Well, I started work yesterday. Got to my office at 9 a.m. and just as I was trying to call in my manager to get me to open the door, my mentor steps out of the lift. He then showed me around the place, introduced me to my manager and told me a bit about what I had to do. He couldn’t show me much at the beginning, since all the data was highly confidential, and I needed to be sworn in first before I could even begin looking at the projects. After being sworn in as an Ontario Public Servant (yay :)), he then showed me some of the data that I would be working with.
I’d be working with Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay most of the time. These will allow me to produce Web Reports, as well as Power Cubes. I still don’t know much about Cognos and it looks like quite a bit of work to learn it, but it looks very challenging and I look forward to gaining experience with this Business Intelligence stuff.
The other part of my job would be doing a bit of .NET programming, mainly interfacing with Cognos. There’s little or no database programming, so that’s a bit disappointing, but I do believe that this experience will really improve my image and especially my resume :).
It is kinda hard moving from a place where I’m in charge of my own computer, have almost unrestricted access to the servers, the ability to play around with software, able to make changes at will, to a place where I don’t even have admin access to my own computer and need to put in a support ticket to get software installed. It was frustrating to find out that I couldn’t even install Google toolbar on my machine since it was restricted. Oh man are they tight at my place, but I guess it goes with the territory, since my area deals a lot with important data. I’ll get used to it after awhile I guess.
Other than that, I haven’t done much yet, just changed backup tapes and got access to my card. Although, they spelt my name wrongly in my email, and I had to put in more tickets to get them to fix it.
Overall it was a pretty good 2 days, although I feel so weak when I get home. I guess it’s because I haven’t worked in a couple of months. I’ll get used to this too. Oh, and I drive 5 minutes everyday to the train station and walk 15 minutes from the train station to my work place. So my commute is not bad, and my hours are flexible, so I can come home early and play with my kid and spend time with my wife.
More to come in the next few days ahead…
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