first day on the job, first post on the blog

in the ever increasing chaos known as the blogosphere, i've decided to add yet another random stream. if nothing else, this blog will serve as a personal journal of my life at google. maybe one day, a collection of these postings and comments will compile into a book...

in the meantime, i'll introduce myself and my new blog. my name is mark jen and i began my life as a googler (or noogler for those of you in the know) today: janurary 17th, 2005. in previous chapters of my life, i'd interned at ibm and worked full time for 18 months at microsoft. so i guess you could say i'm getting first hand experience at three companies who embody the tech company lifecycle - ibm at the tailend of their era; microsoft at the inflection point leading to maturity; and google at the beginning of what would become a new empire.

so what happened today? nothing too exciting. i think new employee orientation is about the same at any company: you show up early, get a security badge, sit through hours of boring presentations and fill out the required paperwork.

cool things about the process at google:

• almost everything is electronic. only four forms need to be printed (two were required by the government; one was the electronic signature authorization form; and of course, the NDA we've all come to know and love)
• my login, badge and workstation were completely ready to go on the first day. you'd think this wouldn't be so hard, but it actually proves to be quite difficult at most companies. to top it all off, my laptop was given to me all setup and in its carrying case with a full complement of goodies :)

now the bad:

• same old 3 hour HR presentation about nothing important in particular

the rest of my day was spent surfing the corporate intranet. this was quite an experience. you'd think that an intranet would typically be oragnized and very cohesive - after all, it's the internal network for a single company. however, google has managed to recreate the chaos of the internet on its internal network. fortunately, they've applied their search engine to help sort through everything. which begs the question - did the intranet become messy becuase google had a great search engine to find things anyways? or would intranets naturally become a mess if not for the fear of creating a huge tangled mess with no search tool to help users?

closing thought: the ibm t41p is truly a laptop done right. i'm not entirely sure why any company would issue anything less to their employees (*ahem* microsoft :p)