Work

[godream]

Imagine you have been hired to wrestle grizzly bears. You're cool by that, because you've wrestled polar bears before and it's about the same thing. You in fact practically have a degree in bear wrestling. So you show up to work and spend your first day figuring out the differences between the white fur and the brown fur and start getting some basic bears wrestled.

Then you come in on day 2 (which is very much a Monday) to be informed that from now on you will be wrestling tigers instead. And all you've heard from many wise wrestlers is that tigers have very, very sharp claws. And your boss says, not visibly joking, "That looks pretty straightforward, right?"

*headdesk*

Comments

[shaktool.livejournal.com]

I'm not surprised about the tigers bit. Jobs have a tendency to be not really what schools train you for. I am surprised that they ever threw grizzly bears at you in the first place.

My first internship started me off with programming a dot matrix printer using assembly, and then a little MatLab mixed with C, and then some Visual C. Of these four languages, the only one I ever studied in school was C (and even that wasn't until after this internship).

My second job was delivering hot chicken wings to your door. It wasn't really any more or less stressful than my first job, nor was it any more or less related to anything I learned in school.

Rest assured that everybody is just as unprepared as you, and 99% of them are slower learners too. Your employers will go out of their way to make sure you can adjust.

[godream.livejournal.com]

Dude, your school actually gives you real languages? All our interesting classes are in Scheme. :p Sass aside, you make a good point, and it's always nice to have company in the wait-what-am-i-doing-now? boat.

Nevertheless the tigers-have-sharp-claws part makes me nervous -- by which i mean in non-metaphor that everyone I know who's had to work on this stuff (bar one person) thinks it's an enormous pain and possibly more trouble than it's worth.

I did find out today that we've got a support contract that will happily answer some of my questions, though. Which is very cool and I wish I'd thought to ask about it on Monday...