International Business Machines

I have a new job. I am at IBM as an intern. Specifically I am in the WebSphere Technology Institute Datapower Integration Group.

And I couldn't be more excited.

I have a long road ahead of me. I know practically nothing about writing software and I am in a development group. To start I will be doing sys admin type stuff which I think I know fairly well. But there is a lot to be excited about. First I will say that my pay is almost double what I was making at FedEx Kinko's, but I would have probably taken this job for less money.

The most apparent thing to the people around me is that I was burned out from working customer driven retail jobs. This is of course a very customer driven job, but in a much more distant way. I come in pretty much when I want to, leave when I feel like leaving, and can work from home. I think that shortly it may mean working more than 8 hours instead of less, but at least I can go to the doctor, or if I get stuck in traffic it's not the end of the world. On a more Jason level this is exciting because of what I will be doing. I have wanted an "IT" job for a while, something where I work from a cube and play with technology and become an "information worker." I finally get to apply all of the GTD stuff I have been looking at for a couple of years now. And I love that it is IBM. They used to be the evil empire, but in recent years IBM has become a radically different company. Things move faster, they take good care of employees, and very important to me, have made huge open source contributions. A lot of what I will be working with is Linux. One of the first things my father asked me when I was telling him about work was if we all had to wear suits. Now its very much business casual, and its not entirely unusual to see someone wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

And I got a ThinkPad. It's a couple of years old, and only about as powerful as the laptop that I had anyway, but just as with Katy's ThinkPad and my old 600, the engineering involved is incredible.

It also seems that I am with a great team. It's a very laid back group that can joke around. The work we are doing is very Web 2.0 oriented, which is another major interest of mine, so all in all it seems like a great fit.

So all in all, I am excited.