Missives from the 6th Floor

He asked me what I thought of Valve so far, having been there a month, delivered my first significant chunk of functionality (to be arriving on Steam once we've accumulated enough features to do a client release, probably in three weeks or so). I gave him some feedback (overall good, still trying to gain credibility and solid footing before strongly asserting my opinion) and asked him to answer the complimentary (mathematical, not suck-up) question: what did Valve think of me after a month? (you might recall there was some hesitation on both sides based on my less-than-stellar showing in my technical interview).

His feedback was encouraging - folks are surprised at exactly how quickly I've come up to speed and have been able to make contributions, and that's evidenced by the fact that folks on the team are already starting to seek my council on technical issues (I had noticed this to some degree, but in my slightly paranoid way, figured it was all part of the test ;). He used words like "wisdom" and "broad and deep experience" in describing what they feel I've brought to the team. It's always good to know that I've not become a useless bureaucrat - even if I started to quack like one for a while.

So that was good.

The commute is manageable so far, a couple nasty days, but on average it's 25 minutes between the office and the ferry - pretty much as predicted. So I think I can deal with the commute. The plan is that once I get a suitable notebook, I'll probably try telecommuting one day a week, which should make commute even less of an issue.

I've got a short laundry list of stuff to work on - none of it quite as directly customer impacting as my first two tasks, but interesting and useful never-the-less.

So looking back at the decision, so far I'm happy with where the process landed me. I'm working with a sharp group of folks, on an interesting system, for a financially secure and very dynamic company.

So, So far, so good.