Embarrassing moment at $UnnamedStartup
At my new job, I was asked to meet with our VP. He’s the guy that runs the show at my place of employment, but he does what management he does by acting like a cheerleader. I really didn’t think he had a technical background because when I was asked to do some bare-bones IT work for him he asked me some basic questions about Microsoft XP that I was easily able to answer (and I haven’t used XP since five years ago at $BigFacelessCorp).
I’m always a bit nervous about talking to him though, because he’s very hard to read, he’s from a completely different culture. It turns out however, that he was blown away by my analysis of the log files from $SeekretDevice, and he asked me to explain exactly what I was doing. I explained that, having been given a herculean task of reading through endless log files, I had just whipped up some simple one-liners that increased my productivity twenty-fold. (You can do that at a start-up. If you need to do something, you just do it, documenting the procedure later for possible reuse. That’s why working for a start-up is made of awesome, that, and free sodas and snacks) He wants more detail, so I show him my code. He wants a step-by-step explanation, so I start in saying, “Well, do you know what grep does?”.
It’s then that I’m informed that he built the first prototype of $SeekretDevice in his basement before the founding of the company.
Yea, I was totally set up for that one.
