It’s a weird feeling, having to head into an office to work everyday.
I guess you could say I’m a bit of a late bloomer, at least in terms of things like inter-office politics and procedures and things like that. I’ve still got a ton of things to learn and understand, and I’m sure I’ll never learn all of it.
By far the most surprising thing though has been how little work actually gets done. Over the past two weeks I’ve watched people from our company and from our client’s company clock in at 8 in the morning and clock out at 6pm (in our case, more like 8 or 9), and still barely accomplish anything.
Instead of actually doing stuff, an inordinate amount of time is instead devoted to meetings, meetings and more meetings. A couple of days ago for example, I got drawn into no less than 5 separate meetings in the same afternoon, none of which actually helped me get any work done. It took several days of these mind-numbing circle-jerk sessions before I finally realized that I was, in fact, supposed to say "no." I mean, all things considered, nothing is said in any of these get-togethers that is actually "solid"; you need stuff written down and signed off on before you can even think about implementation.
The other thing I’ve noticed is how few overlaps there are between people’s skillsets. For example, our client’s web department has a creative director that doesn’t touch HTML at all, and instead just passes flat JPEGs off to the development guys for slicing and implementation. And the content team actually differentiates between a content manager position, and a content editor position.
I can totally see why it would be beneficial to have all of these positions in neat little boxes — in a way, they’re all cogs in a clock — but it implies that these people would be totally lost if one of the other cogs suddenly came loose. It’s great for a perfect-world kind of scenario, but for anything less than that, it just creates too many dependencies, and too many potential deal-breakers.