New DivaBlog

Making friends, hiring and buying chocolate...

Busy 3rd week at PayPal (so busy I didn't have time to blog...must set aside a regular time).

Interestingly formalized on-boarding process.  I met with my group's HR minder about a week ago, so she could give me a many-page "Onboarding Plan", including helpful advice about how to make friends, how to set myself up for maximum impact, how to set goals and what the cadence of required meetings for my group will be (but still no dates of standing meetings so I can actually fill my calendar :-( ).  Since my boss has been traveling the past two weeks for work and her executive admin is leaving the company, I was pretty much on my own.  I spent the time a) meeting EBay and PayPal people who wanted to meet me because of the press I've received b) setting up my desk with the necessaries (tea fixings, snacks, spare pens, stability ball) c) recruiting for my open position and d) the usual stuff I do hanging around the hub of open source making friends.

Here's a quick report-out:

a) met with PayPal peers, PayPal people working on open source projects already in play, and PayPal people looking to open source things their teams have built in equal measure.  There is plenty to do (and much if it is actually pretty interesting).  By far my favorite conversation was with one of the leads on the PayPal Beacon project.  More on that in a future blog.

b) still need a good variety of chocolate for my San Jose desk, so I'll be visiting Fog City News next week! I'm thinking about obtaining a teeny refrigerator for under my desk to hold coconut creamer (which doesn't expire within the window I can expect to keep it in the shared fridge)

c) my open position is listed as a "Tech Evangelist" but I'm going to be treating that person more as my "partner in crime". It currently lists the incomparable Aimie Aronica as hiring manager, but its being transferred to me.  If you're interested in this position, please ping me directly.

d) by far my most interesting outside meeting this past week was the Benetech open house.  It was great to catch up with Jim Fructerman and my great friend (and Benetech Board Member Brian Behlendorf) and also to meet Benetech VP for Human Rights, Enrique Piracés, and Caroll Bogert, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.

On the subject of Admins...I seriously need one and so does my boss!! Apparently I'll have to justify mine because of an irksome PayPal policy about who gets that kind of support, but I know I'm MUCH more successful when I have somebody back-filling the things I'm not great at (which include routine paperwork, tracking deadlines for completion of things like required trainings, expense reporting, medium and large meeting logistics, keeping my calendar and travel booking).  My boss gets a new admin automatically because she satisfies the normal policy requirements, but I'm guessing her actual needs are similar.  If you know a great Executive Admin, I know we'd love to talk to them.

Agent of Change

I've taken a long break from this blog, but as part of my new job I have set myself the task of writing regularly about what it's like to work on open source at PayPal.  So here's a quick take on my first week...

I've joined a team that's been working to transform engineering practices, most famously with a mass-migration to agile methodologies. The job was interesting to me because PayPal is aware they have to continue to learn and change to grow. I am a huge believer in cultivating mental agility and lifelong learning. And they'd already begun with open source projects like kraken and the bootstrap accessibility plugin.

I spent my first week doing the normal first week things:

-Setting up a new laptop and phone (shoutout to Dylan Capener and his team member Victor Garcia for amazing IT customer service)

-Meeting people (most of whom I'll have to meet a few times before I remember their names)

-Doing press briefings for public coverage of my job change (see additional articles here, here, here and here)  I'm especially happy with that last link, where I got mentioned in a larger story about women in technology and the first majority female enrollment in computer science disciplines at UC Berkeley

-Attending a 2-day offsite where I learned a lot more about what my peers are working on and my boss Kirsten Wolberg's vision for the future

All in all, it went by in a blur! As I tweeted to a former Sun colleague who sent me congrats and a query about what I'll be doing, "Stay Tuned..."