Today was my first day at Hunter Industries!
I'm over the moon that I get to go back to coding - especially in a mob setting. But that's the whole reason why I decided to quit being a scrum master and go to Hunter!
If you had told me a year ago that I would get the opportunity to work at home as a programmer on a team whose purpose is to constantly collaborate, I would have never believed you.
I was shipped all of my equipment and hardware last Friday in two giant boxes. Not only did they send me a laptop (all I was expecting) I also got a keyboard, a mouse, a truly giant monitor, a dongle to connect everything to my laptop, and even an HDMI cable and ethernet cable! While the ethernet cable is too short to reach my router, it was such a wonderful touch.
One thing that really stood out to me as I onboarded remotely for the first time was that the folks at Hunter are really easy to get ahold of. An HR person emailed me last Wednesday to tell me I'd be receiving some Hunter swag, and I asked her about when I'd receive my laptop. She immediately knew how to answer my question and did so in a really friendly, accommodating way. Earlier today, when I realized I didn't have a link handy for uploading my I-9 documents (a weirdness of onboarding remotely) she sent the link to me almost immediately!
The new employee orientation was super smooth. I was on Microsoft Teams (which I had never used) on my new Windows machine (been in Mac world for the last 2 years) and everyone else was in-person at the San Marcos office. I appreciated how the facilitator specifically checked with me that I was following along, that I could hear the videos she played, asking about working from home, making me feel included even though I wasn't in the room. She explicitly told me the best way to ask questions during the orientation - just unmute and speak out, as opposed to chat! - which was a great way to level-set right off the bat.
I was surprised to open my brand-new Hunter Industries email and find I had 435 emails - about 340 were AWS alerts, and about 50 were NPM notifications, and ~20 were invites for meetings that happened before my start-date. This was a little off-putting, but also a peek into how many notifications to expect on a daily basis! I'll let you know if I end up getting more of these alerts!
My favorite part was that I was offered a free ticket to Agile Open Southern California next week, because my manager can't attend himself. I'm a huge fan of conferences generally, and especially virtual conferences in distant locations that I wouldn't otherwise be able to attend. I look forward to sharing what that's like! This will be my first open space conference, so it will be interesting to see what that's like virtually.
Curious about mob programming?