Cynix’s World :: January

January 8, 2006

Working

Happy New Year 2006 to everyone. This year has been a special year for me as I’ll be having a new house, a new job and a new lifestyle - working life that is. Just started work this year, went to the orientation on 3rd January. It started with intro like usual, but this one has some much more info, from how to login to enterprise, IP phone to how to report my time & expenses, quite tiring. After a few hours, the recruiting personnel said we’ll be going for lunch. When I was going to the lift I had a chat with a fellow programmer about her work, she had started 10 days ago. She was assigned to a project in Kerinchi and she said there are no transportation allowance to get there. [She could be mistaken as she’s a newcomer as well, collegues said that genereally, transporatation allowance to other offices is given] I was quite worried as I have no idea at all where I’ll be assigned to just yet. And from what I heard, the location could vary anywhere from Cyberjaya to KLCC.

The partners decided to take us to Chinoz on the park for lunch. I dare say that is one of the most expensive restaurant in KLCC. The experienced hire professionals such as consultants, immediatly started ordering appetisers, soups & main entree. Each item costing crazy prices. I had salmon fillet which I enjoyed and an ice lemon tea, wanted to order more, but was afraid that I couldn’t finish them. Enjoyed myself at Chinoz, it’s after all the first time I have been there. However I was quite worried about my placement thus was pretty quiet during lunch.

After a few more hours of explanation regarding health & insurance benifits, flight booking, wroking visas & tons of procedures, the orientation finally came to an end. It was then a HR was sent to me & she told me that I’ll be assigned to a UOB project in Singapore! But I’ll be based in the KLCC office! Thank god, I had always wanted to work in the KLCC office as it looks pretty modern & I have an existing mode of transportation there. Was so relieved that day Many others were assigned to different locations, I was the only programmer assigned to the Singapore project however.

Sample AS400 command window, looks pretty “matrix-y”, ancient IBM app tho

Started working for real the next day, was assigned a project that uses AS400 server & RPGLE progamming language. So I get to learn something totally new & quite different from what we learnt in university. Good thing for me as I always preferred to learn something new rather than doing the same thing repeatatively. Funny thing is that this is the prog language that tortured many of my senior collegues when I was having my industrial training. I didn’t have to learn it then, but certainly have to learn it now, haha… Collegues in the company & project team are very friendly & helpful, taught me a lot of stuff. However this shows that there aren’t anytime for newcomers to chill either.

Received a bunch of company emails, quite a lot of invitations to the company’s various official & unofficial gatherings as well. One thing special about this company is that everyone uses IM, I’ve seen y!m, msn, icq in every desktop and the recruiting HR has told us that this is one of the primary communication media in the company to my surprise. I certainly wouldn’t mind & ‘adapted’ to the company culture immediatly of course, . Learnt how to create PF, DSPF, RPGLE, Query, Subfile and a few more in 2 days of work, tiring but worth it I guess.