out of wet paper bag? Maybe the Chief Architect at some Fortune 500 company or Principle Architect at some global conglomerate? Could be. I reject that the premise for a job candidate is to be a good, stable employee. There must be some clearly evident path for a person’s career. The span of a career or multiple careers are 30-50+ years for some. I think people require defined levels of stability, variety, and growing challenges. That’s how I define a career no matter what combination of jobs or fields. Those individual levels are set by a combination of several factors including personal, family, and social expectations. An individuals own ego and self-esteem also play into these levels. I’m sure further discussion of these factors need an article of its own.

If someone is still looking for the area that interests them, I can not see holding their search against them. Some need more variety and challenges than others. It’s only our hubris that makes us think that we can be the judge of someone’s career. It’s often easy to forget behind each job title and email is a human who faces similar issues and feelings through out their lifetimes.

I saw this article the other day on the Redhat Magazine feed. I so want to try this out and will when I get some free time. I shall see how well it works. It’s basically putting a live Fedora CD on a flash drive and booting off the flash drive. Very handy and portable too. I wonder how many people have done it and how they like it. If you have tried it and have a comment, post one!

Here is the link to the instructions:

Red Hat Magazine | I am Fedora, and so can you!