During my vacation my 1 month anniversary at the new job will have passed. Interestingly, that's noteworthy for more that it's longer than my predecessor lasted (3 days). It's also noteworthy for more than it's already a quarter of the tenure that my predecessor's predecessor lasted (4 months). It's noteworthy because not only does it NOT bother me that 2 other people lasted only a short time, but that I'm actually liking it. Sure, "4-Month-Man" may have run into something I haven't. They speak highly of him (as opposed to how they speak of "3-Day-Man"), so maybe there's something around the bend. But we'll see.
Thus far, things are progressing pretty well. There's A LOT to get up to speed on. There are A LOT of ropes to learn. I'm doing OK on the process side of things. The architecture, the how-MasterCard-is-built, technically speaking, is REALLY difficult. It'll be months before I have a firm understanding of the seemingly hundreds of groups that are responsible for their own little area. Security is paramount, so even something simple is examined, locked down, and controlled tightly. Very interesting place.
It seems that the security initiative begins with obfuscating even the groups' names with which I work. Like most places, everything is an acronym. Plus, like most industries, there's an entire vocabulary of terms related to the workings. However, it seems that there is an intention to use acronyms, left undefined until you cry for the interpretation, only to discover that the definition does little to describe what that group actually does. But, even so, folks around here are pretty cool. They seem to understand/remember that it takes a while to grow accustomed to life here, so they're patient. Or, at least they were. There's a rumor that after a month, you start getting pretty short of "Free Passes".
Oh well. If nothing else, I hope to last longer than my previous two predecessors. Hopefully that will count for something.
Later.